Recently my good friend Sean Taylor ran one of his writer roundtables discussing subtext, possibly inspired by me lamenting my students’ dislike of Hemingway in our discussion of “Hills Like White Elephants.” For what it’s worth, they didn’t like Allen Ginsburg either.
I answered Sean’s questions and he included my comments in his roundtable. Here is the uncut version of my contributions to Sean’s excellent website, as was previously printed on Patreon. You should totally subscribe.
- Dialog. How important is the stuff your characters don’t say or avoid saying to each other in your work?
If my characters are as close to living, breathing humans as I can make them, the things they don’t say are wildly important – just as they are for us allegedly-real people. When a married couple sits at the dinner table and says nothing but “pass the salt,” that tells us a great deal about their relationship, their thoughts and feelings, the comfort level they have reached (or not) between them. There are many times when we feel spurred to speak and do not, either for fear of social or professional consequences, adherence to behavior norms in society, or our own personal tendencies; a person who is generally conflict-avoidant may remain silent when insulted, even as they are burning to speak – or shout – on the inside.
All of these should come to play in our characters, if we are to make them real. The worst thing you can do is an “As you know, Bob…” where a character explains the blatantly obvious to a person who already knows this information. A little subtlety goes a long way.
2. Characterization. How often do you use the uncharacteristic action or thought in your characters to hint about something deeper in their character? Feel free to include examples from your work.
First, you need to establish a character’s personality before something can seem uncharacteristic. Breaking those characteristics should be done judiciously. If everyone treats your character as an unflappable badass, and we see her go through situation after situation without breaking a sweat, it raises the stakes significantly when she finally faces a moment where she falters, and emotion stops her, even for a moment. Likewise if you have a panicky character who cannot get himself together, who freaks out at the slightest challenge, then you can give him a moment of bravery that becomes more profound for being unexpected.
This has to make sense, however: having a character act wildly uncharacteristic can read as false to your reader. You need to give it context and show us why your heroine falters at that critical moment, or else they throw the book across the room and shout, “She wouldn’t do that!” And there needs to be a consequence to that uncharacteristic action, to underscore its importance. That can be an external consequence levied from other characters, or internal, in a subtle shift within the character’s personality and mindset. A character who is not changed by the end of the story is a flat paper doll.
3. In general, do you consider your writing to be dependent on subtext or do you prefer to just “put it all out there” and not make readers work too hard to dig into your theme, characters, etc.?
I think subtext naturally grows out of a story, if it’s told well. Fiction is essentially a cooperation between writer and reader, and everything I write is going to be filtered through my readers’ viewpoints and emotions. Thus if I put all my energies into THIS IS AN ALLEGORY FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE UNITED STATES, it’s going to be too obvious and the reader is going to be bored. “But where’s the story?” he asks. Sometimes the subtext is less subtle, and then you have five generations of college students debating what the hills really mean in classrooms across the country. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, either – that gets back to that cooperation, and how readers will see what you’ve written in different way.
I’m not sure that really answers the question, but that’s because “it depends” isn’t a very satisfying answer. All art has meaning, even if it actively tries to avoid meaning; whether it is an intentional allegory by the writer or an accidental reflection of the culture that created it, all art carries its subtext, if only we are awake enough to see it.
