Creating Characters

by Lauther, Howard

  However, to qualify as a nonhuman adversary, a disease need not threaten a whole city or an entire nation. Setting aside the obvious threat posed by such infectious diseases as yellow fever, tuberculosis, AIDS, cholera, meningitis, smallpox, Bubonic plague, syphilis, typhoid, and leprosy, there are other ways to use disease as a threat. If a child comes down with chicken pox the day before the family takes a vacation, isn't that a nonhuman adversary, since it disrupts everyone's plans? If a character wakes up with laryngitis, how will he deliver a very important speech to the stockholders? What does the woman do when she finds out her boyfriend has gonorrhea? Will a case of the mumps mean that a man will no longer be able to bear children? What will the character do if he develops one of the following: heart disease, cancer, Bright's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, Parkinson's disease, or leukemia?

  When a character in the story is physically threatened by a disease, it gives the writer an opportunity to explore the manner in which the victim handles the misfortune, and how it affects his family, friends, and the other people with whom he comes into contact.

  DISORDER

  For the organized individual, combatting general disorder is tantamount to fighting grizzled, ill-shod rebels who, instead of aligning themselves in parade-like fashion where they might be leveled with a single cannon shot, jump out of alleyways firing and take pot-shots from rooftops. Disorder becomes a nonhuman adversary when the contributors to it are many in number and are essentially faceless—that is, when the blame for the mess cannot be laid upon anyone person's shoulders. Yes, things are indeed strewn about, but who scattered them? Yes, procedures are in a total shambles, but who is to blame? Yes, there is lawlessness, but who is at fault? This nonhuman adversary is a thing out of harmony; it trips over its own devices. It is chaos, it is carelessness, it is freedom run amok. It impedes the success of getting even the smallest thing done; big things are out of the question.

  GHOSTS AND DEMONS

  Authors frequently create ghosts and demons to tell a spine-tingling story. To qualify as a nonhuman adversary, however, a ghost cannot simply be mischievous; instead, it will have to frighten the characters in the plot and possibly even endanger at least one of them in some way. A friendly sort like Casper the Friendly Ghost will not do. If the ghost has the ability to do some extraordinary things, so much the better; readers and viewers often enjoy seeing the unbelievable made believable.

  Rod Serling, the creator of the widely acclaimed television series The Twilight Zone, was highly skilled at fashioning demons out of inanimate objects, including automobiles, a ventriloquist's dummy, and so on. Also, movies have been produced in which the hero or heroine is terrorized by one or more poltergeists.

  HARD TIMES

  As a nonhuman adversary, "hard times" can serve as a backdrop in a story or suddenly become a plot driver; but in the latter instance hardship will usually need a particular related event to trigger it. If, for example, hard times caused a little girl to steal bread from the kitchen of an aristocrat and she is killed for it, a town that is suffering from lack of food could erupt into wide-ranging anger. While the conditions that typify hard times may, in fact, have been generated and perpetrated by human beings, as a nonhuman adversary hard times will generally take on a life of its own and become a rather broad menace to the general population. The sweeping presence of hardship will be seen in every aspect of daily life.

  Hard times might easily include poverty, famine, economic depression, war, and repression, but any period that is essentially negative may serve as a nonhuman adversary, e.g., the Age of Disillusionment, the Age of Cynicism, the Age of Ignorance, the Age of Anxiety, the Great Depression, etc. While essentially faceless, a period of hard times is usually highly destructive in one form or another. Institutions can become dramatically altered; governments can be capsized; and the entire social structure can be realigned. It is a time when the people become severely disadvantaged and their restlessness boils. In his novel A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens expertly wove in the element of hard times as his characters displayed love, courage, and nobility during a time when the French, in an anti-royalist frenzy, were beheading people in a blood lust.

  As a nonhuman adversary, hard times will cause some characters to search for food, work, or justice—and perhaps all three at once. Hard times may bring out the best in them, or the worst.

  THE LAW

  Laws are generated by human beings, and apart from widely accepted conventions, most have at least one author who others can point to as being responsible. Formal laws usually outlive their originators by a great many years; indeed, some of them last several centuries, perhaps for the entire life of a nation. The longer they exist, the less likely it becomes that the authors will be remembered, and the more likely that the law will be seen not as a creation of humans, but as a restrictive power in its own right—that is, a nonhuman adversary to those who disagree with it.

  For example, very few can trace the actual birth of Prohibition in America. While some may know that it was established by the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution in 1919, few people attach any faces or names to the passage of this amendment. Most people see Prohibition as simply a faceless power that attempted (unsuccessfully) to stop the production and sale of alcohol. The subsequent revolt against this law, this nonhuman adversary, led to passage of the twenty-first amendment 14 years later.

  Is there a law, on or off the books, that one of your characters views as adversarial? How has it affected him or someone he knows, and what action does it prompt him to take? Will he purposely break the law? Or try to change it, perhaps, by campaigning against it?

  MEDICAL DISORDER

  As nonhuman adversaries, some medical disorders need a classification separate from disease. They may be genetic in nature, or they may be only temporary inconveniences associated with perhaps a particular lifestyle or a character's age. Take the latter instance: A teenager would certainly view acne as a terrible adversary, for it disrupts the physical image he would like to convey to the opposite sex. Each pimple is a wound suffered, and the mirror reflects the losing battle. Likewise, constipation and malnutrition may represent temporary conditions, but they arise out of deprivation.

  Some of the more serious medical disorders would include arthritis, cerebral palsy, high blood pressure, asthma, cataracts, anemia, varicose veins, neuritis, ulcers, and diabetes. Whether a disorder runs in the family or is a result of the way the character conducts his life is something for the creative writer to decide.

  Usually a character with a medical disorder must endure the hardship that accompanies it. Sometimes that comes in the form of chronic pain, and the character's ability to cope with this nonstop attack upon the body constitutes a dimension that will set him apart from all the others in the story.

  MONOTONY

  Monotony is a nonhuman adversary that slowly grinds away our energy on a daily basis. Struggle against its demands as we often do, it is nevertheless true that an overwhelming number of us can be counted among its victims. We march to the tick-tock of clocks, by doing certain things at certain times, as well as in certain ways. We take the same bus or drive the same way to work each day. From one desk to another we shuffle stacks of paper, each stack hauntingly similar to the ones preceding and following it. We watch the same television programs and listen to variations of the same conversations concerning the weather, the children, rising prices, and last night's sports news. A fictional character who is perceptive may well see his life as some sort of assembly line, in which, one way or another, he keeps adding the same parts to the engine of his life. To a character who is less perceptive, the frustration may be nameless but quite palpable. The question is, what will this monotony cause either character to do?

  OLD AGE

  Old age is, of course, a human trait; however, some of the things that accompany old age have an adversarial nature. For those who have crossed the broad waters from youth to old age and found themselves miraculously turne
d into elders on the far shore, the gratitude they feel for having made it that far may be diluted by the losses they have experienced along the way. Gone is the glowing skin that once had never known a wrinkle or a brown blotch. Gone is the eyesight that was once so keen. And gone, too, is the elasticity of the bones that used to bounce without breaking. These losses, and others like them, represent the wounds suffered in a battle with old age—an adversary who simply never loses. This adversary laughs at the individual who, refusing to admit defeat, tries to recapture the look of youth through exercise, facelifts, tonics, and clothes to dazzle the eye.

  PHYSICAL IMPAIRMENT

  Here the nonhuman adversary takes away what once belonged to the character. He who could see is now blind; or he who could hear is now deaf; or he who could walk is now crippled. Such a character must be differentiated from those born blind, deaf, or crippled, for in this case the impairment is an affliction to which the character is unaccustomed. The presence of any of these nonhuman adversaries places an enormous burden upon the character, for he suddenly finds himself deprived of a precious gift that he once took for granted. How will the character struggle to regain at least some of the ground he has lost? What victories might he achieve in utter darkness? What can he gain from the silence around him? What insight will become his in a wheelchair? Or might he be defeated by this nonhuman adversary and allow his will to shrivel and die?

  THE "SYSTEM"

  The so-called system, which practically everyone complains about, contains an assortment of nonhuman adversaries. While the system is in fact generated by humans, it is seen as self-perpetuating. Three of the prime candidates from this adversarial category include the following: (1) a bureaucracy, which attends every form of government on earth and is restrictive and frustrating in countless annoying ways to those who like swift action; (2) a chain of command—sometimes known as the "pecking order"—which occurs in the military, the corporate structure, and in many organizations, and which is comprised of layer upon layer of jealously guarded fiefdoms that one bypasses at one's peril; (3) a social order, in which one is assigned a place commensurate with one's ancestry, financial clout, skin color, education, or religion, or some combination thereof. There are of course other systems that are just as intimidating.

  And woe indeed to that character who dares to buck the system, simply because he is weary of mountains of paperwork and snail-paced programs, or because he is tired of going through channels, or because he no longer wants to be excluded because of who he is.

  TIME

  Whenever a character in a story must do something within a certain time frame, e.g., deliver the ransom money before noon, or perhaps be at a certain place before the clock strikes a specific hour, then time itself becomes a nonhuman adversary. Moreover, if time is to be used as an adversary, then it probably goes without saying that the writer must place obstacles in the path of the hero or heroine. One cannot make the reader or viewer squirm in his chair if everything goes according to plan. A race against the clock can rivet the reader's attention to the page and glue the theater-goer to the edge of his seat.

  THE UNKNOWN

  When a fictional character feels some degree of inexplicable dread about what the future may hold, he is experiencing the presence of a nonhuman adversary, nameless though it may be. He may believe that danger is just around the corner, yet he may not be able to define exactly what form it will take. He may feel that he is going to lose something of vital interest, though just what it is he really can't say. But it would be a mistake to assume that this character is a good candidate for psychoanalysis. He is not someone who makes mountains out of molehills and sees dragons lurking behind every tree. He is not a worrywart. What he feels instinctively but is unable to verbalize is a result of things he has seen and heard—pieces of a puzzle he has been putting together. He is trying to assemble a picture of the unknown, a shadowy thing that will burst fully featured upon the scene only when some momentous event takes place in the world.

  This nonhuman adversary haunts the investor who, because of the most infinitesimal indicators, somehow senses great danger ahead in a stock market that is rushing to new heights. It presents itself to that person who knows that a war is coming but can tell neither when it will start nor who will initiate it. It dwells in the room with the child who knows his parents are terribly unhappy; it lurks in the minds of those who are afraid of losing their jobs and wonder what they will do; it is a phantom that, sometimes inexplicably, threatens one's sense of well-being.

  WEATHER

  Bad weather provides an author with an excellent opportunity to place his or her characters in extreme conditions that are beyond their control and, as a result, give them the chance to show their courage, cowardice, inventiveness, impatience, and so on. Even fog can be an adversary: In mystery stories, for example, it can prevent the protagonist from seeing the murderer's face, and on the high seas it can make the navigation of ships quite treacherous.

  As a nonhuman adversary, bad weather can be a subsidiary antagonist or a plot driver. In the motion picture Key Largo, it served a subsidiary role: The hurricane did not supersede the conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist. In another story, bad weather might accentuate the human conflict in such a way that it actually helps bring it to a head. For weather as a plot driver, consider John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath: Here a relentless drought was the villain, causing the Joad family as well as thousands of other Oklahoma farmers to give up their land and head for California. Thus the weather was a plot driver because it precipitated action.

  Besides fog, hurricanes, and drought, other nonhuman adversaries in this category would include extreme cold, floods, tornadoes, blistering heat, blizzards, and even high humidity. High humidity? Yes; anyone who has lived in an unair-conditioned city apartment during 100+ degree weather would easily recognize it as a brutal adversary that can make tempers snap like lightning bolts.

  14. What Plot Drivers Will Affect the Character?

  A plot driver is a device that causes the reader or viewer to ask, "What's going to happen next?" It is the banana peel that causes the status quo to lose its footing. Sometimes a writer needs only one plot driver to sustain a story, other times he or she needs more; sometimes one plot driver will beget another plot driver, which will beget another, and so on. The purpose, of course, is to generate action—mental or physical, or both—and propel the story forward, even if only inch by inch.

  Plot drivers create reactions; rarely will you find one that has an emotional base. There are some internal and external traits that seemingly have the power to be listed as plot drivers—among the prime examples would certainly be jealousy, envy, resentment, courage, and cowardice—but the fact of the matter is, all of these traits tend to be reactive; their presence usually depends upon something else that happens in the story. For instance, a character does not suddenly decide to display jealousy or cowardice for the purpose of causing complications. The emotion surfaces because of what the character sees or hears—or at least thinks he sees or hears. Whatever he believes has happened, that is the actual plot driver, even if his belief is mistaken.

  Nevertheless, you may see at least a couple of plot drivers listed in this chapter that could easily be seen as reactive. Kindness and unkindness come immediately to mind. In this chapter, however, an act of kindness or unkindness is seen not from the point of view of the person displaying it, but from the viewpoint of the individual who is at the receiving end.

  Some plot drivers take place before a story even begins. Close to the beginning of Hamlet, for example, we learn that two plot drivers have already occurred: the death of the prince's father and the marriage of his mother to his uncle. The next plot driver occurs during the actual story and falls into the arrival category, for the ghost of Hamlet's dead father appears before him and reveals that he was murdered by his uncle.

  The best kind of plot driver illuminates one or more of a character's internal traits, his strengths or
weaknesses, his likes or dislikes, his wants or needs, or his fears. We learn some of these things when a character is faced with a dilemma, something unexpected, the emergence of danger, something he doesn't like, or one of any number of things that forces him to take action.

  The purpose of this chapter is not to supply the writer with a list of every plot driver imaginable—there are literally thousands—but rather to present at least most of the major categories, allowing the writer to quickly isolate one or two options for his or her particular story. From that point on, the specifics are entirely dependent upon the author's creative intelligence and lie well beyond the scope of his book.

  As you review this section, you will see that adversity is the granddaddy of all plot drivers. Of the 49 plot-driver categories listed in this chapter, almost two-thirds of them fall into adversity's camp; of the rest, a good percentage could become adversarial in nature as well. A tale filled with nothing but sweetness and light is invariably boring and not worth telling. Even in fairy tales there are dragons and villains.