The Anatomy of Story (13 page)

One of the best ways to grab and hold the audience's attention is to make the character mysterious. Show the audience that the character is hiding something. This forces the passive audience member to reach out

and actively participate in your story. He says to himself, "That character is hiding something, and I want to find out what it is."

2. Make the audience identify with the character, but not too much.

"Identify" is a term that many people toss around but few define. We say that the audience should identify with the hero so that they will be emotionally attached to the character. But what does this really mean?

People who think you create a character by adding traits also think that audiences identify with such characteristics as background, job, dress, income, race, and sex. Nothing could be further from the truth. If audiences identified with specific characteristics, no one would identify with anyone, because each character would have too many traits the audience member doesn't share.

Audiences identify with a character based on two elements: his desire and the moral problem he faces—in short, desire and need, the first two of the all-important seven structure steps. Desire drives the story because the audience wants the hero to be successful. The moral problem is the deeper struggle of how to live properly with others and is what the audience wants the hero to solve.

Be aware that the audience should not identify too much with the character, or they will not be able to step back and see how the hero changes and grows. Again, Peter Brook's admonition to the actor is also excellent advice to the writer:

When [the actor] sees himself in relation to the wholeness of the play ... he will look at [his character's] sympathetic and unsympathetic features from a different viewpoint, and in the end will make different decisions from those he made when he thought "identifying" with the character was all that mattered.
²

In Chapter 8, "Plot," we'll look at how you distance the audience from the hero at the appropriate time in the story.

3. Make the audience empathize with your hero, not sympathize.

Everyone talks about the need to make your hero likable. Having a likable (sympathetic) hero can be valuable because the audience wants the hero to reach his goal. In effect, the audience participates in telling the story.

But some of the most powerful heroes in stories are not likable at all. Yet we are still fascinated by them. And even in a story with an initially likable hero, this character often begins to act immorally—to do unlikable things—as he begins to lose to the opponent. Yet the audience doesn't get up in the middle of the story and walk out.

KEY POINT: What's really important is that audiences understand the character but not necessarily like everything he does.

To empathize with someone means to care about and understand him. That's why the trick to keeping the audience's interest in a character, even when the character is not likable or is taking immoral actions, is to show the audience the hero's motive.

KEY POINT: Always show
why
your hero acts as he does.

If you show the audience why the character chooses to do what he does, they understand the cause of the action (empathy) without necessarily approving of the action itself (sympathy).

Showing the hero's motive to the audience doesn't mean showing it to the hero. Often the hero is initially wrong about his true reason for going after the goal and does not discover his real motive until the end of the story, at the self-revelation.

4. Give your hero a moral as well as a psychological need.

The most powerful characters always have both a moral need and a psychological need. Remember the difference: a psychological need only affects the hero; a moral need has to do with learning to act properly toward others. By giving your hero a moral as well as a psychological need, you increase the effect the character has in the story and therefore increase the story's emotional power.

Creating Your Hero, Step 2: Character Change

Character change, also known as character arc, character development, or range of change, refers to the development of a character over the course

of the story. It may be the most difficult but also the most important step in the entire writing process.

"Character development" is another one of those
buzz
words, like "identifying" with a character, that everyone talks about but few understand. Let's return for a moment to the standard approach to creating character. That's where you imagine a lone person, and you try to list as many traits about him as you can. You tell a story about him, and then you make him change at the end. This is what I call the "light switch school" of character change. Just flip the switch in the last scene, and boom, the character has "changed." This technique does not work. Let's explore a different way.

The Self Expressed as a Character

Before we can talk about true character change and how to create it, we first have to get some idea of what the self is, since that is what is changing. And to do that, we have to ask, What is the purpose of the self in storytelling?

A character is a fictional self, created to show simultaneously how each human being is totally unique in an unlimited number of ways but at the same time always and forever human, with features we all share. This fictional self is then shown in action, in space and over time, and compared to others, to show how a person can live well or badly and how a person can grow over his lifetime.

Not surprisingly, there is no monolithic concept of self in the history of stories. Here are some of the most important ways of looking at the self:

■ A single unit of personality, governed internally with an iron hand. This self is cleanly separated from others but is searching for its "destiny." This is what the self was born to do, based on its deepest capabilities. This sense of self is common in myth stories, which typically have a warrior hero.

■ A single unit comprised of many often conflicting needs and desires. The self has a strong urge to connect with others and sometimes even subsume another. This concept of self is found in a vast array of stories, especially in the work of modern dramatists like Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, O'Neill, and Williams.

■ A
series
of roles that the person plays, depending on what society demands at the time. Twain may be the most famous proponent of this view. He created his switch comedies
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
and
The Prince and the Pauper
to show that a person is largely determined by his position in society. But even in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and
Tom Sawyer,
Twain emphasizes the power of the roles we play and how we usually turn out to be what society tells us we are.

■ A loose collection of images, so unstable, porous, malleable, weak, and lacking in integrity that it can shift its shape to something entirely different. Kafka, Borges, and Faulkner are the major writers who express this loose sense of self. In popular fiction, we see this self in horror stories, especially ones about vampires, cat people, and wolf men.

Although these various notions of self have some important differences, the purpose of character change and the techniques for accomplishing it are pretty much the same for all of them.

KEY POINT:
Character change doesn't happen at the end of the story; it happens at the beginning. More precisely, it is made possible at the beginning by how you set it up.

KEY POINT:
Don't think of your main character as a fixed, complete person whom you then tell a story about. You must think of your hero as a
range of change, a range of possibilities
, from the very beginning. You have to determine the range of change of the hero at the start of the writing process, or change will be impossible for the hero at the end of the story.

I cannot overstate the importance of this technique. If you master the range of change, you will win the "game" of storytelling. If not, you will rewrite and rewrite and still never get it right.

A simple rule of thumb in fiction is this: the smaller the range, the less interesting the story; the bigger the range, the more interesting but the riskier the story, because characters don't change much in the limited time they appear in most stories.

But what exactly is this "range of change"? It is the range of possibilities of who the character can be, defined by his understanding of himself. Character change is the moment when the hero finally becomes who he will ultimately be. In other words, the main character doesn't suddenly flip to being someone else (except in rare instances). The main character completes a process, which has been occurring throughout the story, of becoming who he is in a deeper and more focused way.

This process of the hero becoming who he is more deeply can seem hopelessly ethereal, which is why it is often misunderstood. So let me be very detailed here: you can show a character going through many changes in a story, but not all of them represent character change.

For example, you may show a character who starts poor and ends up rich. Or he may begin as a peasant and end up a king. Or he may have a drinking problem and learn how to stay sober. These are all changes. They're just not character changes.

KEY POINT: True character change involves a challenging and changing of

basic beliefs, leading to new moral action by the hero.

A character's self-knowledge is made up of his beliefs, about the world and about himself. They are his beliefs about what makes a good life and about what he will do to get what he wants. In a good story, as the hero goes after a goal, he is forced to challenge his most deep-seated beliefs. In the cauldron of crisis, he sees what he really believes, decides what he will act on, and then takes moral action to prove it.

Just as writers have expressed different senses of self, so have they used different strategies to express character change. I mentioned in Chapter 1 that a story "walks" on two "legs," acting and learning. Generally, in the long history of storytelling, there has been a move from almost total emphasis on acting—in the myth form, where the audience learns simply by modeling themselves on the hero's actions—to a heavy emphasis on learning, in which the audience's concern is to figure out what is happening, who these people really are, and what events really transpired, before achieving full understanding of how to live a good life.

We see these "learning" stories from authors like Joyce, Woolf, Faulk-ner, Godard, Stoppard, Frayn, and Ayckbourn, and in films as varied as
Last Year at Marienbad, Blow-Up, The Conformist, Memento, The Conversation,
and
The Usual Suspects.

Character change in learning stories is not simply a matter of watching a character gain some new nugget of understanding of himself at the end of the story. The audience must actually participate in the character change and become various characters throughout the storytelling process, not only by experiencing the characters' different points of view but also by having to figure out whose point of view the audience is seeing.

Clearly, the possibilities of character change are limitless. Your hero's development depends on what beliefs he starts with, how he challenges them, and how they have changed by the end of the story. This is one of the ways that you make the story uniquely yours.

But certain kinds of character change are more common than others. Let's look at some of them, not because you have to use one of them in your story, but because understanding them will help you master this all-important technique in your own writing.

1. Child to Adult Also known as the coming-of-age story, this change has nothing to do with a child physically becoming an adult, of course. You may think this is obvious, but many writers make the mistake in a coming-of-age story of defining character development as someone having his first sexual experience. Although this experience may be tragic or amusing, it has nothing to do with character change.

A true coming-of-age story shows a young person challenging and changing basic beliefs and then taking new moral action. You can see this particular change in stories like
The Catcher in the Rye, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, The Sixth Sense, Big, Good Will Hunting, Forrest Gump, Scent of a Woman, Stand by Me, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
and
Tristram Shandy
(which is not only the first coming-of-age novel but the first anti-coming-of-age novel as well!).

2. Adult to Leader In this change, a character goes from being concerned only with finding the right path for himself to realizing that he must help others find the right path as well. You see this change in
The Matrix, Saving Private Ryan, Elizabeth, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, Schindler's List, The Lion King, The Grapes of Wrath, Dances with Wolves,
and
Hamlet.