In writing characters—and writing ourselves as characters—how can we create figures on the page that are as complex as the people we meet and love and live with in real life? How can we imagine every character not just as one version of herself but as many versions of herself, a crowded room full of many different figures: the ghosts of prior selves, the fantasies of future selves? If you think of every character as a guesthouse, who would all the guests be? Who are all the selves dwelling inside?
This craft lecture will explore the construction of character as a dilemma (and thrill!) facing fiction and nonfiction writers alike: When you write first-person narratives, how can you construct your own character on the page as something multiple, complex, and surprising? How can you make room for as many versions of yourself as possible—as many versions as necessary? How does paying close attention to experience—to any scene, any relationship, any memory—not just invite but demand this multiplicity of selfhood: that every character be not one way, but many ways; that she want not just one thing, but many things; that she do something not for one reason, but for many reasons.
In personal narrative, writing the self doesn’t just involve writing all these different versions of the self—the various roles we play (mother, daughter, lover, teacher, student, pissed-off person in traffic, ostentatiously courteous subway-smiler, feverish COVID-shut-in, etc.); the Russian nesting dolls of prior selves, nested inside the self of the present; the agreeable self and the difficult self; the loving self and the bitter self; the jaded self and the earnest self. It also involves writing the relationships between these various facets of the self: the vulnerable shy girl lurking inside the woman kneeling at an IKEA coffee table, doing another line; the sarcastic ironist showing up—barbed and grieving—at the funeral to make a joke in poor taste, then sobbing in the bathroom afterward. The question of allowing a self to be many ways at once, defined by love and conflict at once, haunted by the past and yearning toward the future—these are questions facing the memoirist writing autobiographical nonfiction, but they are always questions facing the fiction writer who wants to create compelling characters on the page.
Leslie Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of Splinters, The Recovering, The Empathy Exams, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in Brooklyn with her daughter and teaches at Columbia University.
