Learning to Write Character . . . from James Bond, Part 1

When I was a teenager, I read all fourteen Ian Fleming books about James Bond, Agent 007. It was the ultimate high-class pulp fiction, and the books sold in the millions. Most people in the Western world (and millions in the non-Western world) have seen a James Bond film or read one of the novels. As I recently went through a book titled The Man Who Saved Britain:  A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond by Simon Winder, a study of the sociological and political forces that created James Bond and made him so popular, I came across some speculation on why Bond is such a memorable character and why he was so popular.

Winder thinks Bond came about in reaction to Britain’s decline in power after World War II. The British won the war but came out broke, exhausted, and weary. The United States replaced England as the world power. England went into political and economic decline. Its empire of colonies evaporated. This nation, once the most powerful in the world, became an economically depressed, run-of-the-mill, minor-league country.

In the midst of this gloom and doom, the character of James Bond appeared. Though Britain had declined as a powerful nation, someone was working behind the scenes to save the world. Secret Agent 007 did not, in the books, attract a lot of attention, but he stopped destructive evil time and time again. He was a deadly fighter, as we would expect, but he was a lot of more. Besides being a hidden champion, he was also a remarkable character. Readers loved him and were intrigued by him. Writers can learn a lot from the character Ian Fleming created. Here is a partial list and some notes on the particular items about Bond that caused readers to be fascinated by him.

James Bond had characteristics with which readers became familiar. Everyone knows his favoritedrink was a martini, stirred, not shaken. Unlike most Brits, he did not drink tea but coffee (he called a cup of tea a “cup of mud”). If you read the novels you know what he likes and dislikes, drinks, eats, smokes, prefers. You get to know his preferences very well and they are consistent throughout the novels.

In all types of writing, characters need to be defined. They should have habits, preferences, and likes that the reader can recognize. They should be presented consistently through a work or a series of works centering on that character. The reader should know what the character will do in a given situation. In reading about the figures you as writers have created, your reader should experience the pleasure of recognition. Recognition always occurred in the James Bond novels.

I have written and published thirty stories about a character named Sossity Chandler, a female rock star. Whiskey is her favorite drink. She loves the Rolling Stones and often does covers of their songs at her concerts. She lives in Michigan and likes it so much she stays there rather than living in New York, LA, or Nashville. Her hits are pop hits, but her greatest love is the blues and she supplements her popular albums with “art” albums where she does blues by Robert Johnson, Son House, and Memphis Minnie. “For Christ’s

sake” is the oath she uses more than any other. In her concerts she does the first thirty minutes with her band, does a solo segment with acoustic guitar, and then brings the band out for the last five or six songs. If you read the stories I have written about her, you will know these things, encounter them consistently through the sequence of stories, and enjoy coming across them when they occur in the text. It is the pleasure of recognition. Writers would do well to follow Fleming in this.

Bond has convictions.  He is convinced that the British are right and the Soviets are wrong. He thinks freedom and self-determination are an inherent right all human beings should know. He thinks people should be free and democracy is superior to totalitarianism.

In our age of ambiguity, in the era of the anti-hero, many writers create characters with questionable motives. They can’t quite be trusted. Their loyalties are uncertain. The reader never knows where the character’s loyalty lies.

A bit of ambiguity can work, but readers like good characters who are truly good, loyal characters who show loyalty, courageous characters who show courage; conversely, they want evil characters that are evil and despicable character who may be despised.  Fleming always supplies these things, and this is what made his novels popular.

We hear a great deal about the chimeric nature of virtue. Good people can be evil; marginalized people can be good. But this kind of postmodern ambiguity—the virtuous swindler who trumps the corrupted, thieving clergyman; the stripper with the heart of gold who exposes the sadomasochistic Mother Superior—have been done to death. Readers still long for truly virtuous characters who oppose truly evil characters.

More to come on Bond as a character and a template.

For a study in character, check out my full-length novel, The Sorceress of the Northern Seas.

If you would like to read a story about Sossity Chandler, The Loss of Good, published in Amarillo Bay is a good place to start; or the story in Out of Time in Intellectual Refuge.

Check out my Writer's Page for other choices.

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More on this topic to come!

Setting: Psychological Environment

Given the preponderance of plot in much writing done today, setting often gets shortchanged. It’s not number one on many people’s list of features in a work of fiction. Plot, of course comes first. Many are aware of the need for character development and for good dialogue, but setting often gets little attention. Yet it is an important element, one that must not be neglected, and one that skillful writers exploit to their advantage.

Setting is the background to a story, where the story takes places. It is both the locale—the place where the action transpires, as in London, Paris, Bakersfield, New York City, New Haven; it is also the location:  a bar, a golf course, a haunted house, a suburban house that is anything but haunted, the countryside. But it is much more. Setting creates effect. It gives the mood and atmosphere to a story.

Mood and atmosphere is vital, and it’s a good idea to determine it early on. One of my all-time favorite passages that sets the mood is the beginning of Edgar Alan Poe’s classic story, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” I will quote the opening section here in full:  During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

Is this going to be a happy story? I don’t think so. Poe sets the mood up right away. It is going to be a gloomy story, an oppressive story, and a story of melancholy. And if you’ve read the tale of a mad brother who buries his sister alive, you know that Poe did what he wanted to do. He produced a narrative that equals his opening sentence, and then some.

Poe gives the story a psychological environment, which is another term literary critics use for setting. I like it. The setting creates this kind of feeling. It puts us in a certain mental and emotional disposition. Skillful writers know how to create this psychological environment and set it in such a way that it contributes to the story.

Another example is one of my very favorite stories, “Janus,” by Ann Beattie. It is the story of a realtor. The story is filled with empty houses, empty rooms, and the quiet of someone preparing a home for viewing by potential purchasers. This sets the mood of distant loneliness in Andrea, the realtor’s, life. She is married but not entirely happy. She had an affair some time ago that faded away. She is still married but seems alienated from her husband. And she is obsessed with a bowl.

The bowl was something her old lover bought for her at an antique sale, and Andrea always uses it when she shows a home. It is one of the “devices” she uses to make a home look more attractive when it is being shown. People sometimes want to buy the bowl. Once or twice she leaves it in a house and panics until she can recover it. Somehow it is symbolic—perhaps the empty bowl represents her empty life. It sits in the vacant, unlived-in houses that are the setting of much of the story.

Janus is the Roman god of the New Year, and he has two faces, one looking back and one looking forward. But he is also the god of doorways, of entrances, of passages. Going through doors is important in a home tour. Bettie uses setting—in this case, empty houses, numerous rooms, doors to pass through, quiet, vacancy—to set the psychological atmosphere of this story about a woman who lives in an emptiness she does not understand.

These are two examples of skillful use of setting. Many writers today seem to think that setting is a distraction, that we can simply say a person is in a house, on a spaceship, or in an airplane and this will suffice. Failing to exploit the element of setting, however—failing to create mood and atmosphere, to establish a psychological environment—will impoverish a story and cause it to tend toward superficiality. Set the mood. Create the atmosphere. This will take the story into full expressiveness.