Find the tender spots: Understanding character, with help from my sister
First posted October 5, 2023: reposting now because it's disappeared from the archive
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My sister Anjelica visited me last week, and what a delight it was to have her spend time in my beloved Taos: to see the house I designed and co-built, set in this spectacular landscape and my scrappy landscaping, and to meet my closest friends.
Anjelica’s performance in The Grifters was the inspiration for our approach to creating a character in our book and course Write What You Don't Know. We called the chapter on character "Tender Spots." Remember the scene in which she comes out onto a balcony where the bad guy is waiting? Just before she emerges, she places one hand across the other hand, to conceal the burn where she was brutalized by his minions not long before. She'll feel stronger if he can't see it.
That burn is a tender spot in the flesh. Literally. Most of our tender spots are in the psyche: times when we were wronged or were in the wrong, times when we were hurt or misunderstood, times when we lost something precious. Painful events leave a wound that may scar over but never truly heals. It remains tender to the touch.
Like Anjelica's character in The Grifters, we go to some trouble to cover up our tender spots. We don't want our vulnerabilities on display, even if we're aware that they're known. And we all—kind and cruel, selfish and altruistic, brutal and tender—have our own ways of soothing our tender spots. Who knows what tender spot that Bond villain may be soothing as he strokes his cat?
You bring a character to life on the page not with adjectives but with action. What provokes action? Having a tender spot touched. So when you're writing, find your characters' tender spots, and find way to press on them. You've probably heard someone say, "That really pushed my buttons." Tender spots are the buttons, but with a bit more insight. What's the tenderness? What's its depth, its shape? How raw is it? How did it get there?
The first sentence of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina goes like this: "All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I strongly disagree with him as far as families go (if you've read my memoir Love Child you'll know what I mean), but I think it applies usefully to characters. The well-adjusted, happy person is a tough person to put on the page. They don't want much. They don't need anything. How the hell can you get them to act!
And actually, has that person ever really existed? Buddha, maybe? Not Jesus, who had abandonment issues: "God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" In fact, I'd argue, that cry of distress is the moment in his story that proves he's human.
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The psychologists are booked up everywhere, but we have Allegra with her brilliant insights, like this one to soothe our souls. Cheers to sisters too!