On Messy Characters

In fiction, the best characters are at least a little messy. Sometimes, they have a lot of problems. Sometimes, they’re just plain awful people—people we never want to meet in real life. Yet, somehow, on paper, we find ourselves loving them regardless, flaws and all. How is that possible?

Great storyteller gives their characters boundless empathy. Even and especially the nasty characters. Let’s look at how writers can craft messy characters that, despite their lack of redeeming qualities, we still find redeemed in our, the readers’, eyes.

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Close Study: “Brom” by Ottessa Moshfegh

Read it here, in Granta.

It’s worth warning you that some of the imagery in this story is just plain disgusting. Moshfegh is a writer who embraces the grossest parts of being alive and having a body. Many of her characters perform disgusting acts and think in disgusting ways, and Moshfegh illuminates each disgusting thing with bright, cold, clear prose.

“Brom” is about a (presumably Medieval) Lord who is, in every sense of the word, disturbing. He hires the man who killed his sister as his bodyguard. He kills his mother. He strangles himself for pleasure and eats his own excrement. He ransacks random houses for pleasure, and when he finds something he likes, he sticks it up his anus because he believes he has a light buried deep inside his colon. He is, in every sense of the word, disgusting.

So, why does the reader feel compelled to love him anyway? A few craft-related reasons:

• He’s intriguing. Here is a character unlike any you’ve met before, in real life or in literature. He even seems to enjoy being inside the cage that Moshfegh has designed for us to watch him in. Good character writing makes us curious about the psychology of the characters themselves.
• He wears his heart on his sleeve. There’s no artifice. He never tries to deceive the reader. He might not understand himself, and he might not even be a reliable narrator, but he is convinced that everything he tells us is the truth. (Most readers do not like being intentionally deceived by the narrator, though there certainly are exceptions.)
• His psychology gives shape to the story. The way this story is structured is undeniably filtered through his personality and his relationship to his own memories.

Brom is, by every definition, an antihero. His behavior makes little sense, his morals are highly skewed, and he has no place being the protagonist or this, or any, story. In fact, for most of this story, you might even question whether this man has any redeeming, human qualities. Can we trust that he loves his sister if he hires her assassin? Can we trust that there’s a light up his bum if his bodyguard can’t see it?

And yet, Brom is human, which we come to recognize at the story’s end. Seeing his mother bedridden and wasting away, he cries and both acknowledges and denies his tears. This moment of emotional confusion clues us into what Brom does and doesn’t know about himself, how conflicted he feels about his family, and how capable he is, still, of sympathizing with another person’s pain.

And then, Brom closes his heart again. When his mother describes the torture of old age and shows him the dark nothingness down her throat, he reacts in a way that preserves the light he believes is up his own arse, and has his bodyguard kill his mother. He is humanity’s excrement, but we have no choice but to understand how he feels, trapped under this story’s microscope.

Also worth noting in “Brom” is the story’s unconventional story structure, which almost feels more like a poem or a character study than a narrative. Brom’s psychology shapes the story’s structure. He has a rambling, almost-incoherent manner of speech and thought, and again, he wears his heart on his sleeve. Rather than try to organize this story into a traditional Freytag’s Pyramid, Moshfegh lets her character tell the story in his own way, complete with idiosyncrasies of thought, intrusions of memory, and a tenuous relationship with what’s past and present. This is a daring, risky way to tell a story, but Moshfegh possesses mastery over character and psychology; for her, there is no other way to tell it.

For more on character development, check out these article:

• Character Development
• Writing an Antihero
• Crafting Your Protagonist

Craft Perspective: “The Craft in Writing Characters with Messy Psychology” by Suzanne Berne

Read it here, in Electric Literature.

This is such an illuminating article, and it’s worth bookmarking if you’re working on mastering the craft of character development. Berne deftly excavates what it means to write real, authentic, messy characters, and the privileges of doing so in fiction.

Many writers new to the craft of character leave out something important as they write their stories: how does their protagonist understand themselves?

It’s a tricky question, but it’s essential to answer in your fiction. At the start of a story, your protagonist has certain flaws, obsessions, and/or desires that stand in the way of a better life. Inevitably, this character’s flaws cause the character to start or escalate the story’s conflict. The character will be given several opportunities to correct their behavior and recognize what needs to change in their behavior, but they keep turning down these opportunities, so focused are they on everything but their actual shortcomings.

This quote from Berne’s essay sums it perfectly:

“…my mother was clearly aware that explanations of human behavior are never trustworthy. Especially explanations of one’s own behavior, which are so often shaped as much by convenience, self-importance, and disingenuousness as by an effort to be understood. When it comes to people, my mother must have known, explanations hide as much as they reveal.”

People lie to themselves all the time. Not necessarily out of malice or ego (though that certainly happens), but because our limited understanding of ourselves is essential to our shared human experience, and it’s something we spend our lives overcoming again and again. Your characters will do the same thing.

Take, for example, the novel The Great Gatsby. One of the novel’s themes, The American Dream, is also a blind spot in each character’s understanding of themselves. Gatsby’s wealth and success are not enough for him; he must have it all, including the love of his life, Daisy, a woman who willfully neglects her sense of self so she can also conform to her idea of The American Dream. This obsession results in Gatsby’s death. Daisy, already, is bereft of self. All of this is documented by Nick Carraway, a man who develops a certain obsession with Gatsby and the glitz and glamor of the nouveau riche. Nick is surrounded by spectacle and extravagance until a sequence of murders and moral degradations end the show; The American Dream, too, compels Nick to love that which could one day ruin him.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Brom” is also an excellent case study here. Brom has no need to correct his behavior; he’s never in danger. So he has become his own greatest blind spot, decadent even in filth, vacillating between glimmers of humanity and his own pattern of immoral, disinterested behaviors, the kind which not even his own dying mother can save him from.

Of course, this aspect of human psychology need not end in tragedy. Plenty of beloved protagonists overcome their own blind spots to find happier lives—Jane Eyre, Sethe (from Beloved), and Elizabeth Bennet (from Pride & Prejudice) immediately come to mind.

As you write your own fiction, pay close attention to your characters—not only who they are, but who they think they are.