SMFS Member Guest Post: Who Are You When I’m Not Looking? by Paula Messina

Please welcome fellow member Paula Messina to the blog today...

 

Who Are You When I’m Not Looking?

by Paula Messina

 

Two sisters in their early thirties came through the checkpoint at Logan Airport where I worked for the Transportation Security Administration. One of the sisters, “Merriam,” opted for a pat down. It fell to me to screen her. I turned to her sister “Sarah” and, in my sternest voice, said, “Stand over there and don’t move.”

I gave Merriam the same command. “Don’t move.”

I followed proper procedures. The pat down went smoothly, and the sisters were quickly on their way.

When I screened a wheelchair-bound, elderly woman with cognitive issues, I bent at the waist in order to maintain eye contact and chatted cheerfully the whole time. That screening also went smoothly, and the woman was quickly on her way to the gate.

I reacted differently in both instances because the situations and individuals required it. This is hardly surprising. Adapting to different situations and individuals is something we do instinctively. After all, we’d be in hot water over and over again if we weren’t adaptable. As circumstances demand, we even alter our behavior when dealing with the same person.

We wear many hats, but we forget we’re wearing them. We change those hats more skillfully than a juggler keeping a dozen hats in the air. We’re masters at changing our behavior to fit the situation and the individuals involved.

You might ask what these two sisters and the elderly woman have to do with writing. They relate to character development. In order to be well rounded and imitate life, our characters must adapt as well.

One of Blake Shelton’s songs is “Who Are You When I’m Not Looking?” Shelton sings that he wants to know what a beautiful woman does when he’s not around, when he’s not looking. Even if we could keep our loved ones, friends, and colleagues in constant view, we can only know a portion of who they are. We can never know what they are like when we’re not looking. That’s not true when we write. We create the many worlds our characters inhabit. We get to see what others cannot see when they’re not looking.

Laurie Schnebly, author of Believable Characters: Creating with Enneagrams, says, “We've all experienced changing our behavior to fit the person we’re with. It makes sense to behave differently around your four-year-old niece and your company CEO, around your college roommate and your elderly neighbor. That doesn't mean you're putting on a false act. It comes naturally based on your relationship with each individual.”

In my work-in-progress novel, Donatello, my shy main character, becomes tongue-tied when he meets beautiful Rosa. He tugs his cap down over his eyes to hide his red face. This same shy guy verbally pins his parish priest to the wall for accusing Donatello of murder. When his initial efforts to stop Luciano from committing suicide fail, Donatello resorts to humor. Luciano dissolves in laughter and lives.

Different characters. Different situations. Different reactions.

In my first pass on the suicide scene, Donatello spouted trite phrases to convince Luciano to live. Luciano wasn’t buying it. Neither was my writers group. I put on my thinking cap and went back to the drawing board. I asked myself how would Donatello react in this situation? The answer was humor.

Once I had the key to how Donatello would interact with Luciano, the suicide scene worked.

But there’s another side to that story. Well, in this case, three more sides.

Donatello’s shyness might have put off another woman, but Rosa is charmed by it. She’s as smitten as he is. A different priest would have thrown Donatello out on his ear, but Father Quaranta realizes he, a man of the cloth, has sinned. And if Donatello’s humor had bombed, he would have been attending a funeral. Humor was the right response for Luciano.

Our characters need to be as adept at juggling all their hats as we are. And just as we change hats instinctively in our day-to-day living, we writers might be unaware that our characters are doing the same thing.  Whether we spin our characters’ different traits consciously or not, it’s a good idea to be aware of how differing personalities and events change characters and ultimately dictate a story’s direction.

Stephen D. Rogers says, “Once I learned about using characters to round out the main character by exposing other traits, the approach became: What personality traits has this character not exhibited? What kind of other character would bring one of those out? For the main character, I repeat the cycle multiple times.”

Rogers, whose short story “Sensing the Fall” appears in Black Cat Weekly #54, repeats the cycle for major characters at least once.

“While the rounded character is not one-dimensionally consistent, the character has to be consistent within the different specific relationships,” Rogers says. “For example, the main character is only mean with one certain person, and that mean streak appears whenever they interact.”

Veronica Leigh, whose story "My Brother's Keeper," appears in The Saturday Evening Post, says, “I usually have a plot line in my head first, then as I'm outlining the story, the characters come into fruition (their names, personalities, histories) and it's during the course of writing the story that I observe how my characters behave.”

To get back to those pat downs mentioned at the beginning, that isn’t fiction. They really happened. Why did I act that way?

When the sisters came through the checkpoint every couple of weeks, I patted down Merriam, who was undergoing cancer treatment. Each time, Merriam appeared sicker, weaker, more desperate, but she could not fly unless she was properly screened. The sisters were uncooperative. Their difficult behavior only prolonged their agony and mine.

The truth is I identified with Sarah. I knew what she was experiencing, and I ached for Merriam. If it had been in my power, I would have waved the sisters through without any screening. I couldn’t do that. By being dictatorial, I actually made a terrible situation easier for the three of us. Kindness and sympathy wouldn’t have worked with the sisters.

Leigh says, “Often my characters who are familiar and comfortable with one another will show their closeness in dialog or their demeanor. If there's tension or a complicated past, well, that too will be obvious in how they treat each other. It's a delicate balance between propelling the narrative forward and showing character development, personal arcs, and character interactions. It's a challenge not to neglect one or the other.

“The character's interactions with others - whether they're close or strangers or enemies, must complement the protagonist's growth and contribute to the story arc,” Leigh says. “My protagonists are never in the same place by the end of a story. The circumstances, the plot, and the characters they encounter and interact with, force them to evolve. That's how it is in life too - people and circumstances force us to change.”

Schnebly notes that writers are “all astute observers. We know how our protagonist feels about every other character in the story.”

We can’t always control the individuals who come and go in our lives. One of the things that makes writing so delicious is that we are the masters of our characters’ fates. Schnebly says, “If their relationship is already defined, it’ll be easy to tell how they’re going to behave with each person they encounter. If it’s not yet defined, here’s a great chance to show what you want or need it to be simply by describing how they behave around each other.”

If we writers never step into the same river twice, our characters don’t either. In each scene, they step into a new world with a new cast and new challenges. It’s how they react to those challenges that brings them to life.

 

Paula Messina ©2022 

Paula Messina’s “Indiana Jones and the Horse Bit Cheekpiece” appears in The Ekphrastic Review. She is writing a novel set in Boston during the 1940s.