Writing Opposites: Bad Identity, Good Identity
What opposites exist in you? Do you have a good identity, a not so good one? Maybe you flaunt one, hide the other—whichever you prefer to be seen as, gets shown. Characters are not unlike us, in this way. They have opposites, traits they hide, others they reveal freely.
As a reader—and a writer—I’ve long been intrigued with how a person “presents,” to use a psychotherapy term, versus how they really are. A character with opposites attracts me as a reader. For instance, badass women who secretly live as heroes.
All my novels have them. I nurture that quality in myself. I admire it in friends.
But successfully writing characters with believable opposites takes work and inner research. In early drafts, many characters emerge rather flat. We may not know their opposites yet, or the character may not have revealed them. True for fiction, certainly, in my experience, but also memoir. We learn as we go. Maybe there’s not enough conflict yet in the story to allow the opposite aspects to come forward. Or there is too much and the inner lives of characters are blurred.
In any case, I find that characters are somewhat elusive to readers until their opposite traits are revealed.
But opposites can make characters messy: some writers worry that showing the unlikeable sides of a character pushes readers away. For instance, what if a sympathetic woman shows violent desires? Or a villain is compassionate?
We’re not talking cliches here, or stereotypes. This is internal work, where characters reveal tendencies they may not fully accept themselves—and which can surprise both reader and writer.
Without a good balance of opposite tendencies, revealed carefully in story, I find that readers don’t get close enough your players to relate and want to linger. My all-time best complements are “I didn’t want to leave your characters when the story ended.” That takes revealing who these people are, deep down, what they want and where they’re longing to go. Even if they’re not telling.
There are also the writers—and most of us experience this—who want their characters to be one way, and the characters want to be another. A dilemma that stalls out the story, right? I’ll never forget the great question that came during one of my interviews: How do you resolve a character exercising their right to be who they are? Even if you don’t want them to be that way? I could totally relate.
Yes, we are the gods of the world we’re creating. But at some point, we have to let the character be fully realized, despite our worries about what the reader (or our mother, or sister, or boss who will someday read this story!) might think. Characters who are vivid on the page have no qualms about revealing who they are at the core. Instead of who the author wants them to be.
Running the risk of reader dislike
About five years ago, I was looking for a new agent. I was querying about the manuscript that would become my recently released novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue. I got a lot of interest, requests for pages and even the full manuscript. But I also got this response, too often for comfort.
“The biggest problem with your novel is that I don’t like your narrators.”
At first, I took this literally. I longed to shoot back, “Do all characters need to be likeable?” But I had a sense these agents were telling me something important. So I shut up and tried to understand.
Not likeable wasn’t really the issue, I realized. I found this out when I became humble—and brave enough—to email the agent who sent the friendliest rejection and ask.
Here’s what I got back: “They are too elusive. I just don’t get why I should follow them.”
Ah-ha! Not so much dislike at all! Just lack of access to the interior life of the character. My women were too distant from their readers, and this stopped the story.
It was a real turning point in my understanding. Suddenly I got why some of the more despicable characters in literature—consider Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal Lecter—are so intriguing. Yes, we’d never want to be in the same room with that guy, but he’s fascinatingly wrought as a character on the page.
Is this because they are well depicted? Yes, definitely. But even more, it’s because they are close enough to be truly creepy.
So I took that agent comment to heart. I went behind behind the “I don’t like your narrators” to what might be making these two women less accessible. What opposites inside them were not being revealed in the story? What were those opposites, anyway?
If you’re still with me, I’d like to share the steps I went through to bring my distant characters into fuller relief. The process worked, because now that A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue is published, I’m getting that so-satisfying response from readers: “I didn’t want the book to end because I didn’t want to stop being with those characters.”
Although both my narrators were guilty of distance in those early drafts, I’m going to use the most badass one, Red Nelson, as the example in this post. She’s a red-haired rocker who’s fascinated with fire.
Using images to access opposites
But first, I want to back up to the moment when I first learned about the opposites in characters. It happened in grad school, in my MFA program.
I was assigned a mentor who believed strongly in the power of images as a way to access opposites. I was revising my first novel, Qualities of Light, the prequel to A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue. In that earlier story, two young women fall in love one summer. I was frustrated in my attempts to bring these characters into vividness on the page. So one week, instead of marking up my manuscript pages as she usually did, she mailed me a torn out photo from a magazine.
No words, just images. On one side, the photo of a shy, beautiful young girl, head bent, dark hair covering her face. I knew this was Molly Fisher, the narrator of Qualities of Light. Then I flipped the photo; on the other side was a completely different image. A wild young dancer, skirt hiked up, hair flying, threw herself at the camera with abandon. No restraint. This was Zoe.
They were opposites. But interestingly enough, they also represented the opposite traits in each other. Molly longed to be wild, Zoe was secretly thoughtful and reclusive, not just badass.
From those images, I was able to finish revising that book, and it was accepted for publication in 2009.
Images of opposites became one of my tried-and-true tricks for getting to know the hidden sides of a character.
So when I was struggling to bring my then-elusive character, Red Nelson, into more accessibility on the page, I began to search online for images. My questions were:
What did she love and lost?
What keeps her up at night?
What does she secretly long for?
Could I answer those questions in images? These would be the surroundings of her interior life, aspects she naturally hides because they mean so much.
I immediately accessed two: music and fire. She has loved her music, when she has to run from the law, she loses it. She loses it even more definitely during her escape (her songbook with all her new lyrics goes missing). What keeps her up at night? Fire. The fire she set long ago with her ex-boyfriend, that burned down a building. What does she secretly long for? Freedom and family, which are opposites in themselves.
As I collect those images, I felt the opposites of violence and gentleness within this elusive narrator.
Once you get a sense of the opposites within your character, the next task is to create story to demonstrate this—scenes that force it out.
I needed to figure out how the violence of this character, Red Nelson, came out through both her loves: music and fire.
Opposites appear easily well-structured books as what I call the “outer story” and the “inner story.” Early drafts of my novel started with the inner story, the emotional longing of this narrator, Red, to find family again. But the emotional longing didn’t bring the violence I sensed in her to the page. It wasn’t enough. I knew I needed to delve into the outer story.
For months, I stewed over how to build a compelling outer story. The friendly yet rejecting agent recommended possibly educating myself in the thriller genre, since outer story suspense was the mother’s milk of thriller writers. A circuitous route led me to a crime novelist who taught with UCLA’s writing program. He asked me the right questions about fire.
Fire entered the story as I studied my character’s history. Her first boyfriend was an arsonist, an excitement she once loved then grew to fear. The thriller writer encouraged me to write scenes about fire—setting a fire, running from a fire, fascination with fire. Slowly, I got an idea: what if the boyfriend causes a crisis that forces Red to run for her life? Her mother begs her to find sanctuary with her unknown sister, the other elusive narrator in my book. Red flees there, unsure of Kate’s welcome. Her plane crashes then explodes. Fire starts the book and ends it.
I drafted some rough scenes, then I started studying Kate for her mirror effect. She’s not a badass at all—she is a rule follower, a Search & Rescue pilot. How would violence show up in her life, if she followed my theory of pairs of narrators forming mirrors for each other?
Like my dilemma with Molly and Zoe, how might my two narrators in A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue hold opposite traits?
As unconscious mirrors, they are never identical reflections—because anything too perfectly aligned becomes predictable. Nothing in the human landscape travels a straight line. There are always unexpected turns.
What aligns them, how are they similar? They are sisters but they live apart for their adult lives, estranged because one is the product of a secret affair. Yet they grow up with identical traits. They both become pilots. They both worry about small details. They both love their renegade father who deserts them regularly.
Ten years apart, the older sister doesn’t know the younger exists; the betrayed mother keeps the fact from her daughter. The younger sister knows all about her older sister; her mother, the lover, tells all. So the younger one begins to idolize her older sister, longing for the belonging it might provide. She becomes almost mythic in the young woman’s mind, just from a few photographs, the stories from her parents, the flying lessons her father gave them both.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
You can approach this week’s exercise in two ways.
Either start with images: like my MFA instructor did, try to find opposites in visuals that describe the opposites in your character.
Or, make two lists, two columns on a page. Write 5-10 descriptors of your character, as you know them so far. What do they long for? What drives them? What values do they hold dear?
Then consider the opposite of these characteristics. Write them in the second column.
You might explore opposites like:
Loyal Betrayer
Self-focused Heroic
Introspective Wild
Try not to dismiss the opposite out of hand; instead, free write on each opposite, asking how this quality appears in your character’s life. Does the opposite come forward in certain, rare circumstances?
Then try drafting a scene with this opposite quality. How does it change the elusiveness of your character, making them more available to the reader?