Make A Scene (38 page)

Though these allies do not need to have a complex character arc, most often they
will
have to rise to some kind of challenge in order to support your protagonist. Allies often must undergo an act of courage or selflessness on behalf of the protagonist—however, the goal is not for the ally to change, but for the protagonist to. Allies will achieve these feats in one of a few different ways:

• Sacrifice.
It's very common for an ally to sacrifice himself in a narrative so that your protagonist can carry on with his task. All great epic stories have a sacrifice of this kind. My favorite fantasy series, by Robin Hobb, beginning with
Assassin's Apprentice
and continuing on for a total of nine interlinked books, is rich with wonderful allies who sacrifice themselves in many different ways for the protagonists. Hobb is a master of character development, and I recommend her books to anyone who struggles to build characters of any type.

• Finding surprising strength or courage.
Another wonderful way to use your ally is to have him rally strength or courage nobody knew he was capable of, just when the protagonist needs it most. Think Neville Longbottom—who finds his power in time to support Harry Potter in a big fight. There's nothing more dramatic than a scared ally exhibiting sudden courage, conscience, or strength in the face of danger.

• Rallying larger support groups.
Sometimes your protagonist must go his journey alone for one reason or another. Secondary characters can rally support on the protagonist's behalf without him knowing they are coming, and show up at the scene of his drama with reinforcements that he did not expect. This might take the form of a group of activists who descend upon their cause at the last minute, or a group of women in a historical novel all showing up to fight for their right to vote.

Allies should be vivid and memorable, but they should also function under this main imperative: to support, bolster, and serve the protagonist. If your secondary character doesn't do one of those three things, you've either got a superfluous character who should be cut or an antagonist in disguise.

MINOR CHARACTERS

Finally we come to the last set of characters that should appear in your fiction: minor characters. Their job is to add spice and realism. These are the store clerks, passersby, beautiful ladies, phone operators, plane stewards, waitresses, strangers on a train, movie ushers, etc., who provide small opportunities for interactions and challenges to your main characters. They can be both disposable and essential, depending on your needs. You will know minor characters by the fact that they do not make frequent appearances in scenes as protagonists or secondary characters—they pretty much appear as needed, which might be once in your whole narrative.

Think of Glenda, the good witch in the movie
The Wizard of Oz,
who turns up only twice to give Dorothy important tips on how to get in—and out of—the Emerald City. Or think even more minor, like the crew on a ship in one of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels. Minor characters do not need to be complex. This flat quality works because minor characters exist as foils for your protagonists. In fact, I like to think of them as chemicals that cause reactions in a solution. By that I mean they are there for protagonists to bounce ideas off of, get into brief fights with, and gain tiny pearls of wisdom from in passing scenes. They don't need to be present in as many scenes as your main characters, and they don't need to be vividly drawn.

You most definitely don't have to worry about whether these characters will change. You don't have to give them a love interest or a childhood.

Good uses for minor characters in scenes are to:

• Offer a piece of plot information.
This should be information that the protagonist needs to know or cannot reveal.

•Act as a witness to major plot events, helping to tie threads together.

This may be the witness to a murder, the child who speaks up in his parents' vitriolic divorce, the silent neighbor who reveals the husband's betrayal when the protagonist needs to know.

• Provide a tempering force of behavior.
Your protagonist is fiery and rash, but a friend or acquaintance acts as the calm conscience.

•Add a touch of realism.
Most of us live near, and interact with, other people on a daily basis in nearly everything we do, so your characters are bound to encounter others, from close friends to clerks at the grocery store. In fact, if your character does not meet people at some point in your narrative, you'd better have a good reason for that—incarcera-tion or a case of agoraphobia, for example.

•Add comic relief.
A wisecracking joker can be a great addition to balance intense scenes.

•Act as a trouble-maker.
A minor character can exist merely to add trouble and conflict to your characters' lives: an ex-girlfriend who has a habit of turning up each time your protagonist starts dating a girl he really likes, or a hostile relative who steals from your protagonist's house.

• Function as a distraction.
A minor character can be a red herring to distract the reader from a plot twist you plan to throw into an end scene. The serial killer might be someone the reader has come to think is a pretty nice guy, so you throw in a minor character who looks pretty bad—a history of drugs and violence, say, and lead the reader away from your true killer long enough to let the truth come as a surprise.

As you might be able to tell from the above list, minor characters almost qualify more as a part of the setting than they do as characters. You don't need to develop them deeply; you simply need to make them useful.

HOW TO KEEP YOUR CHARACTERS IN THEIR PLACES

I'd like to mention that secondary and minor characters can be seductive. You can find them saying a bit too much or showing up in more scenes than is useful. Let's refer back to Harry Potter. Though Harry has many friends and comrades and meets many interesting wizards and creatures who are compelling (without whom he never would have made it through seven books worth of adventures), the reader is not going to waste much time worrying about what happens to Madam Rosmerta, the pub proprietor, or Argus Filch, the Hogwarts school caretaker. It's worth mentioning on this note that Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, Harry's two best friends, though they are strong and well developed, are still secondary characters. Ultimately it is Harry's journey and story, and he is the character who must undergo the dramatic transformation. As allies, Ron and Hermione exhibit courage and strength, sacrifice and support, but if one of them had been killed off (horror!) the story would have gone on. While your minor characters are important, remember that they will stay minor only as long as they:

• Make infrequent appearances—they should not appear in every scene

• Demonstrate little or no internal reflection

•Are not emotionally complex

• Demonstrate a behavior or personality that challenges or supports your character

•Act as a catalyst to stimulate change or reaction in your protagonist in any scene

If you've got a secondary or minor character present in nearly every scene, the reader will start to think that maybe this character isn't so minor anymore, and then she will begin to expect more out of that character—which means more out of you. Secondary characters can certainly show up in a number of scenes with your protagonist, but again, the focus must be on your protagonist, and these secondary characters must be there to serve, support, or thwart the protagonist in some way.

Promoting Secondary Characters

From time to time you may discover that someone you intended to be a secondary character is rich and vivid, and fits into your plot so well that you want to bump up his status to co-protagonist—which means that he now would get equal point of view time with any other protagonists currently in your narrative, or even replace your protagonist altogether. Pay attention to how you feel when writing a secondary character. If he fits most of the following criteria, he may be more major than you realized:

•Appears in all or most scenes

• Begins to undergo an emotional transformation separate from that of your existing protagonist

• Becomes so integral to the plot that it falls apart or becomes confusing without him

If he starts to take over the story, or you find that he is more compelling than you first thought, you might consider whether he's been given too low a status in your narrative and needs to be promoted in importance.

Secondary characters thwart or support your main character: They are either allies or antagonists. They are memorable and vivid, but come with no imperative for dramatic transformation. Minor characters are almost a part of the scenery, just simple catalysts to get your protagonist moving on to the next aspect of his plot, and they don't even need to be well-drawn. These characters have no imperative to change whatsoever.

Together, these kinds of characters will create a rich, vivid set of people you can call on in your scenes to provide many challenges and situations under which your protagonist can transform.

So far we have talked about individual scene construction, which is the most important subject of this book, and which will more than prepare you to begin writing a manuscript. Yet a bunch of scenes stacked one after the other doesn't automatically equal a narrative. Now we'll look at ways to link individual scenes to one another to compose a strong, vivid storyline.

It's useful to think of your scenes as the cells that compose a body. Each one is distinct and individual, achieving a different goal, but they all must work together or you won't have a cohesive narrative. The simplest and easiest way to link scenes is through transitions, passages of text at the beginning or ending of a scene, where you condense and shift time, space, point of view, and many other details to create a sense of flow and to bypass mundane or nondramatic moments in your characters' lives.

That last point is very important: fiction is a
simulation
of real life; your goal is to offer only the most meaningful, relevant, and dramatic moments in your characters' lives, and to bypass the other moments that don't contribute to your narrative. Remember this!

Transitions are most noticeable at the beginning of a scene—this is where the reader will make the mental leaps you need: "Oh, I see, he's not on the farm anymore, he's in an airplane! Oh, it's not early morning anymore;

it's nighttime!" So we'll focus first on how to make your transitions clear at the beginning of a new scene, and then we'll talk briefly about how to set up the end of a scene with the next scene in mind.

The reader doesn't like to be jarred every time you begin a new scene, and since a narrative is composed of sometimes hundreds of scenes, you'll need to make sure that each successive scene feels connected to or derived from the scene that preceded it. Chapters are also breaks in your story's action; you may have one or ten scenes within one chapter. Chapter transitions need to be smooth as well.

The end of a scene or chapter is a note to the reader that you are concluding something, taking a break from the preceding events in order to change, refresh, or throw a twist into character or plot details. You might change something basic, such as physical location, or the next scene might take place years down the road. Either way, at the beginning of a scene you are, first and foremost, signaling that changes have taken place since the last scene.

SIGNALING A SCENE CHANGE

When you open a new scene, your first job is to orient the reader as to where the protagonist and other characters are in relationship to the scene (or scenes) before. You start, as the writer, by asking: What has changed? Where and when are my characters now? How can I make this clear to the reader?

Time of Day, or Day of the Week, Month, Year

At the beginning of a scene, it's likely you'll have to somehow make clear to the reader that time—minutes or years—has passed. Condensing time is a handy trick for moving on to only the interesting points of a character's life and story. Here are different examples of leaps in time. The first is from Chris Bohjalian's
Midwives,
and the second is from Caleb Carr's
The Alienist.
Notice how they both rely upon simple expository descriptions, which I've italicized to make them obvious: