by Nancy Kress
Sometimes writers call their characters after people they know. This can be a useful device for helping yourself to visualize a character, to ''feel'' him as you're writing the first draft. But change the name before you submit the story anywhere, to avoid not only hurt feelings but possible legal problems. (More on this in chapter eight.)
Names can also plant a character in a given generation. Jennifer and Jessica have been popular names in the last twenty years; their mothers' generation ran more toward Sue and Karen. And their grandmothers included a lot of Dorothys and Bettys.
Don't give characters in the same story similar names (Jean and June); it can be confusing. The exception to this is when you want it to be confusing, such as when parents with a terminal case of cuteness have named their triplets Mike, Mac and Mick.
Finally, the name by which you refer to your character should be consistent. If his name is Fred Potter, use his full name the first time he's on stage. After that, refer to him in narration as either Fred or Potter. Don't worry about overusing a name; it's exempt from the usual rules about redundancy. The reader won't notice.
THE NAME A CHARACTER CHOOSES FOR HIMSELF
The ways your character modifies her birth name can also be used as a characterizing device. Bernadette Chantelle, for instance, may decide to call herself Bernie. She might do this because she thinks of herself as a no-frills person, or because she likes having a name that sounds male, or because it annoys her mother, or because her husband's name is also Bernie and she thinks the match is just darling. Each of these motivations suggests a very different person. Similarly, the thirty-year-old who does not change Rainbow Sweetgrass Smith to Rainie, but instead insists on the whole moniker, is very confident, very flamboyant or very into environmental politics. You decide.
An interesting example here is Marge Piercy's protagonist in her wonderful novel of radical politics, Vida. Born Davida Witherspoon, the character first shortens her name to Vida to fit in with other children. She then goes by Vida Asch, a symbolic choosing of her stepfather Sanford Asch over her father Tom Witherspoon; this choice fills her with both satisfaction and guilt. She marries twice, but does not take either of her husbands' surnames because she values her own independence. When she goes underground after a political bombing, she chooses the name Peregrine, after the falcon. When she's older, however, Vida finds this choice too romantic and regrets it. One of her pleasures is calling her sister Natalie by her real name, thus reaffirming Vida's right to have a family even though she's been in hiding, cut off from mainstream life, for over ten years. Piercy got a lot of plot and thematic mileage out of this changing roadway of names.
Ask yourself: What did my character choose to be called as a child? A teenager? At college? In the army? When he was part of a gang? In prison? After the divorce? In social situations? In professional ones? The man who insists that even his wife refer to him as ''the senator'' is characterizing himself loud and clear.
THE NAME OTHERS CHOOSE FOR A CHARACTER
The names others call your protagonist without his permission can also be used to create characterization, tension and plot developments. How will the child dubbed Stinky react? By running away? Laughing at his tormentors? Beating the shit out of anyone he can catch alone?
Names imposed on others say something about the relationship. The woman who calls her mother-in-law ''Sally'' is assuming a different relationship than the one who calls her ''Mom,'' or ''Mrs. Jones.'' Consider what your character is called by his parents, children, children's friends, personal friends, enemies, colleagues, neighbors, lovers, the press and the local cops. Then consider whether these names might change over the course of the relationship. The man who is ''Bobby'' to his mistress but ''Robert'' when the affair is over has swapped a breezy, playful name for a more formal one. On the other hand, the man who is called Robert during the affair and Bobby when it's over has just been demoted to a child.
Finally, as with names bestowed on a birth certificate, consider how your character feels about his or her nicknames. Is the businesswoman who usually goes by Elizabeth secretly delighted by the lover who dubs her Kitten? Does the high-school kid glory in being referred to as Slash? How far will he go to live up to that name?
Here's Vida Asch again, in a striking illustration of just how much names matter:
Joel grinned. ''I recognized you immediately. Vida Asch.'' He seemed to enjoy saying her name, while she experienced an automatic spurt of cold along her arteries. In contrast, he had been flattered when she called him by name— not frightened or at least startled as she had expected. That had not given her the commanding edge she had anticipated, but rather had eliminated some small advantage she had not been aware of.
—Marge Piercy, Vida
There is power in names. That is why some cultures reveal true names only to highly trusted intimates. But even in our informal American culture, eager to seize on the first names of total strangers, what we call each other has meaning. Exploit it.
SUMMARY: NAMING YOUR CHARACTERS
• Choose surnames that reflect your fictional world's ethnic diversity (or lack of it).
• Choose first names that tell us something about this character's family's worldview, hopes and/or generation.
• Choose nicknames that show us how the character is viewed by others.
• Show us how the character reacts to her names and nicknames.
• Use her reactions to fuel action—and so generate plot developments.
So now your character has an appearance, a name, some personal tastes. Let's go back in time. He also has a background, a specific place he grew up and first encountered the world—which was, of course, only the version of the world accepted in his particular family in his particular hometown. This chapter will consider that hometown and the marks it has inescapably left on your protagonist. Even if he himself has left town, the town has left its mark on his character. It does on all of us. Place of birth is a lot more than just a phrase on your driver's license application. It's a clue to character.
It can also be a surprisingly effective way to approach plotting.
''There are three rules for writing a novel,'' said the great novelist and short-story writer W. Somerset Maugham. ''Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.'' Another piece of Maugham's advice— about as useful as the first—is, ''Devise incidents.'' Well, OK, fine. A novel consists of incidents; probably not even the deconstructionists would dispute this. But which incidents? What are they supposed to do? And how do you think them up?
One way is to think about the conflicts inherent in your character's background. And there will be conflicts. No matter where she's from or how idealistic her childhood was, there's no place on earth that is Eden. Not anymore. And even if there were, would Eden be the best preparation for climbing on the school bus and encountering the rest of the less-than-perfect world?
Background, in other words, can contribute to both characterization and plot. So before you even begin your story, spend some time thinking about your protagonist's hometown. This chapter explores why you should do that—and how.
EXTERNAL CHARACTERIZATION: I RECOGNIZE YOU
Your character was born in Salt Lake City. Or East Harlem. Or rural Iowa. Or southern California. She spent, say, the first eighteen years of her life there, before joining the army and being shipped to Fort Polk, Louisiana, for basic training.
Each of these four birthplaces has its own subculture. The recruit from East Harlem and the one from southern California are going to speak differently, dress differently, wear their hair and makeup differently, judge others differently. If you, the author, are mindful of these differences, you can use them to enrich your protagonist's believability.
The differences are of two kinds: the simpler external signs of origin, and the more complex inner worldview. Tackle the externals first. Ask yourself the following questions:
• Where was my character born?
• How long did she live there?
• Does she have an accent? What kind? Does it indicate class as well as geography? How pronounced is it?
• How old is she now? Has she had time to leave behind the tastes and fashions of her childhood setting, or is she still following them? Has she had time to leave them behind but is still following them anyway? (That says something about her right there.)
• Does her background influence the way she dresses? Wears her hair? Uses makeup? (The girl from Iowa wears jeans. So does the girl from East Harlem. But the Iowan's jeans are worn with a sweater, sneakers and small gold earrings. The East Harlemite is sitting on the subway in her jeans, high-heeled lace-up boots, leotard top and four-inch earrings heavy enough to distend her earlobes.)
• Does her background influence her tastes in music, food, leisure activities? What does she like to do for fun, and where does she like to do it?
• What was she taught to do as a child, by her family or older kids or professional lessons? Surfing? Ballet? Basketball? Violin? Blues guitar? Horseback riding? Housework? Embroidery? Carpentry?
• What are the political attitudes of her region? Does she share them?
We've departed from externals. In a minute, we'll consider the internal qualities your character may have absorbed from her birthplace. But first let's look at a few objections often raised about this entire process.
STEREOTYPES: I RECOGNIZE YOU TOO EASILY
But, goes one objection to this process, if I create a character this way, won't I end up with a stereotype? The blonde, air-headed, California surfer? The New York black girl in her midriff-baring top, baggy jeans and feisty attitude who says, ''You go, girl''? The Iowa farm girl raising chickens for her 4-H project?
Yes, you'll end up with a stereotype if background is the only means by which you create a character. But it won't be (or at least, it shouldn't). Background is where you start. Then you consider how this individual, this specific person, has reacted to his background. There are a number of possibilities:
He's rejected his background, deliberately re-creating himself on some other model. This is the entire premise of Margaret Drabble's wonderful novel Jerusalem the Golden. Clara, from working-class north
England, meets Clelia at college. Clelia's background is upper-class arts/intellectual, and Clara is so entranced she immediately adopts Clelia's family, speech, tastes and judgments.
Other famous rejecters of their background, whose rejection ends up shaping their personalities, include Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald), Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray), and Rudolph Jordache (Rich Man, Poor Man, by Irwin Shaw).
He's embraced his background, to the point of exaggerating its outer signs. The businessman who wears the boots, Stetson and hearty accent of his native Texas, even though he now lives in Philadelphia. The Frenchwoman whose accent, after thirty years in Boston, is more Parisian than Parisians' living on the Champs-Elys^es. The South Dakotan who's never left Sioux Falls, never will, and belongs to the same civic organizations her mother did. Check out Scotty Hoag, in Herman Wouk's Youngblood Hawke, who does multimillion-dollar real estate deals all over the country, yet sounds and acts like a good ol' boy who never left the Kentucky hills.
What motivates such people? Pride, or contentment, or homesickness, or inertia, or lack of imagination, or lack of pretentiousness, or deliberate camouflage. You decide.
He's ambivalent about his background, and so vacillates between erasing its signs and clinging to them. For a more complex portrait than Scotty Hoag, consider Wouk's hero in the same novel. Youngblood Hawke, a famous novelist, is from the Kentucky hills but now lives in Manhattan. His success has given him entree to upper-class social circles. Hawke, who's only twenty-six, buys expensive suits and shoes like those he sees on New Yorkers at parties. He also clings fiercely to his Kentucky accent. He buys an East Side brownstone, but ends up living in its cramped attic, which is ''much like his bedroom in his mother's house.'' He pursues a sophisticated concert manager who seems to him the epitome of the ''New York woman,'' but falls in love with a small-town girl of working-class parents. In short, he fumbles his way out of, back into, halfway out of his background—like most of us engaged in the lifelong process of growing up.
Using a character's background to help create him does not have to lead to stereotypes. Not if you use your imagination to go beyond the obvious.
A DIFFERENT OBJECTION TO BACKGROUND WORK
Another objection to this process goes like this: OK, well and good, my character does indeed have to come from somewhere, but for the book I have in mind, her background doesn't matter. It's a book about (pick one) the FBI solving crimes/the military chasing foreign subs/ the spaceship crew trading with Deneb Four. There's a lot of action, and no time for explaining characters' earlier lives. All that matters is who they are now. There's no point in my inventing a geographical and social background, because I just won't use the information for anything. Right?
Only half right.
It's true that there are good books in which we never get a hint about where the protagonist comes from. Not a geographical name, not a whiff of accent, not a single childhood recollection. That's fine. It doesn't have to be in the book, or in your character's mind. But it should nonetheless be in your mind, because even if it's never mentioned, it will still influence the way you write him. And if you don't have some sense of his background, you are far more likely to write a bland, colorless, generic sort of protagonist. Yes, the fast-paced and ingenious action might compensate for that—but wouldn't it be better to have both? What can you lose? No book was ever harmed by having interesting, layered characters—but many are never published because they don't have them.
To see how much background can add to a book in which it's not the main concern, read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, possibly the best novel ever written about colonizing Mars. The colonization is an international effort, and the characters, although never stereotypes, are solidly rooted in their backgrounds: Maya Toitovna, the brilliant and volatile Russian, growing up in a socialist matriarchy. Nadia Cherneshevsky, used to the self-sufficiency and hardships of Siberia. Hiroko Ai, with her Japanese dislike of direct confrontation and her Shintoism. John Boone, the easy-going American, accustomed to open friendliness. Selim el-Hayil, from an Arab nation used to being slighted by the West and to settling political problems by assassination. The novel is about terraforming Mars, but the characters are about themselves, the selves that their backgrounds have made them, and the effect is to immeasurably enrich the action.
No matter what kind of book you're writing, take the time to think your way into your characters' pasts—even if you never directly mention their backgrounds. The effort will pay off in deeper, more plausible characterization. It can also, as we'll discuss next, help you to construct stronger plots.
STAYING PUT: USING BACKGROUND TO GENERATE PLOT
Once you know where your character is from, there are two possibilities. Either he's still there, or he's not. In each case, your strategy will differ for making use of the background you've invented.
First, let's consider staying put. Your character has never moved away from her hometown, and neither will the action of your novel. This is important because the whole point of any novel is to create difficulties for your character. That's what plot is. Stories in which the characters sail along happily, without having things made tough for them, are boring. Stories are about conflict. In fact, every story is a war, with battles and artillery and winners and losers. War, as General Sherman remarked, is tough (or words to that effect). So you want to seek out conflicts for your characters.
The usual advice on how to do this goes
something like this: Every protagonist has to want something. So first figure out what your character wants. Then figure out what is preventing him from getting it, what obstacles stand in the way. Then show how the character struggles to overcome the obstacles, and succeeds. Or doesn't. Hamlet, for instance, wants to avenge his father; the obstacle is his reluctance to kill his own uncle and his own mother. Jay Gatsby wants Daisy; the obstacle is their differing social classes. The detective wants to solve the murder; the obstacle is that the murderer does not wish him to do this and so has tried to cover his traces.
Background comes into all this when you begin to work out the specifics of both desire and obstacle. The setting of your story holds all the larger forces that will in turn shape the specific ones at work inside your character, which in turn will determine what he perceives as both desire and obstacle (one person's desire is another's nightmare). By considering setting first, you are going right to the source. The wellspring of what makes your protagonist who he is. The context which provides the forces ranged for and against him. Out of the interaction of those forces can come the specific incidents of the plot.
This might be easier to see in examples.
THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
• Example one: Start with a Southern tidewater town in which status is everything, and the pull of the tides an almost mystical force. This is the setting that has shaped your protagonist's mother. What does she want? How does that impact what her son wants?
• Example two: Start with a quiet upper-class prep school during World War II. The young men here, on the verge of draft age, have been raised with the values of success, athleticism and competition. What does an ambitious student want?
• Example three: Start with the Texas border right after World War II, when the big ranches are being broken up or swallowed up by agribusiness, and the smaller ones are nearly all gone. Take a desolate, isolated ranch. What does the teenage boy who has grown up on it want?