My favorite character

In the Inkwell section of a recent Writer's Digest, they asked "If you had to pick just one, what's the best ingredient of a solid novel: The plot, premise, the style, the characters or the setting?"

The responses surprised me, though they shouldn't have. Some 50 percent said character, which, if I remember my math, means character equaled the combined total of all the others.

I shouldn't have been surprised, however, because I concentrate on character development more than anything else in a story. I do it, perhaps, to the detriment of other elements, like plot or pacing. The key is to show a character's, uh, character instead of telling the reader about a character's character.

I was thinking, who is my favorite character in fiction? Uncle Tom from UNCLE TOM'S CABIN is a good character, though in the black community he is much-maligned and generally misunderstood. But my true favorite is George Smiley.

I think Smiley first appears as a minor character in John LeCarre's first big international success, THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. He was front and center in CALL FOR THE DEAD and several novels starting in the early 1970s.

Smiley was a professional spy and was introduced at a time when the spy archetype, in general, and a British spy, in particular, was James Bond. Bond was tall, handsome, charming, good with women, dashing, debonair. Smiley, on the other hand, was "breathtakingly ordinary." Divorced but with a beautiful, charming and intensely insecure wife who comes and goes in his life, Smiley was described as "short, fat and of a quiet disposition" and with a "fleshy, bespectacled face." His arms were too short or his sleeves were too long.

It was as if on a literary level Bond and Smiley were born twins, with Bond getting all the good traits and Smiley getting all the rest. Except, that Smiley was also exceptionally intelligent. Brilliant, really. His one true shortcoming was his wife, the Lady Ann Smiley.

(Read TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY, my favorite novel, or SMILEY'S PEOPLE. Or see Sir Alec Guinness portray Smiley in the BBC TV/film versions of those novels. He was as brilliant as Smiley as he was as Obi-Wan Kenobi.)

I don't know if I can write a character as wonderfully complex, full-bodied and interesting as Smiley. But the favorite of my inventions is in my current novel, AN UNTIDY AFFAIR. She is a minor, though important character named Marie Toussaint. Marie is pretty, funny, shapely, considerate of elders, flirty and sexy. She is also insecure and impulsive. But acting without thought also saves her life.

Do you have any favorite characters? I'd love to know. Post a comment on my blog or my Facebook page.

Until then, thanks for reading and keep writing.