How to write about a superficial person without superficial prose
How do you write a Stepford Wife with soul? Watch as I tear apart my own work-in-progress to fix what's going wrong.
As I’m writing this, I just had lunch downstairs with my husband.1 Over this lunch (which was a nice one, because he’d cured some salmon for us) I was complaining that I have to axe all the chapters I’ve written this week because the secondary character I’ve been actively trying to deepen isn’t deep in them. “She’s superficial and robotic,” I announced with resignation, slurping my noodles. “She has to be better. The writing must be better.”
“What does that mean, though?” My husband asked. “What’s the problem? Does she have to be funny?”
I grabbed some chocolate milk from the fridge (chocolate milk is my defense mechanism when I have writing problems) and snapped, “Helen doesn’t have a problem! She doesn’t exist, I made her! I AM THE PROBLEM!”
Cue the Taylor Swift.
I’ve spoken to some of you in person about how I’ve been struggling with the secondary character in the novel that I’m working on: a woman, wife and mother who comes from a poor background but is now in the upper class. I need this character—Helen—to find comfort and delight in material things. I need material things to matter to her—perhaps matter too much because a big change is coming Helen’s way regarding her status in the posh community where she lives.
But I also need Helen to be likable. (Not all characters need to be likable! But for plot reasons, Helen does.) I need readers to root for her, to recognize their baser instincts in hers. I’m writing a satire, which means that Helen can be superficial, but only to a point. Helen needs to be superficially superficial, because I need her to change for the better.
Well, guess what. Writing a superficial character meaningfully is HARD AS HELL!
I don’t have the fix for all these chapters yet, which means I can’t give you the numbered list of takeaways I truly love to share. So in lieu of that numbered list, I thought you could simply watch me struggle with my writing. Below, I’m going to share an excerpt from the first of three chapters that I’m going to kill. Then I’ll share my first attempt to fix one of the chapters. After that, I don’t know what we’ll do together. Maybe I will cry.
Here goes it. Put on your hard hat. What you need to know for context is that this woman, Helen, has had a shitty day. She just had an altercation with a neighbor that she got all HOA on and she’s arrived at a barn to pick up her daughter Sunny (who has been morose and sullen lately) after a bad lesson. Helen’s husband Alan—an advertising executive—has just lost a major account that Helen was banking on to pay for a certain something she’s wanted all her life. I think that’s all you need to know before I tear my work apart. I’m going to point out where I’m being rushed and lazy and then I’ll get into how I will fix those weaknesses and stop writing like crap.