Exercise #3: A Coherence of Characters
Matthew Baker, Michael Moorcock, Charles Yu, Amina Cain, Mary-Kim Arnold, Rivers Solomon, Garth Greenwell, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Don DeLillo
Hi all,
Hello and welcome! I hope this newsletter finds you and your family and friends healthy and safe in these difficult times.
Perhaps because I’ve barely left my home in the past three weeks, I’ve recently been dreaming about crowds, about wanting to be with other people, lots of them, all of us safely packed in with other bodies, at a concert or a sporting event; maybe I just being physically present with others, in my classroom or in the aisles of a bookstore or at the rail of a bar. In the last week, I’ve also gotten back to work on my novel-in-progress, which, it turns out, takes places almost entirely in crowded spaces—a fact that a month ago was utterly unremarkable but now seems as surprising as any of the more bizarre inventions I’ve written into the book. Along the same lines, I’ve been thinking about what makes for a good character name, because I’ve been trying to write larger and larger casts of characters, which of course means constantly deciding on new names for people. Because of all this, I decided this month to make our exercise about inventing and employing large casts of named characters, even in short stories. I hope you enjoy it!
In case you too feel a need to gather, this Friday I’ll be hosting a second Online Literary Happy Hour, an attempt to build community and promote writers during this period of banned gatherings and cancelled book tours: the event will be hosted on Zoom, and also livestreamed at Youtube and Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, if you’d like to participate. (The Zoom room requires you to RSVP in advance, but you can just show up for the Youtube channel.) We’ll begin at 5:30 PT with seven-minute readings by Charles Yu, Amina Cain, and Mary-Kim Arnold, followed by a “social hour” using Zoom’s breakout rooms feature. I hosted a first event like this two weeks ago )with readings by Megan Giddings, Mary South, and Amber Sparks), and it was an absolute blast. I hope this week’s will be too. Please join us, if you’d like!
As always, if you write something you like using the exercise below, feel free to say so on Twitter! You’re also welcome to share this prompt with others, if you’d like. 1750+ people got today’s newsletter, which means you’re already writing in good company: as we work on our crowds of characters this week, it might help to picture the many others writers working alongside us.
Be safe this week, be kind to each other, and good luck with the exercise!
Happy writing,
Matt
www.mattbell.com
What I’m Reading/Watching:
The Deep by Rivers Solomon. I loved Solomon’s first novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, and I’ve been enjoying their new novella too: a kind of retelling of a song by the experimental rap group Clipping, it stars Yetu, the historian of a mermaid-like people who make up an underwater society descended from African slave women. The way in which Yetu is expected to be the sole repository of her people’s memories—a task which perhaps asks too much of Yetu—is moving and interesting, and I’m looking forward to see what else Solomon does with the concept.
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. I’m right in the middle of reading Yu’s newest novel, a sharp satire of Hollywood and of race and expectations in America: like everything he writes, it’s formally inventive, laugh-out-loud funny and constantly moving. Written partly in script form, it begins: “Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy. You are not Kung Fu Guy.” Could there be a clearer or more immediate statement of want and obstacle, placed right at the top of the first page?
Portrait of a Lady on Fire. This is the best movie I’ve seen in the theater so far this year, and with theaters mostly closed, it’s also the last I’ll see on the big screen for a time. Thankfully, it’s made a quick jump to Hulu: if you’ve got a subscription, go watch this immediately. A gorgeous, moving, heartbreaking film, incredibly acted and beautifully shot. Directed by Céline Sciamma, starring Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel.
“The Frog King” by Garth Greenwell, published in The New Yorker. (Collected in his newest book, Cleanness.) What keeps me coming back to “The Frog King” is a six-page paragraph toward the end of the story that is the most romantic and erotic passage of prose I’ve read in years. It’s a stunning stretch of sentences, which would be enough, but it’s also incredibly tender and loving, which is maybe even better. I’m going to ruin the end of the passage here, just to give you a taste:
I paused a moment, wanting to speak, to ask him what they were for, his tears, but I knew what they were for, and so I hung over him a moment before I continued kissing him, the line of his jaw, his chin, his cheek and lips, which didn’t answer mine, which suffered themselves to be kissed, his ears, the tracks of his tears, his eyes. It was a kind of blazon of him, of his body, I love you, I whispered again and again to him. And then, when I had laid the last line across his forehead—a garland, I thought, I had garlanded him—You are the most beautiful, I said to him, you are my beautiful boy, and he reached his arms up and pulled me down on top of him, clutching me tightly. You are, he whispered to me, you are, you are.
Exercise #3: A Coherence of Characters
“The future belongs to crowds.” —Don DeLillo, Mao II
In Matthew Baker’s story “Why Visit America” (published in The Paris Review, also the title story of his forthcoming collection, due out in August from Henry Holt), a small town secedes from the United States, renames itself America, and begins a new life as a micro-nation bordered on all sides by the U.S. It’s a truly funny, clever, and politically-astute story, and one of its many highlights is the large cast of named characters who make up the citizenry of this new country. Their secession mostly goes well, with the exception that one of these townspeople—Sam Holliday—never agrees to secede. In fact, Sam remains loyal to the U.S. to the point of trying to organize an “invasion” of this new America, an event that begins with a near roll-call of the town/country:
Sam had chosen the timing of the invasion for maximum impact. It was a weekend. Saturday in the summertime. Some fifty of us happened to be downtown, observing the invasion from some fifty different perspectives. Pam Cone, who was leaning against the hitching post over at the saloon, stared at the soldiers while playing a song on the harmonica. Ward Hernandez stepped up to the doors of the saloon with a dishrag, gazing out at the soldiers with a frown, as Bob Tupper and Pete Christie, who had been playing a game of cards at the table next to the windows, turned to look at the soldiers through the dusty glass. Antonio Vega watched the soldiers from where he was pumping gasoline into a sedan, while Becky Coots, who had gone into the gas station to buy a portable phone charger just in case of emergencies, stared at the scene in the street with the cashier on duty, Rick Pinkney. Tim Kelly watched the soldiers from where he was pulling a sack of ice from a commercial freezer, while Cameron Ramirez, who had gone into the general store to hang a flyer about glee club, stared at the scene in the street with the manager on duty, Hannah Petrovich. The Fankhausers, who had just walked out of the bank with some complimentary lollipops and a receipt for a deposit, froze in the door of the bank. The Bergquists, who had just walked out of the pharmacy with a package of disposable razors and some prescription ritalin, froze in the door of the pharmacy. Across the street, the Garzas and the Dylans, who had just left the library together, stood stock-still in the parking lot with tote bags full of books, staring at the soldiers with expressions of uncertainty, confusion, fear, and dread. Alex Cruz, who had been sitting on a bench playing a game on his phone, literally gaped at the soldiers with a slack jaw. Tony Osin, who had been shuffling to his truck with a liter of margarita mix, was gazing at the soldiers with a look of astonishment. Walt Ho stared at the scene from behind the window of the salon, draped with an apron, getting his bangs trimmed by James Whipper, who was also staring, holding a pair of scissors. Bev Whittaker stared at the scene from the window at the dentist, draped with an apron, getting her teeth cleaned by Audrey Whipper, who was also staring, holding a strand of floss. Riley Whipper, Presley Olson, Kendra Goldberg, Adrian Moreau, and Mike Cooks, who had just smoked a bowl and were all high as fuck, were watching in shock from the picnic table at the ice cream shop, holding spoons over a trough of ice cream, heaped scoops of maple walnut and salted caramel and praline and nutella topped with spirals of whipped cream, which was beginning to melt in the sun. Allison Deloatch, who was working her first shift ever at the ice cream shop, her first job, was peering out the window of the shop, clutching the instruction manual for new employees as if that might explain what to do in the event of an invasion. Kimberly Khan, who had been hanging from the monkey bars at the playground in her lucky outfit, off-brand chucks and a romper with rainbow barrettes in her hair, stared at the soldiers only a second before dropping to the wood chips and bolting back toward home.
I love the way Baker names the move he’s about to make, a kind of literary calling his shot, when he writes: “Some fifty of us happened to be downtown, observing the invasion from some fifty different perspectives.” He follows that line with a pile-up of names and activities and vantage points that’s enjoyably bewildering, all the while setting the scene for the chaotic moment to follow. Note how each character is clearly situated in time and space, relative to the unfolding action around them.
But that’s just how Baker uses his many great names, in this passage—what is it that makes the names work so well together? Why do they seem so instantly believable and tangible, and why does it feel like all of these names could conceivably occupy the same small town?
I think that at least one reason these names work together is that they cohere.
What do I mean by cohere? I’m drawing this use of the term from a post about novelist Michael Moorcock’s “rules” for “How to Write a Book in Three Days,” where Moorcock talks about the prep work a writer might do if they wanted to try to write a fantasy novel so quickly. One of his pieces of advice is this:
You need a list of images that are purely fantastic: deliberate paradoxes, say: the City of Screaming Statues, things like that. You just write a list of them so you've got them there when you need them. Again, they have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with the other.
They have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with the other. I don’t write as fast as Moorcock, nor have I ever done exactly the kind of pre-writing listing he’s suggesting, but his idea of coherence and right resonances has stuck with me throughout this year: one of the ways I’ve been determining if some fabulist or speculative element I’ve added to my novel-in-progress works is to consider where it coheres or resonates with the others already in the book. This is different from asking if it ”makes sense” or if I can articulate why it works—to me, this notion of coherence is somehow both more nebulous and more exacting than that.
Now let’s put this all together.
For this exercise, your goal is to write a short piece of fiction with a huge cast of named characters—proper names, please, first and last—and to use the introduction of that cast to propel the action of the story forward, in the same way Baker does in the excerpt above.
Before you begin, you’ll need two things: a one-sentence scenario and a list of names, names you’ll reach for one after another as you write your story: you’re creating a coherence of names, perhaps, in the mode of those collective nouns for animals many writers love so much.
As you write your list of names, test them against each other—do they cohere? Are they resonant? This isn’t an intellectual question—it’s something you feel in your guts, or wherever else you keep your writerly instincts.
In Baker’s story, the scenario is the invasion of the micro-nation America. You don’t need to know anything more detailed than that to begin your own short. Instead of pre-planning, you’ll figure the details as you go, using your many characters to spur you on.
Once you have your coherence of characters and your one-sentence scenario, begin writing. Sentence by sentence, move us through the unfolding scenario, one character or group of characters at a time, giving each character or group a single event to either enact or witness. In other words, every time you introduce a new character, be sure you’re also moving forward at least one beat of time, by giving that character an action or observation in the unfolding scene.
Aim for 500-1000 words, which should be enough space to let you work in all the names and take us from the beginning to the end of your scenario. If you run out of names before your reach the ending, write more; if you reach the ending without using all your names, flesh out the middle of the scenario with whoever you have left.
With effort and luck, you might write either a complete flash fiction or a promising part of something longer. As always, stick with the exercise for as long as it’s useful, then feel free to swerve toward whatever suggests itself next.
Good luck! See you in May!
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Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House/William Morrow in 2021. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
His personal website can be found at www.mattbell.com.
I have no idea if you will see this comment. I just did this exercise with my high school creative writing students, and they loved it AND wrote some great scenes. The next step will be to take any part or person that they liked and grow it into a story. Thanks so much for these exercises!