Dynamic Characters

by Nancy Kress

  If the mother in your tidewater, status-conscious town is poor white trash, and she desperately wants to not be, she will push her children to bolster her own respectability. And one or more of those children may resist: through anger, through rebellion, through madness. Through intense identification with the magnificent natural world around them. Pat Conroy used this background to generate plot for The Prince of Tides.

  If your prep-school student has always had the best of everything and has been raised to competition and success, he may want to be the best in everything. He may even be prepared to go to violent lengths to do this, spurred on by the awareness of the violence of war just beyond graduation. This logical extension of the values inherent in the setting fuels John Knowles's classic A Separate Peace.

  If your teenage boy regrets the passing of his way of life on the Texas border, and he is a strong-willed and adventurous kid, he will run away south, to Mexico, where that way of life still exists, as

  Cormac McCarthy showed in the National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses.

  Note, too, that when you start with setting and character, the obstacles grow as naturally out of the setting as do the desires. This is because every setting in the galaxy will favor some character types and provide hardships for others. (I use in the galaxy advisedly; science fiction has long known the value of starting with setting.) If, for instance, the mother in The Prince of Tides had been a different sort of mother, or even from a different social class, she would not have put the same pressures on her three children, and Tom's and Luke's and Savannah's stories would have been much different.

  If Gene Forrester of A Separate Peace had not been such a personally driven kid, the competitiveness encouraged in his time, place and class might not have reached such murderous intensity.

  If John Grady Cole had said, ''Oh, I don't care that the ranch is sold, I'm eager for city life in Austin,'' Cormac McCarthy would have generated for him much different incidents.

  Setting, then, is the actual birthplace for desire, character, obstacles—all the things that cause conflict for your characters and hence generate plot. Any character who stays in his hometown may experience conflict between the setting and his own personality. Use that conflict to build plot.

  A warning: To serve this function, your setting must be real. That doesn't mean it has to exist in the actual world (I write science fiction, after all). But it does have to exist complete in your mind, with not only physical features but also prevailing values, beliefs, class structure, economics and social customs. To do you any good as a generator of incidents, a setting must be as complex as real-life settings are.

  This is why it's not sufficient, when asked where your novel takes place, to say simply, ''Rochester, New York.'' There are many Roches-ters. The mansions along East Avenue are not artsy Park Avenue is not the working-class suburb of Spencerport is not the academic-heavy neighborhoods around the University of Rochester is not the northwest quadrant, parts of which have a higher per-capita murder rate than Manhattan. Nor is there one Boston, one St. Louis, one Prairie View, Arkansas. Even if these places are invented, you must invent them completely. Not just physically, but sociologically and economically as well.

  Fiction is not sociology. But fiction, like sociology, is about human behavior. If you answer some of the same questions as sociologists, you will get a fuller picture of your setting.

  And when you do, you'll find you have helped yourself enormously with both character and plotting. Because from your knowledge of what is prevalent and expected in this place, what is valued and believed, you can generate characters at odds with some aspect of your setting. They might be at odds because, like John Grady Cole, they want something different. Or because, like Gene Forrester, they want what everybody else wants but with much more intensity. Or, like Tom and Luke and Savannah, what somebody else wants for them is screwing up their lives.

  LEAVING HOME:

  USING BACKGROUND TO GENERATE PLOT

  The essential process is the same for the character who leaves his hometown: Look for the conflicts between setting and personality. Here, however, you have even more choices, because you have more settings. There are at least two settings: the place the character comes from and the place she is now. Plus many different personalities to interact with them.

  Suppose, for example, that our New York girl newly inducted into the army (remember her?) has just arrived at Fort Polk. Let's call her Lisa. She is feisty, street-smart, suspicious, self-reliant, cosmopolitan—all characteristics with high survival value in Harlem. Louisiana, however, is laid-back, friendly, slow-paced and provincial. Things are done by tradition. Members of the black community rely heavily on each other to live their lives. Sarcasm is not, as it is in New York, an art form. Lisa can adjust all right to basic training, but the culture shock of Louisiana is causing conflict whenever she has leave in town.

  You have a good opportunity to generate plot incidents from the clash between the character, holding onto her old-setting values, and the new setting.

  Or take a different Lisa. This one also comes from New York, but she reacted to her hometown by becoming very self-protective. Silent, withdrawn, almost always fearful but self-trained not to show it. A stoic. In Louisiana, however, she finds a slower, more open culture— and she loves it. She flourishes here. She's happy. But when she goes back to New York, everyone there expects her to be who she was before. She is unhappy and miserable.

  This version of Lisa lets you plot from her internal conflict between the characteristics of old and new settings.

  Or—a third Lisa. She loves Louisiana as much as the second Lisa. However, she's a stronger character. When her hitch in the army is over, she moves to Louisiana and cuts all ties with New York. She renounces her frantic, violent, shiftless family. She starts over. But gradually, over a lifetime, she realizes how many good things there were in her seemingly awful background. Her grandmother's loving endurance. Her brother's colorful scheming. The willingness to try different things. Lisa eventually comes to a reconciliation of her two settings.

  Actually, this is a common plot structure. A character turns her back on the culture of her childhood and chooses a much different setting—geographical or class-based or ethnic. But as time goes on, the character either returns to the values of her childhood or else learns to integrate two different ways of life.

  Thus, Marjorie Morgenstern rebels against her immigrant Jewish background but eventually returns to keeping a kosher household (Marjorie Morningstar, by Herman Wouk). Doug Gardner moves back to his childhood Brooklyn and opens an antique store, leaving behind Manhattan corporate life (Fifty, by Avery Corman). And Michel Duval, a long way from his home of Provence, France (he's on Mars), is first numbingly homesick, and later learns to translate his feeling for Provence into a similar feeling for the much different landscapes of an alien planet (Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson).

  Whether your character leaves home, stays put or returns home, your setting can be a rich source of both characterization and plot. Setting can do so many things: furnish motivation, illuminate internal conflicts, bolster the plausibility of action, provide a larger context for choices. But, of course, setting can do these things only if you take the time and imagination to explore its implications in your own mind, in order to decide which aspects of a particular setting you wish to emphasize in your fiction.

  Then send us there.

  SUMMARY: A CHECKLIST TO START THINKING ABOUT SETTING

  • Who lives in this place? How do they make their living? How stable is the economic situation? What does a household usually consist of? How stable are most households?

  • What values are held in the community as a whole about material possessions? Religion? Children? Patriotism? Education? Crime? Sex? Working? Leaving? Newcomers? Privacy? Loyalty to kin?

  • Who has status here—who is looked up to? For what reasons? Are high-status people treated differently from low-status people? How? How ha
rd is it to change social groups? (Contrast Edwardian England, where it was very hard, with contemporary Los Angeles, where one good movie deal opens all doors.)

  • How are little boys expected to behave? Little girls? Teenagers? Young adults? Wives? Husbands? Community leaders? Old people? What usually happens if each of these people violates behavioral expectations?

  • What is the best personal future most of the people in this setting can imagine? The worst? The best community future? The worst?

  • How does your protagonist match—or differ from—the general community answers to the above questions? What are his preferences in dress, hair, books, music, food, etc.? Which of the prevailing cultural values does he share, which does he reject, which is he ambivalent about?

  • What plot incidents might result from mismatches between character and setting?

  Work is important.

  Of course, you already believe that, or else why are you reading this book, and why are you trying to write fiction in the first place? But I'm not talking now about your work in creating characters. I'm talking about their work. In the words of that perennial cocktail-party question, "What do you do?''

  And even more important, "Why and how do you do it?'' Knowing the answers to these three questions—really knowing them, in detail—can give your novel a tremendous boost.

  THE CASE FOR CHARACTER EMPLOYMENT

  In a short story, it may not matter how a protagonist earns his living. A successful short story is pared down and tight, with everything extraneous to the plot and theme left out, which may include careers.

  In Irwin Shaw's much-anthologized short story, ''The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,'' we never find out what the two characters, Michael and Frances, do when they're not having a Sunday stroll on Fifth Avenue. It doesn't matter. The story is concerned with a powerful moment in the deceptions and desires that make up a marriage, and not with anything else. As far as we readers are concerned, Michael and Frances are eternally walking Fifth Avenue.

  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.