Dynamic Characters (28 page)

In the last chapter, we discussed your protagonist and your point-of-view character as if they were the only two people in your book. This is, of course, untrue. You also have all those secondary characters, antagonists and spear carriers. What can they do for your story? And how do you tie their characterization to the book's plot?

By working backward. You figure out what the climax will be, and then you provide everybody else but main players with just enough characterization to end up wherever you want.

This needs explanation. Didn't I already spend all of part one detailing how a writer starts with a complex character and gets to plot? How can I then say that sometimes you should start instead with plot and fill in only enough characterization to serve the needs of that plot?

Because you
have
to limit the amount of characterization that you give your secondary characters. If you don't, if you try to make every single person in the book full and rounded and contradictory, your novel will fail. It will do so for three reasons:

• The book will be too long.
It takes sheer wordage to adequately develop full, round characters. If you try to do this for not only the key characters but also the protagonist's boss, his wife's best friend and the waitress at their favorite restaurant, the book will have to go on for volumes. Which might not be too bad except:

• The book will be too slow.
The details that build character do not usually move as fast as those of plot. If they're details of background, events that have happened before the story begins (sometimes called
backfill),
they're even slower. Developing all your players will cause the story to creep forward at a glacial pace, and everyone will become chilled and stop reading.

• The book will be muddy.
In real life,
everyone
is complicated. Each person on the planet (all five billion of us) is the complex center of his or her own life story, which also features important secondary characters, people with third or fourth billing and bit players. But fiction is not real life. Fiction traces patterns through the infinitely complicated morass of real life. The patterns may be simple or complex, but they are always simpler and more clear-cut than real life (more on this in chapter twenty-four). You must highlight what's important to your book's particular pattern, and downplay the rest. You do this by concentrating on the stories of your protagonists—one, or two, or at most a handful—and demoting everyone else to permanent bit-player status, without fully developed characterizations that might detract from your main story line.

SHE'S SECONDARY BUT SHE'S CERTAINLY COLORFUL

So where does that leave us? With four categories of characters:

• Main characters,
who will be fully developed, with backgrounds and contradictions and the capacity for change (whether or not they actually do change). Often (but not always) they are POV characters.

• Secondary characters
who, although not fully developed, are nonetheless more than briefly animated pieces of plot furniture. The readers know, or can guess, something about their lives beyond the events of the plot. However, these people don't change during the novel and don't give any indication that they could. They come in two versions: ''ordinary folk'' types, undeveloped in part because they already seem like familiar and comfortable friends, and:

• Colorful
secondary individuals
who may be fascinating to read about, but who nonetheless offer more arresting quirks than deep characterization.

•
 Bit players,
who appear once or twice and essentially
are
furniture.

It's important to note that these categories may overlap somewhat. The reason I'm trying to set them up, despite their slipperiness, is that I think different categories benefit from different approaches by you, the writer—especially at the climax of your book.

Let's get some clarification here from a specific example. We need a well-known novel with familiar characters. Once more we'll call on F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic,
The Great Gatsby.

Main characters are the narrator, Nick Carraway, who changes as a result of the novel events, deciding to break up with girlfriend Jordan Baker and return to his native Midwest. Also major, although they don't change, are Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Tom Buchanan. For all four, the author gives us details of growing up, of current beliefs only peripheral to the plot (such as Tom's racism) and of complexities and contradictions of personality (Daisy is torn between her romanticism and her hardheaded need for money to support a lifestyle she knows she will never abandon for love).

Colorful secondary characters include Jordan Baker, the society beauty who cheats at golf; Myrtle, Tom's mistress; and Wolfsheim, the mobster. We get no background for these people, but each appears in more than one scene, each is essential to the plot and each is flashy and memorable. Jordan is scornful, beautiful and dishonest—all flashy qualities. Myrtle is pretentious, comic, and pathetic, with her too-elaborate dresses and her disdain for her temporary servants. She makes a memorable figure. And Wolfsheim—it would be hard to imagine a flashier figure, nose hairs ''quivering tragically,'' cuff links of human molars, illegal ''gonnections'' offered without discretion.

I stress the colorfulness of these characters because, as a general guideline, the more colorful you make a secondary character, the greater your obligation to account for him at the end of the book. The reason is simple: Readers will remember colorful characters. Remember, and wonder what became of them. If the answers are never provided, readers are likely to feel cheated.

Thus, Fitzgerald accounts for Jordan and Wolfsheim, even though neither accounting is essential to the main plot (Myrtle, whose fate
is
essential, is of course dead). Nick goes to Wolfsheim's office to urge him to go to Gatsby's funeral. Wolfsheim refuses, and we get a clear glimpse of what will happen to him: more endless shady deals, just as if Gatsby had never lived and died. Similarly, we see from Nick's last scene with Jordan (the third-last scene in the book) that she will just go on dating her various beaux until one of the romances turns into a convenient marriage—but not with Nick.

In contrast, less colorful secondary characters often don't have to be accounted for at a book's end. The reader may not even remember that they existed, even though they appeared in more than one scene. Or, the reader may just assume that since this character was presented as ordinary and unremarkable, that's what he'll go on being, and such a fate doesn't need accounting for.

In
The Great Gatsby,
Daisy's daughter Pammy is just such a secondary character. She affects the plot in that she certainly would have complicated any decision Daisy might have made about Gatsby, had Gatsby lived. In addition, Daisy delivers one of her key speeches to Nick on the subject of the child's birth and the painful circumstances surrounding it. Yet the ending of the novel doesn't account for Pammy—never even mentions her. And readers don't notice the omission. Pammy is an ordinary little girl of her class, and it's assumed she goes on living the life that implies, even though her mother and father are both responsible for manslaughter.

Finally,
Gatsby
abounds with minor characters, some colorful and some not: Myrtle's sister Catherine, the ''boarder'' Klipspringer, the reporter checking out the rumors around Gatsby, Michaelis, the McKees. They are all furniture, there to facilitate the doings of the main characters.

It's not, of course, possible for us to know exactly what was in F. Scott Fitzgerald's mind as he wrote Wolfsheim, Jordan, Klipspringer, Daisy and Pammy. However, it's not hard to deduce that he must have had a pretty clear idea of what would happen to Daisy, Tom, Gatsby and Myrtle—otherwise he wouldn't have had a book. Perhaps he knew their fates before he wrote even the first word of the novel.

Perhaps their fates became clear to him part way through the writing. Or perhaps he wrote a first draft, exclaimed at the end of it, ''Good Lord! Wilson shoots Gatsby!'' and wrote that.

It doesn't matter. There are all sorts of ways to arrive at the end of a first draft. But sometimes (often) that's just the beginning.

FIXING PLOT PROBLEMS THROUGH SECONDARY CHARACTERS

After the first draft is finished, most writers feel a flush of triumph. Then they reread the manuscript.

At this point, nearly every writer will find at least some loose ends unraveling during or after the climax. Some common problems:

• Characters will be unaccounted for. (Whatever happened to Good Old George?)

• Actions you need for your climax seem, on second reading, undermotivated.
Why
are these people doing these things?

• Some situations aren't as plausible as you would like. How can you make them feel more inevitable?

• The climax occurs too abruptly. You need more and/or better foreshadowing.

• A few sections of the book seem a little thin. Not enough action, or not enough character development, or not enough tension.

• A key scene reads, alas, too much like a cliche.

• A subplot doesn't feel closely enough tied to the main story line.

What to do about these problems? Work backward, through your secondary characters. Secondary characters are usually more easily revised than are primary ones. It is a major undertaking to strengthen plot holes by changing your protagonist from Irish to Vietnamese, from a plumber to an engineer, from thirty to sixty, from cheerful to bitter and devious. But it's not nearly as difficult to change her
cousin.
The cousin appears in only three scenes. And you hadn't imagined an entire history and personality for him anyway. Thus, it's not so difficult to alter him to whatever your evolving plot requires him to be.

But aren't the problems bulleted above traceable not to secondary characters, but to major ones? Can you solve such major plot difficulties without major changes in your protagonists? Actually, yes, sometimes you can. Let's look again at each problem.

PROBLEM NUMBER ONE: CHARACTERS UNACCOUNTED FOR

Let's say you've finished a first draft and you're actually pretty pleased with the last three chapters. All the forces you've been setting up have come together effectively at the climax, and a complex plot has been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. However, one problem remains. One of the main characters cannot, for plot reasons, be present in the climactic scene. He
must
be elsewhere. Following the climax are only two more short scenes, both of which read very well, but he's not in those scenes either. And you don't want to add him, because he's supposed to be two thousand miles away, and there's no good reason to bring him, at this late date, to the location of the climax. Neither do you want to add a third scene after the climax; the book feels emotionally right just as it is, and another scene would only dilute the effect. Still, this missing character was important and colorful; readers are going to want to know how he ended up. What to do?

Use a secondary character.

This secondary character—we'll call her Pamela—can be the means to let the reader know what happened to the unaccounted-for main character (George). Pamela can receive a phone call from George. Or a birthday card, with a scrawled bit of news in it. Or see George's name in the newspaper. Or she can have a conversation about George with another character. Each of these can be brief—so brief they don't require another scene. Yet they will satisfy the readers' desire to know whatever happened to good old George.

But what if Pamela doesn't know George—and neither does anybody else present at the end of the book, when you're doing your wrap-up? That's where you plot backward with minor characters. Change Pamela's life so that she does know George. It's not hard to do; she's not that fully developed, and not in very many scenes anyway. So decide that Pamela and George are cousins, or ex-spouses, or in the same work field, or from the same town, or whatever. Then go back and plant that in a few earlier scenes—it's not hard. When the second-last scene rolls around and Pamela tells Justin that she received a gloomy note from George (Can you
believe
it, under
these
circumstances! George could be gloomy about winning the lottery, but then he was always like that even when we were kids), it will feel natural. And you the writer will have accounted for George.

Mystery writers do this often to account for suspects who turn out not to have committed the crime after all. Claudia Bishop, for example, in her book
A Taste for Murder,
has as a suspect a boorish businessman staying at the scene of the crime, an upscale inn. One of the two amateur sleuths suspects him. But he's not the killer, and he leaves the inn before the end of the novel. To account for his fate, Bishop ends the book with a restaurant review he wrote of the inn. He was actually a food writer traveling incognito. Had the cook known, she would have cooked much better for him! The tiny incident is funny, brief enough to not slow down the book's ending, and satisfying in accounting for someone physically not present at the novel's end.