There’s a reason that opinion columns churn out weekly advice on how to precariously balance a peaceful holiday meal, forgive your spouse’s inability to rinse and load the dishes, or have patience with your teenager’s tirades: relationships are messy. Rather than advise us to scrub the messiness, the writers at this week’s Third Thursday panel talked about depicting complicated relationships.
Whether between small-town women, parents and children, or people and their environments, these authors tease out the complexities of relationships. In Women and Children First, Alina Grabowski discusses how our inability to communicate often defines our relationships. The unseen and unheard interactions between characters affect their relationships as much, or more, than the words that pass between them. Erin Quinn-Kong uses the medium of snark boards in her novel, Hate Follow, to explore how people interact when shielded by screens. In Jennifer Chang’s poetry collection, An Authentic Life, she examines the responsibility of those who wield relational power, as well as people who complicity accept others’ power.
Through mediums of fiction and poetry, these authors strive to depict authentic characters. Chang captures authenticity by embracing hesitation. She strives to remain honest about the limits of her knowledge; not knowing can be a kind of intelligence and art. For Quinn-Kong, research grounds and animates her characters’ complexities. Although fiction can swerve from facts, research scaffolds stories. In order to allow her characters to feel authentic, Grabowski leaves them the space to surprise her. She cautions against predicting and circumscribing characters’ actions at the outset of writing.
These authors’ works grapple with relationships that continue after a loved one has passed away. In her novel, Grabowski depicts the kaleidoscopic effects of grief by showing how it touches many people in varied ways. Similarly, Quinn-Kong dwells on the different grieving processes of a mother and daughter after the death of their husband/father. Grief reacts differently with each character and context. While writing her poetry collection, Chang dealt with the loss of a friend. She uses an epistolary poem to reflect on her past conversations with her friend and to remain in conversation with his past self and present loss. In each work, the presence of those who have passed away still pervades the narrative.
Since relationships involve multiple participants, authors must prioritize certain perspectives. Grabowski and Quinn-Kong agree that supplying multiple character perspectives adds texture to the story. In her poems, Chang searches for hidden perspectives, casting her vision onto the stories hidden behind men—those of invisible women.
When writing complex characters, writers must confront how to characterize evil. Should authors humanize or alienate wicked characters? Grabowski emphasizes that figuring out why evil exists is relevant and necessary to fiction. Writers can explore the ways that people hide who they are, appearing both human and inhuman. In Hate Follow, Quinn-Kong seeks to make her “villainous” character likeable and understandable. She wants people to root for both main characters so that readers feel the tensions and nuances of their conflict. Although Chang believes in the existence of villains, she reminds writers to turn the mirror on themselves: we all harbor small villainies. Attending the evil and good in characters allows for tender and vexed relationships. In her poetry, she has found that authenticity is not straightforward—it is rooted in the complex.
The writers shared their methods for mapping the relational threads in their books. Grabowski creates a linear timeline and maps character connections. She also considers the symmetry of a book, balancing the relationship between the novel’s beginning and end. For Quinn-Kong, pantsing meets plotting in a combination of spreadsheets and messy drafts. Chang’s ordering process begins when she gathers the individual poems into a collection. Although each poem has an inherent reason to exist, ordering them requires attending patterns and the emotional arc of the book.
Beyond interpersonal relationships, the characters in these books interact with their respective settings. Grabowski discusses how her childhood setting informs her worldview. Having lived on the edge of water, she infuses her novel with the ocean’s perceived connotations of precariousness and decay. Chang uses horses as a non-human presence to explore ideas of domestication, wildness, and abuse. Quinn-Kong indulges Austinites by setting scenes in local favorites like Zilker Park and Home Slice Pizza. Since California and New York have more than ample literary representation, she offers vignettes of Texas.
To learn more about characters’ relationships with their environments, join The Writers’ League March Third Thursday: “Writing the Natural World.”