Dynamic Characters- How to create personalities that keep readers captivated

by Nancy Kress

  • What will be the apex of his achievement? Can you create a single strong event to make this concrete? What did he have to do to get here?

  • What causes his downfall? Whatever it is should be dramatized sufficiently so that the fall doesn't seem even faintly arbitrary. The protagonist caused it by his own choices.

  • Where does he end up? Show us vividly, in some detail.

  • Does anyone else profit by his fall? Who, and how? If it's another person just like him, that says one thing about the world you've depicted. If it's a better sort of person, that says quite another (Shakespeare, for instance, brings down Richard III in favor of the new Tudor dynasty—of which his reigning monarch was a member).

  YET ANOTHER VIEW OF PLOT: STARTING WITH DESIRE

  Perhaps none of these classic plots speaks to you. It's not that you dispute their existence, or don't see how they might shape other writers' thinking; they just don't grab you. You still have characters in search of a structure. Are there any other schemata that might appeal more to you?

  There are hundreds. And, as you've undoubtedly already noticed in this chapter, it's possible to view the same novel from the vantage point of several different conceptual schemes. We'll consider just one more, in the hopes that it better fits your embryonic material. This time, we'll focus on a basic question we've encountered before: What does the protagonist want? Coupled with what he already has, the answer suggests a plot form. Actually, five plot forms, all starting from the protagonist's desire, as follows.

  HARRY VICTORIOUS

  Harry decides he wants something. It could be anything: a woman, a job, a million dollars, revenge, escape from his family, the presidency, a cure for cancer, to be left alone. He sets out to get it, encountering many and varied obstacles along the way. Eventually he overcomes these obstacles, gets his desire and retires from the battlefield satisfied.

  This is the so-called plot skeleton, and it fuels much commercial fiction. Danielle Steel's heroine ends up getting the right man. James Bond ends up vanquishing the dastardly spy from the other side. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo end up defeating the evil Empire, awarded victory medals by Princess Leia herself. Readers crave heroes, and this plot gives it to them.

  So, ask yourself:

  • What does my character want?

  • What's standing in his way?

  • How can he overcome the obstacle(s)? The more inventive you are about this, the better.

  • How will I make his victory graphic and satisfying?

  Once you know these answers, you'll have your basic plot structure and can concentrate on the memorable and individual characters who will inhabit it.

  HARRY DEFEATED

  In the second plot from, Harry wants something, fights all obstacles to get it, and either comes very close or, more commonly, does get what he wanted. But he can't keep it. At the end, he loses his heart's desire.

  Why should anyone want to read—or write—such a downer? Several reasons. Sometimes, Harry deserves to lose (the rise-and-fall plot we discussed earlier). Readers are pleased that Richard III and Elmer Gantry don't triumph. We're rooting for the obstacles instead.

  Sometimes Harry loses, but on such a magnificent scale that the experience is not depressing so much as cathartic. Defeat rises to the level of tragedy. This is what keeps readers returning for centuries to such tales of total loss as Euripides' The Trojan Women and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. More contemporary examples such as Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient or Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day also end in total failure of the protagonists to attain what they wanted. But, again, the emotional workout for the reader, and the wonderful writing, made both novels prizewinners.

  And sometimes Harry's defeat isn't total. He loses his major desire, but gains something else in compensation—either something better, or some hard-won simpler contentment, or some abstract quality of wisdom. Charlie Gordon, for instance, in Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (made into the movie Charly), wants to be smarter. His IQ is subnormal, and he's willing to undergo a risky, experimental operation to raise it. The operation succeeds; in fact, Charlie Gordon becomes a genius. But he also discovers a world of unhappiness and complex double-dealings he never before suspected. When the gains from the operation fade away, Charlie reverts to what he was. He can't hang on to what he so desperately wanted, but at least in compensation he gains a simpler contentment.

  If your character will lose his heart's desire, make sure you build into your plot some compelling reward for the reader who must suffer along with him.

  HARRY WINS, SORT OF: THE PYRRHIC VICTORY

  Here Harry fights the obstacles and achieves his heart's desire. But it turns out to be not as wonderful as he thought, either because the cost was too high or because he never really understood the situation in the first place.

  A famous example is Scarlett O'Hara, of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. From the opening scene, Scarlett wants Ashley Wilkes. Twelve years and one war later, she finally gets him, at which point she realizes he isn't her true love after all, and never really was.

  Count Vronsky, on the other hand, is Anna Karenina's true love. And she gets him. But the cost is too high: her child, her reputation, her self-respect.

  Will your material lend itself to an I-got-it-but-then-didn't-want-it-at-that-price plot? If so, one suggestion: Consider balancing the disappointment of your protagonist with the fulfillment of some secondary character(s). That way, you present a more even, accurate view of the world—as well as some sweetener for readers. Scarlett O'Hara, for instance, ends up discontented with what she has striven so hard to get, but Melanie Wilkes dies fulfilled. Anna Karenina throws herself under a train, but Kitty and Levin, the book's other lovers, flourish.

  Of course, if your view of the world is so unrelentingly bleak that you'd rather not soften it, don't. But you will then have to compensate for the book's more limited audience with some other attraction: dazzling writing or startling plot or cutting social observations so telling that publishers can't resist the novel.

  HARRY LOSES BY WINNING

  The fourth plot form is a sophisticated way of writing about human desires. Harry wants something desperately. He strives to overcome all obstacles, attains it and is victorious. Then, after he has his heart's desire, we see him unknowingly set about trying to change it into exactly what he had before, which is the only thing he really knows how to deal with.

  This is the plot of Dan Wakefield's Starting Over. Phil Potter wants a new start in life: new city, new job, new relationship. He gets all three. The novel details his move from New York City to Boston, his switch from public relations to teaching, his search for the ''right woman.'' Eventually he becomes a good teacher and falls in love. By the end of the book, his new wife has persuaded Potter to return to public relations, and the reader sees clearly that Potter's second marriage is doomed to exactly the same fate as his first, and for the same reasons. Plus ga change, plus c'est la meme chose.

  Your material might lend itself to this treatment if it's either satirical and funny (Starting Over is), or else so brilliantly despairing that it will shock us into a new awareness of the futility of trying to change. Without one of those two virtues, this plot structure could end up just being dreary. Tread cautiously.

  HARRY WINS BY LOSING

  The fifth plot form is the desire plot turned inside-out, like a sock. Harry doesn't want something to happen. He fights determinedly against it. It happens anyway—and slowly he discovers that the new situation is turning out far better than he thought. Sometimes it's even wonderful.

  Georgette Heyer used this structure in her Regency romance A Civil Contract. Adam Deveril, newly returned from war after his father's death, finds the estate heavily in debt and his true love married to someone else. Adam tries every way he can think of to hang onto his family property, but the only way to do it is one that at first he fights against: marriage to a plain, unappealing heiress. Finally, Adam gives in
and marries Jenny Chawleigh. The rest of the book relates how Adam and Jenny reach a strong partnership and build a happy life for themselves—happier than his first love would have made Adam, despite the intensity of his feelings for her compared to what he feels for Jenny.

  Not only romances use the winning-by-losing plot. Anne Tyler's Saint Maybe features Ian Bedloe, who tries to bury his guilt over contributing to his brother Danny's death. (Ian had told Danny that Danny's wife was unfaithful, after which Danny crashed his car into a stone wall, either deliberately or in his rush to confront his wife.) Ian can't attain the absolution he so desperately desires. No matter what he does, he feels guilty. Finally he gives up his search for absolution and settles into raising Danny's children as atonement (the wife, who may not have been unfaithful after all, has killed herself). Decades later, he realizes that the raising of these three kids has made him happy—and brought him the absolution he had given up on. Ian, the pitied and unappreciated, ends up a winner.

  The winning-by-losing plot is an appealing one, because we all like to believe in hope. To adapt it to your material, you need to decide:

  • What does my character want?

  • What insuperable obstacles make it impossible for him to get it? (Dramatize these enough so we believe there really is no way for the protagonist to attain what he wants.)

  • What does he choose, or settle for, instead? What are the big drawbacks of this substitute? (There must be drawbacks. At this point, the character must appear to be losing.)

  • What are the hidden advantages of this substitute? How can you dramatize them so that both character and reader slowly see that this is a good deal after all?

  Basic, premade plots aren't for everyone. If nothing in this entire chapter has started your mind churning, maybe you'd better abandon the tried-and-true plot and custom-build your own. Go back to chapter three and start again to think about your characters. That, too, can be a rich source of plot incidents. It doesn't really matter where you start. It only matters where you are when you type The End.

  Plus, of course, where your characters are.

  SUMMARY: USING PREMADE PLOTS

  • A premade plot doesn't have to lead to hackneyed work. The basic structure may be tried-and-true, but the novel will stand or fall on the freshness, depth and truth of your particular version with your particular characters.

  • Basic plots lend themselves to a huge range of interpretations, moods and worldviews.

  • There are many different ways to devise categories of basic plots.

  • To spark a flagging imagination, consider the categories offered in this chapter, with the aim of seeing whether one fits well with the ideas incubating in your mind.

  Theme.

  The most fraught word in literature. Even if you rename it central concern or reader resonance or some such thing, it still conjures memories of ninth-grade English: What is the book's theme? Concisely state the theme, and be sure to support your statement with specific examples in a well-written essay with topic sentence and—

  No wonder so many writers go out of their way to announce that their fiction has no theme. They don't want students forced to reduce their works to twenty-five-words-or-less platitudes.

  Nonetheless, every work of fiction does indeed have a theme. It's the third leg of the basic literary tripod: character, plot, theme. And, as a writer, you often benefit from knowing what yours is.

  Three paragraphs into this chapter, and I know I'm already in trouble with hordes of would-be dissenters. Yes, I know that writers often

  are not particularly articulate about the larger implications of their own work. Yes, I know that the text itself is what matters. Yes, I know that a story can ''mean'' different things to different people. But I'm going to discuss theme anyway, because knowing your theme can help clarify your view of both characters and plot.

  But if it defuses the controversy, let's not call it theme. Let's call it worldview, for reasons that I hope come clear as we go along. And let's see why you need to think about it—if not during the first draft, then later—in order to make your work successful.

  YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A PATTERN

  First, it's impossible to write a story—or even a few significant para-graphs—without implying a world view. This is because the writer has always chosen to include some events and some details, and to leave others out. Furthermore, the writer has—wittingly or not—chosen a tone in which to present those details, and that tone, too, implies a worldview.

  Here, for example, are two descriptions of the same person. The first is from a police report. The second is from Eudora Welty's story ''Old Mr. Marblehall'':

  Caucasian female, 38,5' 1", 175 pounds. Mole on left cheek, near eye. Described by neighbors as possessing thick shoulders, small round head. Last seen by neighbor, on own front porch, wearing sleeveless loose brown cotton dress, green bedroom slippers size 4.

  There's his other wife, standing on the night-stained porch by a potted fern, screaming things to a neighbor. This wife is really worse than the other one. She is more solid, fatter, shorter, and while not so ugly, funnier looking. She looks like funny furniture—an unornamented stair post in one of these funny houses, with her small monotonous round stupid head—or sometimes like a woodcut of a Bavarian witch, forefinger pointing, with scratches in the air all around her. But she's so static she scarcely moves, from her thick shoulders down past her cylindered brown dress to her short, stubby house slippers. She stands still and screams to the neighbors.

  The police report, through its tone and choice of details, says these things about the world: Reality can be objectively observed and numerically described. The physical world is our common ground in interacting with each other. Missing persons are sometimes able to be located and therefore it is rational to devise paperwork and procedures to do so.

  On the other hand, the Welty description—like the story from which it's taken—implies a different view of the world: The best way to understand something is through subjective contrast and metaphor (''like funny furniture,'' ''like a woodcut of a Bavarian witch,'' ''so static'' even while screaming). Ways of interacting are grounded in some unseen judgment (''This wife is really worse than the other one'') that carries with it a tone of both contempt and mystery. A factual account of what the wife is shouting at the neighbors is never explained; it's the overall subjective impression that counts.

  It's not hard to imagine a third way of describing the second Mrs. Marblehall that would be different from both of these. Her view of herself as a wronged woman, perhaps. Or the view of her through the eyes of her six-year-old son, as ''Mama,'' warm and loving and dependable. Each of these would imply yet another view of the world by choosing different aspects of reality to emphasize.

  What does all this have to do with character and plot in your writing? Hang on; we're getting there.

  It's not only description that implies a view of the world. So does the choice of story events, and the way they work out in your work.

  Detective stories, for example, almost always end with the murderer being identified. If they did not, most readers would get quite upset. The choice of events—investigation, deduction, resolution— carries the metaview that the world is rational, and the further theme that crime doesn't pay. Romances, on the other hand, all offer the reassuring theme that although the road to winning love may be rocky, love is possible and also is worth it. This is true even when the lovers end up losing each other, as in Robert James Waller's best-selling The Bridges of Madison County.

  It's possible, however, to visualize a different choice of ending for the Waller novel. Suppose his two lovers had still ended up parting, but after Robert leaves, Francesca's husband discovers their affair. Shocked and betrayed, he divorces her. Francesca then hunts down

  Robert who, nomad that he is, has meanwhile taken himself to Argentina and fallen in love with a Spanish girl named Rosaria. There is a confrontation, and Rosaria shoots Francesca. In that
book, the view of love—the theme—would be much different than in what Waller actually wrote.

  So, on a macrolevel, the events you choose to include in your story form an overall pattern that implies a worldview. If you know what worldview you're actually creating, it can help you invent plot events that support it, descriptions with telling details and evocative tone, and characters who bear out your beliefs. All this gives your fiction a wholeness, a consistency born as much of patterned emotion as of rationality, that can vastly improve the end result.

  But there's more. Pattern operates in a story on a microlevel as well as a macrolevel, and there, too, you have more control than you may think.

  CHEKHOV'S GUN AND TYLER'S CASSEROLES

  A famous writing maxim attributed to Anton Chekhov says that if you have a gun going off in the third act of a play, it had better sit on the mantelpiece during the first two acts. Conversely, if a gun is clearly visible on the mantelpiece for two acts, it had better go off during the third. In other words, critical plot developments and critical characters must be clearly foreshadowed, not dragged in from left field at the end of your novel. And if you spend time and verbiage on something early on, we can reasonably expect that thing to figure in the climax or denouement.

  Suppose, for instance, you give an entire early chapter of your novel to Aunt Mary shoplifting at Macy's. She stole a candy dish and a bath towel, with enough advance planning and elaborate cover-ups to carry out D day. The chapter is amusing, well written and characterizing. Is that enough? No. You're letting us know that this incident will be part of the overall pattern of your story, and so it had better turn out to be just that. You'd better use that candy dish, that towel or some other aspect of the escapade at Macy's as an important element of your overall plot. A book, like an Oriental carpet, is a pattern, and everything in it is supposed to contribute to the design. Although that's especially true of a short story, it also holds true for a novel.