Mark Twain Rule No. 3: Make Your Characters Act Like Real People

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More words of writing wisdom from Mark Twain:

. . . the personages of the tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and . . . the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

This is Twain’s way of saying that your characters should behave and talk like real people.

Sounds simple, but it isn’t.  As writers, we sometimes have bizarre ideas of how human beings behave or talk.  In an attempt to impress readers with our wit, style, or intelligence, we may end up with characters who do things no real person would do or say things no real person would say.  Instead of impressing readers, we leave them with the impression that we’ve never seen or talked to another human being!

 My Cousin, My Unbelievable Lawyer

One of my favorite examples of characters behaving in unbelievable ways is the film My Cousin Vinny, starring Joe Pesci.  The movie goes to great lengths to establish Vinny (Pesci) as the proverbial fish out of water.  A lawyer from New York who has only recently passed the bar (after six attempts!), Vinny tries to defend his cousin against a murder charge in the Deep South. 

While the film is entertaining at times, the first half drags along with scenes that establish Vinny as an inept boob.  He gets his car stuck in mud and ruins his only suit, he’s held in contempt of court for careless infractions, and he doesn’t know basic court procedures.  We get it that Vinny’s not the best choice to defend a client from a parking ticket, let alone murder.  But credibility is stretched past the breaking point.

In fact, the only way Vinny emerges as a credible lawyer is to be pitted against a southern judge, prosecutor, and witnesses who are equally inept.

The characters in My Cousin Vinny are drawn as broadly as possible for maximum comic effect. While this was a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmakers, it prevents me from getting fully lost in the story because the characters are too unbelievable.

You Can't Handle the Truth (But You Can Handle Characters)

For comparison, check out A Few Good Men, starring Tom Cruise.  This film is also about an inexperienced trial lawyer who takes on a murder case, but the characters behave like real people. 

Cruise’s Lt. Kaffee is cocky and self-involved and does not believe he can get his clients off, regardless of whether they are guilty or not.  However, he demonstrates a wily competence and even brilliance in cross-examining witnesses and outwitting the prosecution.  This combination of good and bad traits, of brilliance and self-involvement give Kaffee a degree of credibility as a character.

That credibility pays off huge story-telling dividends in the end when Kaffee goes up against the imposing Col. Jessep (Jack Nicholson).  We understand what's at stake for Kaffee and his clients if he does not win.  More important, the outcome is believable because Kaffee is believable.

It may be unfair to compare a comedy to a drama, but Twain’s advice holds true either way.  A Few Good Men shines because the characters behave like human beings.  My Cousin Vinny is only passably entertaining because its broadly drawn caricatures serve the needs of the plot.

What do you think?  What’s your favorite example of characters acting or not acting like real human beings?

Mark Twain Rule No. 2: Each Part of a Story Should Be Necessary

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More writing advice from Mark Twain's seminal critique, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses":

 . . . the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale and shall help develop it.

As with Rule No. 1, this rule sounds obvious, yet many writers violate it.  One reason is because much of popular entertainment—comics, TV shows, some films—consists of ongoing serials in which plot lines lead to tangents or unresolved conflicts or characters who contribute nothing to the overall story.  I was never a fan of Lost, but when I listen to friends discuss the series, it seems to typify this approach: Make it up as you go along and keep the audience coming back for more.

The problem is, the audience feels cheated if the story doesn’t actually lead somewhere or if the various episodes of the story contribute nothing to its advancement.  

Fans who feel cheated either abandon the series or take out their wrath by blasting the story (and the writer) on message boards!

It Doesn’t Matter How Cute It Is.  Does It Fit?

One of the challenges writers face is that we often don’t know at first how a scene advances the story.  We write character bits that we think are cute, insightful, or funny.  We introduce an ominous character who we’re certain will become a major antagonist later on.  Or we bust a gut to write a difficult scene, so we want to keep it.  And we delude ourselves into thinking that because the scene is cute or insightful or funny or because the character is ominous or because we’ve busted our gut the reader will forgive us if it doesn’t exactly go anywhere.

But extraneous scenes or characters can slow a story down, derail the plot, and leave even the most faithful readers scratching their heads.

Beware Elves with Guns

Back in the 1970s, writer Steve Gerber introduced a subplot into the Marvel Comics series, The Defenders.  Known notoriously as “the elf with a gun” subplot, it involved—over the course of several issues—an elf ambushing ordinary people and murdering them.  Gerber apparently meant for this subplot to build into a confrontation between the elf and the titular heroes of the book, but it never happened.  He departed the series, and it was left to his successor, David Anthony Kraft, to (humorously) dispose of the elf—who never even met the Defenders!

(And, yes, I know that several years later, the elf storyline was revisited by a different writer and resolved.  Let’s just say that some things—even dangling subplots—are best left alone.)

Most of us don’t have to worry about leaving a series before we get a chance to develop our subplots.  Our characters begin and end with us.  Still, writers sometimes write a scene that seemed necessary at the time.  Only later, when we revise the story or when our critiquing groups read it (or, heaven forbid, when our audience reads it) does the scene lay there like a puppy that's forgotten how to perform a trick.

Building a House of Cards

How do you know if a scene isn’t advancing the story?  

If you find yourself repeating information, or if the characters are doing the same thing they did in an earlier scene, it's usually a tale-tell sign that the scene is going nowhere.  (There's an exception: Sometimes you want the characters to repeat the same actions to show that they are in a rut.)

Writing a story is like building a house of cards.  Take out one card and the entire house falls apart.  If you can take out a scene without hindering the story's progress, leave it out.

What do you think?  Have you ever written a scene that went nowhere?

“A Tale Shall Accomplish Something”: Writing Advice from Mark Twain

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How do you know if you’ve actually written a story? How do you know if your story is, in fact, a story and not a vignette, a scene, or something else?


Mark Twain was answering these same questions nearly 120 years ago. In a scathing critique entitled “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Twain took to task a popular author who violated 18 rules that govern good story telling. You can read the entire list at the link, but today we’ll concern ourselves with Rule # 1:

. . . a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

It sounds simple, yet it's easy to violate this rule. Writers often complete stories that arrive nowhere or accomplish nothing. The situation established at the beginning of the story remains unchanged, and so does the main character.

This happens because the writer fails to consider one simple but all-important question: What has changed for the character as a result of the story?

The Illusion of Change

It’s easy to understand how writers violate this rule. As human beings, we have a built-in resistance to change. Change is scary. It’s often hard. It forces us to step into the unknown. And because we hate taking those steps, we resist the notion of making our characters take them as well.

Popular genres sometimes reinforce the notion that the “illusion of change” is an acceptable substitute for the real deal. In comics, Spider-Man can change his costume—but the new costume turns out to be an alien symbiote and, before long, Spidey is back in his red-and-blue longjohns. In the various Star Trek series, characters get promoted—which means they add an extra collar pip and sometimes take on a new position aboard the ship or space station—but these changes are cosmetic. They do not alter the character, his relationships, or his role on the show.

Instead, what passes for "accomplishing something" in most genre fiction is that the good guys win. After a long, harrowing struggle, they defeat the bad guys and all is right with the universe.

And that’s okay to a point. However, a story becomes predictable if it ends exactly where the reader thinks it should.

Changes that Stay with the Reader

So, what did Twain mean? How do you know if your story has accomplished something or arrived somewhere?

Twain provides a sterling example in his own novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Throughout the book, Huck shares adventures with a runaway slave, Jim. Even though Jim becomes Huck’s friend, mentor, and ally, Huck—raised to believe that slavery is justified by the Bible—continues to see Jim as property of his owner, Miss Watson. However, when Jim is recaptured, Huck and his friend, Tom Sawyer, scheme to free him—even though doing so means not only violating the law but that Huck will “go to hell.”

Huck’s change in attitude shows us that the tale has indeed “accomplished something” and “arrived somewhere.” Would Huck have made the same choice at the beginning of the novel? Probably not—hence the need for going through all those adventures with Jim.

Huck undergoes this change without altering his clothes or saving the world. Nor does he have to become a completely different character.  Deep, personal changes such as this make a story worthwhile and resonate with readers.

What do you think? How does your character change?

The First 100 Words: Hook Your Readers Instantly

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How long do you have to hook a reader into reading your story? One page? One chapter?

Try 100 words.

Hooking readers instantly seems almost de rigueur in today’s world of short attention spans and one-click-away information. However, I first encountered the 100-word rule years ago. Book editors (not article or short story editors, mind you) often decide to pass on a manuscript after the first 100 words. If you can’t sell your book to them in that limited space, the theory goes, you won’t sell it to a paying customer.

To test this theory, I turned to three stories in a literature textbook to see what the authors did with their first hundred words. All of these stories, written long ago, are considered classics. But at one time they were just stories their authors hoped to sell to an editor and, in turn, to a mass audience.   

Here are the first one hundred words of Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (the words in brackets continue the sentence after the 100^th word):
 

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly [a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.]

Twain’s use of regional language tells us a lot about our narrator/protagonist: his age, background, setting, and, most tellingly, his personality—he regards everyone he knows as a liar, even the author! Twain's use of voice makes us like Huck immediately and want to learn more about him.

For a very different opening, check out the first 100 words of Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War short story. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek”:
 

A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners--two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff.

Unlike Twain’s first-person narration, Bierce tells his story in third person—but we immediately know what’s going on: Our protagonist, a soldier, is about to be hanged.

What makes this opening come alive are the details—the water, the cord, the rope, the cross-timber, etc., are all described vividly so the reader can “see” the action. No emotion is given in the passage, but none needs to be. The setting itself is dramatic enough for the reader to want to see if the man escapes.

Lastly, here are the first 100 words of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wall-paper”:

 It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity--but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror [of superstition . . . ]

In 100 words, Gilman tells us who her protagonist is (a married woman) and clues us in on her situation (she’s spending the summer with her husband in an upscale house very different from her usual surroundings). This, in itself, is not out of the ordinary, but notice the narrator's misgivings about the house and how her husband casually dismisses her feelings. The situation is ripe for conflict and danger.

Whether you’re writing a piece of fluff entertainment or the next literary classic, make those first 100 words count.


What happens in your first 100 words?