Dynamic Characters (31 page)

The same techniques can be used to show us present qualities that prepare for change. The airhead who comes through in a crisis will be more believable if she isn't completely an airhead. She's unexpectedly good at handling money, for instance. Or at sensing what other people feel. Or she never forgets a face.

PRESSURE: I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE

Preparation, however, isn't enough by itself to make character changes believable. The next step is to add enough
pressure
to force your character to change. Why the pressure? Because change is threatening to most people, and they won't do it unless something drives them to it, usually pain or conflict. This truth is well known to psychiatrists, drug counselors and confirmed bachelors.

Scrooge is an especially hard case. It takes four ghosts, counting Marley, and a glimpse of his own tombstone in order to effect a change in him. Probably your protagonist will respond to somewhat less pressure. The pressure should be of a type appropriate to the story circumstances and to the character.

Some people, for instance, are most easily reached through concern for others—which might mean that your alcoholic young mother changes only after you dramatize how her drinking is making her child miserable. Other people are motivated to change by guilt, or boredom, or hitting bottom, or love, or danger. Pick your pressure and apply liberally, until something has to give.

All right, now your character has reached the moment of change. She realizes that something has to be different from here on in. How can you best portray this crucial inner transformation?

REALIZATION: IF I DON'T TRY

SOMETHING DIFFERENT, THAT'S ALL SHE WROTE

Oddly, the best technique is to downplay the moment of change. If you've done a convincing job with preparation and pressure, we readers will be expecting some sort of change. If you then drag out the moment of
realization
by having the changee review what she's been doing so far, why it hasn't worked, what she could do differently and how resolved she is to turn things around—if you prolong the moment with all that intellectualizing—it will lose its electric force. Instead, it's more effective to indicate that
something
has happened and let us deduce what it is from the character's next actions.

Scrooge, for instance, does not sit on his bed on Christmas morning ruminating about his past sins and future reformation. Instead, the moment he awakes, he flings open the window and engages in exuberant conversation with a passing, astonished lad.

Similarly, consider the moment of significant change in
Bright Lights, Big City.
The second-person narrator has spent a couple hundred pages drinking, drugging, partying and behaving badly in order to try to evade looking at his life. He's been led in this by Tad, his wild and basically heartless best friend. At a crazy party in which he's introduced to his ex-wife Amanda's gigolo fiance, the narrator has finally had enough: of his destructive friends, his destructive life, his own self-destruction. He's ready to change. McInerney indicates this in a brief, understated exchange:

''Thanks.'' You stand up.

''Take it easy, Coach.'' [Tad] puts his arm around your shoulders.

''I just realized something.''

''What's that?''

"You and Amanda would make a terrific couple.''

The narrator has, of course, realized much more than that. Butunder-playing the moment of change saves the passage from melodrama and leads naturally to step four: validation.

VALIDATION: THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT NOW

Validation
refers to concrete actions the character performs that let us know for sure that she's changed—and in what way. It's never enough for the author to tell us that a person has grown. It's not even enough for the person to tell herself (how often have friends said, ''I've really changed,'' when you can see quite clearly that they're doing the same old things?). Words are easy. Only actions have the force to convince. Seeing is believing.

Scrooge's transformation is validated by a whole string of actions: gifts for the Cratchit family. Donations to the poor. Benevolence toward his nephew and niece-in-law. Dickens takes the time to dramatize each of these fully, validating for us that more has happened with Scrooge than just a passing mood of relief at avoiding immediate death.

McInerney also shows us two validating actions, each fully dramatized. After the narrator's moment of realization with Tad, he finds a phone and calls Vicky, the one sane person in his life. For the first time, he is honest with her about who he is, what he's been through and what he's feeling. He then walks home across Manhattan, finally letting himself remember his dead mother and feel his grief about her death. She used to bake bread; he stops to buy a bag of fresh-baked rolls and to accept that his life is going to be different from now on:

You get down on your knees and tear open the bag. The smell of warm dough envelops you. The first bite sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again.

The book ends there.

To make the change in your character genuinely convincing to readers, finish your story with one or two validating actions. These may be as simple as mailing a letter or closing a door. In an action-oriented novel, the character may have larger and more dramatic actions to perform after he changes, in order to undo whatever chaos existed
before
he changed.

Readers enjoy watching characters grow. To give us that pleasure, dramatize the entire change process: preparation, pressure, realization, validation. Then we'll believe what's happening inside your pro-tagonist—and inside us as we discover her. This is the very heart of successful fiction, the lifeblood of most novels. In the next chapter, we'll look at it in even more detail.

SUMMARY: CHARACTERS WHO CHANGE

• Not all protagonists need to change. Exempt are the protagonists of satires, series action novels, outrageous romps, and books whose point is that human beings are hopelessly stuck.

• If your character does change, give us evidence beforehand that he is capable of being more than he is.

• Put sufficient pressure on him to change.

• Dramatize the moment of change through what he does, not just says or thinks.

• Give us some reason to believe the character change will last once the immediate crisis is over.

In the last chapter we rushed through the complex process of character change, a process important enough to label it ''the very heart of successful fiction,'' in less than 3,000 words. That's quite a sprint. Hearts deserve more time. So in this chapter, we'll look again at the four steps of effective character change, this time in considerable and concrete detail. We'll do this by examining how one recent novel intertwines character, change and plot:
Higher Education,
by Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle.

This novel is science fiction for young adults, but the techniques it embodies apply to other types of fiction as well. Whether characters change on Mars, in Regency England, in contemporary New York or deep in the heart of Texas, the four basic steps apply. Let's see how.

Higher Education
is the story of Rick Luban, a sixteen-year-old troublemaker in a future public-school system even more beleaguered

than inner-city schools are now. Academic standards have been watered down to the point where most kids can barely read; between voice-activated computers and other media entertainment, there's little need. Rick doesn't see the need to prepare for a meaningful job because few jobs are available, and they don't go to people like him. At home, his parents don't exhibit much concern about him. Rick gains prestige among his peers by being obnoxious to teachers, sexually predatory with girls and cynical about life.

In short, not a candidate for Most Likely to Succeed.

But Rick
does
succeed—because he changes. To make the change believable, Sheffield and Pournelle carefully and unobtrusively take Rick through the four steps discussed in the last chapter.

PREPARATION: THE CHARACTER BEHIND THE CONDOM CAPER

The way to prepare us for a character change is to show us that either at some point in the past the character behaved differently, or in the story present he possesses the qualities necessary for change. Rick, at sixteen, does not possess much past. Therefore, Sheffield and Pournelle concentrate on the second approach.

In the novel's opening scene, Rick and his two buddies are engaged in a favorite occupation: harassing teachers. Rick sneaks out of the auditorium during assembly, ducks back into the classroom and arranges a water-filled condom over the door to drench the teacher who unlocks it. What do we learn from this introduction to the character?

That Rick Luban is obnoxious, contemptuous of authority, willing to lie and to humiliate others, a show-off among his peers. All that, yes. He also gets into fights and callously ''scores'' with girls. But Sheffield and Pournelle also show us that Rick is capable of planning, of attention to detail and of a certain perverse discipline:

He stayed in his seat until everyone except Mr. Preebane had left the room, then he moved out and held the door for the teacher. Preebane nodded his thanks. Rick closed the door; was careful not to lock it; and hurried after the rest of the class.

First he headed away from Room 33, keeping his eyes open for working videocameras. The contraceptive dispensers were down by the cafeteria entrance. They needed a student name and ID code before they would operate, but Rick was prepared for that. He entered ''Daniel J. Rackett'' and "XKY-586," waited as the valedictorian's ID was confirmed, and took the packet of three condoms. He did it twice more.

The corridors were deserted as he hurried back toward Room 33, opened the door, and slipped through. The tricky piece now was to disable the classroom videocamera without being seen by it. The cable ran along the ceiling, well out of reach. Rick scaled the open door and balanced precariously on top of it. He had no knife on him—anything that might form a weapon would never get past the school entrance—but his nail clippers were enough for this job. He crouched on top of the door, reached up, and delicately snipped the thin gray cable.

There is intelligence behind this stupid prank, but not enough to save Rick. The water bomb hits not the teacher but his aunt, a visiting congresswoman on the board of education. Rick is expelled.

A kind teacher takes the time to talk with Rick on a bench outside the school. The conversation propels plot; the teacher urges Rick to take application tests for the apprentice program of Vanguard Mining, which mines asteroids in space. However, Sheffield and Pournelle also use this long conversation for more preparation for later character change, by showing us several more latent or underutilized aspects of Rick's character. We learn that he has a natural aptitude for math.

''So now what happens to you?'' ''I don't know. Sit around and watch the tube, I guess, until they throw me out. Mick's goin' to kill me. The education incentive was nine-forty a month and we only get sixty-two hundred altogether.''

''So your education is a good part of the money. Of course you don't get it yourself.''

''Naw. Mick takes it. He's gonna hate losing that nine-forty. Fifteen percent—''

''It is that. You do percentages in your head?'' ''Sure. That's useful, you need it to play the numbers.''

We are also shown that, unlike many teens, Rick is able to control his temper when it's to his own advantage, even in the face of direct insult:

Rick stood up. . . . "Why are you doing this for me?''

Hamel paused. ''Certainly it's not because I like you, Luban. I do not. As I said, you are a fool. And you are—'' ''Ignorant, cynical, amoral, and unthinking. I heard you.''

Rick is also capable of such softer emotions as gratitude, although he has trouble expressing it:

He wanted somehow to thank Mr. Hamel, but he did not know how.

This ability to recognize another person's actions and motives will become critical later in the book.

Finally, when Rick goes to take the application tests for the mining job, we see that he has a street-smart ability to size up a situation, rather than act on his first impulse: