How Not to Write Vignettes

    Over the time that I’ve been posting on this blog, I’ve mostly put up writing which was, if not stupendous, then at least not horrendous. Recently my posts have been mostly those which are given as assignments. Several of the assigned posts could be improved somewhat, but the most poorly-written (in my opinion) is the vignette post.
    The instructions for this post were to write four to six vignettes, not necessarily about real events, as part of our in-class reading of The House On Mango Street. I am stunningly pathetic when it comes to writing about real life, or so I have often thought, so I proceeded to conjure up a character by the name of Madison and write about her instead. I enjoy medieval-ish settings because I read many, many fantasy novels, so that was the environment I devised. The imagined country was called Alnia, and was provided with a cast of a few characters who were not interesting enough to allow their absence of actual character. Don’t believe me? Read this: “[...] Addie said politely, because she's more worried about offending people than anyone should be.” This is all the characterization this character gets, and she’s the protagonist’s sister. Madison herself doesn’t get much to individualize her either, and she’s the first-person narrator. If you’ve read my blog recently, you know that I consider the mark of a good first-person writer to be characterizing narration; reading the vignette post will tell you that I am most definitely not a good first-person writer. I mean, look at this:

The thing about castles is that they do have secret passages, even if there aren't enough of them. Ours has three, and I know exactly where each of them is and where it goes and how to get the bricks out so you can see what's going on. I like all of them, of course, and I use them frequently, but my favourite is the twisty one that goes under the northeast tower and coils like a snake once or twice before slithering off to the stables.

Apart from the use of simile, which is contrived at best, what does this tell you about Madison? She likes secret passages, okay, but you know that because she just told you. What does the style of narration tell you about her? Absolutely nothing. Well, maybe it tells you she’s very precise, but that’s a trait which isn’t at all consistent in the narration. She uses simile, which could be an indication of character, if you were to look at it in the right light. Apart from that, not much. The same notable absence of character is everywhere in the vignettes, and I think I’ve figured out why: all of the vignettes, except the first one, are about other characters.
    The three vignettes following Madison’s complaint about castles have been given the eponymous titles of “Backwards Quellen”, “The Vest of Feliciano Montgard”, and “Jester’s Mule”. Each of these, as you may have guessed, centers around the titular character (the jester, in the case of the last, since the mule is just a mule) and Madison’s experience of them. This might not seem like a bad thing; it’s characterizing to see how a character reacts to others, isn’t it? Well, yes--but only if you know what you’re doing. I clearly do not, because Madison is as flat in these encounters as she is everywhere else. I focused much too much on developing the other characters (and how well I did there is up for debate), which meant that I wasn’t paying too much attention to making the narration interesting or at least connected to the character’s personality. Obviously this is a problem that needs solving if I ever hope to be a successful first-person writer--which I don’t, but for the sake of explanation we’ll pretend I do--so what’s the source of the problem? Once again, it can be traced to Madison’s character: she’s so flat and boring that even I’m not interested in writing her.
    In order to be able to write from a character’s point of view, whether in first or third person, the writer must find the character interesting. For me, this is usually not a problem, because it’s hard for me to even come up with a character who bores me to death. In the vignettes, though, I seem to have managed it. “Castles”, which consists of Madison whining about how much she hates the titular buildings, was the first thing I wrote from her point of view. I disliked the piece from the beginning, both because it could probably be written better and because the character came off as an ungrateful teenager with no other defining character traits:

The one we're in is a horrible thing, musty and full of old tapestry and without enough secret passages, which are the only good reason for living in a castle anyway. But we have to stay because it's ancestral, just like all that furniture in the southwest tower that we're not allowed to sit on, and if we moved out it would go to some cousin in the north. I tell my parents he can have it if he wants it, I don't care, but they never listen.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Why write four vignettes about a character you can’t stand? The short answer: Because I lack foresight. But I suppose you’ll want a longer explanation than that.
    The thing is, I was still hesitant to write about my actual experiences, because I’ve had such failures with that in the past and because I can’t think of interesting memories on demand--I envy those of you who can. I didn’t want to have to come up with another character, because I was afraid that the new character would be just as thoroughly uninteresting as Madison. I suppose I could have used an existing character, but the one I was focused on at the time would have been difficult: I had only written about him third-person from the point of view of others, so I wasn’t far enough inside his head to write in the first person. I have a plethora of other characters at my command, but by the time I realized how hideously dull Madison was, it was too late to try to come up with life histories for them. That takes time, you know, and most of them were already involved in a plot, so I couldn’t just drop them in new settings at their current stage of development and watch what happened. In the end, I ended up writing about Madison because I couldn’t think of anything else to do; in other words, because I lack foresight.
    Fortunately, it’s easy to learn from a mistake as monstrous as this one. Never again will I write first-person from the point of view of a character I don’t like. If I do ever choose to write first-person, I’ll pay a lot more attention to what I’m doing. In the meantime, “Daughter of Alnia” will stand as a testament to the need for proper characterization.