Writing the Wife

What happens when the narrator doesn't want to talk about something?

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In my last “Community Day” column, I explained my view that every significant character needs to 1) meaningfully advance some serious part of the plot and 2) have agency of his/her own. This means that each major character is a load-bearing wall in the story AND has human needs and motives.

Because of these points, I probably worked harder on the wife character than any other. My initial goal, which turned out to be too artistic, was for the narrator to barely mention his wife at all. I was hoping to pull this off as a way of demonstrating the narrator’s disconnection with his real life and his sense of guilt about what he’d done to his family.

How I envision the never-named wife

But I ran into four types of problems. First, among the most common comments from my first year of readers was something like, “I want to know more about the wife! What’s she thinking???” The story felt incomplete without her casting a much bigger shadow over the action. This is partly because, in hindsight, I made most of her mentions vague and intriguing, essentially begging readers to want more. But I also think the nature of the story makes her unavoidably interesting.

Second, I needed her to do some things that no other character could do. The narrator doesn’t want to tell the whole truth about anything, especially not about his personal life. But that would leave a gaping hole in the story. I needed him to talk about his wife more often so the reader could get glimpses of personal things he is hiding.

Third, the narrator tries to be a distant observer of events. He also tends to be snide. And over-the-top. In other words, there are lots of reasons, particularly early on, to not like the narrator. I could find no better way of humanizing him than showing that a wonderful, complex woman love(s)(d) and respect(s)(ed) him.

Fourth, the more I addressed #2 and #3, the more she became a device instead of a character with purpose of her own. That is, when I used her to make the narrator relatable and to help fill out the narrator’s life, she became a bigger character but not necessarily one with her own needs and drive. That was a problem.

I want to give two examples of how I expanded her role.