on character

interiority, the need for instant "payoff" in entertainment, and the shifting of literature over time

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

For folks who have been hanging with me in bookish spaces for a while, you’ll know that I have a particular gripe with books that lack meaningful character development, or seek to achieve character development through limited and clunky means. That is, when a book begins to read more like stage directions and script than book—when the page is filled predominantly with actions and spoken words to the point that it becomes difficult to even begin to understand what motivates or drives any of the characters.

This somewhat recent proliferation of literature is focused not just on plot, but rather plot that is advanced principally through dialogue, or through clunky exposition and info dumps. We see characters move from room to room, enter into altercations or make violent outbursts, or undercut their friends. And in a fair deal of commercially popular books these days, it’s difficult to surmise from these actions what undergirds them from a character perspective. Instead you begin to have narratives bloated with a few too many disjointed plot points and discourse that falls flat due to too many pots boiling on the stove, so to speak. This is particularly true in books that purport to reveal nuanced revelations about the human spirit but, in reality, do little more than give surface-level character sketches.

I find this a pretty curious development within literary culture.

Emphasis on characters’ actions and dialogue presupposes that we can ascertain enough of a character’s personality and interior life from their behavior and words to meaningfully engage with that character…but I find that presupposition to be, in large part, incorrect. Take, for example, the character of a grating coworker who constantly makes snide remarks during and outside of work hours, who is the bane of existence for virtually everyone in the workplace. Focusing solely or predominantly on this character’s outward behavior denies the reader the opportunity to consider more closely the inner workings of that character’s mind—people in the real world tend to be, by and large, far more complex than their actions suggest.

Partially to blame in this development, I think, is the surge in on-demand media and with it the desire among consumers to constantly have some sort of immediate payoff when it comes to entertainment. With streaming services like Netflix offering seemingly endless amounts of content and drinking up more and more of the average person’s leisure time, it’s increasingly easy for people to assume that every piece of media we consume should be binge-able, thrilling, and sewn together by a propulsive plot line. And, I think, some celebrity book clubs are at least partially to blame: Reese Witherspoon, whose usually non-removable book club stickers draw the ire of readers far and wide, leads the Hello Sunshine project which catapults many book club picks to the silver screen. So, we have some of the most prioritized books in the industry being pushed by people who have an interest in making sure that at least some of these books will have a viable shot at big-screen adaptation.

And at the risk of being overly critical of the BookTok industrial complex, there is something to be said about the ways in which online book spaces encourage people to fly through books at breakneck speed, rapidly consuming book after book and turning around to make emotional reaction videos or posts that are, in turn, consumed by others. And what books are most easily binged? Those which don’t require the reader to slow down and contemplate the inner workings of a character’s mind but instead are comprised primarily of quippy back-and-forth dialogue.

In late 2022, Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and most recently The Late Americans, penned a newsletter issue contemplating the essentiality of interiority and backstory exposition:

For a long time—an embarrassingly long time—I thought that good writing was gestural. That it had only to do with what could be implied by action and scene. That exposition and backstory and interior monologue were tools of the emotionally evasive and the cowardly. That people were afraid of scenes because they lacked sufficient moral courage to follow through on their characters’ worst actions. I had a lot of very firm ideas about fiction. But what I’ve come around to is that exposition is indispensable. Critical to the mission of telling a story and telling it well. Indeed, I think that exposition, interiority, and backstory are absolutely essential to getting at that human resonance that makes the characters of James, Wharton, Austen, and Zola so utterly unforgettable.

Taylor highlights the idea that interiority helps the reader understand not only the characters’ thoughts, but the characters themselves—it is prose separate from the narrative that, rather than driving any sense of action forward, grapples with a character’s sense of self and other.

Isabella Hammad is, in my opinion, highly skilled in the craft of character development through the use of interiority—her stunning novel The Parisian gives a thoughtful portrait of a young Palestinian man attempting to position himself in a world that regards his homeland with ambivalence, pseudoscientific fascination, or outright hostility:

And in just a year he had undergone such an alteration, from that stranger who had once desired to become European both inside and out, closer already in appearance to the pale Italian or Greek—when he was not blithely offering his genealogy to anyone who asked—than to the inhabitants of those apostasized subaltern continents who had so defected from civilisation as they occurred in picture books and nursery rhymes and the imaginations of French children. He had fallen so easily into the compromise available in Paris, this type, by an embrace of otherness that at first he had admired in Faruq but which now appeared in his mind a skewed, performed version of what it was really like to be in a place but not of it, not to know it truly. Doctor Molineu lurked at the edges with his notebook and his analysis, his charts of cranial development, observing him at the dinner table.

Hammad, in this passage and so many more, shows the ways in which her characters ponder inwardly their positionality in an ever-changing world, the ways in which their individual relationships indicate broader truisms about society, and so on. Hammad does this beautifully, organically, and in a way that is deeply engaging for the reader.

I think, as readers, we need to move beyond the need for every book we read to have a dynamic and thrilling plot—it is good and normal for some books to be slow, because not all books are meant necessarily as an exciting escape from the mundane. It is okay to sit with a book that demands more introspection, that requires the reader to seek more than the next plot twist or jaw-dropping reveal. Ultimately, a large part of the cultural significance of literature is what it tells us about our own humanity and our search for meaning in the world.

I don’t mean to suggest that every single book we read must have this kind of weighty significance—I for one certainly need a form of mindless entertainment every now and again that cools down the whirring, overheating gears grinding in my head. And I certainly don’t want to come across as some crotchety “high brow” literary persona who only believes in the validity of one particular style of writing (because I think there are major flaws in that way of thinking as well). But I think for those who call themselves bookworms, particularly in hyper consumerist Online spheres, we might benefit from taking a step back to reconsider how we engage with books.

Books with excellent character development (in my humble opinion):

• The Parisian by Isabella Hammad

• Just Above My Head by James Baldwin

• In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif

• The Street by Ann Petry

• Another Country by James Baldwin

• A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza

• Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

Have any recommendations that you feel have good character development? Drop them in the comments—I’d love to see.