The Evolution of Definition

A long struggle with character development, and where it led.

Please forgive me, dear subscribers, for the delay in posting this reflection. I’m ill with COVID, and it’s very hard to think and write clearly. I spent all weekend writing this, and I still don’t know whether it’s any good.

Definition, who abbreviates her name to Nish, is my favorite character in Quibble.

It wasn’t always so. In the early drafts, Nish was bothersome and tedious. Though she was Quibble’s lover, she was also an overprotective, ineffectual mother-figure for half of the story, then a burden to Quibble for the rest of it. First she chased after Quibble, trying to prevent the worst, and then she seemed to make “the worst” worse yet.

As I intimated in last week’s reflection, my problem was failing to see Nish by herself. I saw her only in relation to Quibble, thought of her as Quibble’s foil. As the heroine, Quibble was so central in all my thinking that I gave little thought to what Nish said and did by herself, to what purpose she served by herself, or to what ideas and feelings her story could illustrate and interrogate.

I made a similar mistake in those early drafts with the character who became the Zero Alnasl, who will start to play a major role in chapter 13, “Faith,” and become Quibble’s teacher. Alnasl’s forerunner, Bastet, had little personality; I had originally in mind that Zeros are “blank slates” to Ones. As such, the third-person narration often held Bastet at arm’s length and made him a cipher, as for instance here:

Bastet liked silence even more than most Zeros. He would delay a discussion until he knew what he wanted to say, and once he began to speak, he was still often prone to pause, especially when asked a question. Quibble respected his reticence, but it could be unnerving. (draft: “2nd edited toward 3rd”)

This is fine as a starting point for a character: a tough nut for the protagonist to crack. But then, if these characters are going to orbit each other, some real cracking needs to happen! Keeping Bastet reticent deep into the story — forcing Quibble to knock on a door and get no answer — made him flat, static, and hollow, even in his own point-of-view narration. I believed this was a good thing: with the Zeros, I wanted to explore a theme of depersonalization. But in the fifth draft, I made this Zero I now called Alnasl much more active, some cracking finally got underway, and I saw what a bad choice writing him as a blank slate was, whatever ideas I’d hoped to mine with it. It stunted his character development. Also, Quibble’s: in any scene with him, she looked dynamic by comparison, and that meant I didn’t work as hard to make her dynamic.

Of course, as I embarked on chapter 7, “Quill” — the first narration in the fifth draft not from Quibble’s point-of-view — I’d yet to grasp this lesson about characterization. I’d have to learn it by doing. I didn’t have clear ideas about Nish, either. I sensed my previous ideas about her were simplistic. For instance, on page 19 of a writing journal called Quibble: a new sketchbook, which I began in Texas in August 2018 to replace the journal lost to a thief who took my bag in D.C. the previous year, I wrote only this for her under the heading “CHARACTER MOTIVATIONS”:

DEFINITION simply wants Quibble for her adroitness — she has fallen in love. Her main flaw is jealousy, which prompts her to hide things from Quibble and is at odds with her growing belief in the excelsior. Desire and faith — one must win out.

Fortunately, three years had passed in the interim, two of which I spent teaching full-time. Except when I wrote “if then” (the first 6 chapters) during a summer getaway pet-sitting for my friend Annie in North Carolina, I hadn’t touched the project, had hardly even looked at it. Almost all of my prior ideas in drafts or the sketchbook had floated away. Very nearly, I had a tabula rasa. I liked that. I felt it was what liberated “if then” from the previous drafts’ methods, what made it fresh. It was what now excited me as the book’s writer. I didn’t have to reuse what I’d previously written. If I saw the need to recycle something, I could recycle as much or as little as I wished. But I wanted to see how much I could create entirely new. I’d reduce the cast of characters and build each character in turn, one at a time. I’d start with Nish.

But how? What did I want out of her? Or out of any of my characters?