Observing Main Characters
Action and Metaphor
A common trope for many short stories is for the main character to observe the antagonist and provide the reader with a view of this character as evidence to support the feelings of the main observing character. At its best, Flash often finds a way to eschew feelings to allow the reader to infer what the characters are feeling, making the story more intimate overall. When we make inferences, we engage more with the story, and the characters, through this engagement, become more alive.
So, the Flash writer might want to combine this trope with the use of brevity found in Flash to create a new version of this story. Abigail Williams, in “Don’t mistake me for your crabapple,” uses a second-person point of view to allow the main character to not only observe but also, in some fashion, talk back to the antagonist about the main character’s observations and feelings. There is an intimacy in triplicate here as the 2nd person point of view narrator speaks to the antagonist while also speaking to the reader, and this quickly could have gone off the rails and become a sentimental and abstract mess, but Williams knows how to reveal her characters through observing specific actions and filtering in sensory images that create unique and specific characters who are talking past each other, occupying the same space, but not quite on the same page! A fleeting profile, sure, but one of a specific and unique relationship.
You are in the garden, kneeling among scarlet lupin spears. Savage, you stab the soil with your fork, weed out green tips with dark delight. I find myself lacing the edges of the lawn, shifting from one damp paver to the next. I am ornamental. Like your crabapple which refuses to blossom, I am in the wrong place.
We are quickly orientated to the setting, that the antagonist is kneeling, stabbing savagely, weeding with “dark delight.” The husband is created quickly through his actions, through the wife’s perspective, who feels “ornamental” and I love this twist toward the metaphorical, comparing herself to a plant that “refuses to blossom” that she and the plant “are in the wrong place.” Notice that we get her feelings through a direct and concrete comparision with a plant, that then tries to give us her unsayable feelings, that she is feeling something, but it is specific to her and their relationship and not something generic!
‘Sam’s doing well at school,’ I offer. I hand these pearls, these claims to you, and I feel like my daughter presenting pieces of gravel in the pink crook of her palm, watching me intensely to check I understand their value. You hold the words for long enough to please me, before tipping them out of your ears. It is dangerous to show interest in the grandchildren. I might ask you for something. You fend me off with a long pole.
I love the use of dialogue here. It’s nothing special, and yet it is because it’s her way of trying to break him out of his lack of acknowledgment of her existence, her attempt at intimacy, of swaying him toward a different action than farming his garden. Sometimes it’s not what is said but that something is said at all. A character breaking a silence is often being vulnerable is acting to engage another character, and that is usually more interesting than a character allowing the silence to continue! As Charles Baxter says, “A drama requires an opening of the wound.” The writer creates the static flash by telling us exactly how the character feels about some summarized or habitual event or ritual. Stories are about breaking rituals, about seeing a character try to get out of trouble or get into trouble, to witness their choices, their actions, and the fallout from these choices. Dialogue, when used sparingly in flash, adds a lot of weight and can create action through an interruption of silence. It can make demands upon the characters, a pressure that will reveal themselves to the reader and sometimes to themselves.
There’s a bit of backfill here, too, letting us know that there is a daughter who used to hunger for attention too, that the narrator knows that this hunger for attention can be annoying, maybe, but she can’t help herself from risking her husband’s annoyance. He has learned to ignore her, and that attention could be dangerous for him. Indicating a kind of emotional danger for characters is a great way to hook the reader further into the drama of the story!
Another line of dialogue he ignores, sends the narrator into her own mind, makes her susceptible to memory.
I remember when you planted the lupins. And the hellebores on the shady side. The dahlias and the bee balm. You carved a new shape for the lawn, and you make dad crop it to lush stubs: US marine-green. Your garden is curated. You weigh it daily, your roving eye bleak and calculating.
Here we get more evidence, from her perspective, to show or reveal this husband that in his hands, the garden not grows but “is curated,” and though this is unsaid, we can feel her hunger to be cared for so gently, so obsessively. Passion, care, tenderness are all good things, but turn rotten when applied to something other than our narrator’s heart.
One of the things a flash writer can do to build tension and velocity is to put two counter-pointed characters into a setting together and see what happens. These characters do not need to be exact opposites. As Douglas Glover says, “Well, they are not “opposites’ in the sense of antonyms. They are opposite as in opposing actions or intentions; they interfere with each other.”
The husband’s character is created, revealed through her filtered perspective, through her observations in this small moment that stands in for all of these moments in their life together.
When they are tiny, you are tender. You patrol the borders with your slug scissors. You blanket buds when frost threatens like a mother wrapping winter’s child in a warm towel. But they are like me. Their petals will brown. Their bloom will fade. They will need you too much.
Here, Williams pauses the narrative and allows her thoughts to consider the future, a last attempt to provide evidence for what will become of them if he continues to ignore her, if he can’t love her the way he does his plants. The metaphor works because the comparison breaks down, and they become one. She hides her feelings in the talk of what the plant needs. She attempts the unsayable through the medium of plants, which he adores now. We can infer her last hope here to bring them closer together.
Always the shadow of your fork stripes our shoulders.
But is that hope naïve? If even when she gets close to him, it is only in the garden, only as an observer, always shadowed by his escape into the garden? We don’t know everything about these characters, but we know some small but not insignificant things, and through the evidence provided by the narrator, we get to decide if she will ever break through.
Prompt: Create a scene where the main character observes another character important to them. Let the main character risk being vulnerable by speaking to the antagonist and trying to get the antagonist to share in their past, a memory, or something they both can relate to. Find the metaphor that shows what the antagonist cares about and would rather be vulnerable with than the main character. Give th main character several chances to break through the silence, the unsayable, can they connect? If not, how will you show what their future will be like?
Some Flash Favorites:
Sweater Weather by Mario Aliberto III
Rhinoceroses by Kim Magowan
Crossroads Diner Blues, 1937 by Myna Chang
Shawl with Bees and Sage by Claudia Monpere
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Hi Tommy! Love this, looking forward to your class next month! Also, though, I read Williams's story differently. Though I'm not sure it matters, I thought this was a daughter interacting with a mother, who loved her child (her plants) when young, but now sees them as a burden if they grow too much. Just the mention of the protagonist's daughter brings up defensive comments about how another grandparent found watching her own to be too much. So the speaker is conflating how her mother's severe control of the growth of plants in her meticulous garden, and her own feeling that her mother stifles her own growth (protagonist's) and doesn't want to hear about the granddaughter because something might be required of her. (I am assuming the antagonist is a because the speaker mentions that "dad" mowed the space for the garden that the antagonist has planted the garden). In any case, your discussion of how the speaker's observation conveys emotion is compelling.