My wife (and test reader when editing) recently went through a manuscript (horror genre) and expressed a frustration with my characters that I hadn't considered. This is a moment when I may disregard her advice because I think this is something important to how I write. I don't disregard her advice lightly. I know that she understands "normal" readers better than I. And that means the question is, am I writing for "normal" readers or for some slightly different market segment? I consider disregarding the advice because I think maybe it's the latter.
The issue is with characters who misunderstand each other, in small ways that generally don't affect the plot and often aren't even noticed. This happens two or three times a chapter, and she thinks it's crazy-making.
Here's one example, with complete explanation of how and why, in story, this happens. The explanation is far too tedious to actually be in the manuscript.
There is a character named Philo Garcia. He likes flamboyant clothes, weird music, and art cars. Because his name is Greek/Spanish and the story takes place in the USA, one would expect that he's "American" because we're mostly mixed-up mutts like that and our grandparents come from everywhere. But he's actually an immigrant from Mexico, named after a Greek grandparent. So he's only a little bit mixed. If he has kids here (with his American wife, a sculptor who's a "goth" of Irish/Indian descent and estranged from her east-coast parents on account of being bi, rebellious, and a bit weird) they'll *DEFINITELY* be typical Americans. Probably straight-arrow kids who just want to be "normal" and are embarrassed by their "out there" parents.
For anyone not living here, I should mention that this kind of mixed is normal for western California. I'm not hamming it up, I'm just looking around the Bay Area and talking about normal people (well, okay mostly artists so a bit flamboyant and subcultural, but otherwise normal) who are "from around here."
Anyway, in the manuscript I never actually mention his nationality or immigration status, but this is in my mind when I'm writing the character. His English, although very good, is a second language. If a colloquial expression is both fairly obscure and outside his experience (he's a freight delivery driver who works and lives with industrial artists), he's probably going to miss it.
So his wife has gone missing, and a mutual friend notices a photo in a local paper that looks like her, in a story about a religious event. The story takes place in the 1990s, back when there were still newspapers. Philo positively identifies her: "That's her, she's just put makeup on over her tattoos," and the other character asks, "So when did she take orders and become a nun?"
Philo's response is "Oh hell no, she don't take orders worth a crap, she's gotta be in some kind of trouble there."
He's just misunderstood the question. As writer, I didn't really think about it. This is just what I 'hear' Philo saying, because he is responding to the question Philo would hear in those words. Now that I do think about it, I think it is not a mistake and should not be corrected. I believe it belongs in the manuscript because it exposes a slightly less-obvious side of the character and helps develop who he is.
"Take Orders" is one of those obscure colloquial phrases that I don't really expect an ESL speaker to know, even after years in the USA, especially because it sounds just like "Take orders," a much less obscure colloquial phrase that means obeying commands. So he's mixed it up and responded to the question he thought the other character asked. This is, in my mind, entirely normal. If not familiar with the phrase, the question sounds *EXACTLY* like the one he responded to: did someone command her to become a nun?
The other character either doesn't notice the mixup, or maybe doesn't think it's important enough to comment on, or maybe thinks Philo has just made a joke. The manuscript doesn't switch to "omniscient narrator" to explain which, because it doesn't matter. And they move on to formulating a plan to rescue his wife. It doesn't affect the plot or cause any significant misunderstanding, because both questions have effectively the same answer.
This makes my wife bonkers because something like that happens two or three times a chapter, with different characters misunderstanding each other for different reasons. And they usually don't notice that they have. IMO, this is a normal thing that happens to everybody all the time. I hear it all around me when I listen to people talk to each other. But my wife points out, correctly, that it doesn't happen in most works of fiction. There's a misunderstanding but it doesn't affect the plot or cause conflict so she considers it to raise an expectation that's not fulfilled.
And when I explain to her that Philo is an immigrant whose English is nonnative, she's upset because neither of those things drive the plot or cause conflict or even get explicitly mentioned in the book, so she feels that readers are being asked to figure obscure things out for no reason important to them. Being unrelated to plot is not entirely true: Philo does later have a poor initial reaction to a cop and a testy exchange about "driving while brown" which delays working together, so him being not-exactly-white does rise to the point of being plot related. But I still haven't really made it fully explicit what kind of not-exactly-white or mentioned ESL or immigration.
I think all these tiny little ways of developing characters - all these intuitions about their 'voices' in my head, including when and how they misunderstand one another in small ways - are entirely normal and a reasonable way to engage the readers.
Does anybody else have strong opinions about incidental, mostly insignificant, misunderstandings between fictional characters?
