The Fable: Method Writing

If you're going to write it, must you also do it?

Preface!

I don’t know how much I can say about The Fable, but I keep saying more things, so maybe eventually I’ll feel I’ve said enough. All I know is I keep finding new tidbits to zoom in on because The Fable is just built on fascinating tidbits.

And bizarrely, it isn’t all about how much joy I find in Sato’s naked drawing escapades. My wife often questions my obsession with a naked assassin’s subpar drawings, but what can I say, they bring me joy.

Anyway, there will be more mention of Sato’s naked drawing escapades here, rest assured, because it’s impossible to talk about Sato and not mention that. More than his naked drawing escapades (I’ve said that three times this preface, whoops), we’re going to see a whole new level of Sato here.

One I never expected.

Preface over.

You’ve probably heard of method acting. It’s the whole strategy of an actor becoming the character they’re portraying, even when sometimes not actively performing. There was a lot of talk from the set of Succession that Jeremy Strong was concerning, because he’s a method actor, and was always in character.

Method acting gets mixed reviews from all over the place, but I never stopped to think about how it could parallel in writing. Method writing, if you will. It does sound a bit… dubious. Personally speaking, I would not want to embody my characters, not least of all because all my characters are like… 12 years old. But still, I have heard of writers who enroll in classes to learn skills that their characters have, and in a sense, that’s method writing, yeah? Maybe less extreme, but in concept, it checks out.

I mean, in a sense, Arthur Conan Doyle using Dr. Joseph Bell as inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, even porting most of his traits—both positive and negative—into the character could also have become more “method writing” if he’d forced himself to be around Dr. Bell more, but he didn’t. He hated him and got away from him first chance he got.

All that said, the last place I expected to stumble on any semblance of method writing was in The Fable, where an assassin is laying low, often nude, drawing pictures of Santa Claus for his graphic design job. But that’s where I found it.

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Before we get into The Fable, here’s what you need to know.

Sato is one of, if not the best, hitmen out there, but he’s become too good at killing, and needs to lay low for a year. During this year, he’s under the protection of the Yakuza. One member in particular, Kuroshio, really looks up to Sato and wants to train under him, but Sato is a bit… aloof. Not to mention he operates better on his own, so he’s rebuffed Kuroshio as much as he can. But then he decides to help.

And that’s all you need to know.

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I do enjoy the little mangaka inserts between chapters, and The Fable’s have been fun, as Katsuhisa Minami talks about creating this story and the process of building it out. But there was one insert that I found particularly interesting, and it came just before Sato’s weekend wilderness excursion. On this excursion, Sato and Kuroshio are living off the land, with minimal to no supplies.

Minami wrote that he and his staff did the same thing, they went out into the woods to practice their survival, ate insects and snakes, and literally lived off the land. All in the name of understanding what fictional Sato was going to do.

Interestingly, this scene marks a notable shift in Sato’s character. Aside from one instance of burning his mouth on hot food—a frequent comedy gag throughout The Fable—Sato was strait-laced and serious. He talked a lot. He was a very helpful mentor to Kuroshio, who has been begging Sato to take him on as an apprentice the entire series. This felt like a brand-new Sato.

My initial reaction was one of disappointment. I felt like Minami allowed too much of this sudden method writing to get in the way of Sato’s voice. Like maybe the experience of being outside was blocking the natural silliness of Sato. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if maybe this benefited Sato’s character in the long run. It’s another layer of him, another angle to him. It adds a complexity we haven’t seen before.

Up until this excursion, Sato is 90% clown, 10% badass. When called into action, we see just how skilled he is, but when he’s not called into action, he is all comedy. And it works, because he’s hilarious. I mean, the number of times that we spend pages with naked Sato drawing his parrot, and yet it never gets old.

The question is—how long would that have sustained Sato as a character? Personally, I wasn’t getting sick of it, but maybe I would have. I think of characters like Sakamoto, from Sakamoto Days, and I wonder if his silence could have lasted. His cold, steely exterior.

Then there’s someone like Tatsu, from The Way of the Househusband. For all intents and purposes, Tatsu does not have depth. He’s all comedy. And it works, but it works piecemeal. There is not a deeper level of engagement in the series beyond appreciating the silliness.

The Fable wasn’t going that route. Not that I could see. There were serious complexities among so many characters that I didn’t mind Sato being a bit flippant. Which is why I initially balked at him having this new layer. But again, it’s not like we lost his core traits. He still burned his mouth on hot food, after all, which might have been all it took to remind readers that he’s still the goofball we love.

Which brings me back to this concept of method writing. It may well be a question of how we get to know our characters. Maybe in being out in the wilderness, Minami got to know Sato better, and realized that in order for Sato to be effective in this new space, he needed to have a different layer to him. And maybe my student who took knitting classes because her character was going to be a master knitter benefitted in finding deeper layers to her sweater-making that she otherwise wouldn’t have found.

How do we get to know our characters? How do we populate their traits? Not necessarily the main ones that drive them, but the traits that don’t always make it onto the page? I will almost always add in things I already know. I have had protagonists who are expert swordsman, who obsess over video games, who love history, who live for kickball. And those are traits that I can build out because I know them. Well, I’m not a master swordsman, but I dabble.

But I’ve also had characters do think I’ve never done—chuck javelins, build model airplanes, run a bed & breakfast built on necromancy, etc. Things I know next to nothing about, but I also don’t feel like I need to build an A10 Warthog myself to understand what it’s like.

Now I’ll ask you, dear reader, how do you get to know your characters? Do you go the method route? Do you just pick random traits?