Guest author Ellen Birkett Morris: “Writing My Way into Plot Through Character”

Her debut novel, Beware the Tall Grass, won the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence.

“Character is plot, plot is character.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 2014, I was on a road trip with my husband when I heard a news item on National Public Radio that would change my life. It was a story about the University of Virginia Medical Center program that interviews children who have past life memories and attempts to corroborate those memories with news accounts. The idea would not let me go. Ten years later my award-winning novel, Beware the Tall Grass, was published.

Writing was an eight-year journey to publication full of my own personal challenges and driven by the kinds of questions all writers grapple with: What exactly is going to happen in this story? How do we make sure that what happens in the story is meaningful in the context of these characters and their wants and desires? How do we make sure that the plot amplifies the dramatic potential of the story?

I believe plot and character are inextricably linked. We create characters and give them distinctive traits and habits and preferences, and then we create a plot that is designed to push against their deeply ingrained personal traits and their greatest desires. A plot that tests them at every turn. It’s classic really; think about our introductions to Ebenezer Scrooge or Olive Kitteridge. We have a clear idea of his greed and her inflexibility, and over the course of narrative we watch as they are challenged by circumstances and find their kindness and vulnerability.

Kurt Vonnegut used to tell his students “to make their characters want something right away – even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”

In my novel, Beware the Tall Grass, I created Eve, a perfectionist mother who had an unhappy childhood and who was determined to give her son Charlie a perfect childhood. Then I gave her a son tortured by past life memories of serving in Vietnam.

In the opening pages, it is clear how Eve views the world:

The nurse handed Charlie to me. I ran my fingers across his tiny hands. I unwrapped the blanket and rubbed his small belly.

“What’s this?” I pointed to a brown oval on the left side of his belly.

“Birthmark,” said the nurse. I had a flash of sadness. I had imagined him as a blank slate, unmarked by life. I pushed the feeling away, looking into his small eyes, stroking his fine hair.

Her son is marked already, and he hasn’t yet begun to experience past life memories and act out in ways that will push Eve to find answers. I wrote the story first as a short story, but I knew I couldn’t fill an entire book without a second point of view character. Who would be the most intriguing second point of view character? A young man in the 1960s who was serving in Vietnam.

Early in the book I established the soldier character, Thomas, as a courageous young man driven by integrity, and then I put him in Vietnam, where his courage would be tested. Before I could tackle how these two narratives were connected, I had to have a narrative roadmap for the journeys and challenges Eve and Thomas would face.

Eve was driven to advocate for her son, even if that caused tension in her marriage, made her less attentive to her best friend who was experiencing domestic violence, or complicated her ability to grapple with her mother’s illness amid it all. Eve’s roadmap was made up of the experts and other sources she consulted as she attempted to find the underlying cause of Charlie’s past life memories and of the detours I set up along the way.

For Thomas, it was a bit easier because I knew he would do basic training, and then he would be sent to Vietnam. I selected a specific, dramatic battle, and I knew exactly where Thomas would be on the ground and when. Then I created obstacles for him, an aggressive fellow soldier, his conscience, and a growing sense of brotherhood and responsibility for his fellow soldiers.

If you give yourself signposts as you write, you know where you’re going to take your characters physically, and you know a bit about what their emotional journey is going to be as they’re tested. Knowing where I was going was great, but I needed to fill in the blanks. I took the advice of Anton Chekhov, who wrote to his brother, “In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!”

I gave Eve characteristics that tracked with her perfectionism. She kept an elaborate diary of Charlie’s development and worked as a sculptor, molding things into perfect forms and discarding them when they were flawed.

I gave Thomas a love of animals and forced him to put down his beloved horse when the horse broke a leg. Thomas loves the peace of the ranch, so the reader knows what it means to place him in the tumult of war. As Thomas observed before putting down his injured horse:

“I’m here, buddy, I won’t leave you. I’m here.”

I stared deep into his dark eyes until all I could see was the black of his irises.

We kept a gun in the pack for rattlesnakes. I was a good shot when aiming for soda cans and clay pigeons. I never wanted to hurt anything. I’d shot my share of snakes and even went hunting with Dad once. I didn’t like it, but there are some things you can’t avoid.

I also kept my eye open for a specific image that would resonate with readers and capture the tone of the book. This image, tall grass, became part of the title, Beware the Tall Grass. Tall grass is in both narrative threads and is one of the things that ties the stories together.

My job was to make sure the characters were sufficiently tested in a way that maximized the dramatic potential of the plot. That meant creating a plot rife with roadblocks. Other characters are skeptical about what Eve is saying about her son, and Thomas runs into soldiers who are causing problems, and into battle. As I wrote these scenes, my understanding of my characters and compassion for them deepened.

So, if there is a formula, the formula is to create a character, give them strong traits and strong desires, develop scenarios which will push against those personality traits and complicate their reaching those desires, and do that in a way that maximizes the dramatic potential of each of the scenes. If you know your character well enough, then by the time you get to the end, you will have figured out how exactly they are going to be altered by this experience.

Of course, all of this takes time and introspection. I gave my characters time to grow and wrote my way into challenging scenarios even as I faced challenges of my own, the eventual loss of my mother and a chronic illness diagnosis. Only now, after the book is out, can I see how much the central idea of the book, that the life we expect isn’t always the life we get, applies to my own lived experience.

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Ellen Birkett Morris’s latest book, Beware the Tall Grass, won the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. Prize judge Lan Samantha Chang said, “Through surprising and suspenseful turns, Beware the Tall Grass explores the evocative mysteries of time and memory.” Morris has also published a short story collection, Lost Girls (2020), and two poetry chapbooks. www.ellenbirkettmorris.com