The year I turned thirty, I had a delicious plan for my birthday. I was part of a playwriting workshop and the best plays from the bunch would be performed on my actual birthday. I imagined champagne and desserts after the performance.
But my play was awful. It was loosely based on real life – I imagined what would happen if a group of mothers from the listserv I was on suddenly descended on my town for Oktoberfest. (Remember this was the early days of online life, almost 25 years ago.) Like me, my main character was ambivalent about the prospect, and ambivalence is never a helpful trait in a main character. Main characters have to want something. I wanted and didn’t want–and so did my main character.
My thirtieth birthday was a disappointment, sans champagne, as I watched other, far better plays succeed. That workshop helped me tremendously, though, because it taught me how to write dialogue. That was its gift to me.
But there was also something curious hidden in my terrible play: one amazing supporting character named Caramel. Because she wasn’t the focus of my attention, she was able to live and breathe, be sassy and tattooed. People in the workshop—looking for something nice to say about a play that just was dead in the water – kept commenting that Caramel was where it was at.
Fast forward a dozen or so years to the writing of my novel Ithaca. There’s a secondary character who is described as short “with a toddler in a sling on her chest, a stud in her nose, and short black hair.” She’s a hippie apple farmer and activist in Ithaca who says, “My mother named me after a mountain in the Bible. Although when you grow up on an apple farm and your name is Carmel, you get Candy Apple quite a bit.” Carmel becomes a kind of surrogate daughter for the main character, Daisy.
And now here we are in 2023, and my novel, Renaissance introduces the reader to “ a young woman sitting on top of the counter in the kitchenette. She was all arms and legs in a tank top and jeans, a tattooed vine twining down one arm, blonde hair pulled up on top of her head. She jumped up and shook my hand. Her hand was rough. ‘I’m Honey,’ she said.” Later we see that Honey had recently spent a year with a traveling carnival—not a circus, she explained—after picking almonds in California
When I wrote Ithaca, people assumed it was about me, which it wasn’t. Renaissance’s main character, Liz, is much closer to me. At the same time, just as people say every character in a dream represents some part of the dreamer, I suspect every character in a book represents some part of the author.
But what’s with these sweetly named young women – Caramel, Carmel, Honey—all of whom live outside the norm, most of them with tattoos? I also find myself writing older grandmotherly women and unprepossessing men, so psychoanalyze me as you will, but today I’m thinking about la dolce vita – the sweet life – and the sweet (and salty) characters in my fiction.
I think you’ll like Honey and the lovely relationship that develops between her and the main character, Liz, as they prune trees together, by day and then watch Italian game shows and read aloud together in the evenings. She’s a free spirit like the other sweetly named secondary characters, but she also experiences a degree of healing along the way.
And that is sweet indeed.
Susan Fish 