Dynamic Characters (2 page)

• He will be manipulated by a selfish daughter who plays on his guilt as a parent to get him to support her while she spends her life drinking.

• He will face a tough decision about whether to bail out of jail a teenage son who has stolen a car—or let him take the consequences of his own act.

• He will experience a close bond with one daughter, his favorite child—and also experience grief over her death in childbirth.

• He will undertake to raise that daughter's infant—and be appalled at how much resentment he feels toward this helpless mite who caused her mother's death.

• He will love a woman—and lose her because he can't seem to make enough time for her while preoccupied with his children's problems.

Do you see what's happening here? Roger will have to grow—or, rather, your initial conception of him will. Simply thinking of Roger as ''a good man, kind and generous'' is not going to be enough. Your readers must believe him as a man who also experiences guilt, indecision, grief, resentment and passion—not to mention poor judgment. If all we ever see of Roger is his kindness and generosity, the other events of the story won't seem convincing. ''No,'' we'll say, ''I don't believe this guy would really do
that.''

In order to believe that yes, he
would
do that, we need to be given up front a more complex, conflicted and multiply motivated Roger. A man who may indeed be kind and generous, but whose kindness is sometimes misplaced (when?) and whose generosity may have other motives than just benevolence. Perhaps he needs to be in control of everyone around him. Perhaps he can't separate his own self-worth from how good a ''showing'' his children make in life. Perhaps he unconsciously needs them to be weak, so he can be strong. We need to be shown which of these possibilities motivates this particular Roger. We need, in short, a real human being.

A character with genuine, tangled, messed-up, mixed-bag characterization. Just like all of us.

This is what Henry James meant by ''Character is plot.'' Characterization is not divorced from plot, not a coat of paint you slap on after the structure of events is already built. Rather, characterization is inseparable from plot. What characters do, how they react to story events, must grow naturally out of their individual natures. After all, a Roger who was
not
kind and generous would react entirely differently to his adult kids' difficulties. So would a Roger who
was
kind and generous, but not also driven by guilt and self-doubt—a Roger with more confidence and better judgment.

And why
doesn't
Roger have these qualities? Do you know?

Creating a character with depth and complexity takes time and effort. But the effort pays off in making the character's response to events more believable and interesting.

It works the other way, as well: Once you know a complex character down to his core, then that knowing can help you generate plot ideas. Roger, for instance, is driven by a deep, pervasive fear that he isn't really a good person or a good father. He will do anything to put that anxiety to rest, to reassure himself that yes, he's a good parent because—look!—his kids are fine. Who realizes that about him, consciously or not? His daughter who drinks? Yes. His son in jail? No. The daughter who died? Yes. Each of these people will then react to Roger in terms of what they know (or think they know) of his character.

And their reactions, in turn, create more plot complications.

In short, paying concentrated attention to characterization is useful to you, the writer. It means you end up with stronger and fresher plots. This is not only true of novels concerned, as is Roger's, with exploring psychological dilemmas. It's true whether your story is romance, science fiction, action-adventure, whatever. What characters do must grow out of who they are, and who they are is, in turn, influenced by what you make happen to them. Two sides of the same solid gold coin. This is the best reason for putting effort into characterization.

Well, maybe not the best. There's one reason more.

YOU ARE WITH ME ALWAYS

Huckleberry Finn. Jane Eyre. Sydney Carton. Jay Gatsby. Marianne Dashwood. Sherlock Holmes.

There are characters in fiction so real, so palpable, that we can reach out and touch them our whole lives. See them, hear them, sometimes even smell them. They have a solidity and a humanity that calls up answering emotions in us, and we know we would have been much poorer if we'd never met them.

Hester Prynne. Sam Spade. Philip Carey. Ellen Olenska. Rhett Butler. Lady Brett Ashley.

The chance of creating such a character is the best reason of all for giving characterization everything you've got. ''Character is plot''—but it's also so much more. It's the reason books are not only read but reread, not only praised but loved.

Jo March. Quentin Compton. Becky Sharp. Fagin. Jean Brodie. Lord Peter Wimsey.

Hey, as they say in New York about the state lottery, you never know.

BLOOD, SWEAT, TEARS AND PRINTER TONER

One reason you never know is that no one says creating wonderful characters is surefire. Nor is it easy (and if anyone says it is, don't listen). Nor is it, by definition, formulaic. There is no software you can download, type character parameters into and command to crunch out interesting protagonists (and don't believe anyone who says
that,
either). You create characters out of everything that
you
are: your perceptions, emotions, beliefs, history, lifelong reading, desires, dreams. It's not a mappable process, or a simple one, or a straight-line one. You need patience, and insight, and trial and error.

And even then the balky imaginary so-and-sos sometimes won't cooperate.

However, there
are
some techniques you can experiment with in your trial-and-error approach to characterization. That's why this book exists—to explain such techniques. Part one focuses on police-report externals that contribute to characterization: appearance, dress, environment, name(s), place of birth, job, spoken dialogue. Part two is concerned with what goes on inside your character's head: her thoughts, attitudes, fears, loves and dreams. Part three applies these external and internal aspects of character to creating a plot: how to use each to show your protagonist initiating action, reacting to others, making critical decisions, changing over the course of your novel. Finally, we discuss how characterization contributes—or doesn't—to your book's overall theme.

People are endlessly fascinating, endlessly surprising, endlessly strange; just pick up a newspaper. Any newspaper. If you start with people—characters—as you feel your way into your novel, it, too, can become fascinating, surprising and strange.

In short—real.

Let's get started.

One of the first encounters your reader has with your character will probably come from the outside, especially if your novel is told in third person. Someone will observe the character's appearance, clothes, manner. This someone may be the author, or another character, or even the protagonist himself. Whoever does the observing, the description will be related to us readers, and we will get our first chance to form an impression of this person we're going to spend five hundred pages with. Readers pay a lot of (mostly unconscious) attention to this first impression. They want to know if they're looking at a beauty, a beast or something in between.

Thus, you must make the reader's first encounter with your character sharp and memorable. The key is to choose your first descriptive details carefully. These details should:

• create a visual image, so we can picture the character in some important way(s)

^•
 tell us something about the person inside the visual image

• convey an impression of individuality, of someone unique and interesting, whom we will want to know more about

What you don't want is the kind of description that turns up in police reports: ''Caucasian male, twenty-seven years old, six feet, 170 pounds, short brown hair, blue eyes.'' That could describe thousands of men, none of them memorably. It's not individual, it's not evocative of personality, and it's not interesting. Such a description has detail, all right, but not the
right
detail.

So what kind of details are right? Ones that grab the reader's attention.

I NOTICED YOU RIGHT AWAY . . .

One way to grab your reader's attention, of course, is to create a character so bizarre that the reader
can't
look away:

Bethany, an inch short of seven feet high, had lost her bikini top again. The blue-sequined bottom spanned her generous hips, with a hole cut on the left side for the growing calcium deposit, now the size of a golfball. But on top her 40D breasts flapped free, hidden only by the cascading tresses of greenish-black hair.

We'll notice Bethany. But not every book is the kind of story in which Bethany would have a legitimate place (in fact, very few are). And even in the right novel, a string of Bethanys would become tiresome. When everyone is bizarre, nobody seems really weird.

So what descriptive details both feel ''normal'' and succeed in creating a strong first impression of your character's physical appearance? Let's consider some examples.

THREE TERRIFIC DESCRIPTIONS

The following are introductory descriptions of a wide variety of characters, from wildly disparate books of different genres. (I know this is a lot of examples to throw at you all at once, but we're going to analyze them throughout this whole chapter.) The characters have nothing in common with each other—except that all arouse interest:

He was a lank, tall, bearded man in a shaggy brown suit that might have been cut from blankets, and on his head he wore a red ski cap—the pointy kind with a pom-pom at the tip. Masses of black curls burst out from under it. His beard was so wild and black and bushy that it was hard to tell how old he was. Maybe forty? Forty-five? At any rate, older than you'd expect to see at a puppet show, and no child sat next to him.

—Morgan Gower, in Anne Tyler's
Morgans Passing

Carrie stood among [the girls in the locker room] stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color. It rested against her face with dispirited sog-giness and she simply stood, head slightly bent, letting the water splat against her flesh and roll off. She looked the part of the sacrificial goat, the constant butt, believer in left-handed monkey wrenches, perpetual foul-up, and she was.

—Carrie White, in Stephen King's
Carrie

Solid, rumbling, likely to erupt without prior notice, Macon kept each member of his family awkward with fear. His hatred of his wife glittered and sparkled in every word he spoke to her. The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices. Under the frozen heat of his glance they tripped over door sills and dropped the salt cellar into the yolks of their poached eggs.

—Macon Dead, in Toni Morrison's
Song of Solomon

Each of these descriptions creates a vivid picture (can't you just
see
Morgan Gower, or Carrie White?) But each also does more; it links appearance to personality, letting us glimpse the person underneath. We not only visualize Morgan, we sense his exuberant, childlike eccentricity. We are convinced that Carrie White is passive and Macon Dead is dangerous. And all from descriptions of less than a hundred words.