Dynamic Characters (40 page)

No. In fact, the opposite is often true. Characters you don't love or identify with may come across as
more
real than your favorites.

If you think about it, this makes sense. It's always easier to describe someone standing a short distance away, rather than someone pressed tightly against you. You can see more. And when the person is, say, a suspicious-seeming neighbor rather than a beloved child, you are more likely to observe more accurately, instead of seeing only what you wish to see. Love can be very blind.

Including love for one's characters. In
Atlas Shrugged,
for example, the hero, John Galt, is a blurry and ultimately not very interesting figure. A number of critics have commented that he seems more a walking ideology, in which Ayn Rand was passionately interested, than a real human being. Rand did much better in creating characters whom she did not like so much: Lillian Rearden, Jim Taggart.

Similarly, Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis succeeded in
Dodsworth
far better with his character of an unlikable wife than with her foil and successor. Fran Dodsworth is vividly, achingly real in all her spirited selfishness. Edith Cortright is an idealized blur.

What does all this mean? That you must stand apart from even your most cherished characters, so that you can see them more accurately. Admire your heroes, but hold yourself back from the kind of dazzled love that blurs perspective. You're a writer, not an acolyte.

UNFAVORITE CHARACTERS:

YOU'RE A TERRIBLE WASTE OF PRINTER INK

For some writers, however, the opposite is true. They dislike some characters so much that dislike, not love, erases perspective.

Stephen Vincent Benet warned a young writer about this decades ago. In 1935 Benet, a generous mentor, wrote to fledgling novelist George Abbe:

Parts of the book are real and moving—certain parts and certain characters, to me, very unreal. The office, for instance, seems to me overdone and fantastic. Your personal dislike for it and its people gets in the way of your representing it to the reader. . . . The office people, in the main, don't live—they are dummies set up to be knocked down.

Nothing has changed since 1935. Writers still sometimes fail to see that even horrible people are people: human beings with their own complexities, motivations, desires, fears, loves and—yes—virtues. Be sure you are not letting your distaste for some characters prevent you from making them vivid. Ask yourself the same kinds of questions about dreary types (see chapter fourteen) as about interesting ones, so that you don't end up making them blurry cliches.

REVISING CHARACTERS:

WHEN SOMEONE ELSE WANTS TO PLAY GOD

In one sense, this entire book has been about revising both characters and plot: thinking about them more deeply, changing them throughout the story, changing your ideas about them as the writing progresses. However, all this revision has been assumed to be the writer's idea. What about when the revision suggestions come from the out-side—as, for instance, from an editor?

Many writers are particularly sensitive about editorial requests about characters. Such writers will unresistingly reconsider plot, objectively weigh questions of pace or setting, amiably consider cutting out exposition or adding scenes to clarify. But touch their characters and all hell breaks loose. My offspring! My living and breathing child! How dare you suggest I amputate his limb, decrease his precocity, change the color of his eyes!

This attitude is self-defeating. Your protagonist may indeed lie at the very heart of your novel (indeed, he'd
better).
But that does not mean that revving him up (or damping him down) won't result in a stronger and more believable character—and a stronger and more believable novel. It may be that in that perilous passage from the person in your head to the person on the page, something has been lost in the translation. A second opinion on characterization should be considered with the same thoughtful care as other editorial criticism.

on the other hand, your editor's suggestions may amount not to a clearer translation but to an entirely different text. If she wants revisions that profoundly change the nature of main characters, there is no way you can write them without also profoundly altering the book itself. Your aging police captain trying desperately to hide a hearing loss cannot become a gruff journalist in the prime of his career. Not without eviscerating the plot. Unless this strikes you as the most interesting idea you've ever heard, resist. An editor may be much more knowledgeable than you about fiction, but you are still the creator of this particular piece of fiction. You're the writer.

Will such an attitude lose you a sale? Maybe. Only you can judge what price is worth sticking by your original character. Although you might suggest to the editor that you keep the police captain as he is, and write a different book about the gruff journalist.

POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS: YOUR CHARACTER ON THE SHIFTING SANDS OF SOCIAL PERCEPTION

There's one other important emotional relationship that you the writer may have with one of your own major characters, and it's an uneasy relationship: political incorrectness.

You are Jewish, and you've written an insecure, materialistic Jew— as did Philip Roth.

You're female, and you've written a scheming, man-exploiting, other-woman-disdaining bitch, the worst nightmare of male chauvinists in divorce court.

You're religious, but your religious protagonist is hypocritical and self-serving.

Your first name is
Mohammed,
and you never want to see the words
Arab
and
terrorist
as an automatic coupling—but your international terrorist cartel includes at least one Arab.

You're black, and so is your fictional drug-using pimp.

or—for another kind of sensitivity dilemma—you're not Jewish, female, religious, Arab or black. And you're uneasy because your character, in all his glorious negativism, is.

But you want to write this character. Because, first, the character is vivid and compelling and
good.
And second, because your observations of the world have convinced you that such politically incorrect people do exist. Certainly they're not the majority of a given group, but they
do
exist. Should you write about them, and reinforce destructive stereotypes? or should you not write about them, and portray either only positive members of such groups or, at least, members who are negative in ways different from the stereotypes? Which should prevail: fiction as description of everything that
can
be perceived in the real world, or fiction as description of what
should
be perceived?

There is no easy answer to this one, and I'm not going to try to insist on one. So many factors are involved: what your novel is trying to accomplish. The tone of the book. Your implied attitude toward the characters. The treatment you give all the other characters. The book's overall theme.

Sometimes even the use of stereotypes is devastatingly effective.

Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison have both been criticized for perpetuating the stereotype of the feckless, irresponsible black man— yet both authors claim they write, in their different ways, of the world they actually know. Mark Twain's
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
has been accused of demeaning blacks—yet Jim, the runaway slave, is the most compassionate and moral character in the book. The same contradictions could be advanced about various novels about various other ethnic, racial, religious or sexual groups.

The only guideline here that makes sense to me is to be aware of what you're doing. Give your flirting-with-the-stereotypical character considerable thought. Does he really seem true to you, or just a reflection of secondhand TV and dated potboilers? Do you know enough about his world to render it fairly? Have you looked deeply into the motivations, social conditions and background that surround him? Do you genuinely understand witchcraft, or homosexuality, or Hasidism, or black street culture, or feminism, or whatever other minority group your protagonist belongs to?

Most important, what is
your
motivation for creating this character? Truth, or personal anger? Observation for its own sake, or prejudg-ment masquerading as observation?

Once you've wrestled with these particular angels, go ahead and write the character. And be prepared for the inevitable criticism.

THE FINAL WORD: RESPECT

Ultimately, how effective your characters are depends on how much you respect them.

Think about it. When you respect a real-life person—friend, spouse, neighbor, teacher, public figure—you treat her in certain ways. You let her have her say, even if you disagree with the content. You listen, even if you dislike what you hear. You ponder her reasons, even if they seem wrong. You grant her the dignity of a separate existence, apart from how she fits into your own.

The writer who respects his characters does the same. He tries to see them clearly, to listen to them, to ponder what they are. He may not fully understand the character, but he grants her the dignity of having her own existence, of which he is observer and recorder and judge—but not oppressor. Even a satirist who laughs at his creations laughs at a person's pattern of behavior, not an isolated and disemboweled trait. At least, if he's a good writer, he does.

Consider the ridiculous Mr. Collins in Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice
—an ignorant buffoon, self-serving and bootlicking. Yet Mr. Collins has his author's respect in the sense that Austen portrays him as a member of a functional community, with his own concerns and goals. He has some minor virtues: thrift, fidelity, hospitality. He is not a straw man for the author to rip apart; he is a ruefully observed sample of what a foolish man can become. Foolish, but a man, not merely an object. Mr. Collins lives, he breathes, he has been endowed by his creator with life, liberty and the pursuit of his own venal happiness. Mr. Collins is the butt of Jane Austen's wit, but he is not diminished by it. He is treated with derision, perhaps, but he is treated as a human being.

This is the meaning of
respecting your characters.
They don't need to respect each other, but they do need your respect to become people to us, not didactic tools.

Because, ultimately, characters succeed by how much we are interested in them. If the fiction they inhabit offers an entertaining plot, we will be entertained only if we can suspend disbelief and accept that this plot is happening
to someone.
If the fiction carries metamessages about the world—and it does—these will get through to us only if we believe the characters. If the fiction enlarges our perceptions of life— how we think, or feel, or both—it is only because the characters engage us. Fiction happens to fictional people, who become, in readers' minds, real people.

Go create some.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life itself.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

1
 
Huckleberry Finn, Emma Bovary and Sherlock Holmes