I was talking to a friend recently about writing and mentioned the three things Samuel R. Delany said to put in a story for a well rounded character. "There [are] three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous." ("Characters," Jewel Hinged Jaw p. 157, referring to a passage from Nova.) Of course, I wasn't quite that eloquent on the phone. Here, purposeful actions further the plot, habitual actions can flesh out the context (e.g., society) of the character, and gratuitous actions can provide the leavening—the filling that lets us process the story more easily (e.g., pillow shots in cinema).
Reading further in Nova deconstructs that passage.
The mirror of my observation turns and what first seemed gratuitous I see enough times to realize it is a habit. What I suspected as habit now seems part of a great design. While what I originally took as purpose explodes into gratuitousness. The mirror turns again, and the character I thought obsessed by purpose reveals his obsession is only a habit; his habits are gratuitously meaningless; while those actions I construed as gratuitous reveal a most demonic purpose.
(Nova, p. 166, 1969 Bantum ed.)
The evolution of one type of action into another doesn't negate the need for that type of action, but shows the evolution of it as the story unfolds. All three are there in the mind of the author. The turning mirror is the evolving vision of the author as they write the novel. In some of his Neveryon stories, Delany picks up the topic of mirrors some more and explains how a simple reflection can help us see the problems with something, but a second reflection can show us the answers. That's a topic for another post sometime.
I don't think I'll be quite as conniving as Delany, but I have tried to put the three types of actions to work. When I did, I got very positive feedback from the workshop. I'm not as good with the gratuitous actions because most of my writing has been short stories, and in those every word has to carry as much weight as it can.
Three quick excerpts from my thesis-in-progress:
Gratuitous:
Ahead of her in line were two teenagers who weren't quite old enough to have small jobs with which to earn some spending money. They must be going out for an early dinner on their family's money, Barbara thought. They had made their selections, but their credit accounts didn't have quite enough to cover the cost. They were trying to figure out which item to do without and still have enough to eat. Barbara watched them, remembering some of her early dates while she was still living with her parents. More than one had developed a nervous tick when looking at the bill. Once, she had had to pitch in a bit. These boys were showing that same nervousness that comes with impending and unavoidable embarrassment.
"How much over is it?" Barbara asked the cashier.
The cashier responded that it wasn't much, but that it was also too much for him to simply overlook.
Barbara told him to put on her own tab the amount over what the boys could pay. She would be having a sausage in a bun anyway, so paying a little more wouldn't hurt anything, and besides, the boys deserved to have some time together.
Habitual:
Taking in a deep breath, releasing it, and repeating a couple times, Barbara prepared to enter the apartment. The number was right. She must have taken a wrong turn coming out of the stairs. That wasn't like her. She should have stopped by the church right after getting the prescription instead of waiting until today. She righted the fallen eight and unlocked the bolts. Her keys worked. She opened the door and entered.
Purposeful:
This was the fifth case in which she had seen the faint outline of a triangle in the palm. She pulled up the overview of the five to try and find similarities, something she did almost every day in the few minutes before she went home. She had never found any mention of such an artifact in any case reports. Three dead women. Two dead men. Two from duos. Two from trios. One from a quartet. Ranging in age from twenty to forty--all working age adults. Nothing significant seemed the same between any of them, while too much that seemed insignificant was the same. Perhaps adding Luke to the mix would bring out a few things.
There are passages which I put in just to show some aspect of the character, but which are now turning into lead-ins for some plot twists. I didn't quote any of them, though I have one of the members of Barbara's family share the habit of righting the fallen eight without doing anything else with it. Of course, not everything in a novel falls into one of these three categories. Something I figured out working with the Genre Evolution Project was that the more the lines were blurred, the better the story seemed to be.
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