Introducing Character

I am working on a story, a story that I have been working on for nearly a year now. It started out, essentially as a character sketch; a few months later it developed into a story with a clear plot, but no definite ending; and, now, finally, I see where the story will go. But, this requires the addition of a new character, and a strapping young male character at that. It is incredibly difficult to write about tall dark and handsome or blonde-coiffed blue-eyed dreamy without using those cliches and sounding incredibly sentimental or romance-novelly. I start to imagine my beloved story turning into a scene out of a Nicholas Sparks novel where a muscle bound dude with a perfectly chiseled jaw arrives to to save the day by carrying the female protagonist's bike or two bales of high on her farm. Just like in real life, that man can't save anyone by lifting heavy objects, and he certainly won't save my story by swooping in to ease the female protagonist's plight. Ultimately, what saves a story is writing characters that seem real and that seem to have real connections with your other characters, and, to paraphrase the great Eudora Welty, this often means writing characters that are "more real" than reality because we get to know them more than we ever get to know another real life human being. The trick, of course, is not making it seem obviously over the top or exaggerated. The trick is creating a great character subtly.

So, to figure out how to do this, I decided to go to a writer who could write sex, love, and romance without sounding sentimental: D.H. Lawrence. I believe he does this by focusing on symbols, gestures, etc. that represent the psychological aspects of love, hate, and other impassioned human emotions (see: the rocking horse winner). Particularly, I recall Lawrence's book, The Fox. In this novella, two unmarried women, March and Banford, live on a farm together in England during World War I. They are without laborers and male counterparts, and, during the war, they struggle to maintain life on the farm. A fox is a particular difficulty for them because March, the more stereotypically "male" of the two women who performs acts that require strength such as hunting, attempts to shoot the fox who has ravaged their farm, but he always eludes her. Below is Lawrence's description of March, with gun in hand,  coming face to face with the fox:

"She lowered her eyes and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking up at her. His chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up at her. They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spellbound-she knew he knew her. So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not daunted."

This description ends, of course, with March being shaken from her spellbound state and realizing that the fox had eluded her once again as she sees him leap off, leaving her with only the image of his "white buttocks" retreating in the distance. Shortly after this occurrence, a man, Henry, arrives on the farm. And it is clear, through the reaction of March to both of these characters, that Henry and the fox are connected in some way. It would be easy for Lawrence to have simply made the man appear, but he is creating back story and symbolism with the fox, allowing us to see the psychology of March through a seemingly straightforward description of a fox and a man. Below is Lawrence's description of March and Banford's first meeting with Henry, which certainly has clear comparison to that description of her meeting with the fox:

"He had a ruddy, roundish face, with fairish hair, rather long, flattened to his forehead with sweat. His eyes were blue, and very bright and sharp. On his cheeks, on the fresh ruddy skin, were fine hairs like a down but sharper. It gave him a slightly glistening look...He stooped, thrusting his head forward...He stared brightly, very keenly from girl to girl, particularly at March, who stood pale, with great dilated eyes. She still had the gun in her hand. Behind her, Banford, clinging to the sofa arm, was shrinking away with half-averted head."

There is so much depth in this introduction of Henry. Clearly, Lawrence's language is layered with sexual innuendo, both in his description of the fox, "And he knew her," and of Henry, "He stooped, thrusting his head forward;" but, superficially, Henry is depicted rather innocently. The description starts with alliteration, words to describe Henry's physical description with repeated "f" or "r" sounds: "ruddy and roundish," "face with fairish hair," "flattened to his forehead," etc. The use of these "softer consonants," a voiceless fricative (f) and an alveolar approximant (r), as a opposed to voiced or plosive consonants (for example, a "v" or a "p") has an interesting effect on accelerating the reader's perception of Henry's appearance. The "f" and "v" sounds create a soft and liquidy atmosphere in which we meet Henry. This seems to fit well, generally, with how Lawrence wants the reader to perceive this newcomer - soft, liquidy, and mysterious, like an angel or a ghost (we're not sure). Lawrence also uses words that act like approximants (not a stop or a fricative, but somewhere in the middle), words that establish that Henry is almost certain things but not quite those things: "roundish face," "fairish hair," "rather long," etc. His entrance is cloudy, veiled in mystery. Why, indeed, is he there?

Henry claims that his arrival at the farm is based on the fact that his grandfather once lived there. The truth of this is unclear. But beyond the mystery, we see a bright blue-eyed man with fair hair and red cheeks, and all signs of character types point to innocence, much like the external appearance of a fluffy brown fox. Of course, Lawrence does not stop with the external appearance of Henry. We see how other characters react to his arrival, which gives us information about Henry as well as the other characters in one fell swoop.

March reacts to Henry much the way as she reacts to the fox. She stands, frozen, but with a gun in her hand, conflicted between being mesmerized and penetrated by the stare of the other (a metaphor for her feelings about sex, fertility, the male gaze in general?). With Henry and with the fox, she didn't move to shoot, but she also didn't drop the gun. She stood in a liminal space between fear and fascination. And, through March's lens, the reader becomes fascinated by March, the fox, and Henry as well; all while the frail Banford is cowering in the corner.

In these two descriptions we learn about March psychologically through the physical description of staring from the eyes of a fox and a man. The conflict that boils throughout the story is also given its first flame here in these brief moments of introductory character description. It takes a powerful hand to create so much meaning in a few sentences, but that is what writing is all about. Each word, every sound has power to portray something (plot, character, etc.) to the reader, and, if you are writing smartly, each sentence will do a multiplicity of those things. So, hopefully, I can listen to my own advice and finish this damn story that his been boiling in my brain and on my computer for nearly a year now. I guess I've always been a slow simmerer. ;)