Dynamic Characters (33 page)

VALIDATION: JIGGER TAIT SAYS IT'S SO

Validation
is whatever the author does to let us know that this character change is real and permanent; the character will not revert to his old behavior the next time the wind changes directions. You can do this in several ways.

• Show the character engaging in concrete action(s) that clearly demonstrate that the change is now an entrenched part of his

behavior (this is the most common method).

^•
 Show the character making future plans that reflect his change(s).

^•
 Show another person accepting the character as genuinely changed.

• Show the character resisting old temptations.

• Show the character leaving his old haunts to start over, differently, elsewhere.

• Repeat a version of the first scene, with the character acting much differently this second time around.

Sheffield and Pournelle combine three methods of validation: the third, fifth and sixth.

Rick Luban's changes are validated by his training instructor, Jigger Tait. Throughout the novel, Jigger Tait's judgment has been established as sound, so we can believe his evaluation.

"You may wonder what the hell all this is about,'' Jigger began, even before the door was closed. ''I'll get to the point right away, Rick. I want to talk about your future.... I want to ask you to consider a career with Security.''

The idea caught Rick totally unprepared. ''Security?'' He stared at Jigger. ''Why me?''

''I think—and Gina and Barney agree—you probably have a talent for it.''

We understand that Jigger, a member of Security himself, is offering high praise—and an objective confirmation of how much Rick has changed from the cynical wise guy he was in chapter one.

In addition, we see Rick preparing for his next post with Vanguard Mining: packing his things, applying for special expeditions, and we understand that he is going forward, not backward, with what he's learned. His preparations for the future validate that he intends to continue those new behaviors that make that future possible.

Finally, the novel employs a truncated version of the sixth method of validation, in which a version of the first scene is repeated to show the character acting much differently this time. Sheffield and Pournelle don't actually repeat the entire first scene (the prank in the high school). Instead, they show Jigger telling Rick that the entire education system must change radically, and that eventually recruits from the more effective private training programs, such as Vanguard, will need to be the means for change. Young-looking recruits will need to ''infiltrate the education system, and either transform it or destroy the whole mess.'' The book ends this way:

"We need older people, like Turkey Gossage and Coral Wogan—they've both volunteered—but we also need younger people, too, like me and Gina and—''

''No. Absolutely no. I'm not interested.'' Rick backed toward the door. ''I don't want to talk about it any more.''

... Rick closed the door and entered the second chamber of the airlock. He went through, but at the inner hatch he paused and stood motionless for a long time. He had not thought about Mr. Hamel for months, until today; but suddenly his mind was full of their final meeting, the small stooped figure sitting on the bench in the fading light of late afternoon. He heard again that dry, dusty voice:
Not an easy job, but a worthwhile one. The most rewarding jobs are always the most difficult ones.

Could that be true? On Earth, in space, everywhere?

Maybe, but not for Rick Luban. Not tomorrow, not ever. And certainly not today, with Deedee waiting for him.

He moved to operate the hatch.

Beyond it, the party was getting into its stride. From where Rick was standing the sound coming through the closed door was no more than a confused hubbub, like the first distant swell of a revolution.

The book ends with the implication that there
will
be a revolution in education on Earth, and that Rick will indeed (despite his current teenage denial) be a part of it. He will go back to his old high school, or one like it. And, as an agent of the revolution, he will behave much differently this second time around than he did when the novel's first scene unfolded. This final scene sets the stage for a possible sequel. It also validates that what has happened to Rick is permanent and real.

More introspective characters may give us more direct reinforcement of what they've learned, through either dialogue or thoughts.

Here are three famous examples of novel-end soliloquies that validate a genuine change in attitude:

He realized that he had deceived himself; it was no self-sacrifice that had driven him to think of marrying, but a desire for a wife and home and love; and now that it all seemed to slip through his fingers he was seized with despair. He wanted that more than anything in the world. What did he care for Spain and its cities, Cordova, Toledo, Leon; what to him were the pagodas of Burmah and the lagoons of South Sea islands? America was here and now. It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words and their writings, had instilled in him, and never the desires of his own heart . . . had he not seen that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.

—Philip Carey, in W. Somerset Maugham's
Of Human Bondage

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off-base they killed you. or they killed you gratuitously, like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

—Frederick Henry, in Ernest Hemingway's
A
Farewell to Arms

I felt a little peculiar around the children. For one thing, they were grown. And I see they think me and Nettie and Shug and Albert and Samuel and Harpo and Sofia and Jack and Odessa real old and don't know much what's going on. But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.

—Celie, in Alice Walker's
The Color Purple

Rick Luban is not nearly as eloquent as Philip, Lieutenant Henry or Celie (he is, after all, only sixteen). But he is just as changed.

SUMMARY: DESTINY ON AN ASTEROID

This is anonymous, and very old:

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes destiny.

Although probably written to apply to real people rather than fictional ones, the verse nonetheless encapsulates everything in this chapter:

• Like Rick Luban, your character should demonstrate qualities that foreshadow change
(thoughts
and/or
words).

• He should be pressured by story events into behaving differently
(actions,
which make up plot).

• The new behavior should be validated for us so we know it is now part of him
(character).

• And then he can go on, a changed man, to his
destiny.

A few months ago my local newspaper reported the story of a drunk driver who accidentally hit the car of his own fiancee, killing her. He was convicted of manslaughter. The sentence was reduced to probation, however, when the dead woman's family pleaded for leniency.

Another news story described the divorce proceedings of a man who moved across the country to a city where he knew no one and accidentally married his long-lost half sister.

If a beginning writer puts either of these events into fiction, someone will say, ''Oh, come on now! I don't believe that!'' And then the writer will say, ''But it really happened!'' Which, unfortunately, is no defense at all.

Fiction is not about what really happened. It's about what seems so real that it's happening
now,
as you read the story. Real life is sometimes capricious, occasionally mysterious, once in a while totally inexplicable, nearly always messy. Fiction, on the other hand, has the task of making the capricious, the mysterious, the inexplicable and the messy into something much more coherent. It gives shape and meaning to events that in real life may have none, thereby satisfying a deep human hunger for order. Fiction patterns life for us.

Does that mean that you can't base fiction on real events? Not at all. In chapter eight, we considered ways to adapt real people to fiction. In this chapter, we'll do the same for real plots. Three general guidelines follow.

''ANYTHING BUT THE FACTS, MA'AM''

The most important rule is this:
Don't
stick to the facts.

Fact, as we established above, is different from fiction. It's messier. The facts might be that the man who moved across country really didn't know anyone in the new city, really did meet his half sister purely by chance and really did marry her in total ignorance. But you aren't bound by the facts (no, not even if they happened to you). Instead, create nonfacts that will make a better story.

Perhaps the relocated man knew that his father had once lived in this new city, a long time ago. His father, once a champion pool player and now dead, deserted the family when the boy was four. There was another woman. He finds himself hanging around pool halls, half resentful, trying to learn about the life his father must have led here. He meets a girl, herself a champion pool player. Her father taught her. The clues are there, but he can't put them together—or won't.

What have you gained here? Quite a lot. You've transformed a random coincidence into a story of submerged longing and painfully buried memory. Your augmentation of the facts has given the entire chain of incidents both pattern and meaning.

An important note: In recommending that you play fast and loose with the facts, I'm talking about writing fiction, not about writing dramatic journalism. When Shana Alexander, to take one superb example, writes about a real-life murder of a rich man by his own grandson
(Nutcracker),
she's not composing a novel.
Nutcracker
also tries to find pattern and meaning in what at first appears to be an inexplicable act of violence—but the book is not fiction. It's journalism and, as such, must stick to what really happened.

You don't. Add, drop and invent events as necessary. Treat reality like clay, not stone.

WHY WOULD ANYONE
DO
THAT?

The most important thing you can invent is motives for all the major characters in your borrowed story. In real life, we sometimes don't know why other people behave as they do. In fiction, motives lay the foundation for reader acceptance of everything else. The characters may not understand themselves, but the reader should understand them, at least enough to sense that even the most demented has consistent demons driving him in consistent ways.

Consider an example. Judith Rossner based her famous novel
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
on an actual 1973 murder in Manhattan. Katherine Cleary, a young schoolteacher devoted to her small pupils, was brutally killed in her own apartment by a man she'd picked up in a bar. Journalists ferreted out many facts about the victim, the murderer and the circumstances (one comprehensive treatment is Lacey Fosburgh's
Closing Time).
But when Rossner wrote her novel, she ignored or changed many of these facts, and she spent no more than a few pages on the movements of the killer. Instead, she built coherent patterns of behavior that showed readers how a pretty, educated young woman from a good Irish Catholic family could put herself in such a situation. Rossner concentrated on her character's
motives.