How to map a story: creating distance between writer and character.

Mary Ann threw rocks at the pigeons who sought respite on the mossy terrain of the forgotten graveyard: the wings were a fair win, and chest, the prized bulls-eye. She liked to catch them over the pond, so if they were still alive, the water would drown them out: and she could have an excuse to swim. Her dad did not like her dirtying or wetting her clothes, but he wanted supper and for supper she would sink. (An excerpt from a short story I am writing, 2024).

Above: the music I was playing while writing this article to help me understand Mary Ann; a piece by Aram Khachaturian that balancing many different energies: joy and sadness, fast and slow. It feels like curiosity.

Mary Ann wants to swim: to plunge into another depth. She sits between trees and the edge of the water, and hunts with the sky, vacillating between the elements. She doesn’t side with a specific element, rather she negotiates and trades, tricks and she cheats. A bird for a dive: a supper for a sink. It’s a childish, nostalgic catch-phrase that shows her playing with the rhythms of a youthful time, where morality is not clear cut: where loneliness has set unusual parameters of what is normal. Mary Ann uses the sinking feathers, drowning wings, as an excuse for her sub-terrestrial escape: her entrance into the water. Yet, it is on solid earth that her life-matters occur: she will dine with her father in the kitchen: she sits, waiting most of her days, back rested against a tombstone. There is an order to earth-life. She sees herself sitting between it all, confused and feels like, in some ways, she must choose an element to be loyal to — and she has already chosen to leave the ground: will it be water or sky?

There is something that haunts me about Mary Ann: her questionable morals brings me to my own early youth, when there was little I knew and believed was real — which made my actions feel obscured from consequence. Her character has sombre and sinister hues: I fear what she may do — what she could do if she shared a space with me (who or what would be threatened). Yet, there is innocence and earnest inquiry, as she is only a child, and seeks to act upon what she thinks. She lacks a parental figure, and finds one instead in the parts of the world much bigger than her, than any person: the biosphere. She riddles her environment with fun as she bequests her chores to games, envisioning the world as a magical theatre of interplay between the elements and life-forms.

Mary Ann has a story: she makes me wonder about the to and fro of her tributary streams. Is she a younger or imagined self of Dana Maden, a character of my in-progress novella?

I moulded Mary Ann from a place of plot. In Press (what I will abbreviate my in-progress novella to), I’ve been trying to form a story from the characters first. I believe this is a common notion of literary fiction — the characters are primary, before plot. However, I think there is a degree to which prioritising plot — placing a character as your pawn — enables the writer to create a productive distance from the character’s pursuits. In my endeavours for character-first story, I over-sympathized with my characters, wanting to shield them from harm — which shielded them from the story.

By contrast, when I was drafting Mary Ann, I had just woken up from a short night of sleep, wanting to find something in the morning: something between the cracks of sun in my curtains, and the ‘Cemetary Lane’ I crossed the day before. That is to say, I was not filled with expectation or pretence — I did not think that Mary Ann must be crafted to fill pages of stories. I thought of my Armenian last name, which means bell-ringer and sexton, and thought of the daughters who may have come before me, spending their time overlooking churchyards. I have been thinking about bodies that have been stolen from graves to use for study in hospitals. These ideas exist far beyond Mary Ann. They exist in textbooks, cinema, and my own consciousness: my writing life.

So, now, I am trying to map the characters from Press: to find their tributary streams, their mountains and valleys. Thinking about their plot — their map — the world much bigger than them, that they are merely the size of ants makes them less real. I map the way they think, the process of their perception, as Mary Ann understands peace treaties between the elements; it’s this creative-thinking, beyond the writer’s — imagining the order of operations for the character — that lends to playful writing and momentum. What patterns are they seeing, what lines are they drawing? When I see their whole mind, and body on a mapped geography, I do not feel guilty hurting them: they can be neither complete hero nor villain. They are subjects. If I were to meet my characters in each of their own moments, as I have been trying to do, I would need to process their emotions with them, and that is far too much for a state of planning — that is for the level of the sentence.

Character Cartography: Tributary Streams