This week I’ve been moving back and forth among three writing projects: the Billy and Molly series, I Dare You, Teacher, and The Boaz Superstition. They’re very different projects, but I’ve noticed something happening in all three.
I’m having a harder time putting people into neat little boxes.
That’s probably a good thing.
Take Billy and Molly. It would be easy, especially given some of the religious questions that will eventually surface in the series, to divide the characters into believers and doubters, or maybe the enlightened and the unenlightened. I suspect an earlier version of me might have done exactly that. I’ve been a lawyer, after all. Give me two opposing positions and my instinct is to start building a case.
But that isn’t what I’m interested in doing anymore.
I’m more interested in the person who believes whatever it is she believes.
How did she get there? Who taught her? What does that belief give her? What might it cost her to question it? And here’s one I think I’ve become especially interested in: Who might she disappoint if she changed her mind?
Those questions make writing harder.
They also make the characters more interesting.
A few days ago I wrote about learning to stand beside the witness instead of trying to defeat him. I think what I’m noticing now is another part of the same change. Once I stand beside him long enough, the label I’ve given him doesn’t tell me very much.
“Christian” doesn’t tell me who he is.
Neither does “atheist.”
“Teacher” doesn’t tell me who she is.
Neither does “student.”
Even “good kid” and “troublemaker,” labels adults are awfully quick to attach to teenagers, don’t tell us much once we start paying attention.
The labels aren’t necessarily false. That’s important. Sometimes they’re perfectly accurate.
They’re just incomplete.
And that’s where writing keeps catching me.
The Trouble With Knowing Too Quickly
I can do this with fictional characters because I’m forced to. If I’m going to write a believable character, sooner or later I have to get beneath whatever convenient description I’ve given her.
But I’m not sure I’m nearly as disciplined about doing that with real people.
I suspect most of us aren’t.
Someone tells us a person is conservative or liberal, religious or nonreligious, successful or unsuccessful, difficult or easy to get along with, and before we’ve learned much of anything else, we’ve already begun filling in the blanks.
I know I’ve done it.
Maybe that’s one reason labels are so attractive. They’re efficient. They save us the trouble of having to know the whole person.
And, of course, we can’t know the whole person. I don’t want to pretend otherwise. I can spend years with someone and still not know everything that has shaped the way he sees the world.
But surely there’s a difference between recognizing that limitation and deciding that one word tells me enough.
Writing characters has made that difference harder for me to ignore.
Suppose I decide a character in The Boaz Superstition is simply “the believer.” I can probably predict what he’ll say. I can give him the expected objections. I can even make him say exactly what I need him to say so another character can answer him.
That’s convenient.
It’s also not much of a character.
What if this same man believes deeply but has one question he has never allowed himself to ask? What if his church is where his closest friendships are? What if questioning one belief threatens far more than the belief itself? What if what looks like certainty from the outside doesn’t feel anything like certainty to him?
Now I have somebody I want to know.
And I think that’s the part that keeps escaping the manuscript and following me into ordinary life.
The Person I Haven’t Met Yet
I wonder how often I meet the label before I meet the person.
Probably more often than I’d like to admit.
We do need categories. I’m not arguing that we should stop using them. Words such as teacher, Christian, atheist, Republican, Democrat, teenager, lawyer, writer, and hundreds of others tell us something. Sometimes they tell us something important.
But I’m beginning to think the danger comes when something quietly becomes everything.
Once I’ve decided I know what kind of person you are, curiosity becomes unnecessary.
I don’t have to ask what happened to you.
I don’t have to wonder why this matters so much to you.
I don’t have to ask what you’re afraid of losing.
I don’t have to consider that you may hold two thoughts that don’t fit neatly together.
I already “know” you.
Except, of course, I don’t.
This may be one of the reasons I’m enjoying the work on Billy and Molly so much. Teenagers are especially easy for adults to label. She’s a good girl. He’s a troublemaker. She’s popular. He’s shy. She’s religious. He’s rebellious.
But spend enough time with any one of them and the label starts leaking.
The good girl keeps a secret.
The troublemaker is remarkably gentle with his little sister.
The confident girl is terrified of disappointing her mother.
The boy who questions everything desperately wants somewhere to belong.
That’s when a character begins to feel real to me.
Not when the label turns out to be completely wrong, necessarily.
When I realize how much it left out.
Looking Again
Maybe that’s the larger lesson writing is teaching me.
Paying attention to another person sometimes means being willing to look again after I think I’ve already seen him.
I don’t have to surrender judgment to do that. Understanding why someone believes something doesn’t require me to believe it too. Understanding someone’s behavior doesn’t require me to excuse it.
It simply means I haven’t mistaken my first description for the finished portrait.
I’m sure I’ll keep doing that. I’ll keep sorting people into categories because that’s one of the ways the mind makes a complicated world manageable.
But maybe I can catch myself occasionally.
Maybe when I hear the label—or when I supply it myself—I can leave a little room beside it.
Room for the thing I don’t know.
Room for the contradiction.
Room for the history I haven’t heard.
Room, most of all, for the person.
A label may tell me something about someone.
I’m trying to remember that it can never tell me the whole person.
Writing continues to teach me that.
Continue with The Pencil’s Edge
A Pencil Practice
Think of someone you regularly describe with a label.
It might be political, religious, professional, generational, or something much more ordinary.
Write the label on a page.
Then underneath it, write:
What might I not know about this person?
Don’t try to answer completely. Just write one thing you might have missed—or one question you have never thought to ask.
Read what you wrote once.
When you have finished, the practice is complete.
Listen
Prefer listening?
Listen to today’s Reflection on Spotify.
Subscribe
New Reflections are published every Monday and Thursday morning at The Pencil-Driven Life.
The Pencil-Driven Life 