Dynamic Characters (7 page)

Novels are different. When we spend five hundred pages with a character, we want more than a powerful moment. We want to know this person.

That's why occupation is important. It lets us see how your protagonist spends his days, structures his time, invests his energies, realizes his dreams. Or doesn't. A job can be many things, and sometimes a paycheck is the least important aspect.

The right job for your character can do three things for your novel:

• characterize the protagonist

• gain credibility for the author

• provide plot ideas

However, it must be the
right
job. What job is that?
THE PRE-EMPLOYED PROTAGONIST

In some novels, you don't really have a choice. The job
is
the novel. If P.D. James's protagonist, Adam Dalgliesh, weren't a detective, he wouldn't have murders to solve. If Herman Wouk's Willie Keith weren't an officer aboard the U.S.S.
Caine,
he couldn't have participated in
The Caine Mutiny.
In such books, employment comes tightly bound to the original idea.

However, employment can still be used to characterize. What is most important about a job is not just what a person works at but why, how and with what results. Did your character choose his job? Is he doing it from financial necessity, because it's the only work he could find, because his parents wanted him to, only temporarily while he qualifies for something else, or as the realization of a lifelong dream?

Does he like his work? Hate it? Regard it as a necessary but boring interruption to the parts of his life he really likes? Resent it because he considers it beneath him? A fourth-grade teacher who wakes up every morning eager to rush to the classroom is a different person from the fourth-grade teacher who loathes the very sight of a chalkboard.

Is he good at it? Mediocre? Downright terrible? Does he care? How much of his ego is bound up in his work?

Dramatizing answers to questions like these can show us a lot more about your protagonist than merely telling us he works as a salesman, or a lathe operator, or a doctor. Some examples:

• Charles Paris, the recurring amateur sleuth in Simon Brett's mystery series, is a British actor. But Olivier he's not. We see Charles appearing in a string of bad productions, knowing they're bad, yet taking comfort in the fact that his small parts give him plenty of time backstage to drink Bell's whiskey. When he's supposed to be a corpse, hidden on-stage during the whole first act, he can't keep from giggling. Yet, touchingly, he collects his own reviews, which are usually of the type, ''Also appearing in the cast was Charles Paris.'' Through his attitudes toward his lamentable parts, we come to know Charles's real interests (drinking), his detached but acute powers of perception, his acceptance of his own mediocrity and his nearly dead traces of failed hope.

• The unnamed, second-person protagonist of Jay McInerney's novel
Bright Lights, Big City
has a different attitude. He works in the ''Department of Factual Verification'' of a national magazine. His job is to verify facts in articles by big-name authors. He hates the job and hates his boss. As his life unravels, so does his work performance. McInerney uses job details to illuminate his character's confusion about the world, himself and his future. Had we known this protagonist only in social settings, we wouldn't have known him nearly as well, nor realized the full extent of his personal crisis.

• Violet Clay, in Gail Godwin's eponymous novel, is similarly confused. Violet knows what she wants to do: paint. But she expects easy success, and when it doesn't come, she panics. She turns instead to painting covers for trashy paperback books, because there she can be a star. Violet's career is only one aspect of her self-centered attitude (she also expects love and money to be instantly available to her), but an important one. When she finally grows up, she starts making the sacrifices necessary to genuinely learn her art.

• At the opposite end of the attitude scale, Adam Silverstone, in Noah Gordon's medical novel
The Death Committee,
is totally committed to his profession. Chief resident in a great Boston hospital, he has always wanted to be a doctor, has struggled against great economic odds to realize his dream and knows he is talented. Author Gordon uses Silverstone's committed, professional attitude toward his work as a counterpoint to his halfway, ungiving attitude toward human relationships. Silverstone is a wonderful doctor, but must learn to become an ethical human being.

A JOB WITH CLASS

A second way that a job characterizes your protagonist is to locate him in the socioeconomic structure. This can be a convenient shorthand for conveying information about background, because readers will make certain assumptions about certain jobs. If, for instance, your character teaches Greek at Yale, most readers will make certain assumptions about her: She's educated, her salary allows middle-class living, she is not going to say ''ain't'' or ''I give her three dollars for that hat.'' Starting from your readers' basic assumptions about professors (or doctors, or drug dealers, or NBA stars), you can then expend your wordage on individualizing your character and differentiating her from type.

Or, you can play it another way. You can use our socioeconomic preconceptions to play
against
type, surprising us with intriguing anomalies. Show us your character on the job as a dishwasher—and then show us that he also collects reproductions of pre-Columbian art and reads the great French poets in the original. We'll be fascinated to learn this guy's background, including his reasons for choosing the work he has.

Judith Rossner did this very well in her novel
Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
Her protagonist is an elementary-school teacher from a respectable family, who habitually picks up rough and dangerous men at bars. Eventually, one of them kills her. Because our expectations about primary-school teachers don't include this behavior, Rossner gets our immediate attention. What made this particular young woman behave so contrary to her class?

A note of caution, however: When you play strongly against occupational type, you must spend time convincing us that your character really would do this sort of work. We have no trouble accepting that smart, ambitious Adam Silverstone would choose to be a doctor. You will have to work hard to show us why an art collector and admirer of French poets is employed as a dishwasher.

POSITION WANTED:

THE NOT-YET-EMPLOYED CHARACTER

So much for the novel in which the job and the basic novel structure arrive in your mind in a single package. Detectives in mystery novels, doctors in medical thrillers, platoon leaders in war novels—piece of cake. But suppose you don't know
what
your character does?

Then you have a marvelous opportunity to employ him. Don't reach unthinkingly for those staples of TV sitcoms: architect, advertising copywriter, waitress. Be more imaginative. He could be an antique dealer, a ballet dancer, a costumer, a diemaker, an engineer, a forger, a gunsmith. . .. You get the idea. The possibilities are wide.

Wide, but not infinite. The right job for your character must fit in with both the rest of your novel and your own abilities. You couldn't, for instance, employ a major character in
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
as a circus clown. The book has no need for a circus clown; it would seem artificial. Descriptions of circus-clown duties would add nothing to Rossner's story, and might compete against its thematic concerns and general atmosphere.

So employ your protagonist—and the major secondary characters as well—carefully. As you choose jobs for them, keep five criteria in mind: self-image, worldview, natural abilities, class and credibility.

GIVE HIM A JOB THAT TELLS US SOMETHING ABOUT HIS SELF-IMAGE

Did your protagonist choose to become a successful scientist, spending eight years in college and fifteen in intense research on plasma physics? This man is focused, disciplined, intelligent—and he knows it. Perhaps modestly, perhaps egotistically. Either way, he trusts himself to set a goal and follow through until he's achieved it.

Similarly, the forty-year-old man who in the past two years has worked as a salesclerk, handyman, busboy, truck driver, day laborer, telemarketer and petty thief—and none of them for more than four months at a stretch—has a different self-image. He sees the world as hostile (''Look what they did to me now!'') and himself as a fundamental loser. Is he? Maybe that's what your novel is about.

On the other hand, a string of jobs is normal for a twenty-year-old still searching for his place in the world. Before he becomes a doctor, W. Somerset Maugham's Philip Carey
(Of Human Bondage)
tries out accountant, artist and floorwalker. He is confused about himself, his talents and his desires, and his confusion is beautifully dramatized by his wildly disparate jobs.

GIVE HIM A JOB THAT TELLS US ABOUT HIS IMAGE OF THE WORLD

This may come less from his choice of job than from his attitude toward its permutations. He's a cop: Is he the type who prefers to work with troubled kids or the type who prefers to break down doors and get rough with perps? She's a fashion designer: Does she fawn on rich customers, or enjoy adapting pretty clothes for the average female figure? He's an accountant—does he genuinely enjoy the work, or did he choose it because it's a secure job, with regular hours and no physical danger, in a frightening world? Show us.

GIVE HIM A JOB THAT LETS US ASSESS HIS TALENTS

This comes partly from how well he succeeds at different aspects of his profession. Is he organized? Clumsy? Hopeless with people? Persuasive? Punctual? Patient? Persistent? Show us, through how he handles work duties.

GIVE HIM A JOB THAT FITS THE NOVEL'S SOCIAL CIRCUMSTANCES

I recall a recent, let-it-be-nameless romance in which a woman was supposedly paying the rent on a New York penthouse apartment and supporting two kids on her salary as an art-gallery assistant. She also dressed superbly and sent a lot of roses. People familiar with art-gallery salaries and New York prices howled with derisive laughter. If you need your character to have lots of money and he hasn't inherited it, stolen it or married it, give him a job where he can earn it.

The same goes for more intangible acquisitions. If your character has impressive political connections, either have her born into a political family (a la the Kennedys) or employ her in a place where logically she would meet a lot of high-ranking politicians. If your plot requires that she know a lot about the workings of the FBI, and you don't want her to work for the Bureau itself, then she might be a journalist on the Washington beat, or a cop who regularly attends law-enforcement programs at the FBI training center in Virginia, or a caterer with a contract at the Hoover building. Be inventive.

GIVE HIM A JOB THAT YOU CAN WRITE ABOUT IN CREDIBLE DETAIL

As in all aspects of writing, the details make the difference. Your character is going to spend eight hours a day at this job—a third of his life. It's very real to him. Therefore, you must make it real to us. You can't do that if you don't know anything about it.
Personnel manager
may be no more than a vague label to you—but to a person who is one, it's a very specific set of tasks, headaches, triumphs, hurdles and goals. We need to share them. Not all of them, and not necessarily in exhaustive depth, but convincingly enough that we will believe this character really invests time and energy in what you say he does.

For instance, the reviews of Judy Blume's adult novel
Smart Women
almost universally pointed out that the teenage characters were much more successful than the adults. Blume, of course, has much more experience with creating youthful characters; she is one of the best-selling writers of young adult fiction in America. Nonetheless, I think the lack of realism in
Smart Women
's mature protagonist related directly to that protagonist's job.

Margo Sampson is supposed to be an architect with a small Colorado firm, a position that demands a great deal of creative effort. Yet Margo is never shown thinking about her designs, sacrificing personal time to solve technical problems, handling job details, meeting with clients or encountering the frustrations inevitable to building anything. She has none of the professional highs, lows or absorption detailed in, for example, Tracy Kidder's wonderful nonfiction book about building,
House.
Instead, whenever Margo's job is mentioned, it's usually in connection with her love affairs: She had an affair with her boss; she keeps a list of her lovers in the top drawer of her desk; a design contract is determined by her boyfriend's ex-wife's jealousy.

But, you might ask, so what? This is a book about relationships, not about building. Why does it matter if Margo is not very convincing as an architect?

It matters because it makes
Margo
less convincing. In the real

world, a job is many things to a person: means of support, proof of worth, daily challenge, path to social betterment, confirmation of worldview, source of exhaustion and pride and delight and frustration and, sometimes, incredible anger. Anything that real to your character must also be made real to us. Otherwise, this person lacks a major dimension. He seems less than fully there.