The first box on my One Page of best writing advice contains three suggestions:
If your story isn’t working try:
*Splitting your main character into two characters who are very different from one another
*Disempowering your main character (give them a lot less money and a lot more enemies)
*Making your protagonist much more wrong about how the world is or works
There is, I hope, a lot behind everything in all of the boxes.
For today, I’ll take the splitting.
If your story isn’t working, try splitting your main character into two characters who are very different from one another.
The moment you read this, you probably had a strong reaction. Quite likely, you imagined the painful bisection of a main character you’ve been working on. Of a nuanced psychology that has become increasingly real to you. Of scenes some of which seem to be working pretty well just as they are.
Or perhaps you immediately went aha! That’s it.
In which case, you can stop reading, go and do a draft, and come back when you’ve won the Bridport Prize.
However, if the story overall isn’t working, and you’d like to think through the advantages of pluralising your main character, I hope these notes will help.
I have judged a number of short story competitions, and co-edited a couple of anthologies.
In both cases, the stories which are easiest to set aside fall into the category of Very Isolated Main Character Who Bitterly Pursues a Miserable Routine For a While, and Has their Negative View of the World Confirmed.
Yes, there are many great pieces of writing that take this form.
One of my favourite texts, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude, is exactly this.
However, The Book of Disquietude depends on a unique sensibility, and an utterly seductive melancholy, and an extraordinary prose style.
If I came across all these three qualities in a short story, entered into a competition I was judging, it would win. No question.
However, if you have a main character who doesn’t have anyone to speak to, you not only rule out there being much dialogue, you also reduce the chances of a scene in which there’s change, surprise or revelation.
All of those things are possible with a character who doesn’t move a muscle, but they become serious technical challenges. (A whole life can be explored in a monologue, as with Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads.)
Now split that same character in two. You don’t have to create an odd couple, though that’s fun to do. You might simply take some of your protagonist’s detachable quirks and give them a mouth, arms, legs (optional, as are arms) and a reason for being. To start with. Later on, they can become a fully filled out creation with their own quirks.
Immediately, though, you have the possibility of scenes. Say your main character wants to go to the supermarket and buy a tin of soup, tomato soup, and some cheese biscuits, Jacob’s cream crackers.
This is entirely routine, and — unless you introduce an obstruction or an antagonist — eminently achievable as part of a silent hour.
But split your character into a pair of friends or a couple, then have one of them absolutely insist on chicken soup and oatmeal biscuits. Because they hate tomato soup and crackers.
Now there’s the need for a power battle which might start with menu choices but could end anywhere.
For the trip to the supermarket and soup and cheese biscuits, of course, you can insert whatever you imagine.
One character wants to go on holiday to Cornwall, the other to stay at home. One wants lifelong faithfulness, the other polyamory every weekend. One wants to lay siege to the enemy castle, the other to make peace.
Routine becomes rupture, and stability becomes story.
These fundamental kinds of disagreement don’t have to be the crux of your narrative.
All you need is for your pair to have a simple task they need to achieve — it can even be one on which they completely agree — then have them differ, as they go along, at moments of stress.
I hope you can sense how this new plurality opens out into possibilities, and possibilities upon possibilities.
Three characters will only add to these possibilities. (Two of them can talk about the other, while they’re out of the room, then gang up on them.)
It might even be that you split your character in two, learn about what’s going on inside them, then put them back together again — bringing in a new second character to join them.
Try it.