Dynamic Characters

by Nancy Kress

  PROBLEM NUMBER SEVEN: A SUBPLOT DOESN'T FEEL CLOSELY ENOUGH TIED TO THE MAIN STORY LINE

  When a subplot is the problem, secondary characters provide an ideal remedy. You can easily alter their histories and actions to create closer ties among competing subplots.

  Let's say, for instance, that your main story line concerns a lost family heirloom of great sentimental and monetary value. There's a subplot about the complicated relationship between an unrelated mother and her grown daughter. There's also another subplot about a police investigation in another city, which will turn out near the end of the book to have relevance to the lost heirloom.

  However, the end of the book is a long way off. While you're developing these necessary subplots, how can you make them seem as if they all belong in the same book?

  Again, use your secondary characters. Forge ties among them. The grown daughter can be a cousin to the police detective. The family hunting for the heirloom lives next door to the woman's mother; they share the fruit from an apple tree growing exactly on the property line. A young brother in the family is studying at the police academy in the other city and comes home for vacations. This not only ties your subplots together, it may also suggest plot developments and/ or thematic complexities. What is the brother learning at the academy that might change the way his family searches for the heirloom? What does sharing apples from the same tree suggest about the fruits of one's actions?

  You don't, of course, want to make these connections between secondary characters seem coincidental: The detective just happens to turn out to be the mother's cousin. Or, in Charles Dickens's nineteenth-century version in A Tale of Two Cities, the turnkey at Lucie's husband's prison just happens to be Lucie's governess's long-lost brother. That worked in the nineteenth century, but no longer.

  The way to avoid such implausible coincidences is to build in the relationships from chapter one, not spring them on the reader in chapter forty-two. In other words, don't keep the connections among characters hidden. They aren't secrets; they're just facts.

  THE FOUNDATION vs. THE WALLS

  To sum up this whole chapter: Your main characters are the foundation of your novel. The poured concrete, the weight-bearing girders. Once such things are in place, they are difficult to move. The whole structure relies on their solidity to hold itself together.

  Secondary characters, on the other hand, are non-weight-bearing walls. Certainly they help determine the final plan of the rooms: their shape, size, relationship, uses. But non-weight-bearing walls can be altered while a building is being built or remodeled, without causing structural collapse. You can move a wall, subdivide a major room, eliminate partitions—whatever seems to yield the most pleasing arrangement as the building goes up.

  Secondary characters, plus spear carriers, can also be the colorful aspects of a building that determine its finished look: plaster, paint, wallpaper, carpets, window treatments. Should they be flashy or be neutral background? Ornate or severe? Sensual or cold marble? These are the things about a room that an observer notices first—but they are also the easiest things to change. Many writers, in fact, ''build'' their novels on the first draft, but leave nearly all the colorful decorating until revision time.

  When you remodel, decorate or redecorate, look first to your secondary characters. It's much easier than moving a foundation that may be perfectly sound anyway.

  However—and it's a big however—if your novel has serious problems in its basic architecture, fiddling with your secondary characters is not the answer. Realigning a wall will not cure a crack in the foundation. In that case, you need to rethink your major characters—starting back at chapter one.

  SUMMARY: USING SECONDARY CHARACTERS EFFECTIVELY

  • Secondary characters are not, by definition, as fully developed as main characters. There isn't room.

  • Secondary characters, precisely because they have fewer dimensions than main characters, can often be more colorful and over-the-top.

  • The more colorful a secondary character is, the greater will be the reader's interest in what happens to her at the novel's end.

  • Secondary characters are much easier to revise than are complex main characters, whose emotional growth is tied into the story's main plotline.

  • Because they are easier to alter, secondary characters can be used to solve a number of second-draft problems, including unaccounted-for characters, undermotivated actions, insufficiently plausible situations, a less-than-inevitable climax, thin developmental sections, cliche scenes and unattached subplots.

  • However, secondary characters are not gods. If your story has several of the above problems, you need to seriously rethink its basic foundations.

  "Plus ga change," say the French, "plus c'est la meme chose." Which means, ''The more things change, the more they stay the same''—or, in a slightly rougher translation, "You can't fight city hall.'' But in a short story or novel, change is precisely what you must have if the fiction is to work, even though some story elements may stay the same. Change, as mentioned in the last chapter, is one thing that distinguishes main characters from spear carriers. And maybe fighting city hall is exactly what propels your characters toward change.

  In other words, you the novelist not only have to know who your protagonist is, you also have to figure out who he becomes.

  But is it really necessary that characters change? Well, no. Something has to change, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the characters. There are three possibilities: the situation-change novel, the reader-change novel and the character-change novel. Each has a different relationship to plot, and each requires different handling.

  RETURNING NEXT WEEK: THE SITUATION-CHANGE NOVEL

  The situation-change story opens with a problem for the characters, or else the problem develops shortly after the story begins. The detective is handed a murder case; the colonists on Titan discover an air leak in the security dome; the beautiful architect learns that someone has stolen her building designs. By the end of the book, the problem has been solved, and that solution is what makes the ending situation different from the opening one. The protagonists, however, are fundamentally unchanged.

  This is the simplest kind of fiction. For that reason, it's usually the kind presented by TV series, since at the end of the story everyone important is left unaltered for next week's episode. Before television, much magazine fiction was also of this type: unchanging series characters recycled through endlessly different situations. The form still exists in some series fiction, although for the most part, TV took over the static major character, and print fiction moved on to concentrate on stories in which characters do personally grow and develop as a result of the events in the story.

  Still, it's possible to write a nonseries novel in which character change is absent and plot is all. To do so, you need to invent characters interesting enough to hold our attention without any interior conflict; a plot complicated and fast-paced enough to absorb us by itself; and a setting or style outrageous enough that we don't need to take the whole thing very seriously.

  A good example is Carl Hiaasen's hilarious 1993 novel, Strip Tease. Good-hearted exotic dancer Erin Grant, wheelchair-stealing scumbag Darrell Grant, cynical detective Al Garcia and lusty noodle-headed congressman David Dilbeck are, at the end of the book, just as good-hearted, cynical, lusty and noodle-headed as at the beginning (Darrell would be just as scumbaggy, except he's dead). The book's closing situation is different in several ways, including the fact that half the cast has been murdered. But the survivors are unchanged. The book is an outrageous romp, with only minimal relevance to real life, and that's enough. If your work is of this type, put your energies into exciting, over-the-top situations that make us gasp, and don't worry about character change. However, we'd better actually gasp.

  LIFE ARTFULLY OBSERVED: THE READER-CHANGE STORY

  Much ''literary'' fiction, in direct contrast to a book like Strip Tease, tries to portray real life as real people actually
experience it—but it may still feature characters that don't change. This is because literary authors have observed that, sadly, most people in real life don't change. They go on doing over and over again whatever has messed up their lives before: tunnel vision, denial, passivity, alcoholism, impul-sivity, whatever. The difference between this kind of story and Hiaasen's is that something besides plot situation is meant to change between the opening and closing. That something is the reader. Through careful piling of detail upon detail, the literary author hopes to change how the reader perceives the character(s) or their world, even though that world itself remains unaltered.

  Consider a famous, much anthologized short story: James Thurber's ''The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.'' Hapless daydreamer Walter Mitty, sent on Saturday errands by his domineering and unpleasant wife, starts by imagining himself an ace pilot navigating a dangerous storm. At the end of the story he's still escaping his dreary afternoon through exciting daydreams. Walter Mitty has not changed. But the reader has gained insight into why Mitty daydreams and— more important—into the poignant contrast possible between a man's outer life and the hidden, vital power of his secret imagination. And who, asks the story, is to say that one is more ''real'' than the other? The story nudges the reader to face that question. And afterward the reader looks a little differently at bland, colorless men doing errands on Saturday afternoons.

  It's harder to sustain this no-change structure throughout a novel, because a novel is so much longer. If we spend five hundred pages with a character, we're likely to want to see some growth from him. However, novels do exist in which the whole point is that the character has refused a chance (perhaps his last chance) for meaningful change, but the reader ends up with more insight about reality.

  One famous example is Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. George Babbitt, a self-satisfied, provincial, superficial and unthinking businessman, is thrust into circumstances that could make him less satisfied, less provincial, less superficial and more thinking. He actually progresses a way—a tiny way—down this path, starting to look more closely at the reality of his world. But the glimpse is too frightening. And the price of looking more closely is too high: George Babbitt would become different from those around him and, so, alone. He can't do it. He scurries back into safe modes of thinking, refusing change. At the end of the novel he's exactly the same as he was at the beginning, a point Lewis underlines by duplicating the book's first scene as its last.

  Writing this kind of novel requires a keen appreciation of the complexity of the human mind. It also requires better-than-average prose (to compensate for the lack of flashy events). Put your energies into small faithful details, revealing and symbolic, that suggest ambiguities of character. When done right, such details lead to a change in perception in the reader; in other words, we think differently about the character at the end of the story than we did at the beginning. Under such circumstances, the protagonist can remain static. It's not, however, easy to pull off at book length.

  A SADDER BUT WISER MAN: THE CHARACTER-CHANGE STORY

  Because the reader-change story is not easy, most novels do feature characters that grow and change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Mitch McDeere (The Firm, by John Grisham) discovers he has abilities to cope with a world more treacherous than he suspected. Tom Rath (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson) learns there are more important values than corporate success. The narrator of Bright Lights, Big City (by Jay Mclnerney) discovers you can't evade grief forever, no matter how hard and frantically you run. But how do these characters change with their discoveries? And how can you create plausible changes for your protagonist?

  It's a four-step process: preparation, pressure, realization, validation.

  PREPARATION: RIPENESS IS ALL

  Preparation refers to making us believe that this character is capable of change in the first place. You can do that one of two ways: Show us he has qualities in the present that could lead him to change, or show us he did have such qualities in the past.

  Consider, for example, the famous transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Scrooge starts out miserly, mean and isolated. By the end of the story he's become generous and joyful, giving away turkeys and hip operations. But Dickens prepares us early for this change. During Scrooge's first nocturnal trip, with the Ghost of Christmas Past, we see that Scrooge wasn't always as soul-shriveled as he is now. In the past he enjoyed himself. He danced at his employer's parties. He loved his sister, Fan. He was a person capable of inspiring in Fan a return love. When Scrooge finally becomes a ''new man'' at the end of the story, we find it plausible because it isn't really new; it's a return to qualities he once displayed.

  You can do the same with your character. Show us that once she was different, closer to how she will be after the change in your story. You don't need a Christmas Ghost to do this. Show us through snatches of memory, brief allusions in other characters' dialogue, objects left over from a different life, old photographs—anything that will establish that another side of your character once existed. Then build on that submerged side to make plausible her subsequent change.

  The same techniques can be used to show us present qualities that prepare for change. The airhead who comes through in a crisis will be more believable if she isn't completely an airhead. She's unexpectedly good at handling money, for instance. Or at sensing what other people feel. Or she never forgets a face.

  PRESSURE: I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE

  Preparation, however, isn't enough by itself to make character changes believable. The next step is to add enough pressure to force your character to change. Why the pressure? Because change is threatening to most people, and they won't do it unless something drives them to it, usually pain or conflict. This truth is well known to psychiatrists, drug counselors and confirmed bachelors.

  Scrooge is an especially hard case. It takes four ghosts, counting Marley, and a glimpse of his own tombstone in order to effect a change in him. Probably your protagonist will respond to somewhat less pressure. The pressure should be of a type appropriate to the story circumstances and to the character.

  Some people, for instance, are most easily reached through concern for others—which might mean that your alcoholic young mother changes only after you dramatize how her drinking is making her child miserable. Other people are motivated to change by guilt, or boredom, or hitting bottom, or love, or danger. Pick your pressure and apply liberally, until something has to give.

  All right, now your character has reached the moment of change. She realizes that something has to be different from here on in. How can you best portray this crucial inner transformation?

  REALIZATION: IF I DON'T TRY

  SOMETHING DIFFERENT, THAT'S ALL SHE WROTE

  Oddly, the best technique is to downplay the moment of change. If you've done a convincing job with preparation and pressure, we readers will be expecting some sort of change. If you then drag out the moment of realization by having the changee review what she's been doing so far, why it hasn't worked, what she could do differently and how resolved she is to turn things around—if you prolong the moment with all that intellectualizing—it will lose its electric force. Instead, it's more effective to indicate that something has happened and let us deduce what it is from the character's next actions.

  Scrooge, for instance, does not sit on his bed on Christmas morning ruminating about his past sins and future reformation. Instead, the moment he awakes, he flings open the window and engages in exuberant conversation with a passing, astonished lad.

  Similarly, consider the moment of significant change in Bright Lights, Big City. The second-person narrator has spent a couple hundred pages drinking, drugging, partying and behaving badly in order to try to evade looking at his life. He's been led in this by Tad, his wild and basically heartless best friend. At a crazy party in which he's introduced to his ex-wife Amanda's gigolo fiance, the narrator has finally had enough: of his destructive friends, his
destructive life, his own self-destruction. He's ready to change. McInerney indicates this in a brief, understated exchange:

  ''Thanks.'' You stand up.

  ''Take it easy, Coach.'' [Tad] puts his arm around your shoulders.

  ''I just realized something.''

  ''What's that?''

  "You and Amanda would make a terrific couple.''

  The narrator has, of course, realized much more than that. Butunder-playing the moment of change saves the passage from melodrama and leads naturally to step four: validation.

  VALIDATION: THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT NOW

  Validation refers to concrete actions the character performs that let us know for sure that she's changed—and in what way. It's never enough for the author to tell us that a person has grown. It's not even enough for the person to tell herself (how often have friends said, ''I've really changed,'' when you can see quite clearly that they're doing the same old things?). Words are easy. Only actions have the force to convince. Seeing is believing.

  Scrooge's transformation is validated by a whole string of actions: gifts for the Cratchit family. Donations to the poor. Benevolence toward his nephew and niece-in-law. Dickens takes the time to dramatize each of these fully, validating for us that more has happened with Scrooge than just a passing mood of relief at avoiding immediate death.

  McInerney also shows us two validating actions, each fully dramatized. After the narrator's moment of realization with Tad, he finds a phone and calls Vicky, the one sane person in his life. For the first time, he is honest with her about who he is, what he's been through and what he's feeling. He then walks home across Manhattan, finally letting himself remember his dead mother and feel his grief about her death. She used to bake bread; he stops to buy a bag of fresh-baked rolls and to accept that his life is going to be different from now on:

  You get down on your knees and tear open the bag. The smell of warm dough envelops you. The first bite sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again.