Dynamic Characters Prologue WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE, AND WHO NEEDS THEM? "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." Any one picking up certain best-selling authors--I name no names--can't help but notice that their books are filled with characters with 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. 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, I 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 that his or her 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 500 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 MULTIFACETED 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 multifaceted 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 all 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, then 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 upfront 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 motivate 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 "Plot is character." What your characters do must grow naturally out of who each one is. Characterization is not divorced from plot, 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 jail? 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 graspable, 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 become not only read but reread, not only praised but loved.    Jo March. Quentin Compton. Becky Sharp. Fagin. Jean Brodie. Lord Peter Whimsey.    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 that creating wonderful characters is sure-fire. 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 let 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, life-long 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-so's 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 I focuses on police-report externals that contribute to characterization: your people's appearance, dress, environment, name(s), place of birth, job, spoken dialogue. Part II is concerned with what goes on inside your character's head: her thoughts, attitudes, fears, loves, and dreams. Part III applies both these 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, the last chapter discusses 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.

Copyright ©1999 Nancy Kress