I am so glad to be here today with a wonderful novelist, Amity Gaige,

who's going to help us understand more about character,

more about dialogue, how to get the character on the page, and

how to help your reader hear the character.

I feel that you are so good at writing about marriage and about men and

women together, and I wondered how you come to your male characters and

how do you feel that you breathe life into them.

Do you see them?

Do you hear them?

How do you develop those characters?

Is it more of a reach for

you or absolutely no different than developing your female characters?

>> Yeah, sometimes I feel a little bit more comfortable writing about characters

that are different than me in just a way, for example in gender.

If I write about a man, I don't run into some of the same

problems if I'm writing about a woman who's say my age, in my situation, I have

a hard time getting any distance from that character in order to characterize her.

Sometimes a little easier to estrange myself from the character so

that I can see him or her as more of a character.

For example, I might be able to change the age of a character and thereby,

get to know her or again, the gender.

So with men, it's interesting.

I find that any woman is going to have such a thorough experience of men,

especially a woman writer who's been reading ever since she was little,

books written by men.

The canon is this largely about men written by men,

so I've absorbed much about maleness.

I don't know if it goes both ways, but I certainly hope so.

That a man could also observe the women around him,

his mother was such a huge figure in everyone's life, sisters, daughters and

be able to characterize outside of his own gender as similarly.

>> Do you have a favorite male character that you created?

One who you feel particularly connected to, particularly close to?

Either because of how you created him, or because he really speaks to you even

though he is a man, he is also so much you.

>> Yeah.

I'd say the main character of my last novel,

Schroder, is a man named Eric Schroder,

who actually pretends to be a member of the Kennedy family but he's a German guy.

This is a guy, again, who doesn't share that much in common with me but

I find something essentially sympathetic about him,

I relate to him even though he's quite different from me.

Also, as I said, I'm married, I have a son.

I feel like some of the men close to me, I have good male friends,

have let me in on the secrets of the brotherhood a little bit.

>> Building on that, I want to say that the most interesting characters are not

typical men, or typical women.

Because, what makes us interesting as people

is also what makes interesting characters, which is that people are not typical.

They are not just how they seem.

They have poetry in their souls, they have difficulties.

They have struggles, they have collapses.

And the gap between how they appear and

how they really are is such an interesting thing about creating a character.

You never want to write a typical man or a typical woman because that doesn't exist.

I was wondering in The Folded World, you write so well about mental illness.

I was wondering what you found yourself drawing upon for that?

Was that research, was that life?

Was that a combination?

What do you think drew you to the subject and

what do you think made you write well about it?

>> I started that book with a ripped from the headlines type

situation where there was, in the town which I was living,

a social worker had died while working with a mentally ill client.

I wanted to explore that situation.

I come to fiction a lot by an interesting situation that would bring out the how and

the why of every character involved.

In that instance, I wanted to explore how that would happen.

>> don't have the experience like you do, working in the field of mental health, but

I did a lot of research both from the point of view of the social worker

who is doing his training and his work, and also of the mentally ill client.

In order to that,

I was just helped by people who were willing to speak to me about it.

>> My feeling is always that you don't have to like your character but

you have to love them and you have to be able to see the world as they see it.

>> Is there a person or a moment that you've observed that leads like a snowball

going downhill to the story or the novel?

You talked a little bit about how you are drawn by the situation.

Can you tell a little bit more about how you build from the fascinating situation

to a whole story?

>> It's very difficult.

Every time I try to write a novel, which is such an unwieldy

thing to do, I've solved that problem differently.

One case, one novel I began, was just voices conversing.

I started with dialogue and I heard these two bickering people talking

about marriage [LAUGH] and that was about a tense marriage.

They were just bickering and I then my

charge to myself was to explore the how and the why of what they're talking about.

Why is there this tension between them?

Why are they fighting over it, it happened to be a box.

[LAUGH] And that's what that novel explored.

In The Folded World, I did have this headline and

the context of that story grew out of much exploration,

research, and the hard work of sitting and imagining and

following these characters through their lives.

I don't feel like I have cracked the code on that,

other than the fact that every piece of work, every story and

every novel has an inner logic and has a way in which it needs to be written.

If you can have these intentions to say

I'm going to write rich characters, I want to write inimitable characters or

unforgettable characters and I'm just going to try to swim my way to them.

Then you will find the way that that book or that short story needs to be written.

>> I think that's right.

I think swim, walk, climb, crawl, you have to get to the characters.

My last question is could you talk a little bit about the role of dialogue,

about how you hear it and what you are listening for?

>> I think that really good dialogue is related to,

Robert Frost had this great phrase called the sound of sense.

In his poetry, even though it was written in formal lines,

it sounded like something that could be spoken.

It's a compromise between work that dialogue that feels written and

dialogue that feels spoken, because when we speak,

our dialogue actually isn't that interesting.

>> Alas.

>> Alas, [LAUGH] because if you could just transcribe real dialogue, great but

you can't because it's full of ums and likes and

swear words and people don't even listen to each other when they speak.

You retain the sort of that tang

of reality in your written dialogue and the sound of sense.

It could be spoken but it's crafted and chiseled to be interesting.

The problem with it being too written, of course, is it can sound very robotic and

it sounds like a robot has written the dialogue.

You don't want to do that either.

You're always in a tension between the written and the spoken.

>> Somebody once said that dialogue is not conversation,

it is conversation's greatest hits.

>> That's great.

>> I think that's the compromise, interesting and

crafted but not apparently so.

>> Yes.

>> It's been a wonderful opportunity to talk about character and

dialogue with the novelist, Amity Gaige and we will continue to focus on both of

those issues as building blocks and storytelling.

Picking Your Point of View (Shop Talk with Amity Gaige)

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