Make A Scene (36 page)

While all people undergo some change in life, characters in fiction have a dramatic imperative to change in order to give meaning to the narrative they star in. These transformations, however, can't happen all at once, or too easily. The reader tends to be suspicious when a character starts out mean and becomes kind too quickly, for example. So how can you change your characters in ways that lend credibility to each scene and feel authentic in the course of your narrative? Gradually.

Though each narrative has its own variation on shape and structure, it is helpful to think of breaking your novel or story into three parts (or you can use the theatrical term
acts
if you like). Doing so allows you to step back and really watch as your characters grow and change over the course of your narrative, all the while creating a satisfying arc for the reader.

THE FIRST PART: EARLY SCENES

The first third of your narrative is all about establishing the nuts and bolts of characters and their basic conflicts and plot problems, and setting in motion all the seeds for conflict and challenges to come. In these opening scenes, the reader is meeting your characters just as if they were new guests over for dinner. Their words, actions, and reactions to other people will all serve as introductions, and these first impressions will be remembered and will set the stage for their behavior deeper into the book. We'll now look at the ways you can establish information and set up your characters for change in the first third of your narrative.

Establishing Character-Related Plot Threads

At the same time as you establish that your protagonist is a smack-talking hooligan with seductive eyes and a mop of brown curls, or a lonely librarian who reads mystery novels and winds up investigating an actual crime, in this first section of your narrative, you also need to establish:

• Involvement.
What is your protagonist's relationship to the events of the significant situation? Is the event his fault, centered around him in some way; did he accidentally stumble into it, or is he integral to it?

•The stakes.
What he stands to lose or gain as a result of the above-mentioned events will create necessary tension and drama.

• Desires.
What he desires, from material goods to deep and abiding love, will inform the stakes and his intentions.

• Fears.
What he fears, from bodily harm to not obtaining his desire, will also inform the stakes.

• Motivation.
What reasons does he have to act upon the events of the significant situation? What is he driven by?

• Challenges.
How does the significant situation challenge his life, views, status, other people, his status quo, needs, etc.?

We'll walk through these points using excerpts of early scenes from the first part of the novel
House of Sand and Fog
by Andre Dubus III.

Involvement

Co-protagonist Kathy Nicolo (married name Lazaro) is a cleaning woman whose self-absorbed husband divorced her eight months ago. Since then, her life has been a wreck: Financially, she just scrapes by, and her stability as a recovered alcoholic and addict is severely tested. The only material thing of significance to her is the house she inherited from her father, where she lives.

How is she involved in the significant situation? In the first scene she wakes up to find a locksmith and a cop at her door with a notice of eviction for back taxes—an erroneous notice at that. It doesn't matter; until she can prove in court that she has done nothing wrong, they have the right to evict her, and they do. Kathy loses her house and must go live in a motel while she sorts things out. In the time it takes her to get a lawyer, her house goes up for auction and is purchased by co-protagonist Colonel Behrani, a once wealthy man from Iran who is now a struggling immigrant with iron pride.

For simplicity's sake, I'm going to focus on Kathy's storyline for this first section, though Dubus does a thorough job of developing both characters fully and weaving their stories together seamlessly.

It's pretty clear what Kathy's relationship to the significant situation is: She's been evicted from her house. Though Kathy claims it's a mistake, the reader doesn't have enough evidence yet to know if this is true. She seems volatile, and the reader isn't sure if she's trustworthy; she
could
be the kind of woman who might fail to pay taxes:

"That's all right 'cause I'm not leaving." My throat felt dry and stiff.

The locksmith looked up from his work on my back door.

Deputy Burdon rested one hand on the countertop, and he had an understanding expression on his face, but I hated him anyway. "I'm afraid you have no choice, Mrs. Lazaro. All your things will be auctioned off with the property. Do you want that?"

"Look,
I
inherited
this house from my father, it's paid for. You can't evict me!" My eyes filled up and the men began to blur. "I never
owed
a fucking business tax. You have no right to do this."

The Stakes

The stakes are pretty clear: Without her house, she's got nowhere to go but to a motel, and on her small income, even that expense is a big one—Kathy could wind up in dire straits pretty quick. This evokes some sympathy for the woman, even though the reader doesn't really know who she is yet. Your stakes must be equally clear; don't make the reader guess. Remember to:

• Show what the protagonist has to gain

• Show what the protagonist stands to lose

Let the reader see in the scenes from the first part exactly what is at stake for your protagonist. Does he stand to be kicked out of his tribe if he speaks his mind; lose his worldly possessions if he loses his job; lose his child visitation rights if he can't pay child support? These questions and their answers must be enacted in scenes in the first part of your narrative.

Desires

Next, through passages of interior monologue, the reader gets a peek into Kathy's desires, which center mostly on her relationships. She remembers the few rare good times before her husband Nick left her; she reflects on the days with her first husband, Donnie, when she was barely an adult, and became addicted to cocaine. The reader feels her palpable loneliness—she's so lonely that even the bad memories are a comfort to her. Because of her desire for love, when Lester Burdon, the deputy who first came to evict her, shows up to check on her, even though he helped facilitate her current unhappy state, her desire makes it plausible that she takes to him:

"I thought I'd check on you, see how you're holding up."

He sounded like he meant it, and he seemed even softer than the day before when he'd led those men in kicking me out of my house. When we got to his car, a Toyota station wagon parked at the edge of the lot near the chain-link fence, I kind of hoped he'd keep talking; Connie Walsh was the first person I'd had a real conversation with in over eight months, and that was more of an interrogation than a talk. I wanted one, even with a sheriff's deputy in the fog.

Kathy's pressing desire to be loved will get her into a lot of trouble later on in the narrative. Her other, more immediate desire, which will drive her actions in much of the rest of the narrative, is more straightforward: to get her house back.

Desires will come in many shapes in your narrative and can be expressed or shown:

• In dialogue between characters

• In the form of thoughts (interior monologue), as in the previous example

• In subtle actions—your protagonists may simply take what they desire, or try to

What matters is that the reader has a feeling for what these desires are, straight away. Desires and motivations fuel a character's intentions in every scene; they help give purpose to their actions, so you'll want to make them as clear as possible.

Fears

Kathy's fears are a bit less direct, but they are there in the subtext of the scenes. The reader knows that she is a recovering addict of both drugs and alcohol, with a penchant for men who liked to be in control of her. This tells the reader that Kathy is not a person with high self-esteem, or someone who feels particularly in control of her own life. The reader sees that she is someone who prefers dependence on others over independence, and that the act of being out of her house throws her whole life into chaos. Kathy is afraid to be alone and afraid to be an adult in the world, to take responsibility for herself. These fears will get her into trouble in the middle of this novel.

Your protagonist should have some kind of fear, whether it is a rational one like the fear of fire, or an irrational one, like a fear of butterflies or of the color yellow, because those innocuous things trigger memories of terrible experiences. No character should be too brave—even heroes have weaknesses. Establish what your character is afraid of early on, because in the middle of the narrative you're going to exploit those fears. You can establish fear:

• Through speech (for instance, he can admit to a friend that he is "terrified of spiders")

• Through behavior (your protagonist, upon seeing a passenger jet overhead, hits the dirt like he is about to be bombed)

•Through a flashback scene in which the reader sees that the protagonist was traumatized by a specific event

Fear is as much a part of your protagonist's motivations as desire, and it is through fear and desire that you exert change on your characters.

Motivation

Kathy's surface motivation is pretty clear: She's motivated to get her house back because it's all she has, and she sees it as the cornerstone of her ability to live a stable life. This motivation leads her to get legal aid and fight to get her house back. But Kathy is also motivated by older, deeper issues regarding her family and her relationship to her parents. These motivations are the ones that cause her to get involved with Lester Burdon, a married man and a cop; these motivations also cause her to become volatile and enraged at Colonel Behrani, who has her house; and they begin to set the stage for the drama that unfolds in the second part of the narrative.

Your protagonist's motivations will be clear to the reader so long as you:

• Make it clear what the protagonist's desires are

• Make it clear what the protagonist's fears are

• Offer opportunities to thwart the desires and trigger the fears

In chapter eleven, we discussed scene intentions. Motivations—which stem directly from your protagonist's fears and desires—are the foundation of scene intentions. Once you know how your protagonist is motivated, and by what forces, then you can direct him to act in every scene in a way appropriate to the circumstances of your plot.

Challenges

Kathy's challenges are myriad. She lacks money and resources; she has a weakness for using alcohol to drown her feelings; she is attracted to men who are bad for her; and she is literally challenged by Colonel Behrani's takeover of her home.

Challenges are the situations in which you thwart your protagonist's desires and trigger his fears, and they are good and necessary. The more of them you can comfortably create—that is, the more you can create that pertain to your plot and make sense to the character—the better, because they create a sense of urgency and concern in your reader. In the first part of your narrative, your job is to set up which intentions are going to be opposed, leading the way to the middle part, where these intentions will meet with greater opposition and create more conflict.

Assessing Your Character at the End of the First Part

The scenes in the first part are all about potential conflict. You want to ask yourself, have I destabilized my protagonist, given him problems and conflicts that begin to worry both him and the reader? Has my protagonist been directly involved in a significant situation that has brought initial conflict and challenges? Make sure that by the end of the first part, your protagonist is showing signs that he feels tested, forced into action, and driven toward change. Nothing should yet be too conclusive, too fixed in stone, because if it is, the reader has little motivation to keep reading.

MIDDLE SCENES: PROVIDING OPPORTUNITIES

By the time you've made it to the middle section of your narrative, the reader should be a mess, riddled with anxiety and worry for your characters, tense and upset as he wonders what is going to happen next. It sounds mean, but that's exactly where you want him to be. Your protagonist should be in a similar state. After all, you've dangled his desires just out of reach and pushed him toward, or into the midst of, his fears. And you've added a series of challenges along the way so that he can't get out of conflict too easily. The middle part of your narrative is where he'll do the most work. He will be tested and stretched here because you will provide your protagonist with:

• Opportunities for crisis and conflict.
Now that you've destabilized him and given him problems to contend with, you want to mount the challenges. Complicate his problems. Give him more, new ones. Add other stressors.