The Laconic Character

So I recently watched all of Band of Brothers with Quin for the second time. I don't watch a lot of war movies, and the ones I do watch I seldom watch twice - too upsetting. I can't imagine willing experiencing the storming of the beach at Normandy in Saving Private Ryan ever again, for example. But this TV series is so character-focused with a relatively low disturbing images count it's not an uncomfortable re-watch. Plus with so many characters it's hard to absorb everything the first go around. So I agreed we could tackle all ten episodes together on the nights I don't work (and in return he owes me five nights of Hindi films, which means I can watch five movies from beginning to end all in a blow rather than in 45-minute treadmill chunks).

My favorite episode is "Bastogne". Yes, yes, snow and cold. I love snow in film. (Have you ever noticed how few movies are set in winter? Especially if it's not integral to the plot. I imagine it's a continuity nightmare, working with snow.) But the snow isn't the main reason I like this episode the best. The story here revolves around "Doc" Rowe, who is my favorite kind of character - a laconic one. He spends a lot of time sitting and thinking, and when he does speak he is direct and to the point, and you know what he's saying doesn't even touch the surface of what he was just thinking.

Actors complain about laconic characters; they are hard to play. When you don't have any lines, you disappear into the background (like "Doc" Rowe does in the other nine episodes. You'll see him - sometimes he even speaks - but you don't really notice him). Seth Green had this problem with Oz, the laconic werewolf on Buffy. I suppose as an actor there are only so many ways you can listen intently to the other actors talking before you crave a good monologue. Still, there is a power to the laconic character. One of my favorite Buffy scenes is from season three, when the mayor has Willow but Buffy has the box, and the other characters are all arguing about whether to continue with the spell to destroy the box or to trade the box to get Willow back. And Oz gets up from where he was sitting quietly on the steps, crosses the room without really being noticed, and smashes the spell cauldron against the wall. And then still takes a nice long pause before he speaks. Buffy could have done the exact same thing, but Buffy makes attention-grabbing gestures all the time. It would not have meant the same thing.

Perhaps I have sympathy for actors trying to play a laconic character because I've been struggling so much with the writing of my own. I'm speaking here of my Inuit hunter, Uvlugiaq, in my novel Tao of Troth. He wasn't meant to be a laconic character. I originally intended him to be warm and big-hearted, a Miyazaki character like Tombo in Kiki's Delivery Service or Pazu in Castle in the Sky. That's what I had written him up as in my notes and outline, anyway. But when it came to actually writing the prose, his personality wasn't that at all. When he was alone with Thordis, he let her do most of the talking, and when the two of them were with Snorri he didn't speak at all. Somewhere around chapter six I gave up on trying to force him to speak and just let him be laconic.

This is one of the biggest challenges I'm looking at in the rewrite, keeping him from disappearing for huge chunks of the book. The debate I'm having now is whether to give him a few chapters to tell from his POV. I've been trying a few out, just to see how they work. I'm not sure it does; the power of the laconic character is in not knowing exactly what they're thinking. In this aspect acting is easier. An actor can say a lot with a look or a gesture that doesn't call undo attention on itself. In writing it's very tricky to simultaneously describe something but not call attention to it. Movies can have a few things going on at once; heck, even comic books can have a few things going on at once in the same panel. But prose is always one word at a time.

So it's tricky and for me involves a lot of writing which I'll never actually use in the novel. It reminds me of a page in my Art of Dragonlance book, where on one side is the finished painting but the other side is filled with sketches of all the different ways the artist approached how one person's hand could look - opened, closed, fingers like this, fingers like that. I'm sketching hands, basically.

But it's nice to be writing again after nearly three months without it. And when I finally hit on the perfect sketch and incorporate into the final painting, it will all be so worthwhile.