To my mind, Gurov, the adulterer in Anton Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog", is as vivid, rich and sustaining as F Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby or Theodore Dreiser's Hurstwood, or even Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.īut a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction - from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little. Very few brushstrokes are needed to get a portrait walking and surely, as a corollary, the reader can get as much from small, short-lived, even rather flat characters as from large, "round", towering heroes and heroines. He has been 'got in' and can get to work at once."įord is right. Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: "He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway." Ford comments: "that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. My father, however, is in his element, irrepressible as ever, and has on his head that grey velvet trilby from Prague I remember so well from my childhood." The unpractised novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile: it is getting these people out of the aspic of arrest and mobilised in a scene that is hard.īut how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running - what he calls "getting a character in". She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. You know the style: "My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photographs.
There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character.
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