Dynamic Characters

  Make the wrong assumptions about our reaction to the character, and you will supply the wrong details, leaving us thinking, ''Huh? Why on earth did the character do that?"

  Any of these can kill a story. On the other hand, the right assumptions let you include the right thoughts, attitudes and reactions to really bring your character alive for your readers. This is probably easiest to see through examples.

  WHEN READER AND AUTHOR SHARE ASSUMPTIONS—OR DON'T

  Suppose, for instance, you are writing a story in which the first scene is a mother wheeling her shopping cart out of the supermarket with a full load of groceries and her two-year-old in the child seat. A car pulls alongside and a man leaps out, knocks the mother to the ground, grabs the baby and screeches away. The mother's reaction is screaming hysteria. You stop the scene there.

  You are assuming that we will understand why the mother is upset. And if the next scene is two cops discussing the fact that the mother can't supply the license plate number, we will assume the intervening action: someone called 911, the distraught mother was interviewed, she was too hysterical and terrified to think clearly enough to catch the plate number, etc. Your assumptions are:

  • Mothers get very upset when their children are kidnapped.

  • They turn to authority for help.

  • Hysteria and terror can interfere with clear thinking.

  • The reader will share the above three assumptions without your explaining them.

  The last point is the most crucial. If you don't think readers will share the first three assumptions, you will put in scenes that dramatize her failure to note the license number, her phone call to the police, their arrival, their interrogation of her and any witnesses. If these scenes are doing something more than supplying us with characterization of the mother (supplying clues, for instance, or setting up the attitude of the police), they may work fine. But if the scenes' only point is to characterize the mother's distraught worry, you will be putting in far too many scenes that slow the story down. And the reason you will be putting them in is that you've made a false assumption about how much the reader assumes about character. You should realize that we will assume that a kidnapped child can lead to both hysteria and an appeal to the authorities. Knowing that gives you the option of showing the interrogation scene—or not.

  Now consider an alternate scenario. Suppose the mother is not hysterical. Suppose she coolly notes the license plate number of the abductor's car, calmly calls the cops (no quaver in the voice, no pleas to hurry) and goes through their interrogation without so much as moving a facial muscle. This is not what most readers assume about the mothers of kidnapped children. As a result, you no longer have a choice about showing that scene. You must show it, and in enough detail for the readers to decide if the mother's calm is the result of shock, cold-bloodedness, complicity in the kidnapping, or pathology. We will need a lot more detail to create a believable character, because her behavior runs contrary to our assumptions about motherhood.

  And if she doesn't call the cops at all, ever, we will need even more detail to make this feel real. An example: In her novel Sula, Toni Morrison takes an entire complex social background, with many scenes' worth of dramatization, to make clear why Sula and Nel don't report the freak, accidental drowning of a younger child.

  But—and here's the crucial point—to realize how many scenes you must supply to make a character feel real, you as writer first must have a good sense of what the readers' assumptions are. Not your assumptions—theirs.

  The mother of a kidnapped child is an easy example. Most people would assume that she would be upset and would call the cops. The case of the student writer's retired man is more subtle. The student held certain assumptions about old retired people, and he further assumed that his ideas were universally shared. As a result, he failed to create the character's depression and boredom on the page through specific details, dramatized scenes, pointed dialogue. If he had done so, I would have accepted his bored and depressed retiree. But the writer did not do the necessary work, and so the story failed. And it failed not from lack of skill, but from lack of insight about what needed to be depicted and what didn't.

  In order to avoid making this mistake, you must examine your own assumptions about your characters to determine if they are pretty much universal (like distraught mothers of kidnapped babies) or specific to you as a person. This isn't easy (examining our map of personal reality never is). But such examination can determine how much detail you need to supply, and that in turn can make or break your characterization.

  THE RULE OF SOME

  Again, making assumptions about characters isn't necessarily bad. It can be very useful, allowing you to skip long scenes of the obvious and get on with the story. But the assumptions must be ones shared by editors and readers outside your particular group (age group, gender group, social background, occupation, political persuasion, religion, whatever). If you assume too much, you will (like that student) stint on the work of creating details that reveal character and motivation.

  Do you share any of these assumptions (answer honestly!):

  • A middle-aged woman sitting on a bus, frowning, with deep lines from nose to mouth and an abstracted gaze, is probably sour and bitter about life.

  • A man who's been divorced three times must not be a very good husband.

  • Old people don't notice each other sexually.

  • Old people don't notice younger people sexually.

  • Corporate executives are greedy, rapacious and unprincipled.

  • A mother likes all of her grown children.

  • A mother likes all of her young children.

  • Fighter pilots are fearless, calm people.

  In fact, every one of these assumptions falters on what author Gene Wolfe astutely calls ''The Rule of Some'': Some are, some aren't. Some conscientious mothers do not like all their children, young or grown (and may feel very guilty about it). There exist decent CEOs. There also exist sexually observant oldsters, fighter pilots terrified to fly who do it anyway and thrice-married men who are good husbands but bad choosers of wives. More important, these are not isolated phenomena. The numbers are substantial enough that many readers may depart from the assumptions around which you've constructed your fiction.

  It's important to note that this is not a political question. You can believe that corporations, divorce or marriage are either good or bad. Go right ahead. What you must not do, if you want your fiction to convince us, is assume that we believe the same things and so you don't have to put on the page the details and motivations that convince us your character is a fully rounded individual.

  How do you add those details? Let's look more fully at that middle-aged woman on the bus.

  ONE BUS, MANY WOMEN

  From the outside, what we notice about the woman is her age, the deep lines from nose to mouth and her frowning, abstracted gaze. But what do the lines mean? That she has scowled all her life and is, in fact, a sour and angry person? That she was not regular about the Oil of Olay? That that's the way her chromosomal lottery fell? (Those lines are called ''nasolabial grooves,'' and they are partly genetic.) And what about that frown? Is it really disapproval . . . or preoccupation? The result of thinking hard? Or a temporary bad mood, only part of a complex and volatile personality?

  In a novel, these questions may eventually be answered by the accretion of scenes. The woman frowns and looks sour on the bus and in the kitchen, but never at her job . . . eventually we form an accurate picture of her. But although sheer verbiage may eventually round out your character, it's also important that our first impression of her not be founded on misdirection. This means you want to provide an accurate introduction to your character, one we can build upon, not have to replace entirely. This in turn means you need to go beyond your assumptions about how we will see this woman, and show her to us.

  Here are three of those middle-aged women on that bus:

  Hattie frowned, the lines
deepening from nose to mouth, her gaze abstracted. She didn't trust those two boys two rows up on the left. Heads shaved in the back, what kind of mothers did they have letting them get out of the house like that? Punching each other and grinning. Just the kind that might grab her purse, or assault her, or worse. You couldn't be too careful nowadays. They were everywhere; if people could find a way to take advantage of you they would. Especially on the bus, which certainly wasn't the safe vehicle it had been when she was young. But, then, the whole country had just decayed, it was disgraceful.

  Mabel frowned, the lines deepening from nose to mouth, her gaze abstracted. She tried to concentrate. What would Ben and Sue like for the baby? Mabel wanted to give them just exactly the right gift, they'd been so good to her. A baby buggy? No, they probably had one. A really beautiful dress? But nowadays parents didn't seem to dress babies in frilly outfits that needed hand-washing and ironing. Young people were so much more sensible now. They knew the value of time. Sue did so much, with her job and the house and now that beautiful baby. . . . Oh, yes! Perfect! She'd get Sue a month's worth of a cleaning service! And maybe it would be a small repayment for all the kindness her niece had shown her.

  Jean frowned, the lines deepening from nose to mouth, her gaze abstracted. Damn, she hadn't gone over the copy for the McAllister account with Ben before she'd left the office. She'd meant to do that; Carl McAllister was too important a client to not supervise the work the agency did for him. Jean had just been distracted by bus schedules; she'd certainly be glad when the Mercedes was out of the shop on Thursday. What were the chances of a cab strike the same week her car developed engine trouble? But those were the punches; you rolled with them. That was how she'd built the agency in the first place. Rolling with the punches. That and carefully supervising the talent in every last, crucial detail.

  Very different women, aren't they? One way to deepen individuality is to show us a character's thoughts. But—again—first you must realize when this needs doing, and when (as with the distraught mother of the abducted child) you can safely assume that readers will fill in the character's thoughts accurately.

  You can also, of course, particularize characters through their dialogue, their reactions to other people's actions, their choice of clothing and furniture and vacations and music—everything we discussed in part one. Just don't assume that characters' actions alone will characterize them; actions can spring from too many different motives and world-views. Even worse, don't assume that a label (retired man, CEO, Republican, adulterer) conveys the same ideas to us that it does to you.

  THE MOST DANGEROUS ASSUMPTION OF ALL

  If the aforementioned assumptions can cripple your story, the next one can kill it entirely. This is the most counterproductive—and the most common—assumption that many new writers make: A character just like me is automatically interesting to the reader.

  Now, this assumption may be true. You may be a fascinating person, either flamboyantly fascinating or subtly fascinating. The problem here is the ''automatic'' part. To create yourself on the page (or its analogue, a ''character much like myself') is even more work than to create a totally different character. Beginning writers often think it will be easier to write about a character like themselves, especially if they use first person. After all, you know the character so well, don't you?

  Yes. You know him too well. You make all kinds of assumptions about yourself, and because these assumptions are part of your own mind, they're hard to examine. It's therefore hard to see which details you must artfully create on the page in order for this character— whom you know so well!—to be equally vivid to the reader. Most of the time, it's actually easier to write a character much different from yourself. The distance allows you to more readily identify effective details.

  This is why some writing teachers discourage students from using first-person point of view. I wouldn't go that far, but I understand the point. Third-person lends more distance than first. A character unlike yourself is more distant than one who is you. Distance lets you grasp the outline of the character as a whole and so fill in the details, both large- and small-scale.

  If you do create characters like yourself, give special thought to the assumptions you're making about your type of person, your reactions, your motives, your beliefs. Are they really so universal as to need little dramatizing?

  It's never easy to examine our own assumptions about the world (which is why psychotherapy exists). But do try to cultivate a feel for which of your assumptions about a character are likely to be shared by most readers, and which will need much supporting detail to render vividly. Knowing the difference can greatly affect your success with characterization.

  SUMMARY: HOW YOUR READER READS YOUR CHARACTER

  • Don't assume your readers will evaluate your characters the same way you do.

  • Include sufficient details and dramatizations to make clear how we are supposed to view these people. Do not rely on labels.

  • The greater your characters' personalities diverge from common assumptions, the more details and dramatization you must provide.

  • Be especially careful to fully flesh out characters who are very much like yourself.

  It's amazing how many beginning writers have their characters dream during the course of a story or novel. A lesser, but still significant, number have characters watching TV news or listening to the radio. Are these scenes really useful to your fiction? They may get your character through the night, or through that hour between more concrete fictional events, but can they also add more substantial value? Or are they just hokey and contrived fillers?

  The honest answer: It depends.

  Both dreams and newscasts can be hokey padding. But they can also provide genuine character enhancement, in quite moving ways. Admittedly, neither dreams nor newscasts are among the major techniques for building characterization. But because they can be effective supplementary techniques, it's worthwhile to discuss how and when to add one or both to your fiction.

  Dreams first. Some uses of dreams, unfortunately, are almost guaranteed to fail. By discussing these upfront, we'll prepare the ground for more positive suggestions. There are three pitfalls to avoid.

  DREAM PITFALL NUMBER ONE: THE PLOT THAT HINGES ON A DREAM

  The greatest mistake in using dreams in your fiction is to make the plot require the dream. Except in certain kinds of fantasy or science fiction, where dreams are part of either magic or alternate science, dreams should not be used as character motivation, climax or resolution.

  By ''character motivation,'' I mean the kind of story in which the character doesn't know a vital piece of knowledge until it's revealed to her in a dream: the location of her grandmother's locket, the meaning of a cryptic message or the revelation that her husband is having an affair. The problem with this device is that it looks contrived. The effect is not that the character is sensitive, but that the author is desperate. Not knowing how to move his plot forward, he leads into the next set of incidents by giving the character a dream she will have to act on.

  Sometimes new writers defend this practice on Freudian grounds: ''It's her subconscious that actually knows this information all along, only she can't admit it. She's in denial. Then it comes out in a dream, and so the character is forced to act on it.''

  This defense at first seems to make a certain amount of sense. Undoubtedly there are times for all of us when our subconscious knows more than we do, and that knowledge may well turn up in dreams. Real life is like that. The problem is that real life is not fiction. Real life, as a rule, is much messier and less organized than fiction, which seeks to impose a pattern on the world. So on those rare occasions when real life actually produces an event more patterned and neater than fiction, we marvel. ''Truth really is stranger than fiction,'' we say, as the murderer turns out to be the long-lost cousin of the victim. We accept real-life coincidence because we have to. It happened. But in fiction we don't have to accept it, and if it seems too convenient, we won
't. A dream that unfolds the next section of plot— or even worse, the climax of the plot—seems too easy, too much engineered by the author. Don't do it.

  The very worst version of the dream-as-plot-device is such a cliche that I hardly need mention it (do I?). This is the dream forced into service as story resolution: ''Then I woke up and it was all a dream.'' Readers hate this. They feel cheated. They believed the story was a story—that is, that it was actually happening to someone, even if that someone is fictional. To discover that the story wasn't happening even to an unreal person is a great blow. Don't inflict it.

  DREAM PITFALL NUMBER TWO: THE OVERLONG DREAM

  Because dreams are unreal, they call subtle attention to the unreality of the entire work. Sort of a second-layer unreality: the unfactual illusions of someone who is already an unfactual illusion. You can minimize this effect by keeping your characters' dreams short.

  I cannot emphasize this enough. The brief retold dream becomes a story detail, one of many, that contributes to characterization. The long retold dream becomes a scene in itself and is almost always too fragile (an ''airy nothing,'' in the Bard's words) to carry such importance.

  So how short is short enough? That depends on what function the dream serves. Usually one lengthy paragraph is enough, but not always. We'll look at some examples in a minute, in the section on using dreams well.

  DREAM PITFALL NUMBER THREE: THE FREUDIAN CLICHE

  Finally, including a protagonist's dreams can actually harm characterization. Dreams become pitfalls when they are so overtly Freudian or Jungian that it appears the author has constructed them from a Handy-Dandy Psychology of the Unconscious Kit. Freudian psychology does indeed have an elaborate and significance-fraught lexicon of dream symbols. Some of these have entered the common culture: cigars as phallic symbols, flying as sexual metaphor. Similarly, many people talk easily about ''Jungian archetypes,'' to the point where it may seem reasonable that the audience for literary fiction should be able to translate the symbols you've put into your character's dreams. And perhaps many readers will be able to do that.