Busted!—Kelly Simmons Caught Featuring an Emotionally Troubled Character

In her novel Standing Still, Kelly Simmons writes of a woman who has panic disorder. Contemporary fiction and memoir are full of such emotionally troubled characters, and their story arcs can be most satisfying (brooding, wounded hero, anyone?).

Yet since the novelist’s primary goal is to entertain and/or enlighten, pitfalls abound in such an arc. You will not want to fray your reader’s nerves with your character’s annoying, repetitive characteristics any more than you’ll want to use your exceptional skills to drown the reader in the biological muck and mire of her troubled realities. To do so would be to invite your reader to set down your book.

Kelly’s protagonist, Claire, has had experiences that cause her to succumb to the grip of irrational fears. Here are some useful techniques that helped Kelly deftly handle this arc.

• She gives voice to the reader’s concern by allowing another character to express exasperation. After a troubling doctor’s appointment, Claire sits in the parking garage, shaking, holding up traffic behind her. Her toddler provides commentary.

“Mommy?”
“What, Jamie?”
“You’re embarrassing me.”

Then she allows her character to respond to this pronouncement in a way to which any of us can relate—as a parent:

“What a big word,” I said. “What a big, grown-up word.”

• She creates psychic distance. This can be tricky to do, especially in first person. But Kelly has given Claire a background in news reporting, and the reader gets the sense that Claire is reporting about herself rather than spitting up emotional bile. Here she investigates sounds in her house:

…Finally I make out the contours of His face and eyes, human skin among the plush bears and cloth clowns and nylon-lashed dolls that line Jamie’s floor.
I shake but do not gasp, do not scream. Of course He is there; I expected Him, I heard Him coming for years, each night when Sam left me alone with my obsessions.

• She gives her character a very real adversary to fight. She imbues her foe with archetypal power by capitalizing the pronoun that will be His only name. As His goals become apparent and even relatable, His actions seem no less predictable. What we can’t name or predict seems worthy of our fear as well, a fact that binds the reader to Claire.

• She offers her character redemption. Early. From p. 13, this excerpt from the inciting incident promises that Claire is worth sticking with:

He moves, but not toward me. Holds a finger to His lips, a warning, and glides soundlessly, on cat burglar feet, to Jamie’s canopy bed.
“No,” I cry, but it comes out mangled and small. A croak.
…
I drop to my knees and utter the only fearless words I have ever spoken:
“Take me,” I say. “Take me instead.”

• She allows the disorder itself to give us a new way to look at our lives.

Those are my last words: My purse is in the bedroom. Not “take care of your sisters,” not “I love you.” If He kills me now, that’s the deathbed utterance. Later, I’ll obsess over my bad judgment. Does she even know how to use the cell phone in the zippered pocket? Is “send” one of her spelling words?

• She allows both poignant detail and her sense of humor to shine through.

I look over my shoulder. Jamie is aglow from the nightlight. My daughter, my beautiful, solemn first girl. The blue scissors sit on her desk with her reading camp homework. She has tears in her eyes, but doesn’t scream, or speak, or follow. My youngest child, Jordan, a small tiger of a girl, might have leapt on His back. My middle daughter, Julia, ever vigilant, the last one to fall asleep, could have split atoms with her scream. It seems He had chosen the right one.

• She moves plot along even during a panic attack. Bound in the backseat of the car, Claire does more than pant and sweat. She frets over how the kidnapper knew her husband was away, in a way that reveals much about her life:

Couldn’t anyone watching me know? Count cars in the driveway, watch Sam’s golf magazines pile up on the marble counter, see one person picking up twigs after the storm. I had five laundry baskets, six garbage cans, three daughters, two hands. I carried in dry cleaning, rotisserie chicken, and false cheerfulness at dinnertime. I doled out the father tickles the girls needed at night. And I wonder: Couldn’t any thief, kidnapper, or murderer watching me juggle the mail, the groceries, and a briefcase as I wipe the cat’s feet and put juice into sippy cups recognize me as a woman whose husband was gone? That was the kind of zoom-lens the FBI needed: Look, there, go in tight…see that, Lieutenant? That woman is about to detonate all over her recyclables!

• She gives Claire a physical scar that suggests her problem began with a very real trauma—and then delivers on that promise brilliantly near the end of the book.

• She creates symbols that tells us Claire is having an attack so we don’t have to relive the biology of its onset. “The shaking begins again”—we know what that means. Or Claire will employ a therapy technique of grounding herself by pinching skin on the inside of her arm. ’Nuff said.

• Even within her novel’s tight one-week frame, Kelly offers Claire realistic healing. At the end we sense that she is strong enough to face life head-on, despite her imperfections. Isn’t that what we all want?

Could incorporating a few of these techniques help endear your troubled protagonist to your reader?

For more about my experience reading Standing Still, read a previous Busted! post here.

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Kathryn Craft is an author of women's fiction and memoir who specializes in developmental editing at Writing-Partner.com, an independent manuscript evaluation and editing service. What she believes: 1. Editing forever changed the way she reads. 2. Well-crafted moments of brilliance help her forgive many other problems in a manuscript. 3. All writers have strengths and weaknesses—but why settle for weaknesses? 4. We can learn as much from what other authors do right as we can from what we do wrong. This is her series, "Busted!—An author caught doing something right."