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Giancarlo’s death had felt, for so many, totally unbelievable. I’d learned about it from Martina, my Italian editor and beloved friend in Rome, who emailed the word in all caps (DIED) as if to force herself to see it (I can’t stop crying); and because so many writers loved Gian, the internet filled up with sentimental remembrances from otherwise aloof people, and I made it my job to read every word that everyone had to say about him, as if that was going to be some kind of tunnel back to his apartment in Rome, a meal he and his husband served me after a long journey, fragrant with olive oil, and Gian talking, nodding, smoking, and ready, always ready, for some long and unforeseen night to arrive. That day he was still a little dazed from a night out dancing with Martina and others, so he was going to take it easy, stay in, calm down, but again he saw the dawn.
oh wow
Pessimism might be an insurance policy against disappointment, and optimism a total buying into a different fantasy, but maybe a love of fate could be both and neither, I thought; then the agent at the airport confessed that the problem with my ticket was that it had been recategorized as first class for no understandable reason, and she couldn’t find a way to change it back to the economy ticket I had purchased, hard as she tried.
The flight was long and international, and I felt quite chewed up by the last two months, and perhaps I never needed more than I needed then the ability to fully recline for a few hours. Certainly many people would have liked to have met that first-class fate, and now the idea of getting an amor fati tattoo seemed quite silly, me of all people. What did I know about the difficulty of fate? Nothing.
It was all so odd. In a coffee shop in the terminal a child knocked her plastic cup of yogurt off the table, and looking at it splattered across the floor she was quiet for a moment, then laughed.
I tried to watch the flight attendant explain what to do in case of an emergency, but I had seen it too many times to see her. The oxygen masks, the exit rows, the seat cushion that can float. We know this. We all know this by now.
The pandemic was still drizzling on, so there were not many on that flight, just the people who really needed (or wanted or were being forced) to go somewhere, to leave somewhere, to flee. None of us were listening.
We know more about how to attempt to survive an aerial disaster than we know about meeting the end of love, the former being highly unlikely while the latter is close to certain.
Over lunch on a quiet street a married friend told me that her husband had asked her for a postnuptial agreement. It seemed humane, perhaps, but too late, as they were already getting separated, trying to read the informational brochure in the seat-back pocket as the plane was hurdling down in flames.
But she was not alone in being willing to prepare for imaginary disasters while refusing to imagine the commonplace ones.
What will you think about this from your deathbed? My husband’s wants had been consistent—to get married, to stay married, to have a child—while mine had become clear the hard way. I had, like so many fools before me, gotten right up to the edge of one life in order to learn I had to run in the opposite direction. If I had been more like him, maybe the deathbed question would have made me stay, but I wasn’t, so I left.
<3 same
Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don’t entirely exist and the feelings and thoughts that never exactly passed through them.
However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving.
The philosopher Gillian Rose wrote this in her last complete book before she died of ovarian cancer, but I didn’t know anything about Rose when I picked up the copy of Love’s Work that Sara had left in the living room. I was awake early that day, glad to be alone but also wondering how long I was going to be this glad to be alone. As if it was urgent business I needed to take care of, I surrendered most of the day to this short, circuitous mediation on love and death and sex and longing.
There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage … You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself.
Waldo Salt believed in capturing “the truth” of the characters in a story. I had the good fortune of having several conversations with Waldo, and he was not only an extraordinary writer, but an extraordinary person. We talked about the craft of screenwriting a lot, and Waldo told me that he believed the character’s need (the dramatic need—what the character wants to win, gain, or achieve) determines the dramatic structure. His words resonated with me immediately, and I shared with him that I had recently come to the same understanding while I was analyzing Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: The character’s need determines the creative choices he/she makes during the screenplay, and gaining clarity about that need allows you to be more complex, more dimensional, in your character portrayal.
It was a powerful moment for both of us as we sat in an unspoken glow of communication that was more powerful than words, and it led to a long and passionate discussion about capturing “the truth of the human condition” in a screenplay. The key to a successful screenplay, Waldo emphasized, was preparing the material. Dialogue, he said, is “perishable,” because the actor can always improvise lines to make something work. But, he added forcefully, the character’s dramatic need is sacrosanct. That cannot be changed, because it holds the entire story in place. Putting words down on paper, he said, is the easiest part of the screenwriting process; it is the visual conception of the story that takes so long. And he quoted Picasso: “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”
Reading it from this perspective, I saw four things, four essential qualities that seemed to go into the making of good characters: (1), the characters have a strong and defined dramatic need; (2), they have an individual point of view; (3), they personify an attitude; and (4), they go through some kind of change, or transformation.
Those four elements, those four qualities, make up good character. Using that as a starting point, I saw that every main, or major, character has a strong dramatic need. Dramatic need is defined as what your main characters want to win, gain, get, or achieve during the course of your screenplay. The dramatic need is what drives your characters through the story line. It is their purpose, their mission, their motivation, driving them through the narrative action of the story line.
Having a character change during the course of the screenplay is not a requirement if it doesn’t fit your character. But transformation, change, seems to be an essential aspect of our humanity, especially at this time in our culture. I think we’re all a little like Melvin (Jack Nicholson) in As Good as It Gets (Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks). Melvin may be complex and fastidious as a person, but his dramatic need is expressed toward the end of the film when he says, “When I’m with you I want to be a better person.” I think we all want that. Change, transformation, is a constant of life, and if you can impel some kind of emotional change within your character, it creates an arc of behavior and adds another dimension to who he/she is. If you’re unclear about the character’s change, take the time to write an essay in a page or so, charting his or her emotional arc.
One of Henry James’s theories is termed the Theory of Illumination. James said that if your character occupies the center of a circle and all the other characters he interacts with surround him, then each time a character interacts with the main character, the other characters can reveal, or illuminate, different aspects of the main character. The analogy he used was walking into a darkened room and turning on the floor lamps located in each corner. Each lamp illuminates a different part of the room. In the same way, different aspects of your main character can be illuminated by what other people say about him or her. This is how we know that Bob Harris, the Bill Murray character in Lost in Translation, is a movie star: He’s sitting at the bar, alone, when two guys start telling him how much they loved his movies, and wonder whether he did all his own stunts. In that one exchange, we learn he is an action star, one whose career seems to be on the decline.