Apply Pressure Before Explaining Character

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” Huck Finn has written to Miss Watson to say where her runaway, Jim, can be found, and he feels “washed clean of sin.” Then he sits with the letter and cannot stop seeing Jim standing Huck’s watch on top of his own so that Huck could sleep. He was trembling, he says, “because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.” He tears the letter up (chapter 31 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). He was “brung up wicked,” he tells us, and no paragraph of praise could have ranked his priorities the way the torn letter does, at the price of damnation.

The usual substitute for a scene like that is an inventory: she was generous, short-tempered, secretly afraid of her mother. A private sheet of traits is a fine thing to plan with. On the page, traits are assertions, and readers discount assertions. Readers probably infer people from cost anyway, giving talk that costs nothing less weight than conduct that does, so Huck choosing Jim says less than what he chose Jim over.

A ranking shows only when two things the character values can’t both be kept. It doesn’t take a fire or a death. A host at a dinner table who must decide whether to correct a guest in front of the guest’s child is under pressure if she values both the truth and the child. Heap misery on a character and you learn nothing about her unless she chooses inside it.

Some characters need no pressure at all; comedy in particular lives on display, in voice and habit. This practice is for characters whose priorities are in question.

Practice. Pick a sentence in your draft that asserts a trait (“she was proud,” “he never forgave a debt”) and cut it. Then write, in thirty minutes, a scene of about a page in which the character must choose between two things she values, and the cost lands inside the scene. Don’t comment on what the choice means. Give the page, without the cut sentence, to one reader and ask what the character values most; if the reader names your trait, the pressure was real. If you are writing about a real person, do the same with an occasion: not “my grandmother was frugal” but the day she had to spend. (For the ethics of choosing that occasion, see 79.)