Making a Character Come Alive (in 10 pages or less!)
Bringing a character to life in any work of fiction is a difficult task, but the charge is even more challenging in short fiction, where the author has far fewer scenes and pages through which to make their characters feel alive. Fortunately, Janet Burroway offers concrete techniques for achieving this character three-dimensionality in her craft book, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. In this post, I’d like to analyze a particular short story, Kelly Link’s “The New Boyfriend,” and Link’s characterization of this story’s protagonist, through the lens of Burroway’s devices for achieving effective characterization. I will examine Link’s employment of these characterization techniques – i.e., using scene settings, specific objects, interiority, and secondary characters’ reactions – in turn.
Link’s “The New Boyfriend” tells the story of Immy, a teenaged girl who lives in the perpetual shadow of her best friend, Ainslie. This story opens in media res at Ainslie’s birthday party, where Ainslie is opening her mother’s gift – an expensive, animatronic, interactive “Ghost Boyfriend” that Immy herself has long been coveting. Immy grows increasingly envious of Ainslie’s brooding new Boyfriend; when Ainslie and her mother leave town for spring break, Immy hatches a series of dangerous (and often illegal) schemes to program Ainslie’s Boyfriend into falling in love with Immy instead.
As Burroway tells readers in Writing Fiction, a story’s settings should work to illuminate character (105); in fact, “disharmony” between a story’s setting and a character’s state of mind immediately generates evocative narrative content (106). Link uses such charged, inciting settings for her scenes in “The New Boyfriend.” Consider the story’s opening scene:
Ainslie doesn’t rip open presents. She’s always been careful with her things, even the things that don’t matter. Immy is a ripper but this is not Immy’s present, not Immy’s birthday. Sometimes she thinks that this may not be Immy’s life. Better luck next time around, Immy, she tells herself.” (Link 215)
Link’s choice of setting – Ainslie’s home, on Ainslie’s birthday – immediately frames protagonist Immy as a satellite player, a supporting actress in her own story. In fact, the first fifteen pages of this story revolve around Ainslie: Ainslie’s birthday gift and party, Ainslie’s feelings and desires. Link also sets most of this story’s subsequent scenes in Ainslie’s home or on her property (e.g., Immy sleeping over in Ainslie’s room; Immy breaking into Ainslie’s home to steal the Ghost Boyfriend; Immy clandestinely meeting the Boyfriend in Ainslie’s mother’s storage unit). Even the story’s quieter, more contemplative scenes, such as Immy’s conversation with her father about friendship, take place during commutes to and from Ainslie’s house. Link’s “Ainslie-centric” setting choices brilliantly prod and perpetuate Immy’s frustrations with her shadow status, and further underscore her feelings of inadequacy and disassociation.
Burroway also suggests that writers can deepen their protagonist’s characterization via the use of specific details and objects that prompt emotional, highly-charged character reactions; in Burroway’s words, emotion is “a sensory response within the body to sensory input from the outside world” (Burroway 33). Link uses this technique to stunning extent in “The New Boyfriend;” specific objects serve as “objective correlatives” which showcase Immy’s internal landscape and its evolution throughout the course of the story. For example, consider the homemade absinthe that Immy and the girls drink at Ainslie’s party. At first, Immy regards this homemade brew as just one more emblem of her and her friends’ inauthenticity: they all drink straight from the bottle because “it’s harder for everyone else to tell if you’re only taking little sips or even only pretending” (Link 219). Later on, however, the absinthe becomes a convenient cover for Immy, an excuse to escape her friends and spend some time with Ainslie’s Boyfriend alone (224). When the party winds down, the absinthe bottle becomes symbolic of Immy’s bitterness and jealousy (as Link tells us, at the end of the night, “there’s only a sludgy oily residue left in the absinthe bottle” (227)). Link thus puts her story props to work: objects like the absinthe draw out Immy’s emotional status, and give us unique and pointed windows into Immy’s character.
Per Burroway, “the territory of a character’s mind,” or the direct access to a character’s thoughts and feelings, is also an integral piece of effective characterization (Burroway 70). At first blush, this advice struck me as somehow contrary to the oft-cited writing adage, “show don’t tell,” but sometimes economical “telling” communicates so much more than a myriad of little details ever could. The trick, perhaps, turns on crafting razor-sharp flashes of character insight, versus offering a barrage of diluted and out-of-focus thoughts. Let’s consider Link’s story as an exemplar once more. Near the story’s start, Link tells us that “Immy’s heart isn’t as big as Ainslie’s heart. Immy loves Ainslie best. She also hates her best. She’s had a lot of practice at both” (Link 216). Yes, this passage qualifies as direct telling, but this handful of sentences gives us an effective abridgment of the girls’ entire relationship. Link offers a similar summation of Immy’s relationship with another secondary character, Elin: “she knows what kind of friends she is with Elin. Sometimes a friendship is more like a war” (221). This loaded, insightful line does more with its telling than one hundred “shown” details or explicit moments ever could.
Finally, Burroway offers an indirect method of deepening characterization: the presentation of the protagonist “through the opinions of other characters” (Burroway 77). Such presentation can be accomplished through a secondary character’s actions or dialogue, and can provide readers with a more nuanced, holistic portrait of a story’s protagonist. Link also employs this technique in “The New Boyfriend;” while Immy may frame herself as a jealous, fake, “horrible friend” (Link 220), Link employs shorter, more introspective scenes to demonstrate Immy’s complexity. In a scene late in the story, Ainslie asks Immy to help dye her hair red, only for Ainslie’s overstepping mother to follow suit and do the same. Immy is the person who Ainslie turns to for solace, the one who “cut[s] all the red right out with a pair of scissors” (Link 247). Link also tempers Immy’s insatiable jealousy through other characters’ commentary; on page 226, for example, Elin empathizes with Immy, “I know how much you want [a Boyfriend]. And I know it sucks. How Ainslie gets everything she wants.” These interactions offer additional depth to Immy and soften the edges of her more toxic emotions, rounding her character and adding further nuance.
Link’s employment of these various characterization devices in “The New Boyfriend” bring her protagonist Immy to stunning life on the page. I will continue to refer back to Link’s story as inspiration, and to Burroway’s excellent craft book for guidance, as I attempt to deepen and enrich my own characters.
WORKS CITED
Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition: A Guide to Narrative Craft. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Link, Kelly. “The New Boyfriend.” Get in Trouble. Edinburgh : Canongate, 2016.