We’ve all heard the phrase “a bit part” in reference to acting: a small, fairly unimportant, role. “Bit Part” was a phrase developed in the early 1900s when theatre was in the very beginning of a decline to cinema, and actors were looking for whatever roles were available on stage or celluloid. I’ve heard the term applied (quite negatively) to literature when readers are discussing characters who (a) don’t have a very big part in a novel, or (b) who seem to be stock characters even if they are a huge part of the novel.
A good example of “bit” or “stock” characters in literature are the females in Charles Dickens novels; Dickens had three (or at most four) kinds of women that he wrote: The elderly lady (who could be kind or a crone), The sweet young lady (vapid, and usually the heroine or main romantic female), and The bad woman (young or old, weak or strong, she was the same woman – some generic details thrown over the “bad” core.)
This concept is beautifully examined in the above comic by Kate Beaton (she makes absolutely wonderful comics).
Beaton does a good (if somewhat sarcastic) job of getting to the heart of the problem with character – too often the characters we read are the fantasies, rather than the creations, of their authors. Main characters, romantic interests, one-night-stand bit parts, best friends, loving mothers, kind fathers – and all of them perfect – it’s expected that the worlds we encounter in fiction will be idealized, but it is shocking how often we encounter characters who are idealized to the point of being absolute: the good guys are absolutely good, the bad guys are absolutely bad, the characters are absolutely in love or absolutely hate each other, but there is rarely any gray area to those fictional characters we no so well (and how could we not know them well? There is nothing to them to know.)
So how do you fix (or at least improve) on the problem of flat, static, stock characters, and what on earth does this have to do with Bits?
Bits, in your toolbox, are the drilling parts of drills. I’m well aware that most college English students don’t have a hell of a lot of experience with heavy machine tools, so I’m going to expand a bit here: A drill or drill press is the mechanism that drives a bit – a bit is the part of the whole that actually bores into wood, plaster or metal. There are MANY, many kinds of bits out in the whole wide world (I was forced to learn this while attempting to help my husband find bits and tools when he uses his mill), but there is almost always just ONE kind of bit for the specific job you’re working on. You wouldn’t use a glass bit to drill into wood, for example, and using a carbide steel bit to bore into drywall is some serious overkill. So good craftsmen have their bits organized by job, lined up neatly in a box or a bin, or separated out by material or length or width so that they can always find the right bit for the project they’re working on.
I suggest that, when you still don’t know exactly what you’re doing with your characters, you create bit characters who are not bit parts. Do you have a kind of woman who you see as a heroine? Build her up before you put her in a story and keep her in your bit character box. Do you foresee the need for a maiden aunt in your fiction? Create one – perhaps you can turn her into a widowed policeman in some other piece. Do think you’ll need some child characters at some point? Make a Bobby and a Susie and put them on the shelf, so that they’ll be there when you need them.
I’m aware that this is somewhat unusual (perhaps some people will call it controversial, or even bad) advice. A lot of writers think that you should avoid pulling characters off of a shelf and re-using them, and I agree that you shouldn’t re-use your bit characters without first polishing them and prepping them for your newest story. But….
New writers have a problem when they write characters: they have no idea what characters do. Newbies might have a plot, a setting, and a story all laid out with one character to push it along – but when they sit down to write they suddenly find that they don’t know how to make that one good character interact with anyone else on the page, or that they don’t know who to put on the pages around their good character.
This is why I think you should have a handy supply of trusted, worn, occasionally spit-shined characters available for ready use: as a means of testing your shiny, new, hand-crafted character. Have your bit characters interact with your main character (write this out if you want to, talk it out if you’re not afraid of looking crazy in public.) How does your main character react? How do your bit characters respond to your main character’s traits? Is he likeable? Is she smart? Is he helpful? Is she bitchy?
But spend some time making minor characters before you dig into writing a main character. Figure out what you would name a lunch lady, and how a lunch lady would talk to a lawyer. Decide what you would do if you needed to have a fire fighter in one of your stories and think about how he would make breakfast on his days off.
The brilliant thing about building up a nice cabinet of bit characters is that, in the long run, it means that you are always collecting information for your character development – the woman in line in front of you at Starbucks imparts some of her sass to your cowgirls, while the butcher at the grocery store lends some surliness to your drunks. If you’re always adding to your supply of bit characters, if you’re always giving them more depth and detail then you are always improving your ability to write all characters. Eventually you will want all of your characters to be believable – you’ll need everyone on your page to be ready to walk into the real world – but that will never happen unless you start to put together the blank outline of a character “the virgin,” “the whore,” “the sheep herder,” or “the warrior” and start filling in those blanks with the depth of the real people all around you.
So work on some bit players, give them a little bit of polish, and look at the characters you love in your books while comparing them to the characters you see around you every day. I’ll be back with you next week with a more general discussion about why character and characterization matter, and how to achieve the latter, next week.
Until then, Cheers,
- Alli
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