Dynamic Characters- How to create personalities that keep readers captivated

by Nancy Kress

  There's Rabbit captured in a perfect cameo: passing over the weighty news, interested in the sexual, airing his prejudices and finally interested most in the trivially bizarre.

  Don DeLillo's characters in White Noise, on the other hand, are captivated by the large scale:

  That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We'd never before been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially-mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objections. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

  Nothing could better capture this family's unhealthy, growing obsession with—and inhumane relish for—death and tragedy.

  Sometimes news-reacting can be used to characterize not just an individual but an entire group. Here, in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, are Betty Smith's first-generation, working-class men reacting to news in 1916. They're talking in a saloon, overheard by protagonist Francie Nolan:

  It's a fact. They're gonna stop making liquor and in a few years the country will be dry.

  A man that works hard has a right to his beer.

  Tell that to the president and see how far you get. . . .

  G'wan! They'll never give wimmen the vote.

  Don't lay any bets on it.

  If that comes, my wife votes like I do, otherwise I'll break her neck.

  My old woman wouldn't go to the polls and mix in with a bunch of bums and rummies. . . .

  Airplanes! Just a crazy fad. Won't last long.

  An economical way to convey how fast the world is changing on these people.

  But what if you write genre fiction, with its specialized conventions? Can you still use this device? Yes.

  Regency romances, to take just one example, are set before radio or TV. But news is eternal. Georgette Heyer makes good use of this to differentiate her two heroines, Fanny and Serena, in Bath Tangle. The point of view is Fanny's:

  . . . and in another moment they were in the thick of the sort of conversation Fanny had hoped might be averted. Rotherham seemed to have recovered from all his ill-humor; he was regaling Serena with a salted anecdote. Names and nicknames were tossed to and fro; it was Rotherham now who had taken charge of the conversation, Fanny thought, and once again she was laboring to keep pace with it. There was something about the Duke of Devonshire dining at Carlton House, and sitting between the Chancellor and Lord Caithness: what was there in that to make Serena exclaim? Ponsonby too idle, Tierney too unwell, Lord George Cavendish too insolent for leadership: what leadership?

  ''I thought they had made no way this session!'' Serena said.

  Serena loves political news and has a sharp mind to understand it; timid and sweet Fanny is bored. The same device can be—and is— employed by writers of historical mysteries, medieval thrillers and even far-future science fiction.

  BUT WON'T INCLUDING THE NEWS DATE MY STORY?

  One final consideration: Including contemporary news events may or may not make your story seem dated. It all depends on how specific the news is. Rabbit Is Rich is clearly 1979; Skylab is falling, the fuel crisis is on, the President collapses in a marathon. Updike intends his novel to belong to a definite time and place. On the other hand, reread the passage from White Noise. The news is generic, thereby avoiding pinning the novel to any specific year and so dating it. The choice is yours.

  SUMMARY: USING DREAMS AND NEWS IN FICTION

  • Except in special cases of fantasy, do not have your characters' dreams affect plot. Instead, use their dreams to characterize their personalities and/or current crises.

  • Keep dreams brief relative to other methods of characterization.

  • Choose from among current dreams, recurrent dreams and childhood dreams recalled, using each when most applicable.

  • Consider having a character relate his dream to another, so that you can include either the dreamer's hidden thoughts or the listener's hidden reactions.

  • You can deepen your own understanding of a character by imagining how he would react to the news of his day: what stories he pays attention to, why, how he reacts and how strongly.

  • You can also put your character's reactions to news directly into the story, if it serves a purpose there.

  • To keep your story untethered to any specific year, manufacture generic news events.

  John Milton had a villain problem. Generations of scholars have noted that Satan, the villain in Paradise Lost, easily upstages Christ, Adam and an entire phalanx of archangels. Satan is more forceful, complex and interesting. He also ends up with all the best lines (''Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n'') and most of the best plot developments.

  However, Milton was an exception. Many writers who can characterize their heroes well have trouble making their villains equally interesting and readable. All too often the villain ends up one-dimensional, a stereotype of evil that doesn't convey the horror intended because he's so drearily familiar. Or the villain is such a caricature of perversion that the reader can't suspend her disbelief. Or the villain is so weird that the reader is tempted to laugh—and the novel isn't supposed to be humorous. Or the villain is so powerless and wimpy that the reader thinks, ''This guy is a problem? What's wrong with our hero that he lets this so-called villain bother him for half a second?''

  So how do you create believable, interesting and suitably menacing villains? The first step is to recognize that there is more than one category of villain. In fact, there are five. You must decide which type suits your plot, since villainy is another area where character and plot are virtually inseparable.

  YES, WE HAVE NO REPROBATES

  Of course, you don't actually have to have a villain in your story at all. Many novels flourish without any bad guys. The conflict in these books comes from the wrongheadedness, moral muddles, human confusion and incompatible goals of basically sympathetic characters. Men and women being what they are, these qualities are often enough to create complicated plots and strong suspense, without any outside menace at work.

  One famous example is Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Neither Count Vronsky nor Anna, the sympathetically drawn adulterers, is a villain. Neither is Anna's husband, who may be stiff-necked and boring but is not wicked. The misery that Vronsky and Anna encounter springs from a combination of their own choices, the values of their society, and the limitations of human beings, such as an inability to sustain passion in the face of isolation and idleness. Anna Karenina is a tragedy, ending in the despairing suicide of the heroine, but there are no villains here.

  This raises the question: What is a villain? Who qualifies? Although this is clearly a philosophical question, open to hours of debate, let's set a fairly simple definition. A villain is ''a character who from motives of selfish gain knowingly seeks to injure, kill or loot another person.''

  Within this definition, you can choose from five approaches to villainy. Each demands different techniques for intertwining characterization and plot.

  THE ACCIDENTAL VILLAIN:

  ''I NEVER MEANT IT TO END THIS WAY''

  The classic approach to tragedy, defined by Aristotle, is the ''fatal flaw.'' A character does not set out to do anything wrong. But he has a weakness he cannot control, and that weakness moves him farther and farther along the path to wickedness, until finally he crosses over and performs an act of genuine villainy. He may bitterly regret this act. It may or may not destroy him.

  The classic example is Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which Macbeth begins by strolling home through a forest, minding his
own business, innocent of evil plans. Three witches prophesy that he will become king, activating Macbeth's fatal flaw: ambition. From that point on, he becomes more and more sucked in by circumstances, including his wife's ambition. Finally he murders the rightful king, an act he regrets the second he's done it. But it's too late. Macbeth is now doomed, and all the rest of the murders that confirm his villainy spring from trying to hold onto the power he bought with his first sin.

  This approach to characterizing evil is just as valid today as when Shakespeare used it four hundred years ago. A contemporary example is John Knowles's novel A Separate Peace, which we looked at briefly in chapter nine. Sixteen-year-old Gene Forrester never intends to harm his best friend, Phineas. He admires and loves Phineas. He's also jealous. The jealousy grows throughout incident after incident in which Phineas, less bright and insightful than Gene, nonetheless triumphs through sheer charm and athletic ability. Eventually, when the two boys are standing dangerously high in a tree in one of Phineas's crazy stunts, Gene can't stand it anymore: not Phineas's confidence nor his own constant fear. He wiggles the branch, just a little, without thinking it through. And Phineas falls, is crippled and eventually dies of complications from the fall. One tiny, unthinking act—and Gene becomes a villain, at least to himself.

  He also learns from what he has done that all villainy springs from fear. The novel ends thus, after all the schoolboys have turned eighteen and been sent off to fight World War II:

  Only Phineas was never afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone. Other people experienced this fearful shock somewhere, this sighting of the enemy, and so began an obsessive line of defense, began to parry the menace they saw facing them by developing a particular frame of mind. . . . All of them, except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against the enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, the enemy who never

  attacked that way—if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.

  How do you construct a successful accidental villain? Not accidentally. Rather, you must take considerable care:

  • Set up the fatal flaw early in your story. Gene's rivalry with Phineas is hinted at in the very first scene in story time: ''He weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, a galling ten pounds more than I did.'' ''Why did I let Finny talk me into stupid things like this? Was he getting some kind of hold over me?'' '' . . . and then Finny trapped me again in his strongest trap, that is, I suddenly became his collaborator.'' You, too, need to present many repeated variants of the trait that will eventually cause your character to commit evil.

  • Make the character more than just his fatal flaw. We would not believe Gene, or find his act of cruelty nearly as compelling, if he were nothing but Phineas's jealous rival. Instead, Gene is also Phineas's friend, and Knowles includes scene after scene of their good times together. Gene is good at his studies, shrewd in his observations of others and needy of adult approval. Make sure your accidental villain is fleshed out with sympathetic character traits that nonetheless don't conflict with his fatal flaw. Spend wordage on this. Often, to make this easier, the accidental villain is a POV character.

  • Keep the villain's reaction to his own villainy self-consistent. If you've drawn an introspective character like Gene, it's reasonable to believe he will think a lot about what he's done. If you've drawn one who, like Macbeth, has always been loyal to his king, he shouldn't suddenly become a conscienceless renegade who does the rest of his killing without a qualm (and Macbeth does not).

  • If, on the other hand, your accidental villain has blundered into evil through sheer stupidity, he must go on being stupid about what happens to him next. Each of these character traits should be part of what you set up while fleshing out the character before his act of villainy. Be consistent, and your villain will be plausible.

  THE EXAMINED VILLAIN: PORTRAIT OF EVIL

  In contrast to the accidental villain, the examined villain intends to sin. He plans the arson or rape or serial murders, sometimes very carefully. What the author intends is to create a portrait of who such a person is and why he acts as he does. This is the villain's book and he, not the hero, is the protagonist, and also usually the POV character. There may not even be a hero.

  Diverse examples of this approach include William Makepeace Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, a first-person portrait of a villain who doesn't know he's one; Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, in which the victims are not nearly as important or interesting as the psychology of the killers; and Thomas Perry's Edgar-winning The Butcher's Boy, which examines the techniques and thought patterns of a freelance hit man.

  The Butcher's Boy illustrates an interesting facet of the examined villain: If the portrait is thorough enough, we can come to feel sympathy for even the coldest-blooded of killers. It's hard at times not to root for Perry's nameless protagonist, even while he's indiscriminately murdering wiseguys, FBI agents and a blameless United States senator. Is this character the villain or the hero? The line blurs.

  Whether you're examining a repulsive villain or a semisympathetic one, you need to do the following:

  • Make the villain a POV character. Otherwise, it's very difficult to give us the thoughts, emotions and childhood background that let you examine him thoroughly. Show us how he became what he is.

  • Add something to the stereotype. If your villain fits into a class that's been overused lately—Mafia hit men, serial rapists who hate women, deranged Vietnam vets, rogue CIA agents, white suprema-cists—you're going to have to work twice as hard to create the character. You need to add something new to the portrait—without making it implausible. The butcher's boy, for instance, is not secretly a sentimental man who loves children. But he does have some unexpected facets: the modest way he lives between jobs; his affection for Eddie, his dead mentor and foster father; his awareness of the price he pays for his profession:

  The girl had put him in a bad mood, reminded him of how impatient he was for this trip to end so he could go back to Tucson and relax. It wasn't easy to live for days at a time without so much as talking to anybody, and for weeks without saying more than, ''What's the soup of the day?''

  • Look for the traits and details that make your examined villain individual enough to stand prolonged examination. He should have texture, complexity, personal quirks—all the things that go into creating any other character, and that we've discussed so far in this book.

  • Be accurate and realistic in all other details of your story. You are asking us to stay with you during an examination of a character that we probably can't identify with and that we may find morally repulsive. Make sure the rest of the story—setting, secondary characters, law-enforcement procedures—does not cause us plausibility problems. If we can accept everything else, we are more likely to also accept your villain protagonist.

  • Provide the villain with self-justification. Even Hitler thought he was justified in genocide. The more twisted and evil your villain, the more important it is to show us how he justifies his actions to himself. Everybody has an internal story about why they're actually right in what they've done. Show us his, and in terms we can believe that he believes. Do this by having his self-justifications invade every area of characterization we've discussed so far: thoughts, dialogue, background, peripheral attitudes, even dreams.

  THE SURPRISE VILLAIN: OH! HE DID IT!

  The surprise villain is the character who is introduced to us sympathetically, and we don't see his actual evil until farther into the story. A standard device in mysteries, it also can be used to good effect in other types of fiction. Classic examples are Willoughby in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Steerforth in Dickens's David Copperfield and Rebecca in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Let's look at Rebecca.

  She never appears in the novel, having already drowned when the unnamed narrator marries Rebecca's widower, Maxim de Winter. But everyone is full of praise for the dead woman, and through the shy and awkward second wife we get a textured, nuanced portrait o
f Rebecca: charming, gracious, organized, competent, beautiful, spirited, adaptable. Everything the poor narrator is not. The novel is nearly over before the second wife—and we—learn that in actuality Rebecca was cold, wanton, selfish and cruel enough to trick her husband into killing her so that she didn't have to do it herself.

  How does du Maurier pull off such a surprise villain—one that seems to emerge plausibly from the setup of an entirely different personality? And how can you do the same? Some considerations:

  • Don't make the surprise villain a POV character. Not even for one scene. This is cheating, because we expect to have access to all of a POV character's important thoughts, and the fact that she's seducing her brother-in-law, say, is fairly important. You can't conceal it.

  • Plant hints that all is not as it seems. These should not be blatant, but they must be there, so that the POV character can recall them after the revelation and thereby lend it credibility. Maxim de Winter, for instance, does not like the stone cottage by the bay: ''If you had my memories you would not go there either.'' Also, Maxim never mentions Rebecca's name. Choose such hints carefully, plant them unobtrusively and use them later.

  • Make sure the two sides of your surprise villain—the positive Before and negative After—are plausible together. Rebecca's positive traits—charm, taste, brains, beauty—are not incompatible with being selfish and manipulative. Other positive-negative combinations would be harder to make credible. A person who is represented as boorish and stupid, for example, probably can't be revealed as an international art thief—that criminal career takes too much education, finesse and adaptability. Similarly, if your placid, constantly knitting grandmother is to be plausibly revealed as a surprise serial killer, we had better be shown some degree of anger, self-deception or sheer craziness long before the revelation.

  STANDARD VILLAINS I: THE OVER-THE-TOP WEIRDOS

  Standard villains are standard only in the function they fulfill in the plot: They're the unrepentant, untextured bad guys who are deliberately making life tough for the good guys. They're classical antagonists, generators of conflict, the black hats hassling Dodge City. They come in two varieties.