[QUOTE=knight_tour;4812144]I was flipping through a Donald Maass book today (Writing the Breakout Novel) and noticed that he often repeats the necessity of having larger-than-life characters. It made me worry, since that doesn't really appeal to me much. I more enjoy having normal, realistic people being thrust into extraordinary circumstances and having to sink or swim.[/QUOTE]
If they swim under circumstances where you'd expect them to drown, they are larger than life. Maass, and all the other writers who give this advice, doesn't mean that we all need to write about kings and supermen and vampires. Nor do fictional protagonists need to be physically larger than life; they come in all sizes, obviously. But are they really ordinary? I would argue that while their experiences and their “station” in life may be ordinary, they themselves are not.
They way I see it, as novelists we make a deal with our readers. Give us 8 or 10 hours of your life, we tell them, and we'll give you an entertaining (and possibly but not necessarily enlightening) experience. We'll take you someplace you've never been before, geographically or emotionally. If we then go on to present a novel about a person whose problems are ordinary, and whose responses to those problems are ordinary; a character who neither feels nor inspires passion, we have cheated on our side of the deal and can expect the reader to cheat on his.
Most people live fairly muted lives, constricted by custom, necessity, practicality, and manners. But as readers we enjoy characters who go outside the boundaries we accept in our own lives.
Take TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Atticus Finch is a small-town lawyer, nothing special on the face of it. But he has become for generations of readers, the epitome of integrity and moral courage, because when faced with a terrible dilemma, he makes choices not many would have the courage to make. What sort of story would it have been had he chosen, as most men in his situation would have, not to represent the accused rapist because it was a no-win situation?
Or take Updike’s Rabbit novels. Updike designed Rabbit as an “everyman” sort of character. He hates his job selling used cars in his father in law’s auto dealership, is married but restless, disappointed in his life…but what Rabbit has that elevates him, in my eyes anyway, is the purest, most intense lustfulness of any character I’ve ever met. What he desires, he desires intensely; and I think that’s true of virtually every fictional hero, however modest or exalted his circumstances.
I
We want the person who actually says what we wish we had the nerve to say, who goes farther than any sensible person would go, who wants more, loves more intensely, hates more intensely…someone fully engaged. That's what's meant by larger than life.
