Your Protagonist’s Way of Making a Mess

Rachel Dacus

10 years ago

Unless your main character has OCD, s/he has somewhere she habitually leaves messy. A MC’s mess can point to her attitude in life. Kitchen? Living room? Bedroom? Mine is my desk. Where I can pile books and file folders, defining me as someone always looking forward rather than paying attention to details. Your protagonist’s way of making a mess may be an important trait. It may even involve magic. In magical realism in women’s fiction can be like a brilliant but messy cook in a kitchen.

My mother used to call these pile-ups of my books and papers my “campsites”. I’d pile them up next to where I sat on the couch, in my bedroom, on the dining table. I still stack these “To-Do” or “To be read” piles, telling myself it’s to alert me to follow up. The ,truth is that by the next day, the stack starts to become frozen in place. I dread digging in. My mess shows that I’m the kind of person who reads and writes a lot and has lots of half-written ideas.

I know women whose way of making a mess is to stuff their closets. It’s not because they don’t care about clothes, but because they love having a lavish amount of clothes and accessories. They love fashion and often see glamorous closets portrayed as overflowing with colorful items. It’s a glorious, lively mess. For some of us, the mess descends into the purse. Kitchen mess people are often fabulous cooks, who glory in throwing food and implements around wildly, leaving a tornado trail of their cooking, if only frying eggs.

But how and where you make and leave a mess can define things about you. Your character should either have a mess somewhere, or be so scrupulously mess-free that the reader worries about them. If a character has a spotless kitchen but the bedroom strewn with clothes, that might say he doesn’t really cook and new outgrew having his mom do his laundry. A jock type or a tech guy who has so much money all his meals are take-out from fancy restaurants. See how a mess, or lack of it, can help the reader visualize a character?

What’s your character’s mess are? Or stark lack of messes? It will say a lot about him or her if you can describe the mess-making and mess cleanup moments. And what is the forgotten, messy area in your life?

Visit my Books section for more magical realism women’s fiction and my Timegathering series.

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