A Case For Quiet Characters in Writing

We're drowning in drama and main character energy and losing all complexity, subtlety, and nuance.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

“This was a crystallizing moment in my teaching career: what afflicts literature, more than book banning, is this rapid loss of the ability to read for deeper meanings, to grasp subtlety, and to understand ambiguity. If conviction — instead of clarity, the kind of clarity that arrives via muddled thinking, repeated questioning, and a tolerance for not knowing and not understanding — is the goal of reading and writing, then much is already lost.” — Yiyun Li, “The Seventy Percent,” Harper’s

We live in a time where everyone seems incredibly loud and close. Whether to hate, ridicule, emulate or love, we cleave to the dramatic and bombastic : the influencer crying her woes into the camera, the mom screaming in her car about “un-schooling” her child because the government is toxic and pervasive, men who are missing much of their teeth or have all of their teeth prattling on about women they would not deign to date. The doomsday prophets and the get-rich-quick charismatic scam artists who lure you in with promises of riches and ruin. 

And the algorithms reward this. The loud will always get heard while the quiet shies away from the megaphone. The quiet recedes. 

On Instagram, I see a fiction writer clutching her book, dancing, because “me making a fool of myself is the only way this post gets seen.” I myself have been drawn in by explosive animal narratives — the pup hurled out of a moving car getting a new lease on life. I’ve cried watching one-minute videos of elephants in Thailand and kittens in Brooklyn. The algorithms surface that which will gain our attention. And the more I watch and “like” these videos, the more ubiquitous they are in my feed. So much so that I rarely see the simple lives of puppies sleeping. A seemingly boring day in the life of a shelter owner cleaning cages and feeding strays because it’s not entertaining enough, captivating enough. 

After reading Yiyun Li’s incisive “The Seventy Percent: On minor characters and human possibility,” it got me to thinking about how we consume, process, and respond to the art we see in the world and much of it is reductive on a terrifying scale. Li posits: what if writers auditioned characters — protagonists, antagonists, secondary and tertiary characters — into their work. What would pass muster? What would be the criteria for success in today’s literature? Li writes, 

“Once, a student of mine turned in a story featuring a young husband in a dispute with his wife. Quickly some of the students gave their verdict on the husband: toxic masculinity. Was that it? I tried to find different ways to talk about the character, but once the verdict was given, the case was closed. This tendency to issue a judgment seems to be on the rise. 

Stories are reduced to situations: this story is about grief, or trauma, or injustice. Characters become types or categories: a mourning mother, an abusive spouse, a traumatized child, a struggling artist, a marginalized soul. The word “identity,” which haunts the discussion of literature, has done some damage.”

I’ve witnessed this first-hand from many well-meaning readers of my work. I’ll share an essay about an incident in my life and while I’ll take my readers through this dark country, I’ll invariably show the hope, the possibility, and the light. Yet, the responses are ones of pity, of reduction. How sad. My heart breaks for you. It’s as if they see only the drama of the pain and sorrow and miss all the context and nuance that surrounds it. It’s the rough stuff that captures their attention at the expense of everything else. 

And I’ll read the comments, baffled. How could they miss the rest of it? The words not cloaked in drama or heartbreak. How could they not see the complexity of depression — that what makes this illness so devastating is the juxtaposition of hope, hopelessness, and all the mess in between. The mess is what’s discarded.

It’s the binary we cleave to because we understand its shape. We take comfort in its certainty. 

Li continues on why passive characters in great literature wouldn’t survive today:

Characters like Nikolai and Stoner, who react to life more often than they “take action” — whatever that term means — are often labeled by my students as passive characters. Sometimes a student is advised by his or her peers to give characters “higher stakes” or “more agency.” This tends to lead me to groan internally. Isn’t living from day to day enough of a stake? Isn’t living itself the most important action, if you really pay close attention to the world?

And while Li makes a valid case for ambivalent, passive characters (and how the binary of the fiery, dramatic main character is unrealistic as the majority of us won’t ever live such a bombastic life — all of which upon reading spurs reductive, simplistic assumptions about the characters, their plight and their lives because we only see the grandiose), what I took away from the essay instead is the notion of loud vs. quiet characters — especially as it pertains to what attracts us as consumers today. 

Li makes an analogy to her growing up in Communist China and being instructed to be content with meals making her 70% full. Li carries this analogy into her writing in being content with characters that are 70% (rather than 100%) full and why the in-betweens (not being fully full or far from satiated) allow space for subtly, nuance, and complexity. 

My process for auditioning characters is what Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page refers to when he speaks of “light and shade.” The soft and sparse juxtaposed with the loud and dense. The two need to co-exist powerfully and peacefully to make great music. The rush and the rest are equally valid because it creates space for the consumer of the art to appreciate the waves of drama and anguish while appreciating the serene and quiet. Both allows for complexity in music and, in my view, writing. 

My writing tends to move toward the dark, going to the places most don’t want to go. And in this dark, the pain feels endless and unrelenting. This territory is easy for me to occupy because it’s familiar. I can fully navigate its form and shape. So, I force myself to create contrast. That loud, messy character either needs a softer, quieter internal dynamic or they need a contrasting character. Let me be clear — my characters aren’t binary tropes. They are not fully dark or fully fluffy — rather they contain, as Walt Whitman would have it, multitudes. 

Yet, that’s what we’re missing from what is created and marketed today: the multitudes. The in-betweens. Those who aren’t living on the verge, but are simply content to live. 

I cleave to the loud so I force myself to consider the quiet. Whether it’s in characters, scenes, emotions, or events both the light and shade are tantamount. Because if only the loud exists, we would have no rest, context, or the ability to think critically as we’re subsumed, and distracted, by the noise. 

We know that the loud and bombastic are rewarded. We know the completely passive would put people to sleep. What I argue for is the spaces in between. What I want are both the loud and the quiet, the light and the shade. Characters that contain both. Books that contain the main characters and secondary characters who are quiet or “normal,” people who don’t strive to break ranks, make millions, burn down and save the world. All they want is to live a good, honest, quiet life. 

Not everyone wants the extremes. Most of us want are treading tsunamis and want the tranquil waters, and there’s nobility in that. Nobility in living a quiet, good life. It can be as full as those sporting fast cars and living in sprawling mansions. 

Because, in reality, both exist. Both are real. And it’s the job of us as readers, consumers, viewers, and humans to navigate the spaces under, above, between, and around the two.