Dynamic Characters- How to create personalities that keep readers captivated

by Nancy Kress

  The first type, which is increasingly popular, are over-the-top exaggerations. The blackest of evil, the deadliest of weapons, the coldest of hearts, the most colorful of personalities. The movies have a lot to do with this: the Joker and Penguin in Batman, the mad bomber of Speed, right up to Oliver Stone's Mickey and Mallory of Natural Born Killers. In print, we have similar hyped-up, exaggerated villains: Loren Estleman's Lake Erie terrorists in Kill Zone; all of Ian Fleming's weirdos, killing people with bizarre inventiveness; the Walking Man in Stephen King's The Stand; legions of invading aliens in much (although not all) escapist science fiction.

  The appeal of the over-the-top villain is not realism but novelty. As such, many of the methods of characterization we've discussed so far simply don't apply. This brand of villain does not need background, complexity, individuality, unique thoughts. You aren't creating a real person here, but a colorful sideshow. If that's what you really want, then you must:

  • stretch your imagination. Anything not absolutely fresh will fail. Give the villain larger-than-life beliefs (''I am the devil incarnate''), crimes, weapons, daring. Don't hold back. Think big.

  • match the villain's evil to the hero's weaknesses. In Ed McBain's Doll, the villain, a sexy temptress who ties up the cop hero and injects him with heroin to turn him into an addict, plays directly to his weaknesses: a dislike of being confined, and a male response to female nakedness. (Note: Drugs are not fresh or larger-than-life menaces now—but Doll was written in the early 1960s.)

  • surround your weirdos with factual details. Although plausibility isn't as much of a requirement in this kind of book as in many others, accuracy in details can still help hook readers into accepting the rest. Estleman's weapons, from assault weapons to depth charges, perform as in real life. The police procedures in Doll are accurate. King uses actual Las Vegas geography in The Stand.

  • enjoy your villains. This kind of book is not gritty, painful realism. If you don't have fun with it, neither will your reader.

  STANDARD VILLAINS II:

  THE MUNDANE EVIL ALL AROUND US

  The second class of villains who fulfill a standard plot function are actually the hardest of all to write. They are the mundane, no-larger-than-life antagonists who are evil out of stupidity or weakness or selfishness. They ruin (or at least, try to ruin) others' lives without being colorful, without being original, without repenting, without surprising us. They're criminals as most criminals are in reality—even though fiction is charged with creating more heightened emotion, and more coherent patterns, than does real life. No wonder they're hard to write.

  Yet brilliant examples of the mundane villain abound. Captain Queeg, petty and tyrannical, in Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny. Bob Ewell in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird: ''a low-down skunk with enough liquor in him to make him brave enough to kill children.'' Dennis Nedry in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, selling out his employers and exposing a parkful of researchers to unfenced cloned dinosaurs. Gary Cooper White, criminal drifter, who brutally murders Theresa Dunn because she won't let him stay the night, in Judith Rossner's Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

  To create such villains, you must apply all the guidelines in every other category except over-the-top weirdos. Set up the character early. Give him a wider life, and more comprehensive personality, than just his villainy. Give him plausible self-justifications for his actions and consistent reactions to his crimes. Deepen stereotypes with unexpected twists. Surround your villain with as many accurate details as your hero.

  VILLAIN CHECK: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

  In short, creating a successful realistic antagonist takes the same level of work as creating a successful protagonist. Gary Cooper White, for instance, doesn't have nearly as many scenes as Theresa Dunn in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. But Rossner has taken care that the scenes White does have—his confession and the murder—are each packed with nuance and detail. We can see, hear, smell this guy. We are in his head (and a loathsome place it is). We know why he kills, and why he kills in the way he does. He is not just another cipher. He is Gary Cooper White, a dreary and horrifying moral vacuum.

  Evil may be banal, but it shouldn't be insubstantial. Give it substance. To do that, employ all the same techniques you used to create your hero: appearance, dialogue, attitudes, hopes, fears, preferences, mannerisms, childhood background, dreams and desires.

  One test of a good villain is: Could you write a book telling his side of the story? It would be a different book, surely, and you might not want to write it—but could you? Is your villain real enough, complicated enough, possessed of enough personal history so that you could tell his tale in addition to, or instead of, the hero's?

  If not, think about the villain some more. Try to get into his head, hear his language, feel his fear (everybody's afraid of something—

  more on this in a later chapter). Imagine his childhood. Think what he loves. Listen to what he tells himself just before he falls asleep at night. And try again.

  When the answer is yes, everybody comes out ahead. Especially your reader.

  SUMMARY: CREATING GOOD BAD GUYS

  • Not all novels need villains.

  • If you do have a villain, flesh him out as fully as you do the hero— unless he's an over-the-top weirdo in a fast-paced action book with no other literary goals.

  • Make sure that over-the-top weirdos really are: outrageous, fresh and eye-catching.

  • For accidental villains, set up the fatal flaw early and take care that the character is more than just his flaw.

  • Provide villains with sufficient and heartfelt self-justification.

  • Foreshadow surprise villains carefully enough so that readers will think back on the story and say, ''Of course!''

  As we saw in the last chapter, a villain both is and is not a special case of characterization. He's not different from all your other fictional people in that he, too, needs to be well characterized. But he is different in that, depending on the type of villain he is, you may have to use some additional techniques to fully create him on the page.

  The same is true of the protagonist who isn't really a villain, but isn't exactly someone you'd invite home to dinner, either. The unsympathetic protagonist.

  Stories with unsympathetic protagonists often receive mixed reactions from readers. An aspiring novelist once wrote me a bewildered letter centering around this question:

  Can a short story survive if the narrator is disliked? My creative writing professor and a screenwriter I happen to

  know both read a story of mine, and both were uncomfortable—disquieted?—by the depths of hate they felt for my heroine ... a bitter old woman.

  It's a good question. Although both a story and a dinner party require us to spend time with unknown personalities, they are not the same. We don't want to attend a dinner that features ugly surroundings, scanty food, social cruelty or poisoning the guests—but all these things can be welcome in a good novel. Similarly, we're willing to undergo intimate fictional encounters with people whom for various reasons we might not invite into our homes: Don Corleone (too dangerous), Becky Sharp (too exploitive), George Babbitt (too boring), Captain Queeg (too untrustworthy), Hannibal Lector (we don't wish to be dinner).

  Note that this list is widely eclectic. It includes characters that some people might find sympathetic (Becky Sharp has her defenders, including feminists that consider her to be making the best of the hand Victorian women were dealt). It includes characters who are in no way evil but merely unsympathetically limited and tedious (George Babbitt). And it includes characters so unsympathetic (Hannibal Lector) that they are in fact villains. There's no clear line between the villain and the unsympathetic protagonist, just as there is no clear line between the sympathetic and unsympathetic character. Each reader draws those lines for himself. And each reader will differ in his reaction to spending four hundred pages with a person he does not like. Some readers enjoy it. They like to dislike fictional characters.
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br />   On the other hand, no writer can afford to ignore that many people read for identification. These readers want to experience vicariously adventures they will never have in real life. They want the thrill of falling into perfect love or solving a murder or making three million dollars or escaping the villains in an unchartered boat. To experience these things along with your protagonist, readers must first be able to identify with your protagonist. And they won't want to do that if your protagonist is as criminal as Don Corleone, as rapacious as Becky Sharp, as wimpy as George Babbitt, as paranoid as Captain Queeg or as monstrous as Hannibal Lector.

  But on the other hand (we're running out of limbs here), The Godfather (Mario Puzo), Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray),

  Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis), The Caine Mutiny (Herman Wouk) and The Silence of the Lambs (Thomas Harris) were all bestsellers. When can you get away with an unsympathetic main character? There's no one straightforward answer—but there are some variables to consider. They take the form of seven questions to ask yourself before and as you write your fairly-off-putting-to-totally-repulsive character.

  THE DESIGNATED READERS:

  WHAT AUDIENCE ARE YOU WRITING FOR?

  Your intended audience is probably the most important factor determining how unsympathetic your main character can be. Certain kinds of commercial fiction—romance, ''cozy'' mysteries, romantic suspense, young adult—demand a sympathetic protagonist because of the identification phenomenon mentioned above. ''Literary'' fiction, however, which frequently aims to examine its characters rather than encourage identification with them, allows much more unpleasant protagonists. Even so, Thackeray, a very popular author in his day, was widely criticized for creating Becky Sharp. She was seen as an unflattering portrait of sacred womanhood. And Toni Morrison has not escaped criticism for providing very few portraits of black men that any black male reader would want to identify with.

  The bottom line here is that your chances in commercial fiction are better with a sympathetic protagonist. You can save the unsympathetic characters for secondary roles. Until the movie version of his novel The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris did not sell anywhere near as many copies—by an order of magnitude—as Danielle Steel, whose most prominent characters are always sympathetic. At the other end of the literary spectrum, the ''little'' magazines often seem to me to be bored by ordinary, nice, loving people as protagonists. Know your prospective audience when you plan your unsympathetic character.

  THE NOVEL'S EYES: IS YOUR UNSYMPATHETIC PERSON THE ONLY POV CHARACTER?

  It's easier to pull off an unpleasant protagonist if somebody more sympathetic is the POV character. This gives the reader someone else to identify with. For instance, we see Captain Queeg's story through the eyes of a likable young officer on his ship.

  In a novel, you can also try a multiple POV. The amoral Becky

  Sharp shares her multiviewpoint novel with the saintly Amelia Sedley. On the other hand, George Babbitt is both protagonist and POV character in his eponymous novel. However, Sinclair Lewis tells the story from a great enough distance, and with enough authorial comment, that we don't feel we're locked into this dim and tedious man's head all the time. The author becomes a second POV.

  Can you tell your nasty character's story just as effectively from another POV, with a shared POV or using a fairly distant third person? Will what you lose in immediacy be redeemed by a more balanced perspective—and by some reader distance from a distasteful mind? Only you can make that decision.

  THE ACCEPTABLE LIMITS: IS YOUR CHARACTER JUST TOO NASTY TO BE BELIEVABLE?

  Sometimes the problem with an unsympathetic character isn't that she's a bitch but that she's not a believable bitch. Losers have just as complicated motives as anybody else. Bitter old women get that way because of real-life events. Children who pull wings off butterflies may be fiercely loyal to a friend or a pet dog. Ask yourself whether your unsympathetic character might become more plausible if you showed us her softer side, her history or her inner beliefs. Even if we still don't like her, believability may make us more willing to hear her story.

  THE BIG CHANGE: WILL YOUR CHARACTER BECOME MORE SYMPATHETIC BY THE END OF YOUR STORY?

  Many readers are willing to accept an unsympathetic protagonist if they sense that during the course of the story he's going to change. A character who learns great truths and becomes more human as a result can make a satisfying tale. I did this in my science fiction story ''Mountain to Mohammed,'' in which a young doctor works illegally among the uninsured poor for the danger, self-aggrandizement and thrills. Only after he gets thrown out of the medical establishment does he realize the real rewards of practicing medicine.

  To pull this off, your character has to be deluded or callow, not genuinely nasty, or the change won't be believable. Even so, you'll lose some readers unwilling to stick with the story long enough to discover that the protagonist changes. At least one reviewer has compared ''Mountain to Mohammed'' unfavorably to some of my other work because of its ''unappealing protagonist.''

  JUST DESERTS: IS THIS A COMEUPPANCE STORY?

  Many readers like stories about distasteful people—provided they get squashed in the end, restoring moral order to the universe. When the distasteful person is the protagonist, however, and not merely a supporting character, there are two pitfalls for the comeuppance story.

  One is that, as with the protagonist-who-changes story, readers may not stick around long enough to find out there will be a comeuppance. To ensure they do, you have two choices. You can signal from the beginning that your unsympathetic protagonist not only is riding for a fall, but will get it. Do this through a prologue that hints at the ending, or through making it clear that the author also dislikes the villain, or through telling the story as a flashback, with the comeuppance a settled thing.

  Or, you can make your unsympathetic protagonist seem harmless for the first part of the story, so that by the time we realize he's unsympathetic, we're already hooked on finding out what's going to happen. The second choice is more common.

  A classic example is Edith Wharton's short story ''Roman Fever.'' In the beginning its two middle-aged widows, Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley, seem equally benevolent. They watch their two daughters, brilliant Barbara Ansley and mousy Jenny Slade, go off for an afternoon of pleasure in Rome. But as the ladies reminisce, we slowly realize that Mrs. Slade is an amoral and jealous woman who, twenty-five years ago, tried to have her friend killed because Grace Ansley was in love with Alida Slade's fiancee. Mrs. Slade mocks her friend, reminding her that Delphin Slade loved her and not Grace, that ''I had him for twenty-five years, and you had nothing but that one letter he didn't write.'' She bullies Grace and admits she hates her, even though she believes Delphin never cared about Grace. It isn't until the last line of the story that Mrs. Slade gets her comeuppance: Taunted with having nothing of Delphin, Grace Ansley says quietly, ''I had Barbara.'' It's a quietly devastating line.

  The other danger of the comeuppance story is that it can seem contrived. Every adult knows that the universe doesn't always punish the bad guys. So if your universe is doing just that, it must seem to grow naturally out of the human forces opposing your bad guy, and not just from the author's desire to provide moral justice. Your unsympathetic character must stumble because he's too shortsighted or too ambitious or too cold to understand other people's strengths and alli-ances—not just because he's doing unsympathetic things.

  THE STINGING EXAGGERATION: ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE A BITING POINT ABOUT THE WORLD?

  Sometimes the unsympathetic character isn't actually the protagonist; his world is, and he exists mostly to direct our attention to it. In this case, if the texture of the world is compelling enough, or relevant enough, or horrifying enough, many readers (not all) will accept the unsympathetic protagonist as an inevitable product of the environment you're showing them.

  Consider two very different examples. George Babbitt, an uninteresting man in himself, succeeds as a character becaus
e Sinclair Lewis uses him to hold up a mirror to the (then contemporary) world of small-town American business. Lewis's aim is to show how boring, petty, stifling and mean-spirited that world was. Babbitt is its emblem, but it was the portrait of a way of life that made the book so hotly controversial, so much discussed—and so successful.

  Similarly, Harlan Ellison's science fiction story ''A Boy and His Dog'' features a protagonist, Vic, as horrifying as Hannibal Lector— and for much the same reasons. But Vic is the logical product of a horrifying future, and that future is both the story's justification and its real protagonist.

  A FINAL GOOD JUSTIFICATION FOR MR. REPULSIVE: DOES HE HOLD US RAPT?

  This is the bottom line: If your character is unpleasant, unrepentant, unpunished, implausible, and atypical, is he just so sheerly fascinating that we'll want to read about him anyway? If so, it won't matter that he's unsympathetic; the story or book will sell. But he'd better be really fascinating.

  And there's another caveat here: What's fascinating to one person may not be to another, no matter how well written. Case in point: Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, told from the POV of a psychopathic serial killer. The first publisher, alarmed by adverse publicity, dropped the book. But when it eventually came out, a great many people found the profoundly unsympathetic protagonist fascinating enough that they read the novel. Many others did not. Similarly if less dramatically, many readers praised John Updike for his four-novel series about Rabbit Angstrom, who is crude, selfish, misogynistic, and irresponsible. Others have disliked Rabbit from the beginning, refusing to spend one entire book with him, let alone four (one early reviewer called Rabbit ''repulsive''). It's worth remembering that unsympathetic and fascinating are both subjective terms.

  THE LAST WORD: TRADE-OFF