February 1, 2006
By
Wil Shane Lyon College News Bureau
Photo by Eric Stewart
When writing quality fiction, it’s imperative to let the characters tell the story, and for the writer to remain invisible to the reader, an acclaimed novelist and short story writer said Tuesday, Jan. 31.
Ron Tanner, Lyon College’s 2006 Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing, presented the Fiction Matters craft lecture, “Creating Characters Who Count,” in Nucor Auditorium on the college campus.
Lyon’s writer-in-residence, Andrea Hollander Budy, spoke of the endowment she helped establish to create the Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing program. The endowment brings those writers to Lyon every other even year. In 2004, the first fellow was British poet Peter Abbs, a professor of creative writing in the Graduate Research Centre in the Humanities at the University of Sussex, England. He’s lectured on poetics and given poetry readings and workshops in Britain, Australia, India and the United States, and is the author of eight volumes of poetry.
Budy then introduced Tanner, the program’s second Visiting Fellow.
Skilled writers, who “occupy a god-like seat in his fictional world,” should do more than just stay out of the way of their characters, they must create characters that a reader will care about, Tanner told the audience.
“We need characters as complex and as flawed as ourselves,” he said. “The central characters of most successful American fiction are underdogs. He wants something that he can’t have, or can’t get easily. Our society loves an underdog.”
Compelling fictional characters almost always have four traits in common, including competency, caring, vulnerability and being self-directed, Tanner said. He used the character of Huck Finn from Mark Twain’s masterpiece novel, and Sethe, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as examples of how to incorporate these traits into living, breathing people who step off the page and into our minds, and into our hearts
Both Huck Finn and Sethe are competent in the things they do, Tanner said. With Huck, he’s an expert liar, among other things, when necessity mandates it. And Morrison shows Sethe early on in her story preparing a batch of biscuits with the skill of a craftsman.
“We enjoy watching people who do things well,” Tanner said.
Huck displays a caring attitude in his dedication to helping the slave Jim escape to freedom, and Sethe’s love for her children is her overriding motivation throughout her life, and the story.
Both characters display vulnerability through their flaws, and both are self-directed in their efforts to attain that which they are after. With Huck, it’s helping Jim reach freedom With Sethe, it’s her urgent desire to protect her children from the tyranny of slavery.
“Good characters must feel pressure from within and from without,” Tanner said. “The struggle of these characters is encouraging to us because they mirror our own struggles.” They must be at least as good as we are, and no less troubled.”
Tanner’s many awards and honors for his fiction include a James Michener Fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the New Letters Fiction Prize, the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Award for Short Fiction, and the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for his collection of stories, A Bed of Nails, and the prestigious Pushcart Prize.
Tanner’s work has also been anthologized in Best of the West, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Twenty Under Thirty: Early Work of America's Influential Writers.
A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tanner holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Wisconsin and is chair of the writing department at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland.
Tanner began his residency at Lyon College in mid-January. While in Batesville, he is completing work on a novel and teaching the advanced fiction writing intensive at the college.
