Clyde, Dreiser writes, puts thoughts of his parents "resolutely out of his mind." Thus the choice is made.
After the experience in the brothel, Clyde has thoughts of shame, thinking back on his parents' teachings from the Bible. Yet the experience was "lit with a kind of gross, pagan beauty or vulgar charm for him." Honor is always pitched as a battle of two extremes.
Clyde has made his choice. He seduces the tragic Roberta, consents to marry her (to save his own rep) when she conceives, then lets her drown so he can be free to pursue another woman.
As thoughts of seeing Roberta dead come to Clyde, Dreiser calls it "the devil's whisper."
When our characters show us the full fire of that inner battle, we have the makings of great fiction. For whether the choice is ultimately for honor or dishonor, we will see the consequences and the reader will be instructed without being taught.
• Define the ethics of your character. This doesn't have to be made explicit in the story, but if you know what they are your character will act accordingly.
• Construct or rewrite a scene that forces the character to make a moral choice. Make up strong reasons not to act honorably. Show us what the character does as a result.
GETTING PHYSICAL
When describing your characters, professional writers are of two minds. Some believe in giving a full visual description. They want to control the picture in the mind of the reader. This used to be the popular view. Thus, the beginning of The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett, goes like this:
Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.
The other view, much more popular today, is minimalist. It recognizes that readers are going to form their own picture regardless, and that will be more powerful than what you, the author, can come up with.
Under this view, you select only those details that are essential, that truly characterize. One or two telling details are worth more than a whole page of standard description.
Award-winning novelist Athol Dickson makes an important point about tying the details of description, whatever they might be, to the deeper goals of the story. "In my last two novels and in my work in progress," Dickson says, "all three protagonists have had physical characteristics that play an important role in conveying the story's central conflict. One is an African-American orphan with blue eyes seeking his roots, one returns to a hostile home disguised by long filthy hair and a bushy beard, and one longs for loving acceptance in spite of being self-described as 'mousy.' These physical characteristics do more than ground the character within the reader's mind; they also serve as frequent reminders of the character's struggle."
Choose description wisely, no matter how much you use, and make it do "double duty." You don't simply describe; you describe in such a way that you add to the mood or tone of the novel. Nothing generic. Descriptions should do more than create a picture—they should support the other things you're doing in the story.
In Donald Westlake's 361, the Lead loses an eye in chapter one. He gets a glass eye in chapter two. Later, when trying to convince an old man to talk, he pops out the glass eye and uses it for shock value. It works. The old man keels over and dies.
This is getting double duty out of character traits.
• Make a list of all the physical traits of your character.
• Make a list of the moods you want to create, the way you want read-ers to feel as they progress through the story.
• Now, connect the traits with the mood words, and find ways to tweak them so they're consistent with each other.
THE CHARACTER CHECKLIST
For each of your main characters, consider the following:
• Sex:
• Age:
• Occupation:
• Point of vulnerability:
• Current living conditions:
• Personal habits: dress, manners, etc.:
• Physical appearance and how she feels about it:
• Where she grew up:
• Main attitudes about people and events:
• Main shaping incidents in past influencing present life:
• Dominant attitude:
• What her parents are like:
• Her relationship with other family members:
• Schooling and her performance there:
• Others think of her as:
• What she likes to do in her free time:
• She is passionate about:
• The one thing she wants more than anything else:
• Her major flaw:
• Her major strong point:
• What I love about this character:
• The secret to be revealed:
GETTING INSIDE
Bonding with characters is achieved through intimacy. The more we know and understand characters, especially the Lead, the stronger our desire to follow them through an entire novel.
The greatest intimacy is achieved when we are privy to the thoughts and feelings of the characters. When we get to go inside their heads.
Thoughts
When you render a character's thoughts, you are providing a direct link to what makes him tick. It's secret knowledge. The other characters don't know the thoughts, but the reader does. For this very reason, thoughts are powerful tools in fiction. But because of their power, they must be used judiciously.
You need to pick your spots carefully. Some of those spots would include the following:
• moments of great emotional intensity
• crucial turning-point scenes
• beats where the character must analyze a situation
• challenges that cause the character to reflect on herself
• impressions upon meeting another character or arriving at a location
• scenes where the character is alone and reacting to actions that just happened
There are two ways writers show the thought life of characters: italicized and nonitalicized.
The italicized way looks like this:
Margie burst into the Red Canary. She paused a moment and cased the joint. Where is he? Is he hiding? I'll bet he's hiding. She went to the bar and sat.
The reader instantly knows that what is in italics is what Margie thought. Notice two things here. First, the thoughts are written in present tense. And second, there is no attribution, as in: Where is he? she thought. The attribution is usually superfluous.
When using italics, the words are always the words the character is thinking in the moment.
Note that italics are harder to read, and for that reason you should keep these relatively short.
The other way to do it is simply to use the attribution without italics:
Margie burst into the Red Canary. She paused a moment and cased the joint. Where is he? she thought. Is he hiding? I'll bet he's hiding.
A variation on thought rendition is to give us the thoughts in past tense, so it flows along with the narrative:
Margie burst into the Red Canary. She paused a moment and cased the joint. Where was he? Was he hiding? It was a good bet that he was hiding.
Notice that you don't need an attribution here. Because we see the action first (Margie bursting in), we know that the thoughts are hers.
Sitting behind his drawing board in the third bedroom of his development house in Pinecrest Manor, he asked himself, What the hell do I want out of life?
I want to be happy, of course, but that's pure rubbish. Everyone wants to be happy.
—Strangers When We Meet, by Evan Hunter
The above examples are in third-person point of view. First person, of course, offers endless opportunities for thought life because you're in
the head of the character from the start. She is the one who is doing the narrating:
I walked into the Red Canary and looked for him. I kept thinking He's hiding. I know he's here somewhere, but he's hiding.
I walked into the Red Canary and looked for him. I kept thinking he's
hiding. I know he's in here, but he's hiding.
*
I walked into the Red Canary and looked for him. I kept thinking, You're here, aren't you, Bob? You hiding, Bob? I know you. You're hiding.
Find a spot in your manuscript where the character is thinking. What style have you chosen? Play with it. If you've used italics, try it the other way, and vice versa.
Can you do away with an attribution by showing the character in action, followed by the thought?
Try compressing the thought as much as possible. As an exercise, expand the thought beyond all reason. Write quickly and fill a whole page with inner life. Then pick the best lines to keep.
FIRST-PERSON POV WARNING
When writing in first-person point of view, there's a great temptation to let the character go on and on about her thoughts and feelings. This can slow down the story, even one that's "character driven." Compress thoughts and feelings as much as possible.
Feelings
Fiction is an emotional exchange; at least it should be. The reader primarily feels a story, living it vicariously through the character. When the character feels something we can relate to, that creates empathy, a powerful bonding agent.
Jerry Cleaver calls emotion the "active ingredient" of fiction. "Fiction is about people who are desperate, driven, in crisis," he writes. Character emotion establishes empathy, sympathy, and identification.
And, as he was looking, it happened again to him. It was something that had started with the first warm days of spring. All colors seemed suddenly brighter, and with his heightened perception, there came also a deep, almost frightening sadness. It was a sadness that made him conscious of the slow beat of his heart, of the roar of blood in his ears. And it was a sadness that made him search
for identity, made him try to re-establish himself in the frame of reference in time and in space.
—Cancel All Our Vows, by John D. MacDonald
Feelings can be directly described, as in the above example. You can also show feelings through actions. Hemingway was a master at this.
In his short story "Soldier's Home," a young man back from World War I is having trouble getting back in tune with his family and home town. One morning at breakfast his mother is giving him a talking to. The young man "looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate."
That's a perfect picture of his inner life at the moment, and a metaphor of his life's prospects.
You don't always have to render the feelings of your characters, but you must know what they are in every scene. That way, the actions and dialogue will have an organic complexity that breathes life into fiction.
Add layers of feeling to your characters by answering questions like the following. These may be expanded or adjusted the more you learn and grow as a writer:
• What does your character yearn for? What does he think about when he's got time to dream?
• What's stopping the character from getting what he yearns for? Come up with a list of several possibilities.
• Choose one of the obstacles to the character's yearning. Now think up a scene where the character is faced with that obstacle. The obstacle is strong. How does the character react?
Here's how that might play out. The character, Frank, is a middle school science teacher. He yearns to do something adventurous, like skydiving. What stops him? Some possibilities are:
• his own fear of flying
• his domineering father
• lack of money
Let's say it's his domineering father. Write a short scene where the father tells Frank he's stupid to even think about jumping out of a plane.
How will Frank deal with it? One thing for sure, he won't be a wimp. No wimps!
He has to do something.
Suppose you have him scream at the father in defiance. Or storm out without speaking, determined to live his own life. This is how you push past the mundane in your characters and scenes.
Use Inner Life to Show Character Change
The best plots show us not only actions, but the effect of the actions on the characters, especially the Lead. Use inner life to give us a window into how the character is changing.
In Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the lost girl Trisha knows that her mother will soon be frightened by Trisha not being with her. King writes:
The thought of her fright made Trisha feel guilty as well as afraid.
That is one line of interior life, and the story goes on. Later, we get a much more detailed look inside Trisha:
The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. She knew that now. She was only nine, but she knew it, and she thought she could accept it. She was almost ten, after all, and big for her age.
I don't know why we have to pay for what you guys did wrong! That was the last thing she had heard Pete say, and now Trisha thought she knew the answer. It was a tough answer but probably a true one: just because. And if you didn't like it, take a ticket and get in line. Trisha guessed that in a lot of ways she was older than Pete now.
Showing inner change can be implicit or explicit, but you as the writer should know what your characters are feeling at every stage of the novel.
THE PULL-BACK TECHNIQUE
Often in your first draft your major characters, your Lead in particular, won't "jump off the page." Won't seem all that unique or worth following. You may have created some great plot moments for the Lead to suffer through, but to increase reader interest you need an interesting character.
To deepen the character during revision, try the pull-back technique:
1] Spend some time brainstorming about your Lead. Make a list of main character traits that come across.
2] Now, take each of those traits and ask yourself, what, is an action absolutely outrageous and extreme the character might do under the full sway of that trait? Force yourself to come up with a list of at least five actions.
3] If you've let yourself go, you'll have two or three very surprising actions. These actions are likely not worth putting into the manuscript. Why? Because they're so over the top they'll probably throw off the balance of the character or plot. But you've tapped into some good stuff here. Can you still use some of it?
4] Yes. Just pull back 25 percent. This is a technique I learned as an actor. It was very easy to overact emotional scenes, to go
too far. When I learned the 25 percent pull back, it made a tremendous difference.
Here's how the process might work. Let's say I have a lawyer who is struggling to make it and has a criminal matter he needs to handle. The evidence is not falling his way. He faces recalcitrant witnesses. He's having personal trouble, too. His fiancee has just broken up with him.
One of his traits is speaking his mind when he's angry. Perhaps being a little too honest. Now I ask, what is something the character might do under full sway of this trait? I come up with a list:
• yell at a judge
• scream at TV cameras outside the courtroom
• call a policeman a liar in open court
I need to press these further:
• throw a law book at the judge
• throw a chair through a window
• cut the D.A.'s tie off with scissors during the trial
That last one came out of nowhere but is the most original in my mind.
Now, I have to assess this. I decide that if my lawyer literally performs this action, it would impact the plot too much. It would make the character a little too over the top. So I pull back 25 percent. How?
Maybe he bumps into the D.A. outside the courtroom and, after an exchange, grabs his tie and throws it in his face. That's pulling back, and it works here.
Your hero walks into a bar (this is not a joke!). He needs some information from the bartender. A beefy man, the bartender is cleaning a glass with a cloth. Hero shows a picture to the bartender, asks him if he knows who the guy is.
"Yes," the bartender says, then blows into the glass. He gives your hero a name and your hero walks out.
And your reader yawns and puts down the book. What's happened here is something we've seen innumerable times. A cliched minor character—doing cliched things—who adds nothing to the tension of the story. He's used to convey information only, to give your protagonist a link so he can move on to another scene.
It's an opportunity wasted. Because minor characters can add spice to your novel, that extra spark that distinguishes the best fiction. So put a little effort on your minor characters. Here's how.
Allies and Irritants
Supporting players should serve one of two purposes in a story. They either help or hinder the main character. They are allies or irritants. If they aren't one or the other, what are they doing in the story except taking up space?
Consider Peggotty in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. She's David's beloved nanny who reappears at various times to offer him much-needed support. She is an ally.
By way of contrast there is Miss Murdstone, the cruel sister of David's stepfather. She is, of course, an irritant, someone standing in the way of David's happiness.
Neither character is wasted. Each functions to illuminate a different side of David's character.
When you conceive a minor character this way, you open up wonderful plot opportunities. In Carrie, Stephen King uses an irritant early in the book:
Tommy Erbter, age five, was biking up the other side of the street. He was a small, intense-looking boy on a twenty-inch Schwinn with bright red training wheels. He was humming "Scooby Doo, where are you?" under his breath. He saw Carrie, brightened, and stuck out his tongue. "Hey, ol' fart-face! Of prayin' Carrie!"
Carrie glares at Tommy and makes the bike fall over, hurting Tommy.
He has clearly irritated her, but he also serves another purpose—as a premonition of Carrie's later, telekinetic revenge. This character is put to the best possible use.
Make sure this is true even for the "cogs," those characters who are necessary to move the story along: doormen, cabdrivers, bartenders, receptionists—the people we meet every day, and who your protagonist will have to deal with from time to time.
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