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Although all the popular genres have a single main character, there are some nongenre stories that have multiple heroes. You'll recall that in Chapter 1, we talked about how stories move, with the extreme opposites being linear action and simultaneous action. Having a number of heroes is the main way you create a sense of simultaneous story movement. Instead of tracking the development of a single character (linear), the story compares what many heroes are doing at about the same time. The risk is that you show so many characters at the same time that the story is no longer a story; it has no forward narrative drive. Even the most simultaneous story must have some linear quality, sequencing events in time, one after another.
To write a successful multihero story, you must put each main character through all seven steps—weakness and need, desire, opponent, plan, battle, self-revelation, and new equilibrium. Otherwise the character is
not a main character; the audience has not seen him move through the minimal stages of development.
Notice that having lots of heroes automatically reduces narrative drive. The more characters you must lay out in detail, the more you risk having your story literally come to a halt.
These are some of the techniques you can use to add narrative drive to a multihero story:
■ Have one character emerge over the course of the story as more central than the rest.
■ Give all the characters the same desire line.
■ Make the hero of one story line the opponent in another story line.
■ Connect the characters by making them all examples of a single subject or theme.
■ Use a cliffhanger at the end of one line to trigger a jump to another line.
■ Funnel the characters from many locations into one.
■ Reduce the time. For example, the story may take place over one day or one night.
■ Show the same holiday or group event at least three times over the course of the story to indicate forward drive and change.
■ Have characters occasionally meet by coincidence.
Examples of multihero stories that use one or more of these techniques are American Graffiti, Hannah and Her Sisters, L.A. Confidential, Pulp Fiction, The Canterbury Tales, La Ronde, Nashville, Crash, and Smiles of a Summer Night.
CHARACTER TECHNIQUE: CUTTING EXTRANEOUS CHARACTERS
Extraneous characters are one of the primary causes of episodic, inorganic stories. The first question you must ask yourself when creating any character is "Does this character serve an important function in the overall story?" If he doesn't—if he only provides texture or color—you should consider cutting him entirely. His limited value probably won't justify the time he takes up in the story line.
CHARACTER, WEB BY ARCHETYPE
A second way that characters connect and contrast in a story is through archetype. Archetypes are fundamental psychological patterns within a person; they are roles a person may play in society, essential ways of interacting with others. Because they are basic to all human beings, they cross cultural boundaries and have universal appeal.
Using archetypes as a basis for your characters can give them the appearance of weight very quickly, because each type expresses a fundamental pattern that the audience recognizes, and this same pattern is reflected both within the character and through interaction in the larger society.
An archetype resonates deeply with an audience and creates very strong feelings in response. But it is a blunt tool in the writer's repertoire. Unless you give the archetype detail, it can become a stereotype.
KEY POINT: Always make the archetype specific and individual to your unique character.
Starting with the psychologist Carl Jung, many writers have spoken about what the different archetypes mean and how they connect. For fiction writers, probably the key concept of an archetype is the notion of a shadow. The shadow is the negative tendency of the archetype, a psychological trap that a person can fall into when playing that role or living out that psychology.
We need to translate each major archetype and its shadow into practical techniques that you can use in creating a story. This involves thinking of the various archetypes in terms of both the beneficial role and the probable weaknesses that each might have in a story.
King or Father
■ Strength Leads his family or his people with wisdom, foresight, and
resolve so that they can succeed and grow. ■ Inherent Weaknesses Can force his wife, children, or people to act according to a strict and oppressive set of rules, can remove himself
entirely from the emotional realm of his family and kingdom, or may insist that his family and people live solely for his pleasure and benefit.
■ Examples King Arthur, Zeus, The Tempest, The Godfather, Rick in Casablanca, King Lear, Hamlet, Aragorn and Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, Agamemnon in the Iliad, Citizen Kane, Star Wars, Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire, American Beauty, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Fort Apache, Meet Me in St. Louis, Mary Poppins, Tootsie, The Philadelphia Story, Othello, Red River, Howards End, Chinatown.
Queen or Mother
■ Strength Provides the care and protective shell within which the child or the people can grow.
■ Inherent Weaknesses Can be protective or controlling to the point of tyranny, or can use guilt and shame to hold the child close and guarantee her own comfort.
■ Examples Hamlet, Macbeth, Hera, Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire, Elizabeth, American Beauty, The Lion in Winter, The Glass Menagerie, Long Day's Journey into Night, and Adam's Rib.
Wise Old Man, Wise Old Woman, Mentor, or Teacher
■ Strength Passes on knowledge and wisdom so that people can live better lives and society can improve.
■ Inherent Weaknesses Can force students to think a certain way or speak for the glory of himself rather than the glory of his ideas.
■ Examples Yoda in Star Wars. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, The Matrix, Gandalf and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, Wuthering Heights, Polonius in Hamlet, Homais in Madame Bovary, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, Mr. Macawber in David Copperfield, and the Iliad.
Warrior
■ Strength The practical enforcer of what is right.
■ Inherent Weaknesses Can live according to the harsh motto of "kill
or be killed"; may believe that whatever is weak must be destroyed and so become the enforcer of what is wrong.
■ Examples Achilles and Hector in the Iliad; Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in Star Wars Seven Samurai; King Arthur; Thor; Ares; Theseus;
Gilgamesh; Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli in The Lord of the Rings, Patton Die Hard; Sonny in The Godfather; A Streetcar Named Desire; The Great Santini Shane; Platoon; Sundance in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid The Terminator; and Aliens.
Magician or Shaman
■ Strength Can make visible the deeper reality behind the senses and can balance and control the larger or hidden forces of the natural world.
■ Inherent Weakness Can manipulate the deeper reality to enslave others and destroy the natural order.
■ Examples Macbeth, Harry Potter books, Phantom of the Opera, Merlin, Star Wars, Chinatown, Vertigo, Gandalf and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Conversation, and detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Nick Charles in The Thin Man.
Trickster
The trickster is a lower form of the magician archetype and is extremely
popular in modern storytelling.
■ Strength Uses confidence, trickery, and a way with words to get what he wants.
■ Inherent Weakness May become a complete liar who looks out only for himself.
■ Examples Odysseus in the Odyssey, Men in Black, Beverly Hills Cop, Crocodile Dundee, Volpone, Loki in Norse mythology, Iago in Othello, Indiana Jones, Home Alone, Catch Me If You Can, Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Brer Rabbit, Butch in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Sgt. Bilko on The Phil Silvers Show, Michael in T
ootsie,
American Beauty, Verbal in The Usual Suspects, Oliver Twist, Vanity hair, Tom Sawyer, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Artist or Clown
■ Strengths Defines excellence for a people or, negatively, shows them what doesn't work; shows them beauty and a vision of the future or what appears to be beautiful but is in fact ugly or foolish.
■ Inherent Weaknesses Can be the ultimate fascist insisting on perfection, may create a special world where all can be controlled, or simply tears everything down so that nothing has value.
■ Examples Stephen in Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Achilles in the Iliad, Pygmalion, Frankenstein, King Lear, Hamlet, the master swordsman in Seven Samurai, Michael in Tootsie, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, Verbal in The Usual Suspects, Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, The Philadelphia Story, and David Copperfield.
Lover
■ Strength Provides the care, understanding, and sensuality that can make someone a complete and happy person.
■ Inherent Weaknesses Can lose himself in the other or force the other to stand in his shadow.
■ Examples Paris in the Iliad, Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights, Aphrodite, Romeo and Juliet, Etta in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Philadelphia Story, Hamlet, The English Patient, Kay in The Godfather, Camille, Moulin Rouge, Tootsie, Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, Howards End, and Madame Bovary.
Rebel
■ Strength Has the courage to stand out from the crowd and act against a system that is enslaving people.
■ Inherent Weakness Often cannot or does not provide a better alternative, so ends up only destroying the system or the society.
■ Examples Prometheus, Loki, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, American
Beauty, Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, Achilles in the Iliad, Hamlet, Rick in Casablanca, Howards End, Madame Bovary, Rebel Without a Cause, Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, and Reds.
Here is a simple but effective character web emphasizing contrasting archetypes:
INDIVIDUALIZING CHARACTERS IN THE WEB
Once you have set your essential characters in opposition within the character web, the next step in the process is to make these character func-tions and archetypes into real individuals. But again, you don't create these unique individuals separately, out of whole cloth, with all of them just happening to coexist within the same story.
You create a unique hero, opponent, and minor characters by comparing them, but this time primarily through theme and opposition. We'll look at theme in detail in Chapter 5, "Moral Argument." But we need to look at a few of the key concepts of theme now.
Theme is your view of the proper way to act in the world, expressed through your characters as they take action in the plot. Theme is not subject matter, such as "racism" or "freedom." Theme is your moral vision, your view of how to live well or badly, and it's unique for each story you write.
KEY POINT: You begin individuating your characters by finding the moral problem at the heart of the premise. You then play out the various possibilities of the moral problem in the body of the story.
You play our these various possibilities through the opposition. Specifically, you create a group of opponents (and allies) who force the hero to deal with the central moral problem. And each opponent is a variation on the theme; each deals with the same moral problem in a different way.
Let's look at how to execute this crucial technique.
1. Begin by writing down what you think is the central moral problem of your story. If you worked through the techniques of the premise, you already know this.
2. Compare your hero and all other characters on these parameters:
■ weaknesses
■ need—both psychological and moral ■ desire
■ values
■ power, status, and ability
■ how each faces the central moral problem in the story
3. When making these comparisons, start with the most important relationship in any story, that between the hero and the main opponent. In many ways, this opponent is the key to creating
the story, because not only is he the most effective way of defining the hero, but he also shows you the secrets to creating a great character web.
4. After comparing the hero to the main opponent, compare the hero to the other opponents and then to the allies. Finally, compare the opponents and allies to one another.
Remember that each character should show us a different approach to the hero's central moral problem (variations on a theme).
Let's look at some examples to see how this technique works.
Tootsie
(by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal, story by Don McGuire and Larry Gelbart, 1982) Tootsie is a wonderful story to start with because it shows how to begin with a high-concept premise and create a story organically. Tootsie is a classic exam-
ple of what is known as a switch comedy. This is a premise technique in which the hero suddenly discovers he has somehow switched into being something or someone else. Hundreds of switch comedies have been written, going at least as far back as Mark Twain, who was a master of the technique.
The vast majority of switch comedies fail miserably. That's because most writers don't know the great weakness of the high-concept premise: it gives you only two or three scenes. The writers of Tootsie, however, know the craft of storytelling, especially how to create a strong character web and how to individuate each character by comparison. Like all high-concept stories, Tootsie has the two or three funny scenes at the switch when Dustin Hoffman's character, Michael, first dresses as a woman, reads for the part, and triumphantly visits his agent at the restaurant.
But the Tootsie writers do far more than create three funny scenes. Working through the writing process, they start by giving Michael a central moral problem, which is how a man treats a woman. The hero's moral need is to learn how to act properly toward women, especially the woman he falls in love with. The writers then create a number of opponents, each a variation on how men treat women or how women allow themselves to be treated by men. For example:
■ Ron, the director, lies to Julie and cheats on her and then justifies it by saying that the truth would hurt Julie even more.
■ Julie, the actress Michael falls for, is beautiful and talented but allows men, especially Ron, to abuse her and push her around.
■ John, the actor who plays the doctor on the show, is a lecher who takes advantage of his stardom and position on the show to force himself on the actresses who work there.
■ Sandy, Michael's friend, has such low regard for herself that when he lies to her and abuses her, she apologizes for it.
■ Les, Julie's father, falls in love with Michael (disguised as Dorothy), and treats her with the utmost respect while courting her with dancing and flowers.
■ Rita Marshall, the producer, is a woman who has hidden her femininity and her concern for other women in order to gain a position of power.
■ Michael, when disguised as Dorothy, helps the women on the show
stand up to the men and get the respect and love they deserve. But when Michael is dressed as a man, he comes on to every woman at a party, pretends to be interested in Sandy romantically, and schemes to get Julie away from Ron.
Great Expectations
(by Charles Dickens, 1861) Dickens is a master storyteller famous for his character webs. One of his most instructive is Great Expectations, which in many ways is a more advanced web than most.
The distinguishing feature in the Great Expectations web is how Dickens sets up double pairs of characters: Magwitch and Pip, Miss Havisham and Estella. Each pair has fundamentally the same relationship—mentor to student—but the relationships differ in crucial ways. Magwitch, the criminal in absentia, secretly gives Pip money and freedom but no sense of responsibility. At the opposite extreme, Miss Havisham's iron control of Estella and her bitterness at what a man has done to her tu
rn the girl into a woman too cold to love.
Vanity Fair
(by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847) Thackeray called Vanity Fair a "novel without a hero," by which he meant a heroic character worthy of emulation. All the characters are variants of predatory animals climbing over the backs of others for money, power, and status. This makes the entire character web in Vanity Fair unique. Notice that Thackeray's choice of a character web is one of the main ways he expresses his moral vision and makes his vision original.
Within the web, the main contrast in character is between Becky and Amelia. Each takes a radically different approach to how a woman finds a man. Amelia is immoral by being obtuse, while Becky is immoral by being a master schemer.
Tom Jones
(by Henry Fielding, 1749) You can see the huge effect that a writer's choice of character web has on the hero in a story like Tom Jones. This "picaresque" comic novel has a
large number of characters. Such a big social fabric means the story has a lot of simultaneous action, with little specific depth. When this approach is applied to comedy, truth of character is found in seeing so many characters acting foolishly or badly.
This includes the hero. By making Tom a foolish innocent and basing the plot on misinformation about who Tom really is, Fielding is limited in how much self-revelation and character depth he can give Tom. Tom still plays out a central moral problem, having to do with fidelity to his one great love, but he has only limited accountability.
CREATING YOUR HERO
Creating a main character on the page that has the appearance of a complete human being is complex and requires a number of steps. Like a master painter, you must build this character in layers. Happily, you have a much better chance of getting it right by starting with the larger character web. Whatever character web you construct will have a huge effect on the hero that emerges, and it will serve as a valuable guide for you as you detail this character.
Creating Your Hero, Step 1: Meeting the Requirements of a Great Hero
The first step in building your hero is to make sure he meets the requirements that any hero in any story must meet. These requirements all have to do with the main character's function: he is driving the entire story.