The doctor at the Army base had a young corporal as his assistant to keep track of the paperwork. The young man was curious about the doctor’s affairs. He was always asking questions and one morning said, “In civilian life were many of your cases accidents?”

“I don’t know,” the doctor replied.

“How come you don’t know?” the corporal asked.

“Soldier,” the doctor said, “I was an obstetrician.”

An Army doctor informed his young assistant that he did not know whether his cases in civilian life had been accidents because he had been an obstetrician.

One version’s funny. The other isn’t.

Why? The information is the same. The only real difference is in form. The first example is a story. The second is a summary.

The story, which a graduate student named Adina Gewirtz used to illustrate a University of Maryland paper on journalistic storytelling, derives its impact from the way it sets up the punchline, which is a joke’s equivalent of the dramatic story’s climax.

Like almost all stories, this little anecdote begins with exposition – it introduces the characters and offers some explanatory background. It includes dialogue, a storytelling technique that’s quite distinct from the journalistic quotation. And it lasts long enough to provide a basis for the sudden twist into humor.

Therein lies a great lesson. Bright or moving human-interest items, the “brites” that we’re eager to get on our section fronts, usually work best when they assume a natural story form. They often fall flat when told as the abstract summary, which is the form characteristic of newswriting.

They also work best when they’re short, which gives them the shape and feel of a standup comic’s joke or one of Garrison Keillor’s poignant tales.

All of which suggests several things that can help us do a better job of finding and crafting brites:

• First, we must recognize stories with potential as brites early, before they’re written. If reporters and editors agree that a set of facts justifies a brite, then the reporter can adapt it to a natural story form, rather than a news treatment.


• Second, we need to keep brites short so that they will have maximum impact and a good chance of fitting onto a crowded page.


• Finally, line editors need to sell brites at news meetings and work closely with news editors to make sure they get appropriate play and treatment.

© Jack Hart, 1999

We’ve heard it to the point of numbness: “Get people into your stories. Tell it in human terms.”

Who’s to argue? Yup, human beings are more interesting than paper creeping through a bureaucracy. Yup, real human experiences bring abstractions to life. Yup, readers are endlessly fascinated with the peccadilloes of their fellows.

So we all agree. So what? We still don’t have many people in our stories.

All too often, all we have are ghosts.

We may think of them as people, but they’re actually thin, transparent images that shimmer faintly in the air. These insubstantial bits of plasma barely obscure the usual view of abstract issues and bureaucratic machinery. They are, to resurrect a quaint 19th-century term, mere shades, ghostly shadows that reveal only the faintest outline of a complete human being.

Pick almost any story from the paper. Chances are it’s between 10 and 20 inches long. Most are. Chances are it refers to one or more human beings. Most do. Chances are it contains a half-dozen or so quotations. That’s the formula.

But those few quotes are all the humanity you’re likely to find. Disembodied voices. A few formal pronouncements on the subject of the piece.

Let’s grab a couple of examples from whatever happens to be handy. Here, for example, is a little zoner feature on a family that visited the Soviet Union. It’s 16 inches long. It explains how mother, father and daughter helped operate a Christian camp. “Most of these kids were from registered Baptist churches,” says the daughter. “They were thrilled to have Americans stay with them,” says the mother. The father says nothing, although the story provides his age and an outline of his professional history.

Here’s a sports advance, a little feature on two skaters scheduled to perform with the Oregon Symphony. We quote the skaters six times in the 18-inch story. “I support myself by waitressing,” says the female half of the pair. “They said the tempo would be slightly different,” says the male half. We also know that the woman is 31 and the man is 25. That’s about it. The description is so minimal that we can’t tell whether the writer actually met the two athletes or merely talked to them on the telephone.

So where are the people in these stories?

Nothing’s actually wrong with either piece, of course. They both take a standard approach to the short newspaper feature. Neither pretends to be a full-fledged profile. Neither suggests that the personality of the newsmakers is the main point. They make good examples because they are typical, not because they are different. They’re the kind of thing any of us who produce newspaper copy might write.

And most of us have.

But stop for a minute. Think about the people you know. Think, especially, about the ones you know really well. Examine the bits and pieces that make up the images of them you carry around in your mind. How much would a few comments on some public issue reveal about who they really are? If you called them on the telephone and asked them six questions – and allowed six 25-word answers – how much of the real human being could you shape in your imagination on the basis of that information alone? How much character could you get into a newspaper story?

Contrast the ghosts that populate most of our stories with the flesh-and-blood character a Virginian-Pilot staff writer created on paper when he profiled the $21.4 million winner of the Virginia Lottery. The writer, Greg Raver-Lampman, engages his readers by introducing them to a 49-year-old registered nurse named Charlotte Jones. Then Raver-Lampman, one of Jon Franklin’s former students, gives us the kind of close-up detail that creates true character.

Charlotte L. Jones, we are told, is single, is always on the lookout for a bargain and grabs every freebie she can find. She lives with her sister’s family in a two-bedroom house filled with give-away souvenir mugs, visors and baskets. She drives a 14-year-old VW Rabbit. She’s an inveterate coupon-clipper who, as the writer puts it, lugs her coupons in an accordion file, “craftily cross-indexed.”

Her Rabbit carries a bumper sticker that reads “Happiness is yelling bingo,” and Charlotte plays her favorite game regularly at the Improved Order of Redmen, Tony Tank Tribe No. 149. She has a blue plastic bingo bag, containing magnetic bingo wands, bingo daubers and good-luck charms, including a stuffed Garfield cat. She even remembers her first bingo game, in grade school, and the prize she won in it: “a metal wastebasket with a pedal that opened the lid.”

Charlotte likes to drive to a Delaware truck stop to buy scratch-off lottery tickets, and she always figured that if she won she could take a trip to Alaska. She plays pinball at another truck stop, where she and a pal often cruise through the parking lot so they can see the fancy 18-wheelers. At her sister’s house, the family likes to eat pizza, hot dogs and one of her sister’s specialties, bread topped with cheese and bacon bits and cooked in the toaster oven.

Get the picture?

Human beings are the sum of their values, beliefs, behaviors and possessions. They’re distinctive because they look a certain way, talk a certain way and walk a certain way. We know them only when we start to tap the larger context that defines them. A straight-ahead comment, quoted in absolutely perfect English and devoid of any personal touches, tells us almost nothing at all.

Of course, not every story is a personality profile, and not every personality is relevant to the news. The typical 16-inch story doesn’t allow much space for character development, in any event, and a long digression to describe one of the sources would seem wildly out of place.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t do a better job of bringing people to life in our stories, regardless of length or subject matter. Often just a passing reference will create an image in the reader’s mind, helping replace a distant quote factory with a real character.

Probably the most effective quick hits on character deal with how a person looks. Appearance is the gateway to character, and you can surmise whole lives from a quick glance at someone passing on a busy street. Novelists often describe their main characters in excruciating physical detail. Magazine profile writers dwell on certain aspects of appearance as a tool for developing their explanations of what makes interesting personalities tick.

But newspaper writers seem uncomfortable with physical descriptions, which seldom show up in even long stories. Not even Greg Raver-Lampman actually described Charlotte Jones. We never learned whether she was tall or short, fat or thin. We never saw what she wore, or the expression that crossed her face when she learned she was suddenly one of the world’s richest women.

Of course, most major newspaper stories appear with photos of the principals. So some reporters have argued that a text description isn’t necessary. But think about your own reading. It’s the text description that creates the image in your mind, and you often bounce back and forth between a text description and a photo as a way of comparing the two.

Besides, a text description can zero in on distinctive aspects of appearance in ways that a photo can’t. Note how complete a portrait Randy Gragg manages in these few words:

“Grenon is a huge – yet hugely gentle – man who looks like a cross between a biker and a nose tackle for the Chicago Bears.

“On one wrist, he wears a giant silver bracelet, held in place by an industrial-strength clasp from a hardware store. On one finger rests a ring the size of a small dinner plate. A tiny earring provides counterpoint to the trademark leather jacket and grease-stained jeans.”

A wire-service description of Dr. Oliver Sacks, the absent-minded social misfit portrayed in “Awakenings,” was even more economical. The reporter, noting that Sacks had been laid off at his old hospital, followed the bumbling physician as he “rumbled into his old clinic … long, blue shirttails hanging untucked,” wearing “giant sandals” and a “black tie still loosened to the chest and dangling far to one side.”

When combined with a quote, a quick bit of physical description helps create a mental image of the speaker, which makes the spoken words far more meaningful. A victim of sex abuse is “a chubby girl in gray athletic sweats” who lights a cigarette as she describes how it happened. A woman who speaks to students about black pride is “tall, proud, sensuous” as she dominates the stage. And a tough cop is a “5-foot-9, 200-pound bearded undercover narcotics officer who races cars to relax.”

If we all went naked and lived in caves, what we said and how we looked would be about the only hints to our character. But we live in one of the world’s greatest consumer societies. So what we own sometimes says as much – or more – about us.

Tom Wolfe has made a career out of carefully observing the things we wear, drive and fill our houses with. It’s his way of explaining our social structure. We use things, he says, as symbols of where and how we fit into society, our place in the pecking order. He calls such things “status indicators,” and he wryly refers to the social structure they help create as the “statusphere.”

For group animals like us, the statusphere is endlessly fascinating. At one time, fitting into the group meant the difference between surviving or dropping out of the gene pool. So we’re extremely sensitive to the most subtle status indicators. Two American high school students might look identical to a Russian tourist. But a fellow high schooler could instantly classify one as a neo-hippie and the other as a Nordstrom’s preppie. That classification, in turn, would lead the savvy observer to all sorts of conclusions about values, attitudes and behavior.

That’s why status indicators are keys to character. They reveal how we see ourselves and the image we try to project. So they tap our deeper sense of self.

When Michelle Trappen portrayed a lonely rancher who found a wife through a group called Singles in Agriculture, she brought Drake Dixon to life with a barrage of status indicators. Dixon, who was married in his Levi’s, survived for years with a nightly dinner of a hamburger patty, instant hashed potatoes and green beans. His best friend was his black Labrador, Cole. When his new wife framed the wedding certificate, she backed it with an old issue of Cattleman’s Monthly.

Other stories enrich characters with passing reference to key status indicators. A Jan Filips story that mentioned a student in a Catholic school noted his salt-and-pepper corduroy pants and navy blue sweater. A Dee Lane story on Dominion Capital mentioned that one executive in the company owned a Street of Dreams home in West Linn and that his six cars occupied a garage bigger than some of the company’s Northeast Portland houses. And a wire service story on James Baker observed that just as the conservative, take-no-chances secretary of state “keeps his suit jacket buttoned over his tailored shirts with the JAB III monogram, so he plows through foreign-affairs homework each night, determined never to be caught unprepared.”

However you do it, characterization lets a bit of humanity shine through. That’s what getting people into stories is really all about.

Peter Carlin’s magazine profile of Jim Bosley, for example, started right out with Bosley the human being. Carlin began by portraying Bosley in his office, pacing back and forth, showing obvious discomfort and protesting that he didn’t want to be in the newspaper. “I don’t know why I said I’d do this,” he fretted. But do it he did, revealing a wealth of intimate information that brought him to life on the page.

That was a full-fledged profile, of course, and Carlin had room to stretch. But humanity can come through in daily news stories, too. John Snell caught the emotions of a witness in the Dayton Leroy Rogers trial – a woman Rogers stabbed 17 years earlier – when he described her as gasping for breath and choking back tears. Some members of the jury, Snell revealed, responded by crying, too. What the witness did, apparently, made as much an impression as what she said.

And, in fact, what we do when we speak does color what we say. A quotation is much richer if it carries some context, some hint of the human actions that accompanied the speech. Carlin quoted Bosley’s claim that “the diet is working, and I’m salt-free.” Then, Carlin revealed, Bosley smiled and raised his eyebrows. “Well, I cheat a little,” he confessed.

Just a word or three allowing readers to see the quotation spoken or hear the quality of a human voice can make all the difference. Kristi Turnquist wrote about a former Columbia River Gorge “board-head,” banished to the workaday world, watching wind-surfers skim across the water. “‘This is what a classic gorge day is all about,’ she said, her voice warm and dreamy.”

Holley Gilbert described a drug addict taking a stand during a counseling session. “‘I’m tired of being the one who’s always wrong,’ she said as she crossed her arms.”

Don Hamilton captured the nonverbal side of a campaign exchange between Barbara Bush and Mark Hatfield. The gestures and expressions changed the entire meaning of the conversation:

“Mark is not George’s friend because of his voting record in the Senate,” she said, turning slowly to Hatfield in mock disapproval. Hatfield winced and squirmed in his seat, grinning broadly as the first lady sternly stared at him.

And notice how a completely unexpected side of Katherine Hepburn comes through in this passage, which appeared in a wire service profile:

“It was a short break but long enough for noticing two small paintings on a far wall. One, in Impressionist style, is of a woman with a parasol on a beach. The other is a brightly colored Matisse-like bowl of fruit. Asked about them, she says in a voice much quieter and meeker than usual. ‘I did those.’ She points to a larger, more folksy canvas of gulls on a rock. ‘I did that one, too.'”

A speaker’s tone isn’t the only thing that reveals character. The vocabulary, the syntax, the person’s own approach to grammar and usage … they all help produce a package that reflects each speaker’s unique character.

Portland Trail Blazer Jerome Kersey let down his guard for a moment and revealed worlds about his attitude when he abruptly dismissed the possibility that he might play for his country’s Olympic basketball team. “Eighty-two games a year are enough,” he said. “If I want gold, I’ll buy it.”

And a Soviet visitor put our standards of hyper-hygiene in perspective when she was told that many American women wash their hair every day. “Every day?” she said. “Every day?”

Teen-age talk often lays character bare because it’s so distinctive. The vocabulary is always changing, too, which makes it an especially colorful brightener to any story that carries it in its authentic form.

Dana Tims caught that inimitable adolescent flavor when he quoted a matter-of-fact 12-year-old boy who, after a night lost in the woods, greeted his distraught mother with “Yo, Mom. What did you think I was, dead or something?”

Kristi Turnquist tapped the same rich vein of character when she passed along a 15-year-old girl’s enthusiastic reaction to the dress she was scheduled to wear in a benefit fashion show. “This is fresh,” the girl said, fingering the beaded fabric.

Another 15-year-old betrayed the same brand of enthusiasm as he stood on the main drag of Seaside, Ore., and talked about the beach town’s perennial spring-break appeal. “It’s a party, dude,” he told Don Hamilton. “Nothing but a party.”

Most of us recognize such quotes for the character-revealing gems that they are. We grab them and use them, especially when we’re working on a feature. But we’re far less likely to pass along other aspects of the spoken word. As a result, we often walk away from our sources knowing far more about them than our readers ever do.

Distinctive language patterns that depart from standard English are a prime source of that knowledge. But we seldom let readers hear exactly the same words and phrases that we hear in the field. We drain the color from such comments out of fear that using the untarnished original will somehow demean our sources. We clean out the little grammatical glitches, sanitizing all speech so that it blends into one vast, pale middle-American voice.

Not so with John Snell’s story on Westley Allan Dodd’s sentencing. At one point Snell quoted Ray Graves, the man who nabbed Dodd outside a Camas movie theater. “The man don’t deserve to live,” Graves said, trembling. “Not someone who does that to babies. There’s nothing more precious than them little guys.”

Cleaning up that quote would have drained its emotional content, which is the source of its impact. Ditto with this comment from an Oregon State Prison inmate, interviewed by Naomi Kaufman: “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, be away from my family,” he said. “And I ain’t going to do nothing to get took away from them again, once I get out of here.”

English fractured to that degree doesn’t make much sense in a short, inverted pyramid story that’s primarily concerned with news, not character. But it can be essential to a story that’s primarily concerned with a person. That’s true even if the story is short. Stu Tomlinson produced a 10-inch concert advance on a John Lee Hooker performance and included this comment from the legendary bluesman as he talked about his own brand of music: “Since I was a kid it’s been a healing force for me. Since I was 12 years old. The blues done followed me. And I’ll never get out alive.”

“The blues done followed me.” What a wonderful way to put it. The quote carries the same earthy, honest emotion that gives so much character to Hooker’s music.

When character counts, quotes should reveal character.

Carol McCabe, an ASNE national writing award winner from the Providence Journal-Bulletin, owes much of her success to the way she brings her characters to life, and her technique often includes nonstandard English. She makes no apologies for it.

“I feel very strongly that it is condescending to make everyone sound as if they’re speaking Standard English when they are not,” she says. “I think their speech is just as good as any I could make up for them. I’m not trying to make it ungrammatical or make them sound stupid. I’m trying to let the poetry of the life they’ve led, the experiences they’ve had, come out through the rhythms of the speech.

“I think the American language is pure poetry.”

© Jack Hart, 1998

Think of the great characters from fiction. Gustave Flaubert’s romantic and unfocused Emma Bovary. Mark Twain’s spunky Huck Finn. Larry McMurtry’s lusty Gus McCrae. Margaret Mitchell’s willful Scarlett O’Hara.

Each is memorable because each is a whole person, carefully crafted with a volume full of specific actions, revealing words and individual attributes. The cliche is that good characters come to life on the page. The truth is that they often seem more human than the living characters we actually encounter in our daily lives.

The novel rises or falls on the strength of its characters. A work of fiction that has a lasting effect on us, that somehow changes the way we see the world, does so through the people who live on its pages. A trashy piece of science fiction, long on plot and peopled with cardboard characters, may pass an afternoon on the beach. But it won’t stay in memory for so much as a month.

Even the great popular writers make their millions, at least in part, because they go beyond plot to craft strong characters. Ian Fleming’s James Bond lives in a predictable, fully formed world that includes a running flirtation with Miss Moneypenny, a distinctive brand of custom cigarettes and a recurring faculty for smart-ass comments, perfectly timed. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe never strays from his part as the brilliant, detached aesthetic. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee is forever hard-boiled, with a soft center.

Fiction writers have been struggling to find techniques for creating character at least since Homer sent Odysseus on his way. And novelists have been refining the shape of the modern character since Daniel Defoe stranded Robinson Crusoe on an unnamed island.

Newspaper writers who hope to capture believable characters in their own work will listen carefully to what their fiction-writing elders have to say. Not because journalists should make up characters, of course. But because the detail that makes a character live and breathe can just as easily be the product of good reporting as of imagination.

Fortunately, some fiction writers have given a good deal of thought to their craft. They’ve created a body of literature on technique, and a large part of that deals with techniques for building character. Among the best are Robie Macauley and George Lanning’s “Technique in Fiction,” John Gardner’s “The Art of Fiction” and Janet Burroway’s “Writing Fiction.” What follows is a summary of what they have to say about the fine art of characterization.

The first point virtually all of them make is that the most fully crafted characters are round, rather than flat. Janet Burroway draws the distinction this way: “A flat character is one who has only one distinctive characteristic, exists only to exhibit that characteristic, and is incapable of varying from that characteristic. A round character is many faceted and is capable of change.”

Macauley and Lanning quote E.M. Forster to the effect that flat characters are “immediately recognizable because they have habitual forms of expression or habitual responses to any situation.” They cite examples such as Sam Spade, Yossarian or Nurse Ratchitt.

Not that flat characters can’t be useful. Every character who appears in a novel can’t be fully formed. Many simply exist to advance the plot at some point, or to play off the more central – and complete – characters.

The logical conclusion for nonfiction writers is that reporting on characters will be more or less complete depending on why they appear in a story.

If we simply quote government officials to establish authority, for example, we need only the flattest of characters. The nature of their jobs and their official opinions are about all that count. If we create scenes with quick descriptions of several characters, each will be almost as flat. We might sketch some rough outlines by noting ages, manner of dress, obvious details of appearance and so on. But that’s about all that’s necessary.

Only if we’re planning a much more complete profile might we venture into full-scale characterization comparable to that found in the best fiction. Even then, the natural space limits of the newspaper will limit our effort to create round characters who surprise us by doing the unexpected or who go through dramatic changes in the course of a story.

But when we do venture into more complete characterization, we will no doubt do so with techniques pioneered by the novelists.

The first choice we must make is whether our attempt at characterization will be direct or indirect. Direct characterization is simple commentary by the writer, in the manner of Henry James or other 19th-century authors who were a heavy presence in their novels. Janet Burroway, for example, quoted James’ description of Mrs. Touchett in “The Portrait of a Lady.”

“She had her own way of doing things,” James wrote, and “rarely succeeded in giving an impression of softness.”

Newspaper writers who describe their subjects as timid or brash, forceful or passive, are pursuing the same kind of direct characterization. They also are writing in a style that largely disappeared from the novel decades ago, and that is particularly inappropriate to the just-the-facts-ma’am style of modern nonfiction.

Instead, the best modern fiction and nonfiction writers let a character’s visible persona speak for itself. They carefully choose a few details that hint at the underlying character. Through the choice of detail, they lead readers to certain inevitable conclusions about the character they are describing. They create character, in other words, through careful reporting. Their method of characterization, unlike that of Henry James and other 19th-century novelists, is largely indirect.

Fiction writers who practice indirect characterization do so via the details they report in several basic categories.

Physical Appearance:

Janet Burroway notes that “it is appearance that prompts our first reaction to people, and everything they wear and own bodies forth some aspect of their inner selves.” Macauley and Lanning make the additional point that the best descriptions rest on only a few carefully chosen details and that “they are made on the move.” The descriptive detail, in other words, emerges in the course of narrative. Writers show us characters as they move through scenes, rather than stepping out of the action and holding them up for a static description.

In “Treasure Island,” for example, Robert Louis Stevenson describes one of his characters “as he came plodding up to the inn door, his sea-chest following him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands fagged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, vivid white.”

Movements, Expressions and Mannerisms:

Most of us have some sense that a full-fledged narrative should show the characters in action. Beginning writers often go wrong, as Macauley and Lanning point out, when they include insignificant actions just to break up background or dialogue. “Many cigarettes have been lighted,” they write, “many noses rubbed, many throats cleared in that endeavor.”

The point, as always, is that every word must do some work, and every detail must advance the action line and develop character. We never include detail for its own sake.

In that vein, one of the main fictional purposes in descriptions of expressions and mannerisms is that they can reveal dimensions of character that often are hidden by words. Macauley and Lanning note that “one way to use mannerisms effectively is by showing some action, gesture, stance, bodily attitude, or change of aspect that betrays hidden emotion in a character.”

And, they note in an aside that might have been aimed directly at traditional newspaper style, “Characters who possess voices only may strike the reader as talking heads.”

Speech:

Burroway notes that the purpose of dialogue in fiction “is never merely to convey information. Dialogue may do that, but it must also simultaneously characterize, advance the action or develop the conflict….”

Macauley and Lanning put it this way: “… the writer should constantly keep in mind the thought that speech is not only concerned with the exchange of information, but also with the characters’ attitudes, origins, education, sensitivity and intelligence….”

That opinion, which seems to be universal among commentators on fiction technique, departs strongly from traditional newspaper practice. Newspaper stories often are filled with information quotes, which do nothing more than pass along background that the writer could have presented directly. Moreover, newspaper reporters and editors often shy away from quoting distinctive speech patterns directly. We clean up quotes to eliminate slang, dialect and other forms of nonstandard English. Our characters become even more flat as a result of the practice.

Thought:

Janet Burroway quotes Aristotle, who said that thought was “the process by which a person works backward in his mind from his goal to determine what action he can take toward that goal at a given moment.”

Thought, in other words, is the link between our desires and our behavior. As such, it’s essential to explaining both.

But how to do it? Writers who choose the indirect method of characterization most acceptable to modern audiences have to be extremely creative about getting inside the heads of their characters. They may, for example, suggest hidden thoughts by showing a conflict between what a character says and what a character does.

The most radical fiction technique for probing the minds of characters is undoubtedly the stream-of-consciousness style of interior monologue, which James Joyce took to its logical extreme in “Ulysses.”

Nonfiction writers have generally been even more reluctant to describe the thoughts of their characters explicitly. Gay Talese and the other new journalists caused an uproar when they introduced the literary device of internal dialogue in the late ’60s. They dared to tell us what characters were thinking as they moved through various scenes. Talese remembers being confronted by one huffy critic who demanded to know how he could presume to describe what one of his characters was thinking as he drove across the Brooklyn Bridge.

“I asked him,” replied Talese.

Physical Surroundings:

“In the past,” wrote Macauley and Lanning, “many writers put as much emphasis on surroundings as they did on physical appearance.”

The idea is that we reveal ourselves by what we own. Dumas said that to make a drama, a man needed only a passion and four walls. And, he might have added, some furniture to fill the space between those walls, clothes to cloak the passion and maybe a BMW to drive the passion to its destiny.

The most avant-garde of fiction writers have moved beyond the last century’s obsession with things as a door to character. The minimalists unfold their small plots on largely bare stages. They reject a preoccupation with physical surroundings as an excess of materialism and a cheap way of revealing human truths.

But the great popular novelists still write books rich in physical setting. Characters drive distinctive brands of cars, wear clothes that say something about their values and reveal their place in the social structure via their houses, furniture and jewelry.

Of all the nonfiction writers, Tom Wolfe has probably made the biggest fuss about possessions as a key to character. Like Madonna, he insists that we live in a material world. He capitalizes on that fact with a special expertise in using things to reveal values. He has unquestionably demonstrated that an astute student of popular culture can describe what we own as a way of discovering what we are.

He also has demonstrated that successful nonfiction often flows from careful study of techniques developed in fiction. Wolfe makes no bones about the influence of fiction on his own work. He was a newspaper journalist who studied the 19th-century novel of manners and discovered that some keys to culture lie hidden in the patterns formed by what we own, the things we value and the ways we behave.

And he had no compunction whatsoever about stealing techniques from those who perfected them.

We all can learn from that.

© Jack Hart, 1998