Episode 156 - Character Development Through the Pain and Promise of Life with David Corbett
October 18, 2022
David Corbett talks about CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT THROUGH THE PAIN AND PROMISE OF LIFE. We discuss pathological maneuvers and the pain of life; how a theme emerges from moments of helplessness; the idea of persistent virtues; earning the redemptive moment; the power of giving an unsympathetic character a kid or a dog; and neo-noir and the morally flawed character.
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David Corbett is the author of six novels, including "The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday," and his works have been nominated for the Lefty Award for Best Historical Mystery and the Edgar, Anthony, Barry, Shamus, and Spinetingler Awards. His novel Done for a Dime was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was described by the Washington Post as “one of the three or four best American crime novels.” Corbett’s short fiction has twice been selected for Best American Mystery Stories. His non-fiction has appeared in outlets including the New York Times and Writer’s Digest. He has written two writing guides, "The Art of Character" and "The Compass of Character," has taught at the UCLA Writer’s Program, and is a monthly contributor to Writer Unboxed.
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"I'd go for moments of helplessness that exhibit the characters having to deal with pain. And the categories I use are fear, shame, guilt, betrayal, and loss or death. But we also have great many good experiences, and those patterns of behavior that come from the bad experiences, I call pathological maneuvers. But what develops from our positive moments of helplessness, I call persistent virtues." —David Corbett
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is David Corbett. Hey David, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] David: I'm doing pretty good. How about you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I am doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, David Corbett is the author of six novels, including "The Long Lost Love Letters of Doc Holiday," and his works have been nominated for the Lefty Award for Best Historical Mystery and the Edgar Anthony Barry Shamus and Spinetingler awards. His novel "Done for a Dime" was named a New York Times Notable Book and was described by the Washington Post as one of the three or four best American crime novels. Corbett's short fiction has twice been selected for the Best American Mystery Stories. And his nonfiction has appeared in outlets including the New York Times and Writers Digest. He has written two writing guides, "The Art of Character" and "The Compass of Character," has taught at the UCLA Writers' Program and is a monthly contributor to Writer Unboxed.
And I was fortunate to see David at the Writer's Digest 2022 Conference giving a talk on Misguided Desires and Misbegotten Yearnings. And so I got very interested in a specific aspect of that talk and that was Character Development Through the Pain and Promise of Life. I just love all these titles so much. And so that's what I invited David on to talk about today: character development through the pain and promise of life.
And so David, I wanted to start out asking you, do you remember a moment where you were either reading a book, writing a book, watching a movie, whatever it might be, where this idea of the importance of the pain and promise of life struck you as such an important part of character development?
The Three Questions
Well actually, it wasn't so much when I was watching one. The way I learned about this technique was from a screenwriter named Gill Dennis. And he wrote the script for the biopic on Johnny Cash, "Walk the Line."
[00:01:46] David: And he said that when he was interviewing Johnny Cash, he asked him three specific questions. When was your moment of greatest loss or moment of greatest sorrow? And Johnny said, it's when I lost my brother when I was nine years old. His older brother died. And had a very stern Presbyterian Calvinist father and a mother who was more dedicated to her husband than to her son. And so the death of his brother began a period of extreme loneliness for him.
Then Gill asked, so what was your moment of greatest shame? And Johnny said, it was when I hit June in front of the kids. That's June Carter, the woman he married and stayed with for all of his life.
He said, what was your moment of greatest joy? And he said, my moment of greatest joy was when the entire family played together at the Grand Ole Opry. Because Carlene Carter, his daughter, is also a country Western singer. So is Roseanne Cash, his other daughter. The Carter family was famous in country western circles and June was from that family.
And Gill pointed out two really fascinating things. The first, it goes, now we have an arc, I'm going from sorrow to joy with shame in the middle. And getting from one point to the other was pretty much the story of Johnny's life. I mean, once he felt lonely, he went into the military, but he had a talent for playing guitar and writing songs. And so the love he was seeking, he found in audiences. And the camaraderie he was seeking was with his band mates.
Pathological Maneuvers and the Pain of Life
[00:03:19] David: But he didn't really know how to accept really genuine love. And the down cycle of that because of the drugs and the alcohol that came with being on the road, spiraled him downward to that terrible, that lowest moment of when he hit his wife in front of the kids, at which point he had a reckoning. He had to say, you know, it's look, change or die. And he gave up drugs and alcohol. He turned to Jesus, his wife was very religious, and that began a whole new chapter in his life.
So the pain of life had dictated his behavior in conscious and unconscious ways. He was sad and he was looking for comradery, but he was also keeping real emotional connection at bay because of that fear of once again losing that. And he had to be able to get over that, to overcome those, what I call, pathological maneuvers. And his pathological maneuvers were seeking love through fame and numbing his feelings of shame and loneliness through drugs and alcohol. And only by addressing those, could he then become who he truly wanted to be. And so that was where, if you're talking about how the pain of life, only by reckoning, coming face to face with the pain of life, was he able to address the promise of life.
A Theme Emerges from Moments of Helplessness
[00:04:39] David: Now, one more caveat before I go. That was the one thing that Gill pointed out. The other thing he pointed out, and this is a sneaky little trick to this methodology, is that if you look at those three incidents, the loss of his brother, hitting his wife in front of the kids, the whole family performing in front of the Grand Ole Opry. You see a theme there and that theme is family. I don't know why this works and I'm not sure it will always work. But the more I work on this with that sort of mythology, it's astonishing how a theme emerges from these moments of helplessness.
And when Gill taught this to us, he actually had us do it with personal moments. We did moment of greatest fear, moment of greatest shame, and then he said, "I love you ..." And we had to write scenes that were based on each of those moments from our own lives. And it was one of the most eye-opening things I ever did as a writer, and it changed me and the way I work.
I was expecting a fourth question. So we had the sorrow and shame and then joy. I was hoping for a pride question. What was the moment you, Johnny Cash, were most proud of? Did he not go there because that question was not necessary for him to find the theme he was looking for?
Persistent Virtues
[00:05:56] David: I think so. Now, when I teach this, I actually used two main categories and you brought up pain of life. And I'd go for moments of helplessness that exhibit the characters having to deal with pain. And the categories I use are fear, shame, guilt, betrayal, and loss or death.
But I also, because, you know, only half of our behavior is formed by our bad experiences. We also have great many good experiences, and those patterns of behavior that come from the bad experiences, I call pathological maneuvers. They're defense mechanisms.
But what develops from our positive moments of helplessness, I call, persistent virtues. It's when we find that we're capable of, now taking those five bad ones, instead of fear, courage. Instead of shame, pride. Instead of guilt, forgiveness. Instead of betrayal, trust. Instead of loss, connection. Or death, love. And you don't need to explore all of those. I tend to explore three to five of them.
But I'd like that, just to explore that the positive points, like you said, what would be moment of greatest pride? I call it the golden moment. When was my character's golden moment? And I always find it revealing, at what point in his life or her life was it? Was it early on? Well then, what's happened since? Has it been 20 years since that golden moment? Has it been two months since that golden moment? What if it's later in life, they didn't achieve that golden moment till much later. Why? What kept them from it? So all sorts of interesting story questions emerge, simply by asking, when was that moment in their life?
[00:07:36] David: The same thing with connection. You know, when was, and I love the way Gill did it: "I love you ..." Meaning that, you have said it aloud to someone. It isn't just, I felt love or externalized. No, you've come out and actually said it to the person. I think that's really important. And when was that? Was it when you were a kid? And you just, there was a parent or a friend that you truly loved. Were you incapable of that until you were older? So these questions are interesting, not just in terms of what they reveal about the character's past, but when these events happen, tell you a lot about the shape and contour of that character's life. And from just those questions, those moments and then trying to figure out when they happened, you can begin developing a whole story on that character.
[00:08:21] Matty: When Gill had you do that exercise for yourself, I'm gathering that he was asking you to do that as a person, not like inhabiting a character or something like that. Am I understanding that correctly?
[00:08:31] David: Right.
[00:08:31] Matty: Do you feel as if an author needs to have answered those questions for themselves before they can apply it productively to their characters?
[00:08:39] David: I don't think they need to, but I can tell you it was incredibly valuable for me to have done that. And it was also, we had to reveal it to the other people in the seminar. Now, luckily, they were my friends, so we knew each other, and we were willing to go there with each other. Because I had some pretty terrible things to expose. And my theme, which is really funny, Gill just said, I'm not really sure, but it almost, it seems to be encounters with abusive male authority. And it was probably 30 or 40, no, 30 or 40 years after, until I recognized just how true that was. I went, oh, that's interesting.
But it wasn't until recently, and this is going to hit some of your viewers wrong maybe, but it wasn't until Trump, that I began realizing I was kind of having PTSD.
[00:09:26] Matty: Yeah.
[00:09:26] David: And I'm sure that there's, and I know I've talked to women about this, that he just seemed to embody in a big way, abusive men in their lives. And I found myself feeling much the same way. I was having just almost like obsessive behavior. What's he doing now? What's he doing now? As though protecting myself, you know, what's going to happen next?
And I wish I had figured that out 30 years ago, so I could have used it a bit more productively and altered my behavior accordingly. But you know, sometimes, sometimes you're just kind of slow.
[00:09:59] Matty: So I'm trying to figure out a way to ask this question, so it doesn't become like a therapy session for the author, but if you're thinking through this for a character and overpowering negative male influence is what they're battling, is there a way to look at this and say, I want this person to come out on the other side and have conquered it. So I'm going to look at, you know, you were describing those opposites of the different kinds of experiences. Is it a hint as to where you go in order to allow that character or the individual to overcome what they're struggling with?
Earning the Redemptive Moment
[00:10:33] David: Well, if you've got abuse, you've got, probably fear and shame are going to be key elements of that character's behavior. I actually have a student right now I'm teaching through Lit Reactor, Creating Complex Characters, and we're going through this right now, a lot of the same material. And one of my students is dealing with a young man who had an abusive father and has sort of swallowed his rage.
And his pathological maneuvers are substance abuse, self-isolation, but there is an explosive moment where he reacts to that rage, and is in a fight and damages, he thinks he actually kills the person. And she wants to give him a redemptive moment of forgiveness. And I said, well, you're going to have to earn it. And you're going to have to work through people in his life who allow him to deal with that shame and that guilt to express it and to feel as though he's not still that wounded victim that he was when that abuse took place.
And that's a very compelling story. We're sort of in a weird place fiction-wise, where there's been so much trauma fiction that it's almost become a cliché. And so finding ways to get characters to positively deal with their past instead of mulling over it, the only thing that they accomplish in the story is to get over the past as opposed to embrace a new future, is something I really try to get my students, you know, to interact.
My late wife had a really rough childhood and one of the wonderful things that her uncle that she adored, one of the things that he said at her funeral said, this was a girl who at age 16 said, I don't have to be the person my past says I have to be, and completely changed her life around. And I think that's a powerful narrative. And she just decided, I'm not going to be that person. She just said, now I'm going to start doing things that I want to do that I believe in, that I think are meaningful. And that was her way out of the dark space.
[00:12:35] David: So I think whenever you're crafting a story like this, when you're saying, how do you deal with the pain in life? I don't think you have to go back, and you have to do the navel gazing and dealing with it in some terrible, you have that scene where there's all wrenching, as opposed to when they feel an impulse that echoes from the past, instead of giving into it, they choose something else. And you give your character those positive choices, that decision say, no, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to do this instead. And they keep forging forward from that point. That too is a very dramatic story.
[00:13:06] Matty: Are there differences in how you would use these prompts, I guess, for thinking about your character depending on the genre, like if you were writing more of a comedy, is there a way you can use these prompts in that kind of scenario?
Comedy is Drama Cranked Up to 11
Comedy is just drama cranked up to 11. You know, all the reactions are exaggerated. Where one character might be afraid, your character is terrified. When something bad happens, it just gets worse. If a character feels ashamed that the shame is scalding. What you're always having to do is just push that envelope further. So I think all these explorations, you know, moment of greatest shame is incredibly important in comedy. Fear, I mean, look at cartoons. What are cartoons about? Escaping the anvil falling on your head or being caught in a moment of embarrassment. So I think all the same prompts would certainly work with comedy.
In comic forms, characters are often more types than psychologically real characters, and what I'm talking about here is much more about psychological realism. But if even if you're using characters who have types, they're still going to be dealing with those fundamental emotions. So exploring them, I never think is like a wrong turn. It's just going to be a question of how you decide to approach that material and use it in the story.
Use "Because ..." rather than "Despite the Fact that ..."
You had mentioned before about looking across, for example, the answers to the questions that Johnny Cash gave to the questions and seeing that the theme there was family. If someone is in the early stages of developing a character, is there a benefit to either having the theme and then coming up with what the most shameful, the most sorrowful moments were for the character? Or does it make more sense to write some of that and then step back and look across it and understand what the theme is?
Each writer's process is their own. I don't know that I could answer that categorically one way or the other. I like starting with this because it tells me what the character's story is. But of course, I begin with a story idea and then I begin doing this character work and I find out this character has his own story. Well, how can I make that work with the larger story I had planned? And you just go through that by asking questions, seeing, well, is that really true? Does it fit? How do I make it fit? What sort of questions do I have to ask, and what sort of situations do I have to put the character in to make it work?
[00:15:35] David: And so it's just a back and forth. It's not as though you lay this groundwork and then the highway just lays out before you, you're just laying bricks after that. It's always a back and forth the dialectic of, okay, this is what feels right to me at this point. But wait a minute, the story's going to require this, would my character do that? What you really need to ask is, what will I have to do to make it so my character can't help but do that? And that's just the kind of work you have to do as you're moving through your story.
[00:16:04] Matty: Yeah, I just came up with a phrase that I'm finding very productive for myself, and I'm hoping that I made it up, but I may have just absorbed it through osmosis from someone, that is the idea that if you have to describe what your character's doing and say, "despite the fact that," you're in trouble and you always have to be able to say, "because of," just to explain what they're doing. So, "despite the fact that she was hearing noises from the basement, while she was listening to the radio announcement about the escaped killer, she went downstairs and got killed." As opposed to, "because she knew her daughter was downstairs, she went downstairs to confront the killer."
[00:16:41] David: That's interesting. I like that because, "despite the fact that" seems as though you're trying to shoehorn the character into a situation that they normally wouldn't.
If You Want to Elicit Fear, Create Hope
[00:16:50] David: The example I use is in horror movies, where all the teenagers are at the house, the parents are away and there's a pool house in the back and the teenage boys trying to get the girl out because that's what teenage boys do. And teenage girls usually, they're smarter. So what you want is that you want the teenage girl to say, no, that's not, I don't want to go out there. It's creepy, it's dark. Because if she doesn't do that, if she goes, oh, okay, then they're both too dumb to live, and you just, you don't care whether the monster gets to them or not.
And this is something I learned from Don Maass. He says, if you want to elicit fear, you've got to create hope, hope that the bad thing won't happen. You know, there's a prefigurement of what the danger might be and then hope that it can be escaped. Because if you don't do that, it's never going to register with the emotional impact you want.
[00:17:37] Matty: Well, that is interesting. I interviewed Michaelbrent Collins fairly recently and the title of the episode was, "Why Horror is the Genre of Hope." I think it was tied to what you're saying there that, the hope for something better is what is the fuel for the horrible things.
[00:17:54] David: Yeah. I love that. That's great.
Give Them a Kid or a Dog
[00:17:58] Matty: I think that another way that one could profitably apply some of these theories is if you are needing either to make a generally good character more interesting, or you need to make a generally bad character more empathetic. And I guess I'll start out with a bad character first. How do you advise authors, when they're trying to decide how empathetic or maybe, differently, sympathetic they need to make a character that they don't want the reader to be rooting for?
Well, if you're afraid that your character is going to be unlikeable, a word that I hate, but if you're afraid that readers will react negatively to the character and you want them to stay with the character instead of just being repulsed by them, give them a kid or a dog. And what I mean by that, going back to my students, she’s got two main characters, and one has a very active, external goal. It's combat-oriented, she has to avenge her father, it's a sort of a magical realism kind of thing. And the other character's going through an internal journey, and she goes, I'm just having problems with, but she's my real protagonist, the one going through an internal journey. What should I do?
[00:19:09] David: I said, well, usually I recommend if your character's unlikable, give them a kid or a dog, but in this case, I'm thinking externalized internal journey with a kid or a dog. What if there's a spirit animal that suddenly she comes across and now needs to protect? Because the whole logic behind kid or a dog is, give them some to care about other than themselves. This is specifically good for characters we might not like.
An interesting part of the movie, Casablanca, hopefully most of your viewers will know this movie. I grew up on it, it was on TV every Saturday or something. I know it inside and out and I actually teach it. And one of the things is that if it weren't for Bogart, if it was just some generic guy in that role, we'd hate him, because he's nasty to this woman, when Ugarte gets shot, somebody says, I hope when they come from me, you don't just stand there. And he says, I stick my neck out for nobody. When Ugarte says, you hate me, don't you Rick? He says, if I give you half a thought, I would. I mean, he's mean. But we see that the staff at his casino admire him and are very fond of him. And it's that reaction which makes us realize, this guy's not as bad as he's making himself out to be. And that contradiction intrigues us. We go, what makes this guy tick?
[00:20:26] David: And so if you've got somebody who seems to be nasty, who has this terrible temper or who is jealous or some other negative quality, if we also see that someone else in the story really cares about them or they care about that character, we will be automatically intrigued. So they're not as bad as they make themselves out to be. Okay, well, what’s that about? And you will hang with the character a little bit longer. So that's one of my main techniques for an unlikable character.
And then you flip it on its head. If your character is like too nice, give them a negative trait. I did this in a book I worked on. I say that the problem with the noble character is very often, he's like a nightlight and he doesn't give off very much light and he gives off very little heat and so there's, you know, just why bother? So I needed to give him an edge.
[00:21:15] David: So I started thinking about backstory and he was the youngest of three brothers and I was the youngest of four brothers. And I know what it's like to be the youngest of a bunch of males. It's like basically, you know what rolls downhill and its speed accelerates as it gets closer to you. And what I had is I was having him just fending off blows. And I needed to show that, no, he could be that way to someone else. And I just did it in my own mind, a little scene where he was cruel to another kid, just as his brothers were being cruel to him. And it just gave him a little more agency. It gave him an edge that he had lacked before, and almost like that, he became more interesting.
[00:21:56] Matty: I always admire authors who can make a character that everybody's rooting for, but they have body odor, or they fart or something. Like, something that would, that I think a lazier author would use as a marker that this is somebody you're not supposed to like. And yet, I think the skilled author knows how to use those little quirks, and the bigger quirks, to make a basically good character more interesting.
How Long Should You Delay Showing the Positive Side?
[00:22:22] Matty: And I think the other interesting thing is that thinking about like the time between how long you can go before you see the redemptive quality of the character that you generally dislike. They're mean to someone in the next scene, you see their other side. Let's say, they're portrayed as a selfish person, and then in the next scene, they're portrayed as an unselfish person, then it's not hard for the empathy to kick in then.
But if you have a long period of time, and the example I always think of is Severus Snape. You have him being a jerk through however many books, I forget, and it's only at the end that you realize that this person who has basically been a very selfish character through six, seven books, is ultimately selfless. And I think it's also gutsy that JK Rowling waited that long to let us in on the admirable side of Snape.
And that makes the payoff all the stronger, is delaying it that long. It all depends on whether or to what extent you, you feel you're going to lose the reader. And sometimes, you just have to use a minor positive trait to get us far enough to see the deeper, positive trait.
[00:23:30] David: I'm thinking of a BBC series, and I think it was called Cracker. And it was Robbie Coltrane played a police psychologist, and he was a gambling addict, an alcoholic. One of the first scenes we see him in is in the nine items or less line. And he's got like five bottles of booze and four cartons of cigarettes or something. He's got like about 15 items. He goes, no, there's booze one item. Cigarettes, two items. And the woman behind him, you know, Hey! You know, and we've all been there. And he's not very nice about it. And he's divorced and we meet his ex-wife and she's clearly just done with it. Has to ask him for something that he's supposed to have done, and he kind of brushes her off. We're kind of going what a brusque, abusive, selfish a-hole.
But it's clear he's really good at his job. And sometimes, a skill will make us go, okay, then we're going to get into, what can this guy do? We'll find out later that what makes him so skilled is he really has genuine empathy.
[00:24:32] David: Right. But we don't see that because at first, he's just so abrasive and so obnoxious that is obscured. But it is gradually shown, and it is a case of that delayed payoff. Especially if you're going to use that technique, if you're going to give yourself a character who seems to have more bad going for him than good, then whatever the good is, make it worth the wait if you're going to make the reader wait.
[00:25:02] Matty: I'm trying to think about Casablanca, and I think that there are a couple of hints dropped in there that you're not just supposed to take on faith the fact that he's done something that makes the people who work with him in the bar like him. But I think there are a couple of examples that show him being sort of generous despite what you would expect. Am I remembering that correctly? Like, how long do you have to wait until you see the softer side of Humphrey Bogart?
[00:25:27] David: Well, you see pretty quick. It's just the way that his staff responds to him, the way other people respond to him. It's clear that he's admired. Later on, there's that I think it's the Bulgarian couple where the woman comes to him and is almost basically saying, look, if I throw myself at you, will you let my husband win at roulette because he's losing terribly and he's losing all our money and it's all we have. And he of course lets the guy win instead of making her do what she'd never forgive herself for. But that's a little bit later.
One of the things he does early on, is he confronts the German comandante. And in that scene, we see that he's certainly not afraid. Like, they show him his passport and he goes, are my eyes brown? And the German says, what would you think about if the Reich marched into New York? He says, well, there’s certain neighborhoods in New York I wouldn't try to walk into. And it's clear that Louis, the French guy, just thinks that Rick is clever and fascinating and clearly all the ladies love him. And so we kind of see him through Louis's eyes.
But he still has that edge. And so we gradually see that. But it isn't until that center sequence, when the backstory's revealed, we see that he was in love, totally in love with a girl from Norway. And even then, he's bitter. The way he treats Ilsa the next day, he goes, look, we both know that there'll be another night and you'll be back. I mean, that's just cruel.
[00:26:53] David: And when she's trying to explain herself to him says, yeah, I've heard a lot of stories used to come with the sound of a tinny piano, and he's talking about prostitutes. A bordello. That's the good thing about the forties, is that they always had to find really creative ways to say these things. So he is basically calling her a whore. And then he just says, well, you'll be back. And then when Victor Lazlo comes and asks him, he just says, no, I'm not going to give him to you. If you want to know why, ask your wife, basically trying to tear apart this beautiful marriage that he sees in front of him.
And it isn't until she comes and almost tries to shoot him, and then she admits, I didn't want to run away, and she tells him her side of the story, that he's capable of saying, oh, okay. I get it now. And he forgives. And we still think he's scheming to get the two of them away, and that turn at the end is so brilliant because they just don't give it away.
You know, the screenplay was written in two and a half weeks, I think. And the two main guys disappeared, and it was a relatively young screenwriter who had to just write that thing by the seat of his pants. And sometimes, didn't have pages ready for that day's shoot and just had to just hammer them out. It's one of the best screenplays ever in Hollywood. It's just, it's really funny how sometimes forcing yourself in that situation forces you to just give up to the unconscious and let your unconscious or subconscious, whatever you call it, feed you your ideas instead of suffering over them and trying to wrestle them into the shape you want them to come at you at.
[00:28:17] David: Yeah. Well, I'm assuming that at the time Casablanca was made, Humphrey Bogart was already Humphrey Bogart, right? Like, that was well into his career. Yeah.
[00:28:27] Matty: So I suppose that they could count on people going in there sort of being predisposed to like any character that Humphrey Bogart played, as opposed to, if it was his first movie, maybe he wouldn't have even been cast, because he's not really a typical leading man type. You would almost expect the more typical leading man for movies of that era. And it's interesting that no one ever talks about the Victor Lazlo character the way they do the Humphrey Bogart character, because he's the nightlight, right? Victor Lazlo is a little bit too good.
[00:28:56] David: We'll call him, The White Nightlight. Yeah. Yeah. He is. In a certain sense, who Humphrey Bogart once wanted to be, although he sold guns, so he wasn't exactly Clean Gene. But as Victor Lazlo says, welcome back to the fight, is what he says at the end. And so he's an idealization of what the Humphrey Bogart character could be, but won't be, because he does have that sort of darker side, which makes him more interesting. He's more complex, right?
[00:29:57] Matty: Well, I was thinking of another movie that I know you like: Chinatown
We're dating ourselves. We are dating ourselves. I showed Chinatown because I teach it, and I think it's one of the best scripts ever written. And I keep going back to it to teach myself more, because there's so much more to learn from it. And just for the use of symbols, for example, fish, eyes, glass, those things appear almost in every scene. There's one way or another, those things keep on coming up. The use of the word, albacore. There's one thing when one of the detectives is listening, he says, what were they arguing about? I don't know, but one of them said apple core. And we haven't even heard about the Albacore Club yet. But the screenwriters, laying these seeds.
[00:30:38] David: And then the first scene with Curly, the fisherman, he goes, look, I'm sorry, you know, that we haven't been able to catch any albacore. We're just getting skipjack. And it's just, it's amazing how, until you really study that screenplay, you don't realize that he's constantly laying these little things down. And in the middle scene, when she saves him at the old folks’ home, in her beautiful Cord convertible, it prefigures that final scene when she's shot in that same car and they're shooting at her from behind.
And one guy's in a brown suit, and it might be that same cop at the last, but we don't know because we've only seen him from behind. And then as they're driving away, there's three bullet holes, but they're on the passenger side. So it's a mirror image. And as she's driving, she touches her eye. There are all these little things thrown into it that are just brilliant.
So I'm sorry. But I showed it and there was that 20 something and it goes, God, this is really show. What are you going to do?
Neo-noir and the Morally Flawed Character
[00:31:33] Matty: Well, I think that another difference in how, not just generational differences, but differences in what people expect from movies, and I don't know that this was common among all the movies that were being made during the time of Chinatown, but he kind of never liked the Jack Nicholson character, Jake. I don't think Jake ever has a moment like Humphrey Bogart does in Casablanca of where you say, oh, yes, he was ashamed of beating his wife, but eventually look, he pulled the family together so that they could all be on stage together at the Grand Old Opry. No. Jake never has that moment. Or am I just missing the moment where he kind of redeems himself?
Doesn't redeem himself. But there's one really great moment, and it's after he hits her, with the whole, my sister, my daughter, and my sister, my daughter. And Katherine, the daughter, comes downstairs, or Evelyn brings her down. She goes, Evelyn, this is Mr. Gittes. And she goes, hello. And he looks up and he says, hello. And he's gentle. It's the first time in the whole movie when he seems gentle. Because he's seen how wrong he was. And he gets now that no, the one person who actually has moral authority in this whole thing is this woman. She hasn't been lying to me. I now realize the true nature of the evil I'm up against. The problem is, he hasn't given up his arrogant belief that he can figure it out and he can find a way out. Instead, he's going to get himself right back into Chinatown, and that's the tragic trope at the end.
That was very interesting time in American film. There's number of those films were what were known as Neo noir and noir is almost always about a morally flawed character in an oppressive system trying to find some way to get the brass ring one last time. For example, Jake's trying to get out of Chinatown. You find out he's trapped in it. Dog day Afternoon, I'm going to rob a bank to get the money for my lover's sex change operation. And we're rooting for him, because he's the underdog. And that's what makes a lot of those movies work, is that even though they're morally flawed, they're the underdog. And it was a time when we recognized the system was oppressive and evil. It was a time in the Vietnam War. It was the time of when the civil rights movement was trying to get America to look at itself and say, we're not going to stand for this anymore. And so it was a particular cultural moment. And I don't think that an innocent hero or a benevolent hero would've really fit the times.
The screenwriter for the John Adams biopic that I think PBS did or maybe HBO did, I'm not sure. And he said, when did America stop making humanist films? He said, I'll give you a hint, and he gave a date. Anybody know? And I rose my hand, I said, Jaws. He said, close. That one came out a year later. No, it was Star Wars. And it's when Hollywood realized, whoa, we can make money on these things?
[00:34:34] David: And it's when Syd Field and his screenwriting book began writing, don't write bummer endings. Nobody wants to see them and nobody's going to pay for them. I mean, Chinatown just wouldn't be made, except by an independent. Independents have kind of made a comeback in the nineties and since, but they really are few and far between, sadly.
[00:34:51] Matty: Is Kirk Ellis, the person?
[00:34:53] David: Yes, Thank you very much. Wonderful man, by the way. Incredibly smart. He talked about like Bicycle Thieves, movies like that. Americans don't make movies like that.
[00:35:03] Matty: Yeah. I have not seen that one. I'm going to have to put that on my TV watch list.
[00:35:06] David: My late wife was Italian, and we got about 20 minutes into it. She says, okay, this thing doesn't end well, does it? I can tell. Nope, I can't watch this. This is like watching my family die. I can't do this, bye. So she just checked out. She never did see it.
[00:35:20] Matty: Well, I think nobody wants to write the book or write the movie, or what have you, that no one wants to watch because it's too much of a bummer. On the other hand, I think that people don't want to read and probably don't want to write things that are saccharin sweet, everything's going fine with the perfect white knight hero.
So are there tips, you can share that an author who's working on a work in progress can use to say, I really need to add a little more grit to my good guy, or I need to add a little more softness to my bad guy?
You know, and like I said, if you're trying to soften an unlikeable or overly harsh or vicious or whatever character, a kid or a dog, or, and I mean that in a broader sense, give them somebody else to care about. We always seem to see villains in isolation. Well, why? Or if they do have a sidekick, they abuse them. No. Have them love them.
[00:36:15] David: I mean, one of the things that made Tony Soprano, although he was the protagonist, so fascinating was that he truly loved his family. I mean, he went around on his wife, but he clearly loved his daughter, and he was probably a little scared of her because she was smarter than he was.
And Anthony, he could be a kid with Anthony, his child-like side got exposed through his interactions, whenever he wanted to eat ice cream or play video games, he went with Anthony. And so one way is show them with a genuine concern for another character or give them some meaningful aspect of internal life. I would go with regret strongest, because a shame and guilt, the things we mentioned, some betrayal in their past something, a wound that we could identify with. We know that if that happened to me, I'd be pretty damn pissed off too, I can really realize why he wants revenge. I get it.
So if not a kid or their dog, then some internal life aspect, and usually a wound is really helpful in that regard to clarify why the character's there now.
[00:37:16] David: Now some people just avoid this. For example, Shakespeare notoriously avoided revealing the motivations. I mean, people say Iago clearly is motivated by being overpassed by, I forget the other character's name. And yeah, but he gets revenge on that guy within act one. That wouldn't justify the lengths he goes to, including the murder of Desdemona. I mean, this guy's just bad. Where does that come from? Shakespeare says, I'm going to let you figure that out.
In Richard the Third, they say, well, it's because he wants Queen Anne, can't have her because he's a hunchback. Really? Is that why he wreaks havoc on everybody else? That great line that he says, no, be so fierce, but feel some pity, but I feel none, therefore am no beast. That's just brilliant. And it's just kind of like, well, if I was really a beast I'd feel some kind of pity, but I don't, so I'm something else. I'm even scarier.
We Just Don't Know ...
And that's what makes him particularly fearsome, is that we don't know. And that can be a technique with a villain. You just don't reveal where it came from. You just see them doing something out of the blue, you kind of go, what the hell was that? And you're on the edge of your seat. And then you show them doing something kind or generous, and you're just constantly going, what explains these contradictions? And you don't explain it. You don't need to. That's one really viable technique to use. Or you can explain it, and then for some empathetic with them, until they go one step too far. And then we say, okay, now I really do want the good guy to gun you down.
Insight
[00:38:51] Matty: And I suppose it also depends on whether it's important for the character to be a fully fleshed character, or sometimes they're just there as a mechanism to achieve something. Like, in Silence of the Lambs you need to like, not like, but you know, Hannibal Lecter, you have to kind of be rooting for him in some way. Whereas Buffalo Bill, who cares? Buffalo Bill is just bad and you don't need to understand why he's doing what he's doing. He's just the mechanism to introduce someone who's even worse than Hannibal Lecter.
[00:39:21] David: Well, and the reason he's worse is because he lacks insight. And that's another technique for giving a seemingly evil character something that the reader can latch onto, is insight. I know what I'm doing. I know why I'm doing it. Even that line from Richard III, no, be so fierce. I mean, you sit there and just go, this could be wicked, he's got to figure it out.
Lust for Life
[00:39:46] David: And another one is just a lust for life. One of the reasons we love gangsters is because they live a great life. You know, in Goodfellas, he just says, everybody wanted to be a gangster, they had the best cars, they had the girls, they ate well, they lived life large. Everybody else was a schnook. And sometimes, you can really get into a character, even though he may be doing terrible things that he's just, he has this lust for life. So there's a number of different techniques you can use on that.
Go Internal
[00:40:12] David: For the protagonist who may seem too likable, one same kind of techniques, go internal. What has wounded them? What wound hasn't healed and how are they dealing with it in a counterproductive or even a self-destructive way? And they haven't forgiven themselves or they haven't forgiven somebody else. I think those are ways that you can add that kind of texture that makes the characters more interesting.
[00:40:39] Matty: David, this has been so interesting, and I have fodder for 17 more episodes that I would love to invite you back for. But thank you very much for talking about character development through pain and the promise of life. And please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:40:55] David: Well, if you can do that at my website, and it's very simple, just DavidCorbett.com. And also, I'm on Twitter, DavidCorbett_CA, because I used to live in California. I don't anymore. And I'm on Facebook. If you want to see pictures of my dog and my wife, go to Facebook. If you want to read snarky political comments or quotes from great, actually what I'm doing on Twitter these days is, one of my best friend gave me a birthday present of its diary excerpts for every day of the year from these famous diarists. And so I've begun just doing every day on Twitter. I'll just take a certain excerpt. Today was, Andre Gide about Hitler and listening to him on the radio. And a couple days ago it was Camus. And the day before was Nicolson, it was about Dylan Thomas.
[00:41:47] Matty: So if you were looking for a different kind of Twitter --
[00:41:50] David: Yeah.
[00:41:51] Matty: -- a little more thoughtful than your normal Twitter.
[00:41:53] David: Well, yeah, I have to admit, my Twitter feed is authors I'm following, and if you want a great author, besides me, to follow on Twitter, trust me, Adrian McKinty is one of the most fascinating Twitter guys out there. So I have McKinty, and then I do legal Twitter, because of all the things going on and I have all the legal people, I don't even bother with the news, because the news is so dumb. So I just go to legal Twitter and figure out what are all the smart people say about what's going on?
[00:42:19] Matty: If Adrian McKinty is hearing this, then Adrian, ask your publicist to read through their emails because there's an invitation from me out there to talk about writing a series, a historically based series.
[00:42:31] David: That series is one of the best, the Sean Duffy series. I think it's the best crime series ever, but I'm kind of prejudiced because I'm Irish. Even though he's Northern Irish and we have this all the time because well, you know, Northern. Yeah. Never mind. That's another long discussion.
[00:42:48] Matty: Well, if you know Adrian, please point him to this podcast episode and tell him that I would love to have him on.
[00:42:53] David: That would be great. I'll do that. Thank you.
[00:42:55] Matty: Thank you, David.
[00:42:57] David: You bet. You take care.
[00:00:06] David: I'm doing pretty good. How about you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I am doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, David Corbett is the author of six novels, including "The Long Lost Love Letters of Doc Holiday," and his works have been nominated for the Lefty Award for Best Historical Mystery and the Edgar Anthony Barry Shamus and Spinetingler awards. His novel "Done for a Dime" was named a New York Times Notable Book and was described by the Washington Post as one of the three or four best American crime novels. Corbett's short fiction has twice been selected for the Best American Mystery Stories. And his nonfiction has appeared in outlets including the New York Times and Writers Digest. He has written two writing guides, "The Art of Character" and "The Compass of Character," has taught at the UCLA Writers' Program and is a monthly contributor to Writer Unboxed.
And I was fortunate to see David at the Writer's Digest 2022 Conference giving a talk on Misguided Desires and Misbegotten Yearnings. And so I got very interested in a specific aspect of that talk and that was Character Development Through the Pain and Promise of Life. I just love all these titles so much. And so that's what I invited David on to talk about today: character development through the pain and promise of life.
And so David, I wanted to start out asking you, do you remember a moment where you were either reading a book, writing a book, watching a movie, whatever it might be, where this idea of the importance of the pain and promise of life struck you as such an important part of character development?
The Three Questions
Well actually, it wasn't so much when I was watching one. The way I learned about this technique was from a screenwriter named Gill Dennis. And he wrote the script for the biopic on Johnny Cash, "Walk the Line."
[00:01:46] David: And he said that when he was interviewing Johnny Cash, he asked him three specific questions. When was your moment of greatest loss or moment of greatest sorrow? And Johnny said, it's when I lost my brother when I was nine years old. His older brother died. And had a very stern Presbyterian Calvinist father and a mother who was more dedicated to her husband than to her son. And so the death of his brother began a period of extreme loneliness for him.
Then Gill asked, so what was your moment of greatest shame? And Johnny said, it was when I hit June in front of the kids. That's June Carter, the woman he married and stayed with for all of his life.
He said, what was your moment of greatest joy? And he said, my moment of greatest joy was when the entire family played together at the Grand Ole Opry. Because Carlene Carter, his daughter, is also a country Western singer. So is Roseanne Cash, his other daughter. The Carter family was famous in country western circles and June was from that family.
And Gill pointed out two really fascinating things. The first, it goes, now we have an arc, I'm going from sorrow to joy with shame in the middle. And getting from one point to the other was pretty much the story of Johnny's life. I mean, once he felt lonely, he went into the military, but he had a talent for playing guitar and writing songs. And so the love he was seeking, he found in audiences. And the camaraderie he was seeking was with his band mates.
Pathological Maneuvers and the Pain of Life
[00:03:19] David: But he didn't really know how to accept really genuine love. And the down cycle of that because of the drugs and the alcohol that came with being on the road, spiraled him downward to that terrible, that lowest moment of when he hit his wife in front of the kids, at which point he had a reckoning. He had to say, you know, it's look, change or die. And he gave up drugs and alcohol. He turned to Jesus, his wife was very religious, and that began a whole new chapter in his life.
So the pain of life had dictated his behavior in conscious and unconscious ways. He was sad and he was looking for comradery, but he was also keeping real emotional connection at bay because of that fear of once again losing that. And he had to be able to get over that, to overcome those, what I call, pathological maneuvers. And his pathological maneuvers were seeking love through fame and numbing his feelings of shame and loneliness through drugs and alcohol. And only by addressing those, could he then become who he truly wanted to be. And so that was where, if you're talking about how the pain of life, only by reckoning, coming face to face with the pain of life, was he able to address the promise of life.
A Theme Emerges from Moments of Helplessness
[00:04:39] David: Now, one more caveat before I go. That was the one thing that Gill pointed out. The other thing he pointed out, and this is a sneaky little trick to this methodology, is that if you look at those three incidents, the loss of his brother, hitting his wife in front of the kids, the whole family performing in front of the Grand Ole Opry. You see a theme there and that theme is family. I don't know why this works and I'm not sure it will always work. But the more I work on this with that sort of mythology, it's astonishing how a theme emerges from these moments of helplessness.
And when Gill taught this to us, he actually had us do it with personal moments. We did moment of greatest fear, moment of greatest shame, and then he said, "I love you ..." And we had to write scenes that were based on each of those moments from our own lives. And it was one of the most eye-opening things I ever did as a writer, and it changed me and the way I work.
I was expecting a fourth question. So we had the sorrow and shame and then joy. I was hoping for a pride question. What was the moment you, Johnny Cash, were most proud of? Did he not go there because that question was not necessary for him to find the theme he was looking for?
Persistent Virtues
[00:05:56] David: I think so. Now, when I teach this, I actually used two main categories and you brought up pain of life. And I'd go for moments of helplessness that exhibit the characters having to deal with pain. And the categories I use are fear, shame, guilt, betrayal, and loss or death.
But I also, because, you know, only half of our behavior is formed by our bad experiences. We also have great many good experiences, and those patterns of behavior that come from the bad experiences, I call pathological maneuvers. They're defense mechanisms.
But what develops from our positive moments of helplessness, I call, persistent virtues. It's when we find that we're capable of, now taking those five bad ones, instead of fear, courage. Instead of shame, pride. Instead of guilt, forgiveness. Instead of betrayal, trust. Instead of loss, connection. Or death, love. And you don't need to explore all of those. I tend to explore three to five of them.
But I'd like that, just to explore that the positive points, like you said, what would be moment of greatest pride? I call it the golden moment. When was my character's golden moment? And I always find it revealing, at what point in his life or her life was it? Was it early on? Well then, what's happened since? Has it been 20 years since that golden moment? Has it been two months since that golden moment? What if it's later in life, they didn't achieve that golden moment till much later. Why? What kept them from it? So all sorts of interesting story questions emerge, simply by asking, when was that moment in their life?
[00:07:36] David: The same thing with connection. You know, when was, and I love the way Gill did it: "I love you ..." Meaning that, you have said it aloud to someone. It isn't just, I felt love or externalized. No, you've come out and actually said it to the person. I think that's really important. And when was that? Was it when you were a kid? And you just, there was a parent or a friend that you truly loved. Were you incapable of that until you were older? So these questions are interesting, not just in terms of what they reveal about the character's past, but when these events happen, tell you a lot about the shape and contour of that character's life. And from just those questions, those moments and then trying to figure out when they happened, you can begin developing a whole story on that character.
[00:08:21] Matty: When Gill had you do that exercise for yourself, I'm gathering that he was asking you to do that as a person, not like inhabiting a character or something like that. Am I understanding that correctly?
[00:08:31] David: Right.
[00:08:31] Matty: Do you feel as if an author needs to have answered those questions for themselves before they can apply it productively to their characters?
[00:08:39] David: I don't think they need to, but I can tell you it was incredibly valuable for me to have done that. And it was also, we had to reveal it to the other people in the seminar. Now, luckily, they were my friends, so we knew each other, and we were willing to go there with each other. Because I had some pretty terrible things to expose. And my theme, which is really funny, Gill just said, I'm not really sure, but it almost, it seems to be encounters with abusive male authority. And it was probably 30 or 40, no, 30 or 40 years after, until I recognized just how true that was. I went, oh, that's interesting.
But it wasn't until recently, and this is going to hit some of your viewers wrong maybe, but it wasn't until Trump, that I began realizing I was kind of having PTSD.
[00:09:26] Matty: Yeah.
[00:09:26] David: And I'm sure that there's, and I know I've talked to women about this, that he just seemed to embody in a big way, abusive men in their lives. And I found myself feeling much the same way. I was having just almost like obsessive behavior. What's he doing now? What's he doing now? As though protecting myself, you know, what's going to happen next?
And I wish I had figured that out 30 years ago, so I could have used it a bit more productively and altered my behavior accordingly. But you know, sometimes, sometimes you're just kind of slow.
[00:09:59] Matty: So I'm trying to figure out a way to ask this question, so it doesn't become like a therapy session for the author, but if you're thinking through this for a character and overpowering negative male influence is what they're battling, is there a way to look at this and say, I want this person to come out on the other side and have conquered it. So I'm going to look at, you know, you were describing those opposites of the different kinds of experiences. Is it a hint as to where you go in order to allow that character or the individual to overcome what they're struggling with?
Earning the Redemptive Moment
[00:10:33] David: Well, if you've got abuse, you've got, probably fear and shame are going to be key elements of that character's behavior. I actually have a student right now I'm teaching through Lit Reactor, Creating Complex Characters, and we're going through this right now, a lot of the same material. And one of my students is dealing with a young man who had an abusive father and has sort of swallowed his rage.
And his pathological maneuvers are substance abuse, self-isolation, but there is an explosive moment where he reacts to that rage, and is in a fight and damages, he thinks he actually kills the person. And she wants to give him a redemptive moment of forgiveness. And I said, well, you're going to have to earn it. And you're going to have to work through people in his life who allow him to deal with that shame and that guilt to express it and to feel as though he's not still that wounded victim that he was when that abuse took place.
And that's a very compelling story. We're sort of in a weird place fiction-wise, where there's been so much trauma fiction that it's almost become a cliché. And so finding ways to get characters to positively deal with their past instead of mulling over it, the only thing that they accomplish in the story is to get over the past as opposed to embrace a new future, is something I really try to get my students, you know, to interact.
My late wife had a really rough childhood and one of the wonderful things that her uncle that she adored, one of the things that he said at her funeral said, this was a girl who at age 16 said, I don't have to be the person my past says I have to be, and completely changed her life around. And I think that's a powerful narrative. And she just decided, I'm not going to be that person. She just said, now I'm going to start doing things that I want to do that I believe in, that I think are meaningful. And that was her way out of the dark space.
[00:12:35] David: So I think whenever you're crafting a story like this, when you're saying, how do you deal with the pain in life? I don't think you have to go back, and you have to do the navel gazing and dealing with it in some terrible, you have that scene where there's all wrenching, as opposed to when they feel an impulse that echoes from the past, instead of giving into it, they choose something else. And you give your character those positive choices, that decision say, no, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to do this instead. And they keep forging forward from that point. That too is a very dramatic story.
[00:13:06] Matty: Are there differences in how you would use these prompts, I guess, for thinking about your character depending on the genre, like if you were writing more of a comedy, is there a way you can use these prompts in that kind of scenario?
Comedy is Drama Cranked Up to 11
Comedy is just drama cranked up to 11. You know, all the reactions are exaggerated. Where one character might be afraid, your character is terrified. When something bad happens, it just gets worse. If a character feels ashamed that the shame is scalding. What you're always having to do is just push that envelope further. So I think all these explorations, you know, moment of greatest shame is incredibly important in comedy. Fear, I mean, look at cartoons. What are cartoons about? Escaping the anvil falling on your head or being caught in a moment of embarrassment. So I think all the same prompts would certainly work with comedy.
In comic forms, characters are often more types than psychologically real characters, and what I'm talking about here is much more about psychological realism. But if even if you're using characters who have types, they're still going to be dealing with those fundamental emotions. So exploring them, I never think is like a wrong turn. It's just going to be a question of how you decide to approach that material and use it in the story.
Use "Because ..." rather than "Despite the Fact that ..."
You had mentioned before about looking across, for example, the answers to the questions that Johnny Cash gave to the questions and seeing that the theme there was family. If someone is in the early stages of developing a character, is there a benefit to either having the theme and then coming up with what the most shameful, the most sorrowful moments were for the character? Or does it make more sense to write some of that and then step back and look across it and understand what the theme is?
Each writer's process is their own. I don't know that I could answer that categorically one way or the other. I like starting with this because it tells me what the character's story is. But of course, I begin with a story idea and then I begin doing this character work and I find out this character has his own story. Well, how can I make that work with the larger story I had planned? And you just go through that by asking questions, seeing, well, is that really true? Does it fit? How do I make it fit? What sort of questions do I have to ask, and what sort of situations do I have to put the character in to make it work?
[00:15:35] David: And so it's just a back and forth. It's not as though you lay this groundwork and then the highway just lays out before you, you're just laying bricks after that. It's always a back and forth the dialectic of, okay, this is what feels right to me at this point. But wait a minute, the story's going to require this, would my character do that? What you really need to ask is, what will I have to do to make it so my character can't help but do that? And that's just the kind of work you have to do as you're moving through your story.
[00:16:04] Matty: Yeah, I just came up with a phrase that I'm finding very productive for myself, and I'm hoping that I made it up, but I may have just absorbed it through osmosis from someone, that is the idea that if you have to describe what your character's doing and say, "despite the fact that," you're in trouble and you always have to be able to say, "because of," just to explain what they're doing. So, "despite the fact that she was hearing noises from the basement, while she was listening to the radio announcement about the escaped killer, she went downstairs and got killed." As opposed to, "because she knew her daughter was downstairs, she went downstairs to confront the killer."
[00:16:41] David: That's interesting. I like that because, "despite the fact that" seems as though you're trying to shoehorn the character into a situation that they normally wouldn't.
If You Want to Elicit Fear, Create Hope
[00:16:50] David: The example I use is in horror movies, where all the teenagers are at the house, the parents are away and there's a pool house in the back and the teenage boys trying to get the girl out because that's what teenage boys do. And teenage girls usually, they're smarter. So what you want is that you want the teenage girl to say, no, that's not, I don't want to go out there. It's creepy, it's dark. Because if she doesn't do that, if she goes, oh, okay, then they're both too dumb to live, and you just, you don't care whether the monster gets to them or not.
And this is something I learned from Don Maass. He says, if you want to elicit fear, you've got to create hope, hope that the bad thing won't happen. You know, there's a prefigurement of what the danger might be and then hope that it can be escaped. Because if you don't do that, it's never going to register with the emotional impact you want.
[00:17:37] Matty: Well, that is interesting. I interviewed Michaelbrent Collins fairly recently and the title of the episode was, "Why Horror is the Genre of Hope." I think it was tied to what you're saying there that, the hope for something better is what is the fuel for the horrible things.
[00:17:54] David: Yeah. I love that. That's great.
Give Them a Kid or a Dog
[00:17:58] Matty: I think that another way that one could profitably apply some of these theories is if you are needing either to make a generally good character more interesting, or you need to make a generally bad character more empathetic. And I guess I'll start out with a bad character first. How do you advise authors, when they're trying to decide how empathetic or maybe, differently, sympathetic they need to make a character that they don't want the reader to be rooting for?
Well, if you're afraid that your character is going to be unlikeable, a word that I hate, but if you're afraid that readers will react negatively to the character and you want them to stay with the character instead of just being repulsed by them, give them a kid or a dog. And what I mean by that, going back to my students, she’s got two main characters, and one has a very active, external goal. It's combat-oriented, she has to avenge her father, it's a sort of a magical realism kind of thing. And the other character's going through an internal journey, and she goes, I'm just having problems with, but she's my real protagonist, the one going through an internal journey. What should I do?
[00:19:09] David: I said, well, usually I recommend if your character's unlikable, give them a kid or a dog, but in this case, I'm thinking externalized internal journey with a kid or a dog. What if there's a spirit animal that suddenly she comes across and now needs to protect? Because the whole logic behind kid or a dog is, give them some to care about other than themselves. This is specifically good for characters we might not like.
An interesting part of the movie, Casablanca, hopefully most of your viewers will know this movie. I grew up on it, it was on TV every Saturday or something. I know it inside and out and I actually teach it. And one of the things is that if it weren't for Bogart, if it was just some generic guy in that role, we'd hate him, because he's nasty to this woman, when Ugarte gets shot, somebody says, I hope when they come from me, you don't just stand there. And he says, I stick my neck out for nobody. When Ugarte says, you hate me, don't you Rick? He says, if I give you half a thought, I would. I mean, he's mean. But we see that the staff at his casino admire him and are very fond of him. And it's that reaction which makes us realize, this guy's not as bad as he's making himself out to be. And that contradiction intrigues us. We go, what makes this guy tick?
[00:20:26] David: And so if you've got somebody who seems to be nasty, who has this terrible temper or who is jealous or some other negative quality, if we also see that someone else in the story really cares about them or they care about that character, we will be automatically intrigued. So they're not as bad as they make themselves out to be. Okay, well, what’s that about? And you will hang with the character a little bit longer. So that's one of my main techniques for an unlikable character.
And then you flip it on its head. If your character is like too nice, give them a negative trait. I did this in a book I worked on. I say that the problem with the noble character is very often, he's like a nightlight and he doesn't give off very much light and he gives off very little heat and so there's, you know, just why bother? So I needed to give him an edge.
[00:21:15] David: So I started thinking about backstory and he was the youngest of three brothers and I was the youngest of four brothers. And I know what it's like to be the youngest of a bunch of males. It's like basically, you know what rolls downhill and its speed accelerates as it gets closer to you. And what I had is I was having him just fending off blows. And I needed to show that, no, he could be that way to someone else. And I just did it in my own mind, a little scene where he was cruel to another kid, just as his brothers were being cruel to him. And it just gave him a little more agency. It gave him an edge that he had lacked before, and almost like that, he became more interesting.
[00:21:56] Matty: I always admire authors who can make a character that everybody's rooting for, but they have body odor, or they fart or something. Like, something that would, that I think a lazier author would use as a marker that this is somebody you're not supposed to like. And yet, I think the skilled author knows how to use those little quirks, and the bigger quirks, to make a basically good character more interesting.
How Long Should You Delay Showing the Positive Side?
[00:22:22] Matty: And I think the other interesting thing is that thinking about like the time between how long you can go before you see the redemptive quality of the character that you generally dislike. They're mean to someone in the next scene, you see their other side. Let's say, they're portrayed as a selfish person, and then in the next scene, they're portrayed as an unselfish person, then it's not hard for the empathy to kick in then.
But if you have a long period of time, and the example I always think of is Severus Snape. You have him being a jerk through however many books, I forget, and it's only at the end that you realize that this person who has basically been a very selfish character through six, seven books, is ultimately selfless. And I think it's also gutsy that JK Rowling waited that long to let us in on the admirable side of Snape.
And that makes the payoff all the stronger, is delaying it that long. It all depends on whether or to what extent you, you feel you're going to lose the reader. And sometimes, you just have to use a minor positive trait to get us far enough to see the deeper, positive trait.
[00:23:30] David: I'm thinking of a BBC series, and I think it was called Cracker. And it was Robbie Coltrane played a police psychologist, and he was a gambling addict, an alcoholic. One of the first scenes we see him in is in the nine items or less line. And he's got like five bottles of booze and four cartons of cigarettes or something. He's got like about 15 items. He goes, no, there's booze one item. Cigarettes, two items. And the woman behind him, you know, Hey! You know, and we've all been there. And he's not very nice about it. And he's divorced and we meet his ex-wife and she's clearly just done with it. Has to ask him for something that he's supposed to have done, and he kind of brushes her off. We're kind of going what a brusque, abusive, selfish a-hole.
But it's clear he's really good at his job. And sometimes, a skill will make us go, okay, then we're going to get into, what can this guy do? We'll find out later that what makes him so skilled is he really has genuine empathy.
[00:24:32] David: Right. But we don't see that because at first, he's just so abrasive and so obnoxious that is obscured. But it is gradually shown, and it is a case of that delayed payoff. Especially if you're going to use that technique, if you're going to give yourself a character who seems to have more bad going for him than good, then whatever the good is, make it worth the wait if you're going to make the reader wait.
[00:25:02] Matty: I'm trying to think about Casablanca, and I think that there are a couple of hints dropped in there that you're not just supposed to take on faith the fact that he's done something that makes the people who work with him in the bar like him. But I think there are a couple of examples that show him being sort of generous despite what you would expect. Am I remembering that correctly? Like, how long do you have to wait until you see the softer side of Humphrey Bogart?
[00:25:27] David: Well, you see pretty quick. It's just the way that his staff responds to him, the way other people respond to him. It's clear that he's admired. Later on, there's that I think it's the Bulgarian couple where the woman comes to him and is almost basically saying, look, if I throw myself at you, will you let my husband win at roulette because he's losing terribly and he's losing all our money and it's all we have. And he of course lets the guy win instead of making her do what she'd never forgive herself for. But that's a little bit later.
One of the things he does early on, is he confronts the German comandante. And in that scene, we see that he's certainly not afraid. Like, they show him his passport and he goes, are my eyes brown? And the German says, what would you think about if the Reich marched into New York? He says, well, there’s certain neighborhoods in New York I wouldn't try to walk into. And it's clear that Louis, the French guy, just thinks that Rick is clever and fascinating and clearly all the ladies love him. And so we kind of see him through Louis's eyes.
But he still has that edge. And so we gradually see that. But it isn't until that center sequence, when the backstory's revealed, we see that he was in love, totally in love with a girl from Norway. And even then, he's bitter. The way he treats Ilsa the next day, he goes, look, we both know that there'll be another night and you'll be back. I mean, that's just cruel.
[00:26:53] David: And when she's trying to explain herself to him says, yeah, I've heard a lot of stories used to come with the sound of a tinny piano, and he's talking about prostitutes. A bordello. That's the good thing about the forties, is that they always had to find really creative ways to say these things. So he is basically calling her a whore. And then he just says, well, you'll be back. And then when Victor Lazlo comes and asks him, he just says, no, I'm not going to give him to you. If you want to know why, ask your wife, basically trying to tear apart this beautiful marriage that he sees in front of him.
And it isn't until she comes and almost tries to shoot him, and then she admits, I didn't want to run away, and she tells him her side of the story, that he's capable of saying, oh, okay. I get it now. And he forgives. And we still think he's scheming to get the two of them away, and that turn at the end is so brilliant because they just don't give it away.
You know, the screenplay was written in two and a half weeks, I think. And the two main guys disappeared, and it was a relatively young screenwriter who had to just write that thing by the seat of his pants. And sometimes, didn't have pages ready for that day's shoot and just had to just hammer them out. It's one of the best screenplays ever in Hollywood. It's just, it's really funny how sometimes forcing yourself in that situation forces you to just give up to the unconscious and let your unconscious or subconscious, whatever you call it, feed you your ideas instead of suffering over them and trying to wrestle them into the shape you want them to come at you at.
[00:28:17] David: Yeah. Well, I'm assuming that at the time Casablanca was made, Humphrey Bogart was already Humphrey Bogart, right? Like, that was well into his career. Yeah.
[00:28:27] Matty: So I suppose that they could count on people going in there sort of being predisposed to like any character that Humphrey Bogart played, as opposed to, if it was his first movie, maybe he wouldn't have even been cast, because he's not really a typical leading man type. You would almost expect the more typical leading man for movies of that era. And it's interesting that no one ever talks about the Victor Lazlo character the way they do the Humphrey Bogart character, because he's the nightlight, right? Victor Lazlo is a little bit too good.
[00:28:56] David: We'll call him, The White Nightlight. Yeah. Yeah. He is. In a certain sense, who Humphrey Bogart once wanted to be, although he sold guns, so he wasn't exactly Clean Gene. But as Victor Lazlo says, welcome back to the fight, is what he says at the end. And so he's an idealization of what the Humphrey Bogart character could be, but won't be, because he does have that sort of darker side, which makes him more interesting. He's more complex, right?
[00:29:57] Matty: Well, I was thinking of another movie that I know you like: Chinatown
We're dating ourselves. We are dating ourselves. I showed Chinatown because I teach it, and I think it's one of the best scripts ever written. And I keep going back to it to teach myself more, because there's so much more to learn from it. And just for the use of symbols, for example, fish, eyes, glass, those things appear almost in every scene. There's one way or another, those things keep on coming up. The use of the word, albacore. There's one thing when one of the detectives is listening, he says, what were they arguing about? I don't know, but one of them said apple core. And we haven't even heard about the Albacore Club yet. But the screenwriters, laying these seeds.
[00:30:38] David: And then the first scene with Curly, the fisherman, he goes, look, I'm sorry, you know, that we haven't been able to catch any albacore. We're just getting skipjack. And it's just, it's amazing how, until you really study that screenplay, you don't realize that he's constantly laying these little things down. And in the middle scene, when she saves him at the old folks’ home, in her beautiful Cord convertible, it prefigures that final scene when she's shot in that same car and they're shooting at her from behind.
And one guy's in a brown suit, and it might be that same cop at the last, but we don't know because we've only seen him from behind. And then as they're driving away, there's three bullet holes, but they're on the passenger side. So it's a mirror image. And as she's driving, she touches her eye. There are all these little things thrown into it that are just brilliant.
So I'm sorry. But I showed it and there was that 20 something and it goes, God, this is really show. What are you going to do?
Neo-noir and the Morally Flawed Character
[00:31:33] Matty: Well, I think that another difference in how, not just generational differences, but differences in what people expect from movies, and I don't know that this was common among all the movies that were being made during the time of Chinatown, but he kind of never liked the Jack Nicholson character, Jake. I don't think Jake ever has a moment like Humphrey Bogart does in Casablanca of where you say, oh, yes, he was ashamed of beating his wife, but eventually look, he pulled the family together so that they could all be on stage together at the Grand Old Opry. No. Jake never has that moment. Or am I just missing the moment where he kind of redeems himself?
Doesn't redeem himself. But there's one really great moment, and it's after he hits her, with the whole, my sister, my daughter, and my sister, my daughter. And Katherine, the daughter, comes downstairs, or Evelyn brings her down. She goes, Evelyn, this is Mr. Gittes. And she goes, hello. And he looks up and he says, hello. And he's gentle. It's the first time in the whole movie when he seems gentle. Because he's seen how wrong he was. And he gets now that no, the one person who actually has moral authority in this whole thing is this woman. She hasn't been lying to me. I now realize the true nature of the evil I'm up against. The problem is, he hasn't given up his arrogant belief that he can figure it out and he can find a way out. Instead, he's going to get himself right back into Chinatown, and that's the tragic trope at the end.
That was very interesting time in American film. There's number of those films were what were known as Neo noir and noir is almost always about a morally flawed character in an oppressive system trying to find some way to get the brass ring one last time. For example, Jake's trying to get out of Chinatown. You find out he's trapped in it. Dog day Afternoon, I'm going to rob a bank to get the money for my lover's sex change operation. And we're rooting for him, because he's the underdog. And that's what makes a lot of those movies work, is that even though they're morally flawed, they're the underdog. And it was a time when we recognized the system was oppressive and evil. It was a time in the Vietnam War. It was the time of when the civil rights movement was trying to get America to look at itself and say, we're not going to stand for this anymore. And so it was a particular cultural moment. And I don't think that an innocent hero or a benevolent hero would've really fit the times.
The screenwriter for the John Adams biopic that I think PBS did or maybe HBO did, I'm not sure. And he said, when did America stop making humanist films? He said, I'll give you a hint, and he gave a date. Anybody know? And I rose my hand, I said, Jaws. He said, close. That one came out a year later. No, it was Star Wars. And it's when Hollywood realized, whoa, we can make money on these things?
[00:34:34] David: And it's when Syd Field and his screenwriting book began writing, don't write bummer endings. Nobody wants to see them and nobody's going to pay for them. I mean, Chinatown just wouldn't be made, except by an independent. Independents have kind of made a comeback in the nineties and since, but they really are few and far between, sadly.
[00:34:51] Matty: Is Kirk Ellis, the person?
[00:34:53] David: Yes, Thank you very much. Wonderful man, by the way. Incredibly smart. He talked about like Bicycle Thieves, movies like that. Americans don't make movies like that.
[00:35:03] Matty: Yeah. I have not seen that one. I'm going to have to put that on my TV watch list.
[00:35:06] David: My late wife was Italian, and we got about 20 minutes into it. She says, okay, this thing doesn't end well, does it? I can tell. Nope, I can't watch this. This is like watching my family die. I can't do this, bye. So she just checked out. She never did see it.
[00:35:20] Matty: Well, I think nobody wants to write the book or write the movie, or what have you, that no one wants to watch because it's too much of a bummer. On the other hand, I think that people don't want to read and probably don't want to write things that are saccharin sweet, everything's going fine with the perfect white knight hero.
So are there tips, you can share that an author who's working on a work in progress can use to say, I really need to add a little more grit to my good guy, or I need to add a little more softness to my bad guy?
You know, and like I said, if you're trying to soften an unlikeable or overly harsh or vicious or whatever character, a kid or a dog, or, and I mean that in a broader sense, give them somebody else to care about. We always seem to see villains in isolation. Well, why? Or if they do have a sidekick, they abuse them. No. Have them love them.
[00:36:15] David: I mean, one of the things that made Tony Soprano, although he was the protagonist, so fascinating was that he truly loved his family. I mean, he went around on his wife, but he clearly loved his daughter, and he was probably a little scared of her because she was smarter than he was.
And Anthony, he could be a kid with Anthony, his child-like side got exposed through his interactions, whenever he wanted to eat ice cream or play video games, he went with Anthony. And so one way is show them with a genuine concern for another character or give them some meaningful aspect of internal life. I would go with regret strongest, because a shame and guilt, the things we mentioned, some betrayal in their past something, a wound that we could identify with. We know that if that happened to me, I'd be pretty damn pissed off too, I can really realize why he wants revenge. I get it.
So if not a kid or their dog, then some internal life aspect, and usually a wound is really helpful in that regard to clarify why the character's there now.
[00:37:16] David: Now some people just avoid this. For example, Shakespeare notoriously avoided revealing the motivations. I mean, people say Iago clearly is motivated by being overpassed by, I forget the other character's name. And yeah, but he gets revenge on that guy within act one. That wouldn't justify the lengths he goes to, including the murder of Desdemona. I mean, this guy's just bad. Where does that come from? Shakespeare says, I'm going to let you figure that out.
In Richard the Third, they say, well, it's because he wants Queen Anne, can't have her because he's a hunchback. Really? Is that why he wreaks havoc on everybody else? That great line that he says, no, be so fierce, but feel some pity, but I feel none, therefore am no beast. That's just brilliant. And it's just kind of like, well, if I was really a beast I'd feel some kind of pity, but I don't, so I'm something else. I'm even scarier.
We Just Don't Know ...
And that's what makes him particularly fearsome, is that we don't know. And that can be a technique with a villain. You just don't reveal where it came from. You just see them doing something out of the blue, you kind of go, what the hell was that? And you're on the edge of your seat. And then you show them doing something kind or generous, and you're just constantly going, what explains these contradictions? And you don't explain it. You don't need to. That's one really viable technique to use. Or you can explain it, and then for some empathetic with them, until they go one step too far. And then we say, okay, now I really do want the good guy to gun you down.
Insight
[00:38:51] Matty: And I suppose it also depends on whether it's important for the character to be a fully fleshed character, or sometimes they're just there as a mechanism to achieve something. Like, in Silence of the Lambs you need to like, not like, but you know, Hannibal Lecter, you have to kind of be rooting for him in some way. Whereas Buffalo Bill, who cares? Buffalo Bill is just bad and you don't need to understand why he's doing what he's doing. He's just the mechanism to introduce someone who's even worse than Hannibal Lecter.
[00:39:21] David: Well, and the reason he's worse is because he lacks insight. And that's another technique for giving a seemingly evil character something that the reader can latch onto, is insight. I know what I'm doing. I know why I'm doing it. Even that line from Richard III, no, be so fierce. I mean, you sit there and just go, this could be wicked, he's got to figure it out.
Lust for Life
[00:39:46] David: And another one is just a lust for life. One of the reasons we love gangsters is because they live a great life. You know, in Goodfellas, he just says, everybody wanted to be a gangster, they had the best cars, they had the girls, they ate well, they lived life large. Everybody else was a schnook. And sometimes, you can really get into a character, even though he may be doing terrible things that he's just, he has this lust for life. So there's a number of different techniques you can use on that.
Go Internal
[00:40:12] David: For the protagonist who may seem too likable, one same kind of techniques, go internal. What has wounded them? What wound hasn't healed and how are they dealing with it in a counterproductive or even a self-destructive way? And they haven't forgiven themselves or they haven't forgiven somebody else. I think those are ways that you can add that kind of texture that makes the characters more interesting.
[00:40:39] Matty: David, this has been so interesting, and I have fodder for 17 more episodes that I would love to invite you back for. But thank you very much for talking about character development through pain and the promise of life. And please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:40:55] David: Well, if you can do that at my website, and it's very simple, just DavidCorbett.com. And also, I'm on Twitter, DavidCorbett_CA, because I used to live in California. I don't anymore. And I'm on Facebook. If you want to see pictures of my dog and my wife, go to Facebook. If you want to read snarky political comments or quotes from great, actually what I'm doing on Twitter these days is, one of my best friend gave me a birthday present of its diary excerpts for every day of the year from these famous diarists. And so I've begun just doing every day on Twitter. I'll just take a certain excerpt. Today was, Andre Gide about Hitler and listening to him on the radio. And a couple days ago it was Camus. And the day before was Nicolson, it was about Dylan Thomas.
[00:41:47] Matty: So if you were looking for a different kind of Twitter --
[00:41:50] David: Yeah.
[00:41:51] Matty: -- a little more thoughtful than your normal Twitter.
[00:41:53] David: Well, yeah, I have to admit, my Twitter feed is authors I'm following, and if you want a great author, besides me, to follow on Twitter, trust me, Adrian McKinty is one of the most fascinating Twitter guys out there. So I have McKinty, and then I do legal Twitter, because of all the things going on and I have all the legal people, I don't even bother with the news, because the news is so dumb. So I just go to legal Twitter and figure out what are all the smart people say about what's going on?
[00:42:19] Matty: If Adrian McKinty is hearing this, then Adrian, ask your publicist to read through their emails because there's an invitation from me out there to talk about writing a series, a historically based series.
[00:42:31] David: That series is one of the best, the Sean Duffy series. I think it's the best crime series ever, but I'm kind of prejudiced because I'm Irish. Even though he's Northern Irish and we have this all the time because well, you know, Northern. Yeah. Never mind. That's another long discussion.
[00:42:48] Matty: Well, if you know Adrian, please point him to this podcast episode and tell him that I would love to have him on.
[00:42:53] David: That would be great. I'll do that. Thank you.
[00:42:55] Matty: Thank you, David.
[00:42:57] David: You bet. You take care.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with David! Did David’s ideas suggest way you can add depth and interest to a character who might be overly nice, or encourage readers to empathize with a character who is unsympathetic? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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