Selene Castrovilla’s LUNA RISING and Equipping Your Characters with Confidants
When the great Rod Serling sat down to write a second pilot script for a TV program he was calling The Twilight Zone, he heaped a big problem onto his shoulders. The episode, you’ll recall, finds a man meandering through a small town. He’s utterly alone. Not a person in sight. There are hints of habitation-a burning cigar, a ringing telephone-but no people. The man finds clues for twenty-plus minutes, but for all but a few minutes of the episode, he has no idea where he is or what is happening. (Don’t worry, I won’t ruin the story for you.)
Serling really complicated matters for himself. So much drama comes from two or more characters interacting. “Where is Everybody” is a one-man show. The restraints we place on ourselves, of course, force us to write our way around them.
In Luna Rising, Selene Castrovilla‘s titular protagonist isn’t exactly a loner. She has friends (including the enjoyably drawn Sunny), family, and a succession of boyfriends to keep her company. Still, Luna begins the (third person) book very much in her own head. Her husband has freshly come out of the closet. This complicates her life, along with that of her two sons. Luna is only thirty-eight. She’s still a woman and still has the requisite needs. Unfortunately, finding love in her situation is not the easiest thing to do.
The main love interest in the book is an older man named Trip. Will they end up together? Will they go their separate ways? Read for yourself, but remember: the course of true love never did run smooth.
So Luna feels a little lonely. That’s understandable. While she has a support system, she understandably doesn’t know how she is going to handle the changes that are shaping her new life. One of the ways to chart a character’s thoughts and to release exposition is the use of a confidant. There’s so much more you can do with a character and a scene if the character is not alone. Here’s an example: the gravedigger scene from Hamlet:
How different would the scene be if there were no “I knew him, Horatio?” There would be no reason for Hamlet to talk to himself. (I know…not that it stops Hamlet from doing so at other times…) And seeing as how Hamlet is dead at the end of the play, there would be no one to share the sad story of the ill-fated prince of Denmark.
Ms. Castrovilla gives a slightly lonely character a confidant: an imaginary friend named Jiminy. (Yes, after Pinocchio’s buddy.) Here’s how Jiminy is introduced in the first chapter of Luna Rising, before the narrative takes a trip to the past:
Jiminy is a useful character/device in the book because it allows Ms. Castrovilla to do the same work as can be done in a scene with an additional character. Luna certainly can’t tell Trip what she is thinking or how she feels-what a boring romance story that would be-but she can think what she is thinking and have an internal dialogue with Jiminy, who appears in the book a great deal.
Ms. Castrovilla did something very interesting with the characterization. Let’s look at how she introduces Luna’s ex-husband:
So she goes from straight third-person prose into a kind of profile divided by sections. Isn’t this an interesting choice? Ordinarily, exposition and characterization are released in straight narration or in dialogue; the author did something a little different here. It reminds me of the bare-bones exposition of the G.I. Joe profile cards that were on the back of the action figure packages.
As we all know, the value of a choice is determined by the effect it has on the work. On one hand, it could be considered inconvenient to drop such a big exposition bomb so close to the beginning of the book. Maybe Ms. Castrovilla really doesn’t need to tell us that the ex dislikes tomato seeds. Maybe she could release the necessary information in other, more felicitous ways. On the other hand, this is a fun romancey-type book. We’re reading this for enjoyment and to have fun. The bolded profile structure gives us a mental image of Nick very quickly. Ms. Castrovilla suggests other scenes (what it was like when Luna discovered Nick’s activities on the gay site!) and is clear about what Nick looks like. Looks are very important in romancey-type novels. Just the way it is.
So if we put all of this information on a scale, I think that the author made the right choice. She offers similar lists for the other characters in the book when appropriate, and they have the same effect.
Ms. Castrovilla imbues the book with a great deal of pathos and deals with it in much more comprehensive terms than you might find in straight-up romance novels. (The “heat meter” is also lower.) These choices make Luna Rising a novel that has a bigger emotional impact. Instead of chronicling how one finds passion, Ms. Castrovilla illuminates how people negotiate the minefield of love. I suppose it’s easy for two incredibly hot people to fall into bed for a night. This book is much more about how we build deeper feelings and appreciation for the people in our lives, from neglectful parents to our kids and especially the man or woman we love, even if their snoring makes us want to smother them in their sleep sometimes.
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