I'm just going to ask this, because -- natch-- I was reading a novel and thought, "This isn't a character. This is a construct." You ever have that experience? I don't know what the distinction really is, or how you make a real character, or how you know when you've "constructed" one rather than created one or discovered one. But I noticed this and thought I'd bring it up for review.
What it felt like had happened is that the writer started with an idea. "She's a gardening catalogue copywriter!" And what does that mean? It means that she describes things. That she is part of the whole commercial materialistic American machine. That she describes mundane tools with gilded language, that she uses language to sell, and sell out. That there's this motif of gardening/growing/life vs. glossy paper/lies/death. That there's a worthlessness and emptiness of her work, a prostitution.
And that's all true, and of course, I think that the art of characterizing might come from taking what we know of the character and inquiring and extrapolating: "What does it mean that she's...."
So when does this go wrong and create types rather than characters? When does this become "a catalogue copywriter" rather than "Sharon who writes catalogue copy" ? When does she become not a character but a way to satirize or symbolize commercialism or???
You know, this is really hard, creating people and stories.
Somehow this feels like what happens when we start conceiving a story with a premise or theme-- "I'm going to write about how modern college life is so commercialized and anomistic." It so often ends up so didactic and preachy, like the story is actually an allegory meant to prove this point. So the character above becomes just a way to prove some point about people?
How do you know when you've created a construct? I wonder if that's something readers can see but writers can't. (Also, I suspect this is something that lit-fic writers do deliberately sometimes-- to prove a point, or to prove that there is no point. :)
No brilliant thoughts, but have you experienced this in your reading? When do you sense this is a symbol, not a person, and what causes you to feel that?