9. How Not to Convince Me
by Steve Rosse
Why do you write? Do you want attention? Do you want money? Do you want to express something deep in your soul?
Whatever your reason, it begins with “I want.”
We all have desires that propel us through everything we do. We want things, and we will do stuff in order to get what we want. We want some of those things badly enough to go to extremes to get them.
Likewise our characters. A character needs a voice, he needs an appearance, and he needs to perform actions. Those actions must be motivated: he needs to want something. It’s not enough to write, “The butler did it.” You have to explain why the butler did it. What did the butler want that he could only get by doing it?
Why does Ahab sacrifice his ship, his crew and himself in his hunt for the white whale? Because the whale bit off his leg and he wants revenge.
Why does Ulysses travel for ten years to get home, sacrificing his men and ships along the way, forsaking the beds of Calypso and Circe? Because he’s a king and he wants his throne.
Why do Romeo and Juliet kill themselves rather than obey their parents? Because they’re teenagers. ‘Nuff said.
Simply naming a protagonist, assigning him a goal, and placing an antagonist between him and his goal is not enough. We’ve got to give the protagonist a reason for pursuing that goal and the antagonist a reason for denying him that goal. A lazy writer could go to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and just pick one. But nobody wants to read lazy writing.
Finding out what your characters want is hard but necessary work. That being said, you don’t necessarily have to reveal the want right away. If a character is compelling enough your reader will go along for the ride, trying to guess the desire, until the “reveal.” Thomas Harris’ readers stuck with him through four thick books before he revealed why Hannibal Lechter eats people.
There is currently a small niche market of novels about Western men who go to Thailand, most of them written by Western men who’ve gone to Thailand. In every one the author will deliver a laundry list of reasons why the main character moved himself and his fortunes from one side of the planet to the other: petulance over feminism, a shrewish ex-wife, rapacious government taxation, immigrants taking over his hometown, etc. etc. etc.
Those conditions, if they exist at all, exist for a large percentage of men everywhere. Yet only a small percentage of Western men become expatriates and even a smaller percentage choose Thailand rather than Greece or Jamaica or Belize. So these reasons seem to this reader to be woefully inadequate, or worse, a smokescreen for the real reasons.
In “Lord Jim,” perhaps the finest novel of this kind ever written in English, Conrad’s protagonist buries himself in the East because he is ashamed of who he is. He wants, and wants desperately, to be somebody other than himself. I’ve met quite a few Western male expatriates in Thailand. It’s very easy for me to believe that such a man would want to be someone other than himself.
We’ve all been there, haven’t we? So embarrassed by something we’ve done that we just want to crawl into a hole and die. So we believe it when Jim throws away everything he’s ever known and loved, runs to the farthest ends of the earth, and finally sacrifices his life in a fruitless point of honor.
We believe it enough that the book has been in print and widely read for more than a century, has inspired at least two movies and thousands of graduate theses, and probably inspired more than a few Western men to move East.
It would be interesting to see, a hundred years from now, if the current crop of Thailand expat novels, with their protagonists claiming less plausible motivation, are enjoying the same success.
Eastlit Note on How Not to Convince Me:
How Not to Convince Me is the ninth article in the series. Previous articles in the series are:
Steve Rosse is a former columnist for The Nation newspaper in Bangkok. His books are available on Amazon.com
