19.28: A Close Reading on Character: Internal vs External Identity
Today, we’re focusing on C.L. Clark’s “The Cook,” as we explore external and internal expression. We chose this story because it’s a remarkably physical and touchable story with myriad sensory details. While the audience gets very little information about what Clark’s characters are thinking, you can still understand their internal landscapes by what they seee and notice. How do these external indicators help us understand the internal worlds of the characters?
We mention two infographics during the episode– “Intersections of Self (Trauma Points)” and “Axes of Power.” These are available on Patreon (they’re posted publicly, so anyone can view them!) Feel free to use them in your own writing, and let us know if you find them helpful!
Thing of the Week: “Bodies” (on Netflix)
Homework: Pick a major character in your story and write two short summaries of the character arc, one using your original motivation and goal, and a second with a different motivation but the same goal.
Liner Notes:
Sandra Tayler’s new book, Structuring Life To Support Creativity. Preorder your copy today at sandratayler.com!
And help fund Mary Robinette Kowal’s Silent Spaces, a collection of short stories on Kickstarter here:
(Or go to kickstarter.com and type in “Silent Spaces”)
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were DongWon Song and Erin Roberts. Our guest was Arkady Martine. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key points: Warriors! Half-unbuttoned blouse. Monstrous. Trauma points, something that happened in the character’s past. Safety, connection, empowerment. Ability, role, relationship, status. Crying over roasted potatoes. Leave space for the reader. The smell of yeast. Carmelized onions. Common ground.
[Season 19, Episode 28]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Erin] As you may or may not know, I started my journey to being one of the hosts on Writing Excuses by going on the Writing Excuses cruise. While, to be honest, I can’t promise that for you, I can promise that if you go on the cruise this year, you’ll have a lot of fun. The entire cast of Writing Excuses will be there. We’ll be sailing from Los Angeles on the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th to 27th, and we’re going to stop in three places we’ve never been to before, Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise has seminars, lectures, exercises, group sessions, group dinners, partying. It’s just everything you want just all in one big package. Relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
[Season 19, Episode 28]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Character: Internal vs External Identity.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Howard] And I’m Howard. Both internally and externally. I insist.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] It’s nice when those matchup. I think one of the interesting things about this topic is that often those are two things that are in tension with each other. Right? We’re going to mostly focus on The Cook today. Again, one of C. L. Clark’s stories. But we might bounce around among all three stories a little bit here. What I love about The Cook as a story is how external everything is in the story. It’s an incredibly sensory story. C. L. Clark is describing smells and sensations and sounds and action and very little what anybody is thinking. We get some sense of desire, but that desire and that affection is expressed through contact, through touch, through action throughout the story. For a story that has chosen to move all of the battles offscreen, and only focus on the action inside this tavern, it is still a remarkably physical and touchable and sensory story. What do you all think about how character is communicated through all of those external indicators and how do we understand the interiority of these people?
[Howard] The first external indicator we get for the identity of our main character is the sentence that I leaned into last week. “I’m standing in the common room, and the other warriors straddle chairs.” I, other warriors. This character’s a warrior. We don’t know what warrior means, but because we have been mimetically linked to Pathfinder, D&D, fantasy role-playing game, whatever, we have a picture in our head that is good enough to tell the rest of the story. We’re talking about somebody who fights for a living. Maybe a soldier of fortune, maybe a mercenary, maybe a… To use D&D terminology, a murder hobo.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But that is our external. The internal… I think the internal we get in the first line, which is “The first time I see her, it’s just a glimpse.” Well, externally, you’re a warrior. Internally, you’re paying attention to who’s working in the kitchen.
[Erin] Yeah. I think the things that you see really tell a lot about the character. So I’m looking a bit further down, there’s a line, “Her blouse is half-unbuttoned, leading my eyes down the V between her breasts.” Now, if you see a half-unbuttoned blouse, there are a lot of things you could think about it. You could think that should be fully buttoned.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Like, how dare you show so much skin? Or, your eyes can be led down. Or, you can be wondering about the price of fabric. All of those things will tell you something very different about the character whose thinking them, about the character who’s making the observation. So, even though we don’t get the interiority, looking at what the character focuses on and how they interpret it tells us a lot about what’s going on in the inside.
[Howard] My last name is Tayler. I look at the half-unbuttoned blouse and think, “Ah. There’s a free button on the floor somewhere.”
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Even the next line, “The sheen of sweat, like condensation, makes me thirsty.” Again, we’re getting interior reaction through exterior reaction. Right? Because it’s that sensory thing of now she’s thirsty, she’s thinking about this. We completely understand where her brain’s at. We know what is happening here very, very clearly in a way that is very compelling and moving as well.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the other things that I just want to flip back up to the top, this line, “My stomach growls, a monstrous growl,” [yeah] “I should be slain.” It’s like that line is actually carrying so much about the way this character is thinking about themselves. Like, yes, they’re in this band of warriors, but they’re aware of what they’re about to do. It’s not just that they’re hungry, but the word monstrous in this context is carrying a lot of weight of establishing this character’s not entirely comfortable with what they’re about to have to do.
[Howard] I think… And, again, this is the principle you carry about 80 percent of what you’re getting out of a story into the story with you. I hear that monstrous growl, I should be slain, and I am imagining that party, having conversations around other dinners, where somebody burps, and somebody else says, “Oh, my gosh, it’s a bug blatter, we gotta go down into your belly and kill that,” and they joke about those kinds of noises. This is not the first time we made the monster metaphor in order to relieve tension.
[Mary Robinette] So, I’m going to give you another tool, which is something called trauma points. Now previously, I’d talked about, in the first episode, the ability, role, relationship, and status. I promise, I’m going to dig into those a little bit more. But I also want you to be thinking about something called trauma points. These are things that have happened in a character’s past. You don’t necessarily have to know what they are. But there’s basically three things, safety, connection, and empowerment. When you look at this character, in the way this character is reacting to her, to the cook, we see a lot of stuff about connection, and also, the character has been sitting… We never know her name, by the way. The character has been sitting by herself. So… But she’s in this band of people, and she… The first time she sees her… So we see a lot of things where she’s looking for that connection. Which, then ties in with the ability, role, relationship, and status that I referenced in our previous episode. So, relationship is all about your loyalty to others. Sometimes your loyalty to yourself, your loyalty to others. One of the things that you’ll see shift over the course of this is where her loyalty lies, and what is important to her. At the beginning, we are very focused on we see the woman, but there’s also the other warriors. By the time we get to the end, we are much… We’re all… Like, we are not thinking about the other people, in part because a lot of the time… A lot of them are dead. But that loyalty has fully shifted at that point. You can tell, by the time you get to the end of this, based on her word choice and her sentence structure, that this character is not going to go back out adventuring again. This character has come home.
[DongWon] She’s done with the war by that point. Right? You mentioned the trauma points is such an interesting aspect as well, because it just feels like such a big hook for the character as well. Only a few paragraphs into the story, again, not a very long story, but she goes out to war and comes back. Then there’s this beautiful paragraph here describing the meal that she’s served on their return. “But there’s butter and rosemary and warm carrots that crunch when I bite them and small roasted potatoes, skin crisp, but flesh so soft that I have to swallow tears.” So, like that moment where she begins to cry, you sort of feel the weight and the grief that war has brought to her as she’s going out, fought this battle, and come back. Then, that’s followed immediately with, “My friends hoot and cheer and pound the tables with their blessedly finally empty fists.” That they’re not carrying weapons anymore.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] From that monstrous line in the opening to this, we’re getting a sense of the weight of trauma that fighting is putting on this person, as she has to bear all this violence, all of this weight, over the course of this…
[Erin] That paragraph also reminds me of something we talked about in other episodes, about leaving space for the reader. [Yeah] Because it’s that flesh sos of that dot dot dot I have to swallow tears. It’s really up to you to dec… Like, what… There’s a moment there… It’s like watching… Have you ever watched someone react to something, and you know they’re having a moment?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] You don’t know exactly what it is, but you can see that the way that it’s affecting them, but not exactly what the image is that they have in their head. I actually think that that dot dot dot there is more powerful than if we tried… If C. L. Clark actually told us exactly what is there.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because, in some ways, I don’t even think the character herself can express it. I don’t think the character can express it, and therefore, it can’t be expressed on the page. Because we are within that headspace.
[DongWon] It’s funny. In my head, this is a grisly, gory story. I feel that, like the visceral horror of war within this story. But there’s nothing… There’s very little described in it. Even the wound at the end is very obliquely referred to. Right? We don’t get any direct description. For a story that’s so like bodies and flesh and peoples relations and hunger, for all of that, the author really pulls back on portraying the true gore aspects of it. But, boy, do I feel it in a line like this.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It’s, again, that negative space and allowing the reader to put themselves into the character and supply some of their own emotion to the moment. Like, what would I feel like if I had returned from something so horrific that I can’t actually even think about it. I can only think about the food.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] Before Mary Robinette keeps her promise about explaining this toolbox, we’re going to have to go on break. When we come back, I have a question.
[Mary Robinette] There’s this show on Netflix that I want you to watch, and I want to tell you as little as possible, because the book is also a spoiler. I know, usually we tell you all about why you should watch this thing. In this case, the show is called Bodies. It has strong procedural murder mystery vibes, and also this whole other layer going on, that I can’t tell you about. If you trust me, just watch Bodies. Go in knowing as little about it as you possibly can. Don’t watch the trailer. Just queue it up and watch it. That’s Bodies on Netflix.
[Mary Robinette] When you write a novel, there are often things you have to leave out. Scenes that predate the main book, situations that just didn’t fit in, character moments that hit the cutting room floor. I’ve taken nine stories like that from the Lady Astronaut series and put them together into a short story collection called Silent Spaces: Tales from the Lady Astronauts. It’s on Kickstarter right now. It includes stories about the arrival of the meteor in 1952, the race to the moon and Mars, and my Hugo award winning novelette, The Lady Astronaut of Mars. And there’s one story, Silent Spaces, that is 100 percent new for this book. The Kickstarter funded in eight hours, so this is not so much a please help me make this, as a please help me make this even cooler. Because the stretch goals bring the Lady Astronaut series off the page and into the real world with tons of memorabilia, like patches, drink where, teletype reproductions, recipe cards, spacesuits, and more. I hope you’ll be a part of its journey and help out Silent Spaces on Kickstarter.
[Howard] Mary Robinette, this toolbox… Name the four things again?
[Mary Robinette] Ability, role, relationship, and status.
[Howard] Okay. Those are nice pointers that draw a little valley and mountain graph for what a character might look like in the absolute abstract. Can those points be, like, shifted around as a way to visualize the character arc? Or something like that?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So what you’re looking at in with these is that each of them represents an aspect of self. Our self identity is sacred to us. We will defend it. We will hold onto it. We don’t want it to change. So, what you’re looking at is what the character values about themself the most. They may value their abilities most, or they may value their responsibilities most. The person who is, like, “Yeah, I always get all of my homework checked in. I’ve designed a really good lesson plan.” With loyalties, the relationship, the… I am a good daughter, I am a good wife. I’m a good friend. Then, with status, people look up to me. People fear me. I have… This gives me the power to make these changes. But, within those, the character may have things that they’re afraid of. So you can also have these other aspects, which is I don’t have the ability to do this. I’m incapable of doing this. So, you can think of them as each of them as being kind of a hole that the character’s either trying to fill or run away from. They’re taking strength from, or they’re fleeing. It depends kind of on a given moment and how they self define about it. Particularly if it’s linked to a trauma event. So, if they… If ability is linked to empowerment, it’s a trauma point, then they’re going to be afraid that they don’t have that ability to deal with things. So it’s going to be something they’re more likely to run from. Not always, there’s different ways of responding to trauma than running. Sometimes, you’ll double down. But what this tells you is that you can look at a character’s starting place and a lot of the conflicts in the character, their internal identity, happen when you put tension on those, when you pit two aspects of self against each other. What you’re doing is you’re having the character question their own values, and then realign them over the course of the story. So a character may move from I really value my skill as a warrior, I’m really good at it, to ending up with what I value most is my loyalty to my friends. You see this a lot with things where it’s like, I’m going to become the most powerful person in the world. Oh, no, it’s actually my family that’s the most important thing to me. It’s… It is… It’s that realignment of values. That’s where this character tension can come from. Because the character is all the time, at the beginning, trying to hold onto this idea of I’m about power. Then they are making a series of choices that they are increasingly aware are the wrong choice. Which we particularly see when we get into Your Eyes, My Beacon. The character makes choices that they know are the wrong choice.
[Howard] Let me try and reflect this back onto The Cook. This warrior is probably placing pretty high on the I have ability. I am willing to go out and swing a sword at things. There is a measure of personal empowerment there. Relationship is the camaraderie of the other warriors, not a single interpersonal thing. By the end of the story, ability appears to have perhaps let this warrior down a bit. They’ve suffered a lot, at the hands of the enemy. They’re accepting a much closer relationship with just one person, rather than the camaraderie of soldiers.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You can also… Like, you can take that and you could shift the focus of it by… And how it executes on the page… By saying that the warrior focuses on their role. It’s like I have a job and I go and I do it, and I do it well. But it’s just a job. Or, looking at the loyalties and thinking my… The camaraderie to my friends versus the camaraderie… Yeah, you can push all of those around.
[Erin] Yeah. I’ve been thinking about, as you’ve been talking about these four different things, I’ve been thinking about them in the way you be a cook. Because this is called The Cook, and…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] My mind is focused. But I… It makes me think of the difference between thinking, like, I’m really great at mixing flavors together. I’m really great at picking the right spices. To me, that’s an ability thing. Versus saying, like, I am a chef. That’s who I am, that’s how people identify me, that’s my role in…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Erin] I am… That’s my role. Relationship, I feed people. Like, there are people who would say, like… They would never call themselves a chef, but they’d be like, I feed my family. I feed people. I make sure that they are really enjoying themselves. Then, you might have somebody who’s like, I am a James Beard award winning, like, super chef. Like, I am… My status is that people will come to me from near and far for my cooking. These are all cooks. But these are all cooks that view themselves differently and have a different emphasis on whether they care about the ability, the role, the relationship, or the status. Does that make sense?
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] I want to be best friends with all of those people.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Who will feed you in different ways.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly how that works.
[DongWon] There’s something so interesting happening with the status part of this in this story, because you get the sense that as the soldiers, they should have status, because they have martial power. Right? They have the threat of violence when they come in the room, and you feel that in the description as they’re like pinching the butts of, like, these people. You get a sense of, like, these warriors have taken over this space in a really raucous way that is very not necessarily respectful of the people who were there. Right? [Garbled]
[Mary Robinette] A right to grasp.
[DongWon] Exactly. There’s not a lot of kindness being shown here, and a lot of power being shown here. But, by the middle of the story, the power is completely inverted, because it is the cook who is providing them the only thing they care about now, which is food. Which are these potatoes that are so tender that there crying over them. Right? It’s that inversion of power and that re-conception of what power is and what status is over the course of the story. I think is so much of what drives it home. It matters that she’s a cook, of all things. Right?
[Mary Robinette] There’s this line that I love in that second encounter. “She’s cleaned, but it still smells like yeast, that fermenting precursor to everything we missed for months.”
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] There’s so much… There’s like a double duty there. It’s like not just the food, but also the civilization and also this particular woman. Like, the comfort. Like, there’s so many things happening in that one sentence.
[DongWon] Well, then… The inversion for the third time, she comes back, which is, “She unwraps me like a parcel she has waited too long for.” Which is a very similar thing in terms of the longing for, wanting to encounter this. But then, “The smell assaults us both, and the battlefield stitching is an insult to precision.” Right? She has come back as this creature of war that has suffered at this in a way that is so in contrast to all of the smells you’ve seen in this story up until this point. Right? Again, this is why I am like, “Wow, this story is really gory.” Even though there’s nothing here other than the smell was an assault. But I smell that, I know what [garbled]
[Howard] My brain says, wait. That is a wound on the torso, and it smells that bad. I’m sorry, it’s gone septic, you’re going to die, because we can’t amputate it.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Howard] But a good poultice…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] A really good magical poultice.
[Mary Robinette] That’s why we got a cook.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Something else I really love in this story which maybe is related to what we’re talking about, maybe not. But I think, something… There’s a line in here about the color of skin. “Has anyone ever told you that you’ve skin the color of caramelized onions?” Which I love on two levels. One, that’s just a really great line from a cook that is like extra rizzy.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] But also, it’s something that, like, we’re often told sort of not to describe skin color really of, like, brown skinned people using something that can be consumed. Because, it’s like you’re viewing the person as if you want to consume them. But, here, because it’s been done by a character, it’s not being done by the author, it comes through the view of the cook who is the person who understands consumption, what it is to consume something, what it is to prepare something better than anyone, it is this beautiful moment that makes the main character fall in love.
[DongWon] Well, she’s picked something so delicious. Right?
[Erin] Yeah.
[DongWon] She’s picked something that is prized by cooks and takes care and effort and all of these things. So, there’s a ton being communicated in this moment that is caramelized onions [garbled]
[Howard] She’s picked something where… When the onions have been caramelized perfectly, that’s the color. Oh. And that’s the color on me.
[Mary Robinette] But it’s not just that. It’s not just that. It is also the nature of what causes caramelization to happen.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Onions gone soft, brown, and sweet, almost burnt. Like, this is someone who’s come back from war and almost burnt. The other thing, the line right after the caramelized onions line. We’ve talked at some point about finding common ground. “She brushes my scarred hand with burn-callused fingertips.” These are both people who have been scarred by their jobs. That is commonality that they have between them. That’s a really… Like, again, when you’re looking at trying to express character and between these two people, trying to find the places where their experiences overlap, even if it’s from different reasons, they both know what it is to be injured. That’s… It’s a lovely thing, and it’s also, I suspect, means that they both know what it’s like to be injured emotionally in addition to physically, as well.
[DongWon] Yeah. There’s so many beautiful parallels in this story. On that note, I have a little bit of homework for you. Which is to pick a major character in your story, and write two short summaries of the character arc. One using your original motivation and goal, and the second but with a different motivation, but the same goal.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.
[Erin] Are you struggling to find time and energy for creative work or writing? Sandra Tayler has a new book that might help. Structuring Life to Support Creativity is a resource book for creative people who want to make more space in the life that they have for the creative work they want to do. This book is drawn from 30 years experience in juggling creative work along with everything else life throws at us. Inside the book, you can find such topics as managing your mental load, arranging your physical space, how to come back to your creative work after life goes sideways, the problem of motivation, and more. The whole book is written with a focus on adapting for how your brain works instead of trying to change you to fit expectations. The book is not prescriptive. Instead, it provides concepts and tools so you can find the ones that work for you. This makes the book autism, ADHD, and neurodivergent friendly friendly. Preorder your copy today at sandratayler.com. Just make sure that Tayler has an e r in the Tayler.