I recently sat down with the director of a play I’m working on to let him grill me with questions about the show. His questions covered everything from staging to music, but in the end it all boiled down to asking one primary question of my characters, “Why are you here?”
Now this idea isn’t something I’m a stranger to. Any time I write fiction I have to wrestle with the question of what each particular character contributes to the whole of the story. But writing for the stage has clarified the importance of those questions in a way that writing a novel rarely has. Here’s why: In a novel, the writer has a great deal of leeway to explore characters and to use them for flavor or window dressing or comic relief. But in stage writing, every character has to be played by an actual actor—an actor who is being paid—and that means the writer has to be absolutely sure of each character’s necessity, otherwise I’m wasting the actor’s time, the audience’s time, and the production’s budget.
So the director went down the list.
“Why is Henry in the play?”
“What’s Henry’s goal?”
“Who is Henry’s antagonist?”
“What causes him to change?”
“Why can’t his character be combined with this other one?”
And then on to Nettie, and General Cox, and Mary Alice, and all the others.
We did this for every single part in the play, large or small. For a lot of characters, there were easy answers. But for some, I found myself squirming as I tried to articulate exactly why they were there and what they were accomplishing. At one point, the director asked me to show him a single line of dialogue in which a certain character gave voice to his reason for existence. Whoa. That’ll put you on the spot, especially if you are doing your best to keep that kind of heavy-lifting in the subtext.
A good story will be lean enough that it labors if a single character is removed. Pete Peterson
But here’s the thing, I couldn’t get out of answering the question. There was no room to wiggle. The director has to take my writing and understand it inside and out in order to interpret and represent it well and to communicate to the actors exactly who they are playing and why. Every actor on the stage needs to understand why he or she is there, what their character is trying to accomplish, and why they make the decisions they do. If the writer doesn’t know, how can the actor, and if the actor doesn’t know, how can the audience?
It was an uncomfortable meeting at times, troubling even. But I’ll tell you what, it sent me back to my writing desk with a rare clarity of vision. It had become obvious that some characters were too weak, had too little conflict, or too little consequence. And the director told me something in that meeting that I’ll keep with me every time I write from here on out. He said that every actor needs a reason to be excited about his or her part. That means every character needs to have his or her chance to shine, to matter, to take center stage and move the audience, to mean something.
I’ve known all this intuitively, but writing for the stage has focused my mind on its importance. These issues get worked out in the writing of a novel, but in that medium they get worked out primarily in my own mind and there’s wiggle room to fudge and gloss things over. Maybe that’s because I’ve been sloppier than I ought. Because while stage writing and novel writing are two very different forms, most of the same principles apply. And one of those is that the writer needs to have a clear vision of the purpose, motivation, and goal of every single character in his cast. A good story will be lean enough that it labors if a single character is removed. The writer needs to be able to answer well when a reader points to a minor character and asks “Why are you here?” A good writer will have a good answer—and his character will be better for it.
If you’re a writer, I challenge you to try this and see if it doesn’t make you uncomfortable. Give your work to someone else to read, and then have them ask you about your characters. Force yourself to explain to someone each character’s purpose within the story—out loud. Why is this character necessary? How does this character affect the resolution of the narrative? Can this same purpose be fulfilled by another character? Is this character only here because you like him or her? Does this character have a moment in which he or she alone bears the dramatic weight of the narrative? Is this character a part that an actor could get excited about? How does this character serve the story?
I guarantee that trying to explain yourself out loud like this will make you squirm—especially if your inquisitor is bold enough to really take you to task. And I guarantee it’ll illuminate some weaknesses in your work.
But it’s worth it.
It’ll inform and clarify the final creation and allow your audience to submit themselves more easily to the willing suspension of disbelief. And isn’t that what serves the story? Sometimes it’s not about what we want, sometimes it’s about what the story wants, what the characters want. It’s our job to listen.
We’re storytellers. We serve the story. That’s why we’re here.