The subtle character

it's harder to not be loud

CRAFT is a reader-supported email newsletter about the nuts and bolts of fiction writing and the world of publishing.

Welcome back everyone. I mentioned last week that I was in NYC doing some socializing and also some business stuff. If you ever have an opportunity to meet your agent and editors in person, I think it is always worth the trip. It was still a bit slushy and gross in New York (my decision to bring oversized too-long wide leg pants was a MISTAKE) but I was definitely enjoying something that New Yorkers probably take for granted: the question is never “can I find some dan dan noodles” but “which dan dan noodles place will I go to today?”

My musical theater friend and I waited in line for 2 hours for discounted theater tickets and one of the shows we saw was The Great Gatsby. I hadn’t known it had been turned into a musical and was more than a little curious about whether or not it could even be turned into a musical, but the advertisements indicated it was the sort of grand production I tend to like: great costumes, big scenery.

When my friend and I walked out of the performance, we had the same exact reaction, despite the fact that he is extremely knowledgeable about musical theater and I’m only a “one every couple of years” kind of person: Gatsby just doesn’t really work as a musical. (For the record, though, we both agreed that the price of admission is worth it if you can see it with Jeremy Jordan playing Gatsby. He’s incredible. Every moment he was singing I was absolutely captivated. He reminded me of Frank Sinatra—not in terms of the sound of his voice, but in the way that he makes smooth-as-butter singing seem absolutely effortless.)

A lot of our conversation revolved around characters, and how the way The Great Gatsby the novel is set up in such a way that made the musical not really work. In the novel, Nick Carraway is a sort of blah character. Why focus the novel on a sort of boring, blah character when you could have it told through Gatsby’s POV, or focused 3rd person on Gatsby, who is clearly more interesting and is clearly the focal point of the novel?? Because then you can’t see him from a removed perspective. Nick functions as the glass through which you look at Gatsby. Because so much of the story is about this larger-than-life character, you need to see him through someone else’s eyes, and in this particular case, Fitzgerald made the decision to make Nick a sort of clear glass. No glitter in the glass, no bubbles, no opaqueness of a bizarre personal perspective. He’s just there to be the lens through which we see Gatsby and others.

In the musical, we open with Nick Carraway doing the sort of “introduction to me and the situation” type of song you often see in musicals. Nick is by default the main character so in the musical he actually gets more screen time then Gatsby. And this… doesn’t work. Part of the reason this doesn’t work is because no one in the musical reaches Jeremy Jordan’s level of talent, I hate to say. Another reason for this is that Nick just isn’t interesting. In the concept for a novel, I think Fitzgerald makes Nick “work” as a narrator because he is a stand-in that we step into. We too, are ignorant to the social politics of East and West Egg, we’ve all been in situations where we are relatively naive—about love, about work, about society. Nick is not interesting because he’s not supposed to be interesting. This was a narrative choice. In my first book I drop the reader into a first person POV of a psychopath. I’ve put you in an alien place. You get sort of repulsed and intrigued about what she is going to do next. She is the interesting thing; in The Great Gatsby, it’s what other people are doing that is interesting. To my friend I proposed the idea that it might have made more sense for Nick Carraway to be a non-singing role. (I think this would be harder to pull off, but I think it would highlight his nothingness rather than trying to pretend he is an interesting person.)

I also thought Daisy as a character in the musical didn’t work. Daisy’s character in the novel is subtle; in a musical characters have to belt dramatic songs and dramatically turn their heads away while talking to people. Daisy in the musical was a character, but was not the same character that she was in the novel. I told my friend that he should check out the Baz Luhrmann adaptation of Gatsby that starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, which I recalled liking quite a bit. (I rewatched it on the train ride home and have the same opinion.) In fact, the first time I watched that movie, when they got to the part where Gatsby is throwing his shirts down on Daisy I remember thinking, Oh I get it now. That adaptation was a rare instance where the adaptation made me understand something I hadn’t gotten in the book. I hadn’t really understood the romance between Gatsby and Daisy until I saw that particular adaptation, I think because DiCaprio and Mulligan lend a lot to these characters. Because the novel is told through the filter of Nick, there is a sort of opaqueness to Daisy and Gatsby’s love. We are told they love each other—we must accept is as true.

But because this is a movie we “see” things in way that we can’t in a novel. There are scenes where Tobey Maguire’s Nick is observing the couple from across the room where they are talking avidly to each other, but we can’t hear what they are saying. In other words, there is content to their relationship, even if we don’t know what it is. What works a lot better in a movie than a stage play or musical is that you’re physically closer to the characters. You can see subtle facial expressions. Carey Mulligan is fantastic in this movie IMHO— even though Daisy is kind of annoying in the novel (did she really have no idea where Gatsby’s money came from?)—I thought she did an incredible job of adding life to lines of dialogue that came off as flatter to me when I read the novel. There is a scene when someone is talking to Daisy and the camera is close in on her face, and she does this thing with her eyes—her actual eyes, not the parts of her face that immediately surround her eyes—where she makes them sort of shine and sparkle.

What is my point here? The way fiction functions in the written word gives us way more leeway in subtlety than a musical, and certainly more than in a movie. We have access to the interiority of the POV characters. In other words, we can get away with subtle characters. And we should. I think a lot of terms get thrown around: there are “quiet books,” which I would describe as being the opposite of a Michael Bay movie. There are quiet characters, whose actions and dialogue don’t seem to be screaming for attention but can still nevertheless be fascinating. I don’t know if all subtle characters are quiet ones—I’d have to think about it more. To me, a subtle character is one where we encounter some opaqueness, we don’t fully understand them because they are not screaming their theses to us; their actions might be small, but there might be more meaning to them than meets the eye. They may be people we assume fit a certain archetype, but perhaps we see something about them where they are more filled out than that.

I have to think more about whether or not I have seen subtle characters that are male, because they probably do exist, but the two immediately ones that came to mind are also female characters, love interests, and ones that people might describe as “weak” characters. Betty Draper in Madmen and Tawney Talbot from Rectify. We are initially introduced to Betty as the beautiful and probably miserable housewife to the cheating Don Draper, and she comes off this was, as a sort of boring victim, until this scene where she has been complaining to her neighbor about loud interactions between geese and the neighbor’s dogs and the neighbor won’t do anything about it, so she goes outside, smoking a cigarette, with a shotgun, and starts firing into the air. She is never as clever as Peggy, never as saucy as Joan, as strong a counterpoint to Don as his second wife is—not every character is going to roar across the screen or page, but she can still be interesting. (One of the more bizarre and interesting things she does in the show is form a strange friendship to a weird young boy who is a classmate of her young daughter’s—she doesn’t even seem to like him really, but is just so profoundly lonely.) Rectify, a great show very few people have watched, is about a man, Daniel, being released from prison on a technicality for a murder he was arrested for when he was a teenager. Daniel was a strange boy before the murder, and years of being in prison have made him even stranger. Daniel becomes romantically attached to his stepbrother Teddy’s wife, Tawney, who is strangely drawn to Daniel. Tawney is the quiet character, the woman married to a shitty man, yet I found myself fascinated with her every time she was on screen.

This is also to say that in the push to make “strong female characters,” books are littered with sassy Erin Brockavich types, women who can do jiu jitsu, women who take no shit, women with magical powers. There are of course nothing wrong with such characters, but sometimes they come across as something being scrawled across the page with the Mega Chunk sized Sharpie. The louder and more brash a character is, the more likely they are to be screaming their theses out loud as opposed to showing them in subtle ways, or perhaps not showing then at all or withholding.

Perhaps in this particular slice of time, where many are critiquing the supposedly best writers of literary fiction for literally stating their theses and themes, often in dialogue, there is less of a place for subtlety. I think if someone were doing a modern take on Gatsby they would try to make Daisy come across as a headstrong feminist iconoclast —perhaps she does decide to leave her husband, only in the process of fleeing the hotel the terrible car accident happens, which derails her plans. But Fitzgerald was writing about a particular woman living in a particular time. I guess what I’m saying is, are the things that are the most interesting always the loudest? Are they the things that are the most expected or well explained? What makes readers the most curious?

book bump

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. Today’s book was recommended to me by my good friend and fellow Substacker Kelly Turner. The context was that I was saying my life was particularly stressful right now because I have several complicated problems I am dealing with that have no end in sight, that are stretching on for years with no resolution, and that involve many many steps, and often the steps are like a horrible version of that children’s story where you need broth to make soup, but the broth maker won’t give you broth unless you give them a duck, and the hunter won’t give you a duck unless you give him a fur, and the tanner won’t give you a fur unless you hire a lawyer you found on Reddit. (true story). This book is very practical advice about things that are very much in my life right now: how not to worry about catastrophes that may or may not happen in the future, how fantasizing about a perfect thing in the future is preventing you from doing something right now, about how wanting to focus on everything means you do nothing about things you might actually have the ability to change. I felt this particular bit hit home when thinking about being inundated with endless bad news of the world ending: