Dynamic Characters (34 page)

Note the plural of that word. The schoolteacher, here named Theresa Dunn, is not merely a victim; she's the complicated yet understandable protagonist that good fiction requires. She arrives at that seedy bar, ready for sex with a thug she doesn't know, because of everything that has happened to her throughout her whole life. Rossner uses her novel to show us what drives Theresa.

At least two motives are factual. Both real-life Katherine Cleary and fictional Theresa Dunn have spines deformed by polio, which leaves them feeling less than perfect. And both are rather isolated individuals, without close friendships.

To these facts, however, Rossner adds other motives for Theresa Dunn. Journalist Fosburgh tells us that ''little is known of Katherine Cleary's childhood.'' This doesn't stop Rossner. She invents for Theresa a brother killed in Vietnam, a gorgeous older sister to whom Theresa could never measure up and a contented younger sister who marries early and happily. In college, Theresa is callously rejected by a married professor after a four-year affair she believes is true love. Rossner also throws in a burning desire in Theresa to escape repeating her mother's life, which Theresa sees as made burdensome by marriage and family, including Theresa's own long illness:

Still, if you weren't careful, you could end up with a house in New Jersey and six screaming kids. Or maybe five, and one who was too sick to scream and just lay in the bed and stared at you.

Terrified of domesticity and the ''nice'' men who lead one into it, hating her own body, feeling inferior always to her sisters, Theresa grows into a woman who feels she doesn't deserve to be loved, and who even needs to be roughed up in order to feel sexual desire. By the time she picks up her killer in an Upper West Side bar, we understand all her tragic motives for being there.
Not
because those motives were true of her real-life counterpart, Katherine Cleary, but because Rossner has concentrated throughout her novel on showing us Theresa's acting out of the demons she herself refuses to recognize.

What does all this mean to you? That if you're going to base your story on real-life incidents, first ask yourself the following questions:

• What does my character think about these events? Why?

• What does my character feel about these events? Why?

• What formed his thoughts and feelings?

• How can I dramatize his motives clearly to my readers?

• What facts do I need to change to make those motives even stronger?

The answers will transform opaque life into illuminating fiction.

I WAS ON THE VERY EDGE OF MY SEAT!

Fiction must not only be illuminating, it should also be exciting. This is where tension comes in. Tension is the other great transformer of life into art.

Tension means that the pressure in a situation mounts and mounts, until finally there's a climactic scene where the pressure in some way explodes. We all know that in real life, it doesn't always work that way. In real life, a given difficult situation might wax and wane, instead of building steadily. A climactic explosion might come with no advance warning. Or it might build and build—and then suddenly collapse into nothingness, like a hurricane that bypasses a town at the last minute. Or it might just wind down slowly, with no real climax at all.

Fiction, however, demands a pattern of mounting tension. Thus, if you are shaping real-life events into fiction, you must rearrange them into the kind of pattern we discussed in the last two chapters—a pattern that puts ever increasing pressure on your protagonist.

To see how this works, let's return to
Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
The factual Katherine Cleary was killed by a bar pickup in a situation no different from her other bar pickups. She had been doing this for several years, and that night offered no more significance for her than any other—until the man killed her. But that random pattern doesn't satisfy the needs of fiction for mounting pressure or significant choices.

So Judith Rossner rearranged events to provide pressure and choice, starting at the very beginning of the novel. We see how deeply Theresa is emotionally involved with her first lover, an older professor. We see her choices of men worsen steadily, as she despises herself more and also feels more need to despise them. Theresa's fall into danger has a clear trajectory, lower and lower.

Another pattern is provided by Rossner's inventing a serious suitor for Theresa. Katherine Cleary had no decent boyfriend in her life. But Rossner gives Theresa a decent man, James, who wants to marry her. James finds out about Theresa's sexual activities with rough strangers and gives her a choice: them or him. He issues his ultimatum on the very night she's killed. In fact, it's this choice that sends Theresa out to Mr. Goodbar. She just can't deal with the pressure.

Further pattern comes from the time-honored use of foils. These are paired characters who are opposites in some crucial aspect, thereby throwing that quality into sharp relief in both of them. Theresa, for instance, cannot face her inner pain. Whenever it tries to break through, she runs away: out of the room, into drink or drugs, into mindless sex. James, on the other hand, calmly faces pain and gives it words. He explains to Theresa why he believes in God:

''The truth,'' he said, ''is that I have chosen to believe in Him. I'm not sure even that's true. I believe in Him and I

choose not to challenge my own belief. Because if I found that my challenge was successful . . . I would feel myself totally alone. And then I would know despair.''
And then I would know despair.
She looked at him in wonder.
I would be alone and then I would know despair.

Theresa can't bear to think about it. Immediately she starts a quarrel with James, to avoid having to think. That's her pattern, a perfect foil to his.

Pattern and pressure—the two elements that create tension. Neither was present in the facts about Katherine Cleary, but Rossner didn't let her story be bounded by facts. In inventing pressures, she created something different: a choice for Theresa with greatly heightened implications. Theresa makes her choice. And dies for it, in a climax that seems to follow inevitably from all that went before.

You can—in fact, you must—do the same with your factual material. Rearrange existing events and invent new ones to form a pattern of mounting pressure. Then let that pressure explode into a climax we're holding our breath waiting for.

THE FIRST OBLIGATION

Your main goal as a fiction writer should be to create emotional truth, not literal truth, in an interesting and exciting way. If that means changing real-life events until they're nearly unrecognizable, go right ahead. Make life serve your plot. Stanley Elkin understood this completely in his wonderful surreal novel
The Living End.
The protagonist, a modern-day loser as beleaguered as Job by tragedy and bad luck, finally makes his way to God to ask,
"Why? Why
did You put so much suffering in the world?''

And God answers simply, ''Because it makes a better story.''

SUMMARY: BASING PLOTS ON REAL EVENTS

• Change whatever facts are necessary to make a better story.

• Concentrate on inventing and dramatizing motives for real-life events.

• Rearrange incidents into a pattern of mounting pressure culminating in a definite climax.

This chapter could just as easily have been titled ''Common Plot Patterns—and the People Who Live Them.'' That's what archetypes are: the original pattern or model after which a thing is made. In other words: the basic, universal characters, the basic, universal plots.

Are
there such things? And if there are, haven't they been worn into useless cliches?

Yes, archetypal plots and characters both exist. And no, they aren't useless cliches—if they're handled with a fresh approach. That usually means original characters inhabiting a time-tested plot, or time-tested characters inhabiting a fresh plot. Let's look at some examples.

AN OLD, OLD STORY: THE ARCHETYPAL PLOT

Some researchers into the human brain have concluded that it reasons not by analyzing data, but by recalling stories. We have cultural stories embedded in the very fabric of our thinking, goes this argument, and those stories influence what we notice in a given situation, how we interpret it and how we choose to react. Moreover, some stories seem to transcend individual cultures. They are universal archetypes. The form may look different in different tellings, but the underlying plot is the same.

Here is one such plot: A character becomes discontented with where he lives. He journeys to some other place, which at first seems much better. But over time, the defects of the second place make themselves known. The character returns home, better able to appreciate what he had.

This is a very old plot. It's also an extremely versatile one, adapting amazingly well to different characters and situations, with each new version fresh and absorbing. These versions include:

• ''City Mouse, Country Mouse,'' a seventeenth-century European folk tale. Country Mouse is visited by her cousin, City Mouse, and tempted to the city by tales of rich human houses with lavish table scraps. But the city household also contains a cat, and after a brush with death, Country Mouse decides she prefers her humble but safe nest and simple diet.

•
 The Wizard ofOz,
by L. Frank Baum, in which Dorothy runs away, is taken to miraculous Oz, but eventually decides ''there's no place like home.''

•
 Bright Lights, Big City,
by Jay Mclnerney, in which the narrator, unable to cope with the grief in his home after his mother dies and his marriage ends, immerses himself in the big-city club scene of drugs, drink, easy sex, nonstop hedonism. Eventually he returns home to take up the grief and sanity he left behind.

•
 Maybe I'll Go Home Next Month,
a young adult novel by Robert Carter, in which Sam, fifteen, runs away from parents who are ''always on his case'' and teachers who ''just put him down.'' A summer on the mean streets of New York City helps him decide to return to his family and his education.

•
 The Dispossessed,
by Ursula K. Le Guin. In the far future on another planet, Shevek leaves his peaceful, spartan, anarchistic society on the moon to enter the richer and more intellectually varied one on the planet Urras. Eventually its injustices drive him back home.

Past, present, future. Fable, realism, science fiction. Children, teens, adult readers. This archetypal plot works for each new mood, set of characters and audience. It—and the other archetypal plots discussed later in this chapter—can work for you, too.

I'VE MET YOU BEFORE: THE ARCHETYPAL CHARACTER

When the character is an archetype, the plot may be new, but the character is recognizable.
Not
because he's a stereotype or a cliche, but because he's an aspect of human nature we all share. We know him because, in some sense, he is us. He embodies some deep part of ourselves that we remember, or fear, or treasure, or hate.

Here is such an archetypal character: the person possessed by some desire who eventually transgresses laws and morals. We all know such a person. She's an alcoholic who can't stop drinking. Or a woman so consumed by the desire for love that she commits terrible acts in her frenzied search for it. (The Glenn Close character in the movie
Fatal Attraction
comes to mind. So does real-life Susan Smith.) Or a man so desirous of financial success that he sacrifices integrity to get it, breaks the law and ends up in jail.

The obsessed person may also be more than an acquaintance. Even if you personally have never gone over the line in your pursuit of some desire, you may recognize in yourself the capacity to do so. Perhaps you've held that capacity in check, through common sense or decency or good luck. But are you sure that you always could, given extremely provocative circumstances?
Completely
sure?

Because the archetype of the character possessed by overwhelming desire is so universal, it fuels an enormous number of different plots. Usually the character ends up destroyed by the laws and ethics he's smashed while pursuing his desire. But even within these shared traits and fates, this archetype lends itself to an astonishing range of individual, fully realized protagonists, including: