Harnessing Shadow: A Writer's Way to Overcome Shortcomings

As writers, we reveal not only our strengths, but our own foibles and shortcomings in our storylines and character developments. Usually, especially when we're new writers, we are not aware that that is what is happening. We happily trip along telling a story with characters we love or revile, in settings that hopefully evoke strong feelings through heartfelt description. What we don't know is that it is what is missing that often informs an astute reader (like an agent or editor) of what our authorial shortcomings are and how that might correspond to our personal blind spots or resistances.

What I mean by 'what is missing' is not some thing -- like a backstory or a character's desire -- that can simply be dropped into the narrative to fix the problem. If that were the case, then, for example, if my antagonist is a black-hearted killer, but I failed to make him compelling because I didn't include his motivation, I could just stick in a few sentences about his mother locking him in the closet when he was a child and my problem would be solved.

While the locked-in-the-closet thing helps, I've still left my antagonist as an essentially unsympathetic enigma in terms of his deepest motivations and human frailties -- the things that made him what he is. For a key player whose behavior drives the story a fair part of the time, these characteristics need to be palpable to readers. Just inserting broad facts or actions, no matter how well understood, doesn't do the trick. No, to really fill in what is missing, I've got to get inside his character. I've got to inhabit him to find my empathy for him. I'll viscerally understand his terror of being controlled by anyone -- I'll know what it feels like when his cramped thigh muscles burn and his throat constricts when he's in that closet as a boy, how his heart feels like it's being squeezed by giant hands and his bowels threaten to betray him in that enclosed dark space he can't escape. While none of these specifics necessarily need to appear in the novel, this knowledge will show up on the page nonetheless, in far more nuanced, informative and effective detail in this character's thoughts and actions. That's because I now know exactly how he'll react for the rest of his life any time he's threatened with losing control to someone else.

My gut reaction to inhabiting that bad boy? Eeeuwww! See, that's my problem. I don't like going there. At least at this stage of my game I know that, and have developed a few skills (I hope!) to deal with it, which essentially means being willing to go fully to the dark side in my mind and find the black parts of my own heart. When I manage that, I effectively harness the shadow of darkness, with its myriad gradations of gray, and can use that to make my antagonist and my story powerful.

What is missing is often shadow. Nuance. Organic detail that reveals character. And not just in terms of the dark side. This concept applies equally to the bright side: a protagonist whose true heroic qualities are never plumbed compellingly, because the author has a problem with the bright side, comes off just as unsympathetically as the early-stage antagonist above. Nobody is really Snow White, just as nobody is really the Wicked Witch, unless you're writing a fairy tale. Unless we enter the shadow, our characters will be cardboard cut-outs.

p.s. Writing about how to write a novel is a whole lot easier than actually writing a novel. I've got to go take my own advice now and see if I can't bubble up some dark, ugly, but irresistibly 'right' behaviors from my poor old antagonist's primordial mud -- the son of a gun!

Linda