# Make Contradiction Coherent

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 33 · Part 4: Character, narrator, and point of view

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> Contradiction becomes depth only when it arises from coherent motives.

A character can do two things that clash without looking random, provided the motives behind them cohere. Dostoevsky manages it in a few pages. On a hot afternoon in St. Petersburg, Raskolnikov, a former student in rags, finds a very young girl drunk on a boulevard and a well-dressed man waiting for him to leave so that he can approach her. Raskolnikov rushes at the man, enlists a policeman, explains what he sees, and gives the policeman twenty copecks for a cab. As the policeman starts after the pair, “something seemed to sting Raskolnikov; in an instant a complete revulsion of feeling came over him.” He calls the policeman back: “Let them be! What is it to do with you?” Left alone, he asks why he wanted to interfere: “Have I any right to help?” A few lines on, he arrives at this: “But what if Dounia were one of the percentage!” (*Crime and Punishment*, Part One, chapter 4, in Garnett’s translation.)

He has been charitable and contemptuous within two pages, and the scene doesn’t read as arbitrary, because the text holds the reason. Moments before the last line he had used a cold logic himself: “Let them devour each other alive—what is it to me?” Then he turns over the argument that a certain percentage of such girls must go to the bad every year so that the rest may stay chaste, and he mocks the vocabulary as “so scientific, so consolatory.” We read the kindness and the contempt as one mind that cannot bear what it sees and is trying a way of not feeling it, a way that fails the moment the percentage includes his sister. Other readers may weigh it differently. Either way, the page supplies a hypothesis that fits both halves.

A writer who learns that real people are contradictory may add contradiction as seasoning, the brutal man who adores his cat. Or the contradiction is an artifact of plot, a character who does whatever the scene requires. The reader, unable to find the person behind the two behaviors, finds the author instead.

From outside, a contradiction is two behaviors, and depth is a hypothesis about the person who produces both. Once a reader holding the two can work out a want or a fear that explains them, they read as one person. Her manner needn’t be consistent, and you needn’t explain; Dostoevsky never states what Raskolnikov’s two behaviors have in common. The explanation does have to exist, and a reader has to be able to find it.

E. M. Forster, in *Aspects of the Novel*, tests what he called a round character by asking whether it is “capable of surprising in a convincing way.” His examples include all the Dostoevsky characters. Surprise without conviction is randomness (“a flat pretending to be round,” in Forster’s phrase), and conviction without surprise is, in his terms, simply flat.

Given two behaviors, readers seem to look for one account, and they can hold a surprising choice open for pages if they sense one coming. So make sure the account exists and that at least one piece of evidence for it turns up before the second behavior, or just after. It needn’t be stated; Dostoevsky offers the vocabulary of “percentage” and the sister and leaves the connection to the reader. If you discover rather than plan, you will often find the contradictory act first, because the character simply did it, and then the practice runs backward. What would have to be true of someone who does both?

A poem’s speaker may decline the demand. Whitman writes, in section 51 of “Song of Myself,” “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” A lyric speaker owes the reader no motive.

In memoir or biography, people are sometimes inconsistent in ways no biographer can trace, and the duty there is to report both behaviors, say what is not known (71), and leave the motive uninvented. When you are designing a person, though, an unmotivated contradiction is a gap in the design.

**Practice.** Choose two behaviors in your draft, or in the person you are writing about, that seem to clash. Complete this sentence as many ways as you can in fifteen minutes: “She does A and also B because she wants ___ and is afraid of ___.” Pick the version that surprises you least and sounds most true. Then find the earliest place in the draft where a reader could glimpse that want or fear, and sharpen one detail there, such as an object, a hesitation or a word she avoids. Do not explain. Give the pages to one reader and ask only whether the second behavior surprised her and whether it felt right. If you cannot complete the sentence for a real person, write the uncertainty into the draft instead. Two yeses mean the motive is on the page; a no tells you where it is still in your head alone.

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