In Vilnius, the signs are very small. The sign for a restaurant may only be a foot square, the name of a shop may be in tiny letters over the doorway. Upon first arriving, I didn’t even notice: I was too overwhelmed by the narrow winding streets, the baroque churches, the strange lowness of the clouds. But the longer I stayed, the more I noticed how small the signs were. I mostly noticed because I was unable to tell my fellow travelers where I had eaten dinner or bought the most delicious rye bread because I simply hadn’t noticed the sign.

Believe it or not, this street is lined with stores, and "Guru" is the largest sign to be found, still only about a foot and a half square.

In America, as with so many things, we have decided that bigger is simply better. This means that supermarkets, those most banal of suburban conveniences, are billed like Broadway shows, three-foot high letters announcing their name to the quiet parking lot. In short, I was used to a lot of signs and big ones, in bright colors, on stretched awnings, in neon, in a variety of fonts and scripts specially designed to be easy to read and appealing to the eye. In fact, it is difficult to even think of many American businesses without visually bringing to mind the signs that label their buildings. Blockbuster, though now all but defunct, is a good example. This even has a special name: logo, which, I suppose, indicates that the modern world is no longer in need of the “s” in logos, and can do very well with only a bucket of fried chicken and toilet paper which purports to be tested by a family of red bears.

Anyway, it would be easy to complain about the visual chaos of American space and the negative effect of our large signage; one hears such arguments on NPR all the time, especially about the new LED signs about to be put on buses, and quite frankly I never had any interest in these arguments before. They seemed sort of ninny-ish and hysterical. My attitude was, I suppose, that the future was going to happen to us whether we liked it or not, and that the future wanted brightly lit signage on buses, advertising everywhere, a carnival of light and sound. I did not like the idea, but I did not feel it was the biggest item on the agenda. In the face of war, who can bring themselves to argue about bus signage?

But I became interested by what happened to my eye when I had been living for a week or so in an environment with such small signs. What happened is: my eye became curious. It started to wander and meander and take in smaller details than it had been capable of before. It started to look for things and memorize. It became relaxed and began to play.

I don’t have a real political point here. I still doubt very much that I am going to begin protesting the LED signs on buses or marching for the dismantling of billboards. And yet, I suspect, as with so many things in life, the smaller the problem seems the larger its effect. In the same way that health can be bought by a series of very tiny choices, of, say, eating a banana instead of a slice of cake, perhaps a happier, saner and more playful and productive populace could be bought with a size limit on signage.

Regardless, we would do well to pay attention to how frightened our eyes have become and give them a chance, at least once a week, to play, to investigate places and things without knowing ahead of time what they are.

But recently I’ve been wondering: do I use any of these?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized: no, I don’t really. They inform my understanding, but those ideas are not what I use to actually build a character.

So for just a self-indulgent moment, I’m going to describe how I actually write characters, in case it will be useful to anybody at all.

First of all, I start with an abstract idea of what I need. My writing usually starts with an abstract idea: say, the problem of psychology. I may not even know what I have a problem with about it– I just have this vague feeling that something is a little wrong there. So I think, okay, I need a character who is going to think about and talk about psychology.

The more I was thinking about it, the more I was thinking that my problem with psychology was that I wasn’t really sure that it was an adequate response to human suffering. In short, I thought the idea of doing psychoanalysis on a woman who was raped in the Congo was a laughable idea, and the thought of just giving her a pill–a very dark and depressing idea.

Slowly, I got the idea of a student of clinical psychology who abandons her studies to go to the Congo and help– she doesn’t know how, she can’t even picture how her tiny stupid life could help with a problem so big, but she goes anyway because she’s reached a point where she can’t not go.

So then I have the general shape of what the character will need to be capable of, and from there: I reverse engineer. In this particular instance, I knew I would need someone a little bit over passionate, emotional, and also, in order to get her to feel so guilty that she actually gets on the plane, someone harboring a heavy burden of self-hatred and shame.

So I had to figure out the origin of the self-hatred: I decided she had a really confusing case of childhood molestation, some situation where her own guilt or innocence was unclear, not for the reader, but for her. I decided that her cousin, only a few years older than her, had molested her. She was only 8, an innocent, but he was only 10– so was it really rape? Yes, it was, and yet, she feels it wasn’t. What if she was just a dirty girl? (Which is what her cousin told her, told her, in fact, that she was making him do it.) This seemed like it would cause in her all the qualities I needed.

But that left me only with a shell of a human being when what I needed was a voice. And so…. I began stalking psychology students online.

I read their blogs, I secretly befriended them on Facebook, I read their scholarly articles. I just stalked the shit out of them. In part, I was looking for details of what it was like to be part of a psychology department, but mostly I was looking for an indefinable something. I wanted to hear them talk. I wanted the small, nuanced pattern of a voice. At the same time, I was understanding that I needed to invent work for my character to be doing: what was she researching? What was her thesis about? And so I went about the task of giving myself a fake master’s in psychology.

Gradually, I was able to look up enough clinical trials and read enough texts to come up with what was, to the best of my knowledge, a pretty interesting thesis for her to be writing. And as it happened, right as that was coming together, I came upon a psychology student online who was just what I was looking for.

She was writing, basically, a blog that was complaining about her life. She suffered from clinical depression, self-doubt, and she was a closet feminist, ranting about how none of the men in her department took her seriously. She was pretty perfect for what I needed. So then I started looking at the way she wrote, the way her thoughts moved, the patterns of her speech.  I wrote out, well, pages and pages of observations, tried out writing a few of her blog posts myself until I could do a fairly accurate imitation.

Then I spent a few days thinking about how I would have to modify her. For one thing, the girl I had found wasn’t very likable. She was pretty whiny. And she didn’t seem to be very smart. So I decided to make my character a little less whiny, and a little more brilliant. But I needed another characteristic– something idiosyncratic, that would allow the reader to fall in love with such a troubled character. So then I went and thought about all the people I love who are deeply troubled, and what allows me to love them despite the fact that there are very dark things about them. I realized that usually those dark people I love are very aware of their own fucked-up-ness and make interesting commentary about it. The fact that they are in charge of their fucked-up-ness means that I don’t have to be, thus allowing me to love them. Also, usually, these people are very funny.

But funny wasn’t going to work for me. I’m just not funny. I try very hard, and in life I can be pretty funny, but I’m not very funny on paper. So self-aware I could do: funny was harder.

Then I did something that… well, I like to think of it as my secret weapon, but who knows– maybe all authors do it? Anyway, I think that everybody has a mental tick– some thought pattern they use over and over again. I use it as a kind of signature for my characters, so that you can feel them thinking and you feel like their thinking is the same throughout the whole course of the novel. In the novel I’m writing now, the main character’s signature thought pattern is empathy: she’s always thinking about what it must be like to be other people. That’s where her brain goes. So for this character, the psychology student, I decided her signature thought pattern would be: fantasy. She’s always imagining things, either revising what just happened in her imagination, or projecting what she hopes will happen. She’s imagining absurd things, and also realistic things, but no matter what she’s always in a state of fantasy.

And with that piece in place, I started writing. I spent a great deal of time getting the first five pages right, making sure I had the voice, reading it to a variety of people to get their impressions, reading it out loud, etc. And then I just… let it rip.

All of the details: what kind of clothes she would wear, where she lived, what the cousin was actually like, etc, were filled in by my subconscious. I never planned them, they just arrived, and sometimes, if they didn’t work, I would modify them. But it was never my intention to make her like fried chicken, she just turned out to like fried chicken. I had no idea there was a bowl of rotting tangerines in her kitchen until it appeared there when I was writing a scene. It turned out she even had a boyfriend I didn’t know about who showed up in the middle of a scene, literally knocking on the door and asking to be let in. Obviously, I had her answer the door, and then he just sauntered in and he turned out to be one my favorite characters I have ever written, and I didn’t know the first thing about him. It was a joy to write him because I had no idea what he would say.  So… who knows where he came from? He just arrived.

I’d be really interested to hear how other writers do it. Do you plan the rotting tangerines? I suspect not: you could never plan everything that goes into writing a piece of fiction, just like it would be impossible to walk across a room if you had to give the orders to each muscle group consciously. But how do you do it? I’d love to hear.

For those of you who don’t remember Lisa Frank, her creations, which graced everything from lunch boxes to notebooks, looked something like this:

Except there were even more rainbows. Picture it more rainbowy even than that. As rainbowy as you possibly can.

The only thing that troubled me was… well, I couldn’t figure out how the Nazis came into it. I had completely melded together the names Lisa Frank and Anne Frank and was under the impression they were one and the same person.

Had Anne Frank doodled these colorful unicorns and generous spirited penguins in her famous diary?

Was she just that kind of girl? Thinking of her doodling puffins embracing as all the while her family were hunted by evil Nazis… well, even at 6, I worried it showed signs of a dangerous mental schism.

I considered other possibilities:

It seemed possible that unicorns had conceivably aided in Hitler’s downfall, either directly or indirectly. After all, felling an evil dictator seemed like something unicorns would be likely to do. As I looked down at my little eraser, no bigger than a silver dollar, I shivered, thinking of the tremendous violence and power within its tiny form.

And yet, there was a third and troubling possibility. I hated even to think about it. But I worried. What if… well, what if…?

Some of my favorite Ann Beattie quotes: “How did you think it was okay to write this sentence down? I mean really, you actually sat there and wrote this, and thought: this is a good sentence?”

“I’m just baffled. I don’t understand how you even got to this point in your career. You have no talent, and not only that, but no skill. I suggest you find something you’re better at.”

“Your fiction needs to be more interesting than sitting in a chair and staring at a wall. Right now, I would rather stare at the wall.”

Which caused me to say things like: “You are being unbelievably condescending right now, are you aware of that?”

Which caused her to say things like: “What, I’m the teacher, you don’t want me to find flaws in your work?”

Much of what she and I said to each other was useless, and I thank God there was no one there to hear but all those deaf figurines. For the record, I wasn’t the only one who had trouble in that living room. One of the other students had a plan to take a dump on her lawn on one of his morning runs. Several students gave up writing entirely because she told them they were talentless. On top of this, she had these insane, long, pointy fingernails that she would use to stab at the page when she was particularly displeased. Every time I would go to her house, my stomach was a mass of heaving knots, and I was sure I would york all over her pretty oak floors.

But Ann Beattie did say one thing to me that was worth her weight in gold. She doesn’t weigh very much, I could easily have picked her up and tossed her across the room, which did occur to me to do on multiple occasions, but, slight as she is– that’s still a lot of gold.

So I will tell it to you, this one, beautiful, helpful, infinitely wise thing that Ann Beattie told me. She said: details are free.

This needs a bit of explaining. At the time she said it, I think she was saying she didn’t like that my characters were eating tuna sandwiches. In my traditional, hostile way, I said something to the effect of: what’s wrong with tuna sandwiches and what does it matter anyway!?! But she explained that fiction was not made up of themes or ideas or even words, so much as it was made up of details. In every detail, we are creating the world of the story. Whether the sandwich is tuna or peanut butter is everything, means everything. Not only this: but you can change them for free. It costs nothing. You simply keep on subbing different kinds of sandwiches until you get the effect you want, because, you don’t have to make a real sandwich, you just get to say: “peanut butter” and wham– the story is changed.

Now, as to the importance of sandwiches in themselves, I am not qualified to speak. But I do have to say, this idea, that fiction is really made up solely of details, an idea already of interest to me from Nabokov’s excellent essay, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” took root, and the insight, moreover, that there was no cost to me, no effort even, in tinkering with and replacing these details, struck me like a lighting bolt. It’s an obvious enough insight, in a way. But never before had it hit home to me how absolutely phantasmagorical fiction itself is. How utterly free I was in its creation. How perfectly MINE my words ought to be.

I never was able to get my fiction to the point that Ann Beattie would rather read it than stare at a wall. But then again, my cats have the same feeling about my writing, and I don’t let that get me down any. Staring at a wall, when you really think about it, is one of the great experiences in life. Who am I to mess with that?