THE MISSING PIECE OF YOUR STORY WORLD
by Donald Maass
What makes the world of your story feel real? The way it looks? Sounds? Smells? Its society, rules, history, traditions, transportation, rites and rituals, celebrations? Its broad avenues and dark corners? Its landscape, commerce, power games, means of oppression, system of justice? Its dialect, dumplings, or dresses?
Worldbuilding is not just for spec fiction writers. All stories are set in some world or other and that’s just as true if the story world is our own. Every corner of our real world is a microcosm, an ecosystem, and a place that’s just a little bit different than others.
Just walk into a coffee shop anywhere and ask for a “regular” coffee. Do you drink “soda” or “pop”? Submarine, hoagie, hero, Italian, grinder, wedge or spuckie? (That’s in Boston, y’all.) Slight variations in ordinary things keep a story world from feeling homogenous, like we could be anywhere as is so often the case in manuscripts.
A story world is not necessarily a place, either. Families, professions, countries, regions, eras and more are all story worlds as well. Each world deserves to be as detailed and distinct as the worlds which each of us actually live in. Wherever we are, though, there’s one element of story worlds which I notice is more underutilized than any other: people.
Now, hold on, you may be thinking. There are plenty of people in my novel. Plus, I’ve done my character-building work. I’ve got backstories, buttons, beliefs, flaws, arcs, Meyers-Briggs personality profiles, you name it. How can my novel possibly be deficient in characters?
I have no doubt that you’ve done the work. Your major characters are complete, conflicted and as real as people can be, of course they are. You’ve got them down. However, the world of your story is made up not just of the landscape, weather and the many other factors we focus on in worldbuilding and it’s not populated with just your primary characters, either.
As much as anything, your story world is a world of people. Lots of people. What are they like?
Deep Character Dives
National Book Award-winner James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023), is a novel set in the 1930’s in a part of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, called Chicken Hill. The novel is frame-worked by the discovery in 1972 of a human skeleton in a well. How did it get there, and why is there a mezuzah pendant on a chain also in the well? McBride’s novel looks backward to answer that question and along the way brings vividly alive a forgotten world populated by Blacks and Jewish immigrants.
The main trusts of the story concern the efforts of the Chicken Hill synagogue to obtain water for its mikvah, its ritual bath, as well as a fatal attack on the overly-generous Jewish woman who operates Chicken Hill’s never profitable Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and the resulting unjust incarceration of a deaf Black boy in the state’s horrendous institution for the handicapped, Pennhurst State School and Hospital.
McBride’s novel has scores of characters: theatre owner Moshe Ludlow, his wife Chona, his wealthy brother Isaac, Doc Roberts, Addie Timblin, her husband Nate, Rev. Ed (“Snooks”) Spriggs, a baker of awful-tasting challah bread named Malachi, the deaf boy Dodo, the beautiful local gossip monger Paper, and other characters with names like Rusty, Big Soap, Fatty, Bernice, the Skrupskelis twins (orthopedic shoe makers), Monkey Pants, Dirt, Miggy, Son of Man, and many more.
I’m leaving out quite a few, but McBride lavishes attention on all of his characters, even when their role in the story is passing and his plot is not wholly, sometimes only slightly, dependent on them. Take for example the beautiful local gossip monger, Paper, for whom every Saturday a crowd gathers at the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store to hear the news. McBride’s description of Paper occupies a paragraph that runs two-and-a-half pages long in the hardcover edition.
Quoting the passage in full would exceed fair use, but in part it reads:
White men found her irresistible, which is why she held no lucrative maid’s job. “I’m retired from days work,” she told friends with a laugh. “Too much trouble. The men grope and the women mope.” White housewives from town who wanted their husbands to climb the greasy pole of opportunity in Pottstown’s thriving banking and manufacturing worlds made a steady trek to Paper’s house bearing their husband’s laundry, for she washed with such thoroughness and ironed with such professional skill that even Willard Millstone Potts, the town’s chief banker, grandson of Mr. John Potts himself, the old fart who lay in the graveyard gathering worms, thank God—parachuted over to hell even if the bridge was out, the old black folks prayed—sent his shirts to her house to have them cleaned and pressed. Paper, as the old folks said, had turn—talent. Women found her funny and interesting, for unlike most men, she was curious about their opinions, was yet to be married, and swore she had no plans to. “I can do better without a man,” she declared, which made her high cotton and one up on the Chicken Hill’s most respected stateswoman, Addie…A colored person couldn’t survive in the white man’s world being ignorant. They had to know the news. That’s why Paper was so important. She was a Pottstown special.
Later in the novel, Paper has a part to play in the liberation of the boy Dodo from the horrible institution Pennhurst, but frankly that role could have been taken by a number of other characters. Is Paper really necessary to the novel? No, but you can’t imagine the novel without her. Without her the world of McBride’s story would be less, and that’s my point.
What, really, is Paper’s function in the novel? It is to round out the world of Chicken Hill; to show that disenfranchised Blacks had their own systems; that Black women of the time were, despite their limited opportunities, not all one thing; that someone clever always knows how to get along and even—later in the story—devise ways to get around, subvert, and defeat systems of oppression controlled by white people.
Who is the main character of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store? There isn’t one. The protagonist is all the characters. Paper is as much a part of Chicken Hill as the mud roads, sewer gutters, water pump, theatres, church and synagogue. McBride knows that his story world is, more than anything, people and he stints on them not at all.
Edgar Award-winning author Dennis Lehane uses his characters in a similar way in his novel The Drop (2009, also a 2014 film starring James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy). The Drop is a dark crime tale set in working-class Boston and the world of bars used as “money drops”, collection and distribution points for underworld revenues. It’s a violent, high-body count novel in which no one—spoiler—is completely good, not even the novel’s main character, quiet bartender Bob Saginowski, who as the novel opens rescues a puppy which has been beaten and thrown into a back-alley trash can. The plot concerns Bob, bar owner Cousin Marv (Bob’s actual cousin), Chechen mobsters, a fragile young woman named Nadia, a psycho named Eric Reid who claims to own the dog, and various poorly-planned rip-off schemes which are destined to end in blood.
In the background is the long-ago disappearance of a local guy named Richie (“Glory Days”) Whelan who left Cousin Marv’s bar one night and was never seen again. Another ongoing thread is the pending closure of Bob’s church, St. Dom’s, which he has attended his whole life but where he does not take communion. Also attending St. Dom’s is Boston PD Detective Evandro Torres, who later investigates various homicides.
Det. Torres does not, in the novel, solve any crimes. You could argue that he’s not needed in the novel at all, and yet Lehane not only includes him but takes some page time to tell us about Torres:
When Evandro Torres was five years old, he got stuck on the Ferris Wheel at Paragon Park in Nantasket Beach. His parents had let him go on the ride alone. To this day he couldn’t understand the fuck they’d been thinking or fully comprehend that the park personnel had let a five-year-old sit alone in a seat that went a hundred feet in the air. But back then, shit, child safety wasn’t a big concern to most people; you asked your old man for a seat belt while he was barreling along 95 with a Schlitz tall between his legs, he handed you his tie, told you to figure it out.
So there was little Evandro, sitting at the meridian of the wheel’s rotation when it jammed, sitting under a white sun that beat on his face and head like a bee swarm, and if he looked to his left he could see the park and then the rest of Hull and Weymouth beyond. He could even make out parts of Quincy. To his right though was ocean—ocean and more ocean and then the Harbor Island followed by the Boston skyline. And he realized he was seeing things as God saw things.
It chilled him to realize how small and breakable everything was—every building, every person…
…he was weeping…because he understood that life was finite.
Like I say, Det. Torres solves no crimes, so what actually is his purpose in the novel? Why do we need that bit of back story, which is in no way plot-essential? Torres is in the story to balance the “bad” guys and the “good” guys because one of the points of the novel is that everyone, from bartender to detective, is a sinner.
That’s the truth of working-class Boston and its bars. Everyone is the same. Torres is having an affair with a fellow, female detective and this work is cursory, he’s no hero. (He does, though, get a zinger line in the last chapter, on the day that St. Dom’s holds its last service, when he says to unassuming Bob, “No one ever sees you coming, do they?”)
Lehane, like McBride, knows that every character is an opportunity, and that no characters should be wasted. Each author takes deep dives with characters who don’t necessarily need them—and so builds and makes richer the story world.
Writing Deep Dives
Are there secondary, or even walk-on, characters in your novel who could help you paint a richer, fuller picture of your story world? That’s a rhetorical question. Sure, there are. Pick one, and ask…
What makes this character unique in the story world?
What position does this character hold, or community function does this character serve?
What does everyone say about this character?
What does nobody know about this character?
How is this character admirable to others, or anathema to them?
What does this character do in a way that’s odd or habitual?
What does this character think about…well, just about anything or anyone?
What shaped this character?
What is this character’s secret dream?
What is this character’s inescapable reality?
How does this character get along?
What’s the one thing this character must do in the story?
What’s the reason to do that which we wouldn’t guess?
Write out your deep character dive. Take your time. Take ours. When you do, your story world will be complete in ways that description cannot capture nor physical things convey. A story world is its people, and of those you have plenty.
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON WRITER UNBOXED - JANUARY 3, 2024