by Nancy Kress
''Character is plot.''
So said novelist Henry James, master of both, a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, in an uncharacteristic burst of taciturnity, James stopped there, leaving several crucial points unexplained. Why is character plot? How do you use your characters to move your plot forward? What kind of characters must you create to make that happen, and how do you create them? And why are characters such a pivotal concern anyway? If you have really exciting events, can't you just plug in people with enough characterization to carry those events out? After all, how much characterization do most best-sellers actually have?
Good questions, all of them. This book will address them in reverse order, starting with: Do you really need strong, complex, original characters to write a book that might sell?
The honest answer to this has to be ''No.'' Pick up certain
best-selling authors—I name no names—and you can't help but notice that their characters have all the depth of wallpaper. And yet the books are dazzling successes, at least in terms of sales. So why labor over creating believable and original characters?
Four reasons, ranging from the cynical to the idealistic. The most cynical reason first.
PUT AS MANY BEST FEET FORWARD AS YOU CAN
Novels that sell to editors—and then to readers—must have at least one strongly appealing characteristic. In books where the plot is all and the characters characterless, that appeal is the exciting events. Some editor bought the book because the events are different, fast-paced, gripping. Readers read it for the same reason. Both editor and readers stick with the book not because the characters are flat, but despite that fact.
So why not give your book more than one quality to catch an editor's interest? A terrific plot earns you one point. A terrific plot plus fascinating characters earns you two. A terrific plot plus fascinating characters plus an eloquent style . . . but you get the idea.
I said this was a cynical reason for concentrating on characterization. It is. It assumes that your only interest in writing a book is the eventual sales volume. In fact, however, that is almost never true. Writing a novel is a major undertaking, consuming anywhere from several months to several decades, and few people can last through the marathon of writing one if their only motivation is a large print run. Which brings us to the second reason for concentrating on characterization.
WELL, / LIKED HIM!
Those authors with sketchy, hackneyed characters in best-selling books don't believe they're sketchy or hackneyed. I've seldom met a writer who didn't think his protagonist felt very real. The most simpering and savorless romance heroine, stereotyped tough-guy detective, purely evil black-hatted villain—it doesn't matter. Their creators see in them depth and interest and reality.
The point of this is not that there are a lot of deluded writers out there (although there probably are). The point is that in order to create a character—think him up, animate him, stick with him for five hundred pages—a writer has to be enthusiastic about that character. Even if not everybody else is.
Which means you must believe in your characters. Be convinced of their solidity. Feel a quickening of interest as you decide what they'll do next. Care about their fates.
All this is much easier if you have created original, complex, individual characters in the first place, rather than simply plugging in stock characters from other people's fiction (or, worse, from TV). Your interest will come through in the writing. We'll discover more depth in the characters—because you have.
THE MULT/FACETED CHARACTER: MANY THINGS TO MANY PEOPLE
We all have different friends for different occasions. With John we share a love of discussing politics. We go to the movies mostly with Karen. Bill is the one we turn to when we're in trouble. Nobody is as good as Terry at organizing interesting vacations.
Characters are like that, too. Some are fitted for only one function: the classic ''spear carriers'' who walk on stage, deliver one line and exit. That's fine, for bit players.
But main characters are another story. Like that wonderful multi-faceted friend—the one we can talk with, rely on and vacation with— major characters need to participate in many different kinds of events. To do so believably, they need to have enough complexity so that readers accept them in these multiple roles.
Let's consider an example.
You're writing a book about a man—we'll call him Roger—who goes through several kinds of hell before he finally realizes that he cannot be responsible for the welfare of his five grown children. You conceive of Roger as a good man, kind and generous. What kinds of events will he participate in during the course of the book?
• He will be manipulated by a selfish daughter who plays on his guilt as a parent to get him to support her while she spends her life drinking.
• He will face a tough decision about whether to bail out of jail a teenage son who has stolen a car—or let him take the consequences of his own act.
• He will experience a close bond with one daughter, his favorite child—and also experience grief over her death in childbirth.
• He will undertake to raise that daughter's infant—and be appalled at how much resentment he feels toward this helpless mite who caused her mother's death.
• He will love a woman—and lose her because he can't seem to make enough time for her while preoccupied with his children's problems.
Do you see what's happening here? Roger will have to grow—or, rather, your initial conception of him will. Simply thinking of Roger as ''a good man, kind and generous'' is not going to be enough. Your readers must believe him as a man who also experiences guilt, indecision, grief, resentment and passion—not to mention poor judgment. If all we ever see of Roger is his kindness and generosity, the other events of the story won't seem convincing. ''No,'' we'll say, ''I don't believe this guy would really do that.''
In order to believe that yes, he would do that, we need to be given up front a more complex, conflicted and multiply motivated Roger. A man who may indeed be kind and generous, but whose kindness is sometimes misplaced (when?) and whose generosity may have other motives than just benevolence. Perhaps he needs to be in control of everyone around him. Perhaps he can't separate his own self-worth from how good a ''showing'' his children make in life. Perhaps he unconsciously needs them to be weak, so he can be strong. We need to be shown which of these possibilities motivates this particular Roger. We need, in short, a real human being.
A character with genuine, tangled, messed-up, mixed-bag characterization. Just like all of us.
This is what Henry James meant by ''Character is plot.'' Characterization is not divorced from plot, not a coat of paint you slap on after the structure of events is already built. Rather, characterization is inseparable from plot. What characters do, how they react to story events, must grow naturally out of their individual natures. After all, a Roger who was not kind and generous would react entirely differently to his adult kids' difficulties. So would a Roger who was kind and generous, but not also driven by guilt and self-doubt—a Roger with more confidence and better judgment.
And why doesn't Roger have these qualities? Do you know?
Creating a character with depth and complexity takes time and effort. But the effort pays off in making the character's response to events more believable and interesting.
It works the other way, as well: Once you know a complex character down to his core, then that knowing can help you generate plot ideas. Roger, for instance, is driven by a deep, pervasive fear that he isn't really a good person or a good father. He will do anything to put that anxiety to rest, to reassure himself that yes, he's a good parent because—look!—his kids are fine. Who realizes that about him, consciously or not? His daughter who drinks? Yes. His son in j
ail? No. The daughter who died? Yes. Each of these people will then react to Roger in terms of what they know (or think they know) of his character.
And their reactions, in turn, create more plot complications.
In short, paying concentrated attention to characterization is useful to you, the writer. It means you end up with stronger and fresher plots. This is not only true of novels concerned, as is Roger's, with exploring psychological dilemmas. It's true whether your story is romance, science fiction, action-adventure, whatever. What characters do must grow out of who they are, and who they are is, in turn, influenced by what you make happen to them. Two sides of the same solid gold coin. This is the best reason for putting effort into characterization.
Well, maybe not the best. There's one reason more.
YOU ARE WITH ME ALWAYS
Huckleberry Finn. Jane Eyre. Sydney Carton. Jay Gatsby. Marianne Dashwood. Sherlock Holmes.
There are characters in fiction so real, so palpable, that we can reach out and touch them our whole lives. See them, hear them, sometimes even smell them. They have a solidity and a humanity that calls up answering emotions in us, and we know we would have been much poorer if we'd never met them.
Hester Prynne. Sam Spade. Philip Carey. Ellen Olenska. Rhett Butler. Lady Brett Ashley.
The chance of creating such a character is the best reason of all for giving characterization everything you've got. ''Character is plot''—but it's also so much more. It's the reason books are not only read but reread, not only praised but loved.
Jo March. Quentin Compton. Becky Sharp. Fagin. Jean Brodie. Lord Peter Wimsey.
Hey, as they say in New York about the state lottery, you never know.
BLOOD, SWEAT, TEARS AND PRINTER TONER
One reason you never know is that no one says creating wonderful characters is surefire. Nor is it easy (and if anyone says it is, don't listen). Nor is it, by definition, formulaic. There is no software you can download, type character parameters into and command to crunch out interesting protagonists (and don't believe anyone who says that, either). You create characters out of everything that you are: your perceptions, emotions, beliefs, history, lifelong reading, desires, dreams. It's not a mappable process, or a simple one, or a straight-line one. You need patience, and insight, and trial and error.
And even then the balky imaginary so-and-sos sometimes won't cooperate.
However, there are some techniques you can experiment with in your trial-and-error approach to characterization. That's why this book exists—to explain such techniques. Part one focuses on police-report externals that contribute to characterization: appearance, dress, environment, name(s), place of birth, job, spoken dialogue. Part two is concerned with what goes on inside your character's head: her thoughts, attitudes, fears, loves and dreams. Part three applies these external and internal aspects of character to creating a plot: how to use each to show your protagonist initiating action, reacting to others, making critical decisions, changing over the course of your novel. Finally, we discuss how characterization contributes—or doesn't—to your book's overall theme.
People are endlessly fascinating, endlessly surprising, endlessly strange; just pick up a newspaper. Any newspaper. If you start with people—characters—as you feel your way into your novel, it, too, can become fascinating, surprising and strange.
In short—real.
Let's get started.
One of the first encounters your reader has with your character will probably come from the outside, especially if your novel is told in third person. Someone will observe the character's appearance, clothes, manner. This someone may be the author, or another character, or even the protagonist himself. Whoever does the observing, the description will be related to us readers, and we will get our first chance to form an impression of this person we're going to spend five hundred pages with. Readers pay a lot of (mostly unconscious) attention to this first impression. They want to know if they're looking at a beauty, a beast or something in between.
Thus, you must make the reader's first encounter with your character sharp and memorable. The key is to choose your first descriptive details carefully. These details should:
• create a visual image, so we can picture the character in some important way(s)
• tell us something about the person inside the visual image
• convey an impression of individuality, of someone unique and interesting, whom we will want to know more about
What you don't want is the kind of description that turns up in police reports: ''Caucasian male, twenty-seven years old, six feet, 170 pounds, short brown hair, blue eyes.'' That could describe thousands of men, none of them memorably. It's not individual, it's not evocative of personality, and it's not interesting. Such a description has detail, all right, but not the right detail.
So what kind of details are right? Ones that grab the reader's attention.
I NOTICED YOU RIGHT AWAY . . .
One way to grab your reader's attention, of course, is to create a character so bizarre that the reader can't look away:
Bethany, an inch short of seven feet high, had lost her bikini top again. The blue-sequined bottom spanned her generous hips, with a hole cut on the left side for the growing calcium deposit, now the size of a golfball. But on top her 40D breasts flapped free, hidden only by the cascading tresses of greenish-black hair.
We'll notice Bethany. But not every book is the kind of story in which Bethany would have a legitimate place (in fact, very few are). And even in the right novel, a string of Bethanys would become tiresome. When everyone is bizarre, nobody seems really weird.
So what descriptive details both feel ''normal'' and succeed in creating a strong first impression of your character's physical appearance? Let's consider some examples.
THREE TERRIFIC DESCRIPTIONS
The following are introductory descriptions of a wide variety of characters, from wildly disparate books of different genres. (I know this is a lot of examples to throw at you all at once, but we're going to analyze them throughout this whole chapter.) The characters have nothing in common with each other—except that all arouse interest:
He was a lank, tall, bearded man in a shaggy brown suit that might have been cut from blankets, and on his head he wore a red ski cap—the pointy kind with a pom-pom at the tip. Masses of black curls burst out from under it. His beard was so wild and black and bushy that it was hard to tell how old he was. Maybe forty? Forty-five? At any rate, older than you'd expect to see at a puppet show, and no child sat next to him.
—Morgan Gower, in Anne Tyler's Morgans Passing
Carrie stood among [the girls in the locker room] stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color. It rested against her face with dispirited sog-giness and she simply stood, head slightly bent, letting the water splat against her flesh and roll off. She looked the part of the sacrificial goat, the constant butt, believer in left-handed monkey wrenches, perpetual foul-up, and she was.
—Carrie White, in Stephen King's Carrie
Solid, rumbling, likely to erupt without prior notice, Macon kept each member of his family awkward with fear. His hatred of his wife glittered and sparkled in every word he spoke to her. The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices. Under the frozen heat of his glance they tripped over door sills and dropped the salt cellar into the yolks of their poached eggs.
—Macon Dead, in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon
Each of these descriptions creates a vivid picture (can't you just see Morgan Gower, or Carrie White?) But each also does more; it links appearance to personality, letting us glimpse the person underneath. We not only visualize Morgan, we sense his exuberant, childlike eccentricity. We are convinced that Carrie White is passive and Macon Dead is dangerous. And all from descriptions of less than a hu
ndred words.
HOW DO THEY DO THAT?
These authors and the others quoted throughout this chapter achieve so much with visual description because they choose and present details that suggest more than their literal meaning. You, too, can choose from several categories of details that accomplish this. Consider the following as a literary smorgasbord, to sample as you wish.
Use Appearance to Indicate Personality
The technique is to choose details that match your character's inner self, and then to use language that makes that connection clear. There are hundreds of details that could be cited about anyone's appearance. Stephen King chose to describe Carrie's blemished skin, passive posture and colorless hair because they suggest an unattractive person, a victim. This suggestion is reinforced by King's word choices: stolidly, dispirited, sogginess, letting the water run off her—even the word splat to describe the water hitting her, since splat is usually a sound associated with someone being hit, rather than someone enjoying a hot shower. The facts that Carrie is plain and overweight would not, by themselves, indicate a victim—there are plenty of plain, overweight, feisty fighters in the world. It's King's diction that transforms a collection of physical details into a memorable impression.
Similarly, Margaret Mitchell selects some details over others in describing Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind:
Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. in her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia skin. . . .
By focusing on Scarlett's square jaw, aggressive eyebrows and feminine skin and lashes, Mitchell emphasized the contradictions within Scarlett's nature: a delicate Southern belle with a will of steel.