Dynamic Characters (6 page)

Background comes into all this when you begin to work out the specifics of both desire and obstacle. The setting of your story holds all the larger forces that will in turn shape the specific ones at work inside your character, which in turn will determine what he
perceives
as both desire and obstacle (one person's desire is another's nightmare). By considering setting first, you are going right to the source. The wellspring of what makes your protagonist who he is. The context which provides the forces ranged for and against him. Out of the interaction of those forces can come the specific incidents of the plot.

This might be easier to see in examples.

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

• Example one: Start with a Southern tidewater town in which status is everything, and the pull of the tides an almost mystical force. This is the setting that has shaped your protagonist's mother. What does she want? How does that impact what her son wants?

• Example two: Start with a quiet upper-class prep school during World War II. The young men here, on the verge of draft age, have been raised with the values of success, athleticism and competition. What does an ambitious student want?

• Example three: Start with the Texas border right after World War II, when the big ranches are being broken up or swallowed up by agribusiness, and the smaller ones are nearly all gone. Take a desolate, isolated ranch. What does the teenage boy who has grown up on it want?

Probably you found you could not answer those questions without deciding on the specific personality of your young mother, your preppy student, your teenage Texan. In these settings, different people will want different things. So the next step is to think about where your character fits within the setting, and how she reacts to it.

If the mother in your tidewater, status-conscious town is poor white trash, and she desperately wants to not be, she will push her children to bolster her own respectability. And one or more of those children may resist: through anger, through rebellion, through madness. Through intense identification with the magnificent natural world around them. Pat Conroy used this background to generate plot for
The Prince of Tides.

If your prep-school student has always had the best of everything and has been raised to competition and success, he may want to
be
the best in everything. He may even be prepared to go to violent lengths to do this, spurred on by the awareness of the violence of war just beyond graduation. This logical extension of the values inherent in the setting fuels John Knowles's classic
A Separate Peace.

If your teenage boy regrets the passing of his way of life on the Texas border, and he is a strong-willed and adventurous kid, he will run away south, to Mexico, where that way of life still exists, as

Cormac McCarthy showed in the National Book Award winner
All the Pretty Horses.

Note, too, that when you start with setting and character, the obstacles grow as naturally out of the setting as do the desires. This is because every setting in the galaxy will favor some character types and provide hardships for others. (I use
in the galaxy
advisedly; science fiction has long known the value of starting with setting.) If, for instance, the mother in
The Prince of Tides
had been a different sort of mother, or even from a different social class, she would not have put the same pressures on her three children, and Tom's and Luke's and Savannah's stories would have been much different.

If Gene Forrester of
A Separate Peace
had not been such a personally driven kid, the competitiveness encouraged in his time, place and class might not have reached such murderous intensity.

If John Grady Cole had said, ''Oh, I don't care that the ranch is sold, I'm eager for city life in Austin,'' Cormac McCarthy would have generated for him much different incidents.

Setting, then, is the actual birthplace for desire, character, obstacles—all the things that cause conflict for your characters and hence generate plot. Any character who stays in his hometown may experience conflict between the setting and his own personality. Use that conflict to build plot.

A warning: To serve this function, your setting must be real. That doesn't mean it has to exist in the actual world (I write science fiction, after all). But it
does
have to exist complete in your mind, with not only physical features but also prevailing values, beliefs, class structure, economics and social customs. To do you any good as a generator of incidents, a setting must be as complex as real-life settings are.

This is why it's not sufficient, when asked where your novel takes place, to say simply, ''Rochester, New York.'' There are many Roches-ters. The mansions along East Avenue are not artsy Park Avenue is not the working-class suburb of Spencerport is not the academic-heavy neighborhoods around the University of Rochester is not the northwest quadrant, parts of which have a higher per-capita murder rate than Manhattan. Nor is there one Boston, one St. Louis, one Prairie View, Arkansas. Even if these places are invented, you must invent them
completely.
Not just physically, but sociologically and economically as well.

Fiction is not sociology. But fiction, like sociology, is about human behavior. If you answer some of the same questions as sociologists, you will get a fuller picture of your setting.

And when you do, you'll find you have helped yourself enormously with both character and plotting. Because from your knowledge of what is prevalent and expected in this place, what is valued and believed, you can generate characters at odds with some aspect of your setting. They might be at odds because, like John Grady Cole, they want something different. Or because, like Gene Forrester, they want what everybody else wants but with much more intensity. Or, like Tom and Luke and Savannah, what somebody else wants for them is screwing up their lives.

LEAVING HOME:

USING BACKGROUND TO GENERATE PLOT

The essential process is the same for the character who leaves his hometown: Look for the conflicts between setting and personality. Here, however, you have even more choices, because you have more settings. There are at least two settings: the place the character comes from and the place she is now. Plus many different personalities to interact with them.

Suppose, for example, that our New York girl newly inducted into the army (remember her?) has just arrived at Fort Polk. Let's call her Lisa. She is feisty, street-smart, suspicious, self-reliant, cosmopolitan—all characteristics with high survival value in Harlem. Louisiana, however, is laid-back, friendly, slow-paced and provincial. Things are done by tradition. Members of the black community rely heavily on each other to live their lives. Sarcasm is not, as it is in New York, an art form. Lisa can adjust all right to basic training, but the culture shock of Louisiana is causing conflict whenever she has leave in town.

You have a good opportunity to generate plot incidents from the clash between the character, holding onto her old-setting values, and the new setting.

Or take a different Lisa. This one also comes from New York, but she reacted to her hometown by becoming very self-protective. Silent, withdrawn, almost always fearful but self-trained not to show it. A stoic. In Louisiana, however, she finds a slower, more open culture— and she loves it. She flourishes here. She's happy. But when she goes back to New York, everyone there expects her to be who she was before. She is unhappy and miserable.

This version of Lisa lets you plot from her internal conflict between the characteristics of old and new settings.

Or—a third Lisa. She loves Louisiana as much as the second Lisa. However, she's a stronger character. When her hitch in the army is over, she moves to Louisiana and cuts all ties with New York. She renounces her frantic, violent, shiftless family. She starts over. But gradually, over a lifetime, she realizes how many good things there were in her seemingly awful background. Her grandmother's loving endurance. Her brother's colorful scheming. The willingness to try different things. Lisa eventually comes to a reconciliation of her two settings.

Actually, this is a common plot structure. A character turns her back on the culture of her childhood and chooses a much different setting—geographical or class-based or ethnic. But as time goes on, the character either returns to the values of her childhood or else learns to integrate two different ways of life.

Thus, Marjorie Morgenstern rebels against her immigrant Jewish background but eventually returns to keeping a kosher household
(Marjorie Morningstar,
by Herman Wouk). Doug Gardner moves back to his childhood Brooklyn and opens an antique store, leaving behind Manhattan corporate life
(Fifty,
by Avery Corman). And Michel Duval, a long way from his home of Provence, France (he's on Mars), is first numbingly homesick, and later learns to translate his feeling for Provence into a similar feeling for the much different landscapes of an alien planet
(Red Mars,
by Kim Stanley Robinson).

Whether your character leaves home, stays put or returns home, your setting can be a rich source of both characterization and plot. Setting can do so many things: furnish motivation, illuminate internal conflicts, bolster the plausibility of action, provide a larger context for choices. But, of course, setting can do these things only if you take the time and imagination to explore its implications in your own mind, in order to decide which aspects of a particular setting you wish to emphasize in your fiction.

Then send us there.

SUMMARY: A CHECKLIST TO START THINKING ABOUT SETTING

• Who lives in this place? How do they make their living? How stable is the economic situation? What does a household usually consist of? How stable are most households?

^•
 What values are held in the community as a whole about material possessions? Religion? Children? Patriotism? Education? Crime? Sex? Working? Leaving? Newcomers? Privacy? Loyalty to kin?

^•
 Who has status here—who is looked up to? For what reasons? Are high-status people treated differently from low-status people? How? How hard is it to change social groups? (Contrast Edwardian England, where it was
very
hard, with contemporary Los Angeles, where one good movie deal opens all doors.)

• How are little boys expected to behave? Little girls? Teenagers? Young adults? Wives? Husbands? Community leaders? Old people? What usually happens if each of these people violates behavioral expectations?

• What is the best personal future most of the people in this setting can imagine? The worst? The best community future? The worst?

• How does your protagonist match—or differ from—the general community answers to the above questions? What are his preferences in dress, hair, books, music, food, etc.? Which of the prevailing cultural values does he share, which does he reject, which is he ambivalent about?

• What plot incidents might result from mismatches between character and setting?

Work is important.

Of course, you already believe that, or else why are you reading this book, and why are you trying to write fiction in the first place? But I'm not talking now about your work in creating characters. I'm talking about
their
work. In the words of that perennial cocktail-party question, "What do you do?''

And even more important, "Why and how do you do it?'' Knowing the answers to these three questions—really knowing them, in detail—can give your novel a tremendous boost.

THE CASE FOR CHARACTER EMPLOYMENT

In a short story, it may not matter how a protagonist earns his living. A successful short story is pared down and tight, with everything extraneous to the plot and theme left out, which may include careers.

In Irwin Shaw's much-anthologized short story, ''The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,'' we never find out what the two characters, Michael and Frances, do when they're not having a Sunday stroll on Fifth Avenue. It doesn't matter. The story is concerned with a powerful moment in the deceptions and desires that make up a marriage, and not with anything else. As far as we readers are concerned, Michael and Frances are eternally walking Fifth Avenue.