Dynamic Characters (21 page)

She never appears in the novel, having already drowned when the unnamed narrator marries Rebecca's widower, Maxim de Winter. But everyone is full of praise for the dead woman, and through the shy and awkward second wife we get a textured, nuanced portrait of Rebecca: charming, gracious, organized, competent, beautiful, spirited, adaptable. Everything the poor narrator is not. The novel is nearly over before the second wife—and we—learn that in actuality Rebecca was cold, wanton, selfish and cruel enough to trick her husband into killing her so that she didn't have to do it herself.

How does du Maurier pull off such a surprise villain—one that seems to emerge plausibly from the setup of an entirely different personality? And how can you do the same? Some considerations:

• Don't make the surprise villain a POV character. Not even for one scene. This is cheating, because we expect to have access to all of a POV character's important thoughts, and the fact that she's seducing her brother-in-law, say, is fairly important. You can't conceal it.

• Plant hints that all is not as it seems. These should not be blatant, but they must be there, so that the POV character can recall them after the revelation and thereby lend it credibility. Maxim de Winter, for instance, does not like the stone cottage by the bay: ''If you had my memories you would not go there either.'' Also, Maxim never mentions Rebecca's name. Choose such hints carefully, plant them unobtrusively and use them later.

• Make sure the two sides of your surprise villain—the positive Before and negative After—are plausible together. Rebecca's positive traits—charm, taste, brains, beauty—are not incompatible with being selfish and manipulative. Other positive-negative combinations would be harder to make credible. A person who is represented as boorish and stupid, for example, probably can't be revealed as an international art thief—that criminal career takes too much education, finesse and adaptability. Similarly, if your placid, constantly knitting grandmother is to be plausibly revealed as a surprise serial killer, we had better be shown some degree of anger, self-deception or sheer craziness long before the revelation.

STANDARD VILLAINS I: THE OVER-THE-TOP WEIRDOS

Standard villains
are standard only in the function they fulfill in the plot: They're the unrepentant, untextured bad guys who are deliberately making life tough for the good guys. They're classical antagonists, generators of conflict, the black hats hassling Dodge City. They come in two varieties.

The first type, which is increasingly popular, are over-the-top exaggerations. The blackest of evil, the deadliest of weapons, the coldest of hearts, the most colorful of personalities. The movies have a lot to do with this: the Joker and Penguin in
Batman,
the mad bomber of
Speed,
right up to Oliver Stone's Mickey and Mallory of
Natural Born Killers.
In print, we have similar hyped-up, exaggerated villains: Loren Estleman's Lake Erie terrorists in
Kill Zone;
all of Ian Fleming's weirdos, killing people with bizarre inventiveness; the Walking Man in Stephen King's
The Stand;
legions of invading aliens in much (although not all) escapist science fiction.

The appeal of the over-the-top villain is not realism but novelty. As such, many of the methods of characterization we've discussed so far simply don't apply. This brand of villain does
not
need background, complexity, individuality, unique thoughts. You aren't creating a real person here, but a colorful sideshow. If that's what you really want, then you must:

• stretch your imagination. Anything not absolutely fresh will fail. Give the villain larger-than-life beliefs (''I am the devil incarnate''), crimes, weapons, daring. Don't hold back. Think big.

• match the villain's evil to the hero's weaknesses. In Ed McBain's
Doll,
the villain, a sexy temptress who ties up the cop hero and injects him with heroin to turn him into an addict, plays directly to his weaknesses: a dislike of being confined, and a male response to female nakedness. (Note: Drugs are not fresh or larger-than-life menaces now—but
Doll
was written in the early 1960s.)

• surround your weirdos with factual details. Although plausibility isn't as much of a requirement in this kind of book as in many others, accuracy in details can still help hook readers into accepting the rest. Estleman's weapons, from assault weapons to depth charges, perform as in real life. The police procedures in
Doll
are accurate. King uses actual Las Vegas geography in
The Stand.

• enjoy your villains. This kind of book is not gritty, painful realism. If you don't have fun with it, neither will your reader.

STANDARD VILLAINS II:

THE MUNDANE EVIL ALL AROUND US

The second class of villains who fulfill a standard plot function are actually the hardest of all to write. They are the mundane, no-larger-than-life antagonists who are evil out of stupidity or weakness or selfishness. They ruin (or at least, try to ruin) others' lives without being colorful, without being original, without repenting, without surprising us. They're criminals as most criminals are in reality—even though fiction is charged with creating more heightened emotion, and more coherent patterns, than does real life. No wonder they're hard to write.

Yet brilliant examples of the mundane villain abound. Captain Queeg, petty and tyrannical, in Herman Wouk's
The Caine Mutiny.
Bob Ewell in Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird:
''a low-down skunk with enough liquor in him to make him brave enough to kill children.'' Dennis Nedry in Michael Crichton's
Jurassic Park,
selling out his employers and exposing a parkful of researchers to unfenced cloned dinosaurs. Gary Cooper White, criminal drifter, who brutally murders Theresa Dunn because she won't let him stay the night, in Judith Rossner's
Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

To create such villains, you must apply all the guidelines in every other category except over-the-top weirdos. Set up the character early. Give him a wider life, and more comprehensive personality, than just his villainy. Give him plausible self-justifications for his actions and consistent reactions to his crimes. Deepen stereotypes with unexpected twists. Surround your villain with as many accurate details as your hero.

VILLAIN CHECK: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

In short, creating a successful realistic antagonist takes the same level of work as creating a successful protagonist. Gary Cooper White, for instance, doesn't have nearly as many scenes as Theresa Dunn in
Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
But Rossner has taken care that the scenes White does have—his confession and the murder—are each packed with nuance and detail. We can see, hear, smell this guy. We are in his head (and a loathsome place it is). We know why he kills, and why he kills in the way he does. He is not just another cipher. He is Gary Cooper White, a dreary and horrifying moral vacuum.

Evil may be banal, but it shouldn't be insubstantial. Give it substance. To do that, employ all the same techniques you used to create your hero: appearance, dialogue, attitudes, hopes, fears, preferences, mannerisms, childhood background, dreams and desires.

One test of a good villain is: Could you write a book telling his side of the story? It would be a different book, surely, and you might not want to write it—but
could
you? Is your villain real enough, complicated enough, possessed of enough personal history so that you could tell his tale in addition to, or instead of, the hero's?

If not, think about the villain some more. Try to get into his head, hear his language, feel his fear (everybody's afraid of something—

more on this in a later chapter). Imagine his childhood. Think what he loves. Listen to what he tells himself just before he falls asleep at night. And try again.

When the answer is yes, everybody comes out ahead. Especially your reader.

SUMMARY: CREATING GOOD BAD GUYS

• Not all novels need villains.

• If you do have a villain, flesh him out as fully as you do the hero— unless he's an over-the-top weirdo in a fast-paced action book with no other literary goals.

• Make sure that over-the-top weirdos really
are:
outrageous, fresh and eye-catching.

• For accidental villains, set up the fatal flaw early and take care that the character is more than just his flaw.

• Provide villains with sufficient and heartfelt self-justification.

• Foreshadow surprise villains carefully enough so that readers will think back on the story and say, ''Of course!''

As we saw in the last chapter, a villain both is and is not a special case of characterization. He's
not
different from all your other fictional people in that he, too, needs to be well characterized. But he
is
different in that, depending on the type of villain he is, you may have to use some additional techniques to fully create him on the page.

The same is true of the protagonist who isn't really a villain, but isn't exactly someone you'd invite home to dinner, either. The unsympathetic protagonist.

Stories with unsympathetic protagonists often receive mixed reactions from readers. An aspiring novelist once wrote me a bewildered letter centering around this question:

Can a short story survive if the narrator is disliked? My creative writing professor and a screenwriter I happen to

know both read a story of mine, and both were uncomfortable—disquieted?—by the depths of hate they felt for my heroine ... a bitter old woman.

It's a good question. Although both a story and a dinner party require us to spend time with unknown personalities, they are not the same. We don't want to attend a dinner that features ugly surroundings, scanty food, social cruelty or poisoning the guests—but all these things can be welcome in a good novel. Similarly, we're willing to undergo intimate fictional encounters with people whom for various reasons we might not invite into our homes: Don Corleone (too dangerous), Becky Sharp (too exploitive), George Babbitt (too boring), Captain Queeg (too untrustworthy), Hannibal Lector (we don't wish to
be
dinner).

Note that this list is widely eclectic. It includes characters that some people might find sympathetic (Becky Sharp has her defenders, including feminists that consider her to be making the best of the hand Victorian women were dealt). It includes characters who are in no way evil but merely unsympathetically limited and tedious (George Babbitt). And it includes characters so unsympathetic (Hannibal Lector) that they are in fact villains. There's no clear line between the villain and the unsympathetic protagonist, just as there is no clear line between the sympathetic and unsympathetic character. Each reader draws those lines for himself. And each reader will differ in his reaction to spending four hundred pages with a person he does not like. Some readers enjoy it. They like to dislike fictional characters.

On the other hand, no writer can afford to ignore that many people read for identification. These readers want to experience vicariously adventures they will never have in real life. They want the thrill of falling into perfect love or solving a murder or making three million dollars or escaping the villains in an unchartered boat. To experience these things along with your protagonist, readers must first be able to identify with your protagonist. And they won't want to do that if your protagonist is as criminal as Don Corleone, as rapacious as Becky Sharp, as wimpy as George Babbitt, as paranoid as Captain Queeg or as monstrous as Hannibal Lector.

But on the other hand (we're running out of limbs here),
The Godfather
(Mario Puzo),
Vanity Fair
(William Makepeace Thackeray),

Babbitt
(Sinclair Lewis),
The Caine Mutiny
(Herman Wouk) and
The Silence of the Lambs
(Thomas Harris) were
all
bestsellers. When can you get away with an unsympathetic main character? There's no one straightforward answer—but there
are
some variables to consider. They take the form of seven questions to ask yourself before and as you write your fairly-off-putting-to-totally-repulsive character.