good characters don’t know what they really want
This morning, on the Writer’s Almanac, there was a quote from Raymond Chandler.
In Farewell, My Lovely, Philip Marlowe says: “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”
It got me thinking about a pivotal quote from Hard Rain Falling, when the narrator says of Jack Levitt “He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey.”
And how in both of those quotes, at both of those moments in those stories, it’s what they want because they don’t know what they really want. What Levitt wants is the love and respect of someone who truly cares about him; what Marlowe wants is a world less sordid and ugly than the one he lives in.
I wonder if we can extrapolate a rule from here: good characters don’t know what they really want. Or at least a lot of them don’t. They want something, and that’s clear to them and to us (to get home to Ithaca and his wife, to destroy the alien that’s been killing her fellow passengers, to investigate an urban legend in a Chicago housing project), but they also want (or need) something else, and it might take a long time to figure it out. Even a quest as primal and basic and simple as Odysseus’s is complicated by his own flaws, and his inability to identify how he as a human being needs to change; his arrogance in taunting the defeated Cyclops spurs Poseidon to send him a whole heap of additional troubles. Good acting turns Ripley’s drive to destroy the alien into something more than simple survival; we’re watching a woman come into her own as a warrior and a leader.
I’m sure this is not really any kind of earth-shattering discovery. But examples from Farewell My Lovely and Hard Rain Falling show that good literary sleight-of-hand, like a magician’s performance, is made stronger by distracting the audience from the real magic by displaying something very obvious and easy to focus on.
Night Highway Window photo by Sam J Miller
) Your Reply...