Elements of Fiction Writing, page 14
The only time insanity can work for a character is when it’s kept within safe bounds — minor eccentricities that can even be rather charming. And even then, an insane character is almost never viable as the main character in the story. The audience is rarely comfortable enough with insane characters to want to spend any length of time with them.
Attitude
The bad guy’s attitude toward himself and others is the mirror image of the good guy’s. To make us dislike Pete, make him humorless, completely unable to laugh at himself. When things go wrong, have him whine and complain and blame everyone but himself. When things go right, have him take all the credit and boast about his accomplishment. Make sure Pete never shows regard for other people’s feelings, judges people without listening to their explanations, and never trusts or believes anybody. Pete always treats rich and influential people better than he treats the poor and powerless, and he has no qualms about being a flaming hypocrite. In short, he treats other people as if they exist only to serve his purposes. You can be sure the audience will detest him.
Redeeming Virtues: The Understandable Villain
While readers will eventually get sick of a hero who’s too good to be true, they almost never refuse to believe in a villain. Unless you deliberately make the villain comic, there is almost no limit to the audience’s willingness to hate and fear — the seemingly endless series of Friday the 13th sequels makes that plain enough.
That doesn’t mean, however, that you should create completely evil villains. While many stories — perhaps most — draw clear distinctions between good guys and bad guys, there are also quite a few stories that don’t.
At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned my fondness for stories in which all the characters are at least somewhat sympathetic, so that the audience is never given a clear list of people to love and people to hate. Even if you don’t go that far, however, you can still improve your story by making sure that your negative characters are as honestly depicted as your heroes.
What you must remember is that everybody is the hero of his own story. Even if a character is completely evil, he will no doubt have his own internal story that depicts him as noble. Perhaps he fancies himself a benefactor, an altruist. Perhaps he feels that his innate superiority gives him the right to exploit other people the way people exploit lower animals. Perhaps he feels that ill treatment he has suffered in the past justifies any harm he causes now. Perhaps he believes that everybody acts the way he acts — they just pretend to be nice. The bad guy doesn’t necessarily believe his own version of events — or at least not all the time — but one way or another, the bad guy has found a way to justify his actions to himself, and if you’re going to depict him honestly, you have to let your readers know his version of events.
You can soften your “bad guys” even further by partially justifying their actions. Just as you can make a hero more believable by giving him endearing imperfections, you can make a villain more believable by giving her compensating virtues. Show that there is someone she loves or respects; show that she does keep some promises; show that she really was deeply wronged at some time, so that her hate and rage is partially justified. You may never actually persuade your readers to like her, but you can win their respect. In fact, by giving your villain some ennobling quailties you actually make her a worthier opponent for your hero.
What you can’t do, however, is make a sadist or a bully or a madman or a usurper into a completely sympathetic character. Any story that seems to do so always does it by showing the reader, at some point in the narrative, that in fact the character is not a sadist or a bully or a madman or a usurper, that when you thought he was, it was an illusion or a misperception; he was only pretending to be a bully in order to accomplish some noble purpose; he was under the influence of drugs or hypnosis and so it wasn’t really himself doing all those bad things; his children were being held hostage and the person he killed with his package bomb really deserved to die anyway; his actions were fully justified if only people knew the true story; he really was the rightful heir to the throne and not a usurper at all; and so on.
The storyteller’s strongest tools for provoking the readers’ antipathy cannot be overwhelmed by the tools for arousing sympathy. As long as they remain true within the story — as long as you don’t deny that Nora did the terrible things you showed her doing, as long as you don’t deny that the things she did were terrible, and as long as you show that Nora is still the same person who did those bad things — then the audience will never be on Nora’s side. The most you can do is soften their hatred for her, show that she is more to be pitied than to be hated or feared. Even if the readers come to feel great pity for Nora, at no point will they want her to emerge victorious.
Nobody wants Oedipus to stay married to his mother. Nobody is rooting for Macbeth to win.
CHAPTER NINE
THE HERO AND THE COMMON MAN
When the ancient Greeks and Romans told a serious story, the characters were kings and queens, great warriors and heroes, the sort of people who expected to receive visitations from the gods — heck, the gods were often their aunts and cousins anyway. But when the Greeks and Romans set out to tell a story about common everyday people, the result was comedy, in which the characters were lewd and foolish and corrupt.
It was long believed that great poetry could never be written about low characters — magnificent art demanded magnificent subject matter. The rules have changed since then. The invention of the novel — with such landmarks in English as Pamela, Tom Jones, Robinson Crusoe, and Tristram Shandy — proved that wonderful stories could take common people seriously.
Oddly enough, however, storytelling keeps drifting toward extraordinary heroes, so that the common people have to be rediscovered every few decades or so. Noted critic Northrop Frye examined this pattern and came up with the idea that our preference in fictional heroes swings back and forth like a pendulum. Frye used the words realistic and romantic in a special way, as the two ends of a descriptive spectrum. Romantic, in this context, doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not a character is in love. At first, heroes become more and more romantic (idealized, extraordinary, exotic, magnificent) until finally they become so overblown and so cliched that we cease to believe in or care about them. In reaction, the pendulum swings back the other way, and our fictional heroes become realistic — common, plain people living lives that are well within the experience of the readers. However, these realistic heroes quickly become boring, because people who live lives no different from our own are not terribly interesting to read about — or to write about. So storytellers almost immediately begin making their heroes just a little out of the ordinary, so that readers will again be fascinated — until the romantic hero is in the saddle again.
In creating characters, we don’t have to worry about pendulums. What concerns us is that our main characters must be at once believable and interesting — simultaneously realistic and romantic. Each of us, however, finds a different balance between the two. How extraordinary or exotic or “elevated” do characters need to be for you to want to read or write about them? How much detail, how much commonness, how much familiarity must characters have before you believe in them? Your answer will be different from mine and from every other writer’s; your audience will consist of readers who agree with your answer.
Look at the fiction market today, and you’ll see what I mean. Do you want romantic characters? Thrillers deal with people who are on the cutting edge of power in the world — spies, diplomats, heads of state — and their lives are never ordinary; even shopping for groceries, they have to watch out for the enemy. Historical romances deal with characters in exotic times and places, and usually people of high station in an era when class distinctions meant all the difference in the world. Glitter romances deal with the very rich, jetting between assignations in Rio, Paris, and Singapore. Mysteries offer us the detective as avenging angel, tracking down the guilty despite their best efforts to escape retribution. Fantasy, the true heir of the great romantic tradition, still shows us kings and queens wielding the power of magic. Science fiction takes us to worlds that have never been, to show us new kinds of magic, new kinds of nobility, new kinds of humanity.
Yet every single one of these genres includes stories that rebel against romantic excess, that insist on realism. John le Carré’s spy thrillers achieved great note in large part because his characters were not romantic James Bond-like heroes, but instead ordinary people who got sick, confused, tired, old; people who made mistakes and had to bear the consequences. Yet is George Smiley really ordinary? Of course not. He is only one of the “common people” by comparison with the extravagance that went before. We still look at George Smiley with admiration and awe; we still expect him to achieve great things. He still moves through an exotic world. He is still a true hero, no matter how much shine has been taken off his armor.
The same pattern can be found among mystery novels. John Mortimer’s wonderful hero Rumpole is an English barrister who will never achieve recognition, who isn’t terribly successful and loses a lot of cases, and who certainly isn’t rich. His home life is deplorable, as he endures a testy relationship with his shrewish wife whom he calls “She-who-must-be-obeyed.” His very ordinariness is endearing — we read of him and feel that he is one of us. Yet Rumpole is really not ordinary at all, or we wouldn’t like reading about him. After the realism has won our belief, we still see him solving cases through remarkable persistence and clever insights, and we come to believe that in fact he deserves great recognition and a place on the bench. Others may think he’s ordinary, but we know he’s a truly remarkable, admirable man. The same pattern is followed by other “ordinary” mystery heroes — Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford, Robert Parker’s Spenser, and of course all the heroes of the American hard-boiled detective tradition.
Just when the fantasy genre seemed likely to lose its last connection with reality, Stephen R. Donaldson made a bitter-hearted leper named Thomas Covenant the reluctant hero of his stories; more recently, Megan Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons found magic in a Vietnam veteran living among the street people of Seattle. A large part of Stephen King’s appeal as a writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction has been his insistence on using heroes from the American middle class, living in the familiar world of fast food, shopping malls, and television. Yet even as we recognize people and details from the real life around us, all these stories would have been pointless had their heroes not been extraordinary in one way or another, though their uniqueness was hidden even from themselves.
As I pointed out in chapter 8, readers tend to like a character who is at least superficially like themselves. But they quickly lose interest unless this particular character is somehow out of the ordinary. The character may wear the mask of the common man, but underneath his true face must always be the face of the hero.
Why? Because we don’t read stories to duplicate real life. In our own diaries and journals we tend to write down only what was out of the ordinary, skipping the dull parts of the day. Why should we read the dull parts in the life of a made-up character?
We read stories to get experiences we’ve never known firsthand or to gain a clearer understanding of experiences we have had. In the process, we follow one or more characters the way we follow our “self” in our dreams; we assimilate the story as if what happened to the main characters had happened to us. We identify with heroes. As they move through the story, what happens to them happens to us.
In comedy, heroes go through all the terrible things that we fear or face in our own lives — but they teach us to look at disaster with enough distance that we can laugh at it. In noncomic fiction, the hero shows us what matters, what has value, what has meaning among the random and meaningless events of life. In all stories, the hero is our teacher-by-example, and if we are to be that hero’s disciple for the duration of the tale, we must have awe: We must know that the hero has some insight, some knowledge that we ourselves do not understand, some value or power that we do not yet have.
This is true even in that great bastion of extreme realism, the academic/literary genre (those who refer to their genre as “serious literature” — as if the rest of us are just kidding). One reason why the academic/literary genre usually reaches such a small fragment of the reading public is because in their pursuit of seriousness, they have beaten down the romantic impulse wherever it rears its head. But the romantic impulse is still there. Even in the endless stories about college professors or advertising writers or house-wives entering midlife crises and trying to make sense of their senseless lives, the heroes always seem to face some uncommon problems, always seem to be extraordinarily contemplative and perceptive, always seem to reach a moment of epiphany in which they pass along a key insight to the reader. Despite their seeming ordinariness, these heroes always turn out to be extraordinary, once we truly understand them.
Arthur Miller may have meant Willy Loman to be a nonheroic hero in Death of a Salesman — he was named “low man” to make sure we got the point — but by the end, Miller has shown us that Loman dreamed of greatness for himself and his children, and his failure to achieve it destroyed him. The fact that Loman reached such a point of despair that he killed himself moves him out of the ordinary — but what really makes Loman a figure of awe is that he expected himself and his sons to be great, that he measured himself against such high standards that, by trying to meet them, he became exactly the romantic hero that Arthur Miller was trying to avoid. He was one of the knights of the round table who failed to find the Holy Grail — but he was nobly searching for it nonetheless.
The writers in the realistic tradition — for instance, Updike, Bellow, and Fowles — still give their characters heroic proportion; only it’s more restrained, used less boldly, better disguised. By the end of Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, Humboldt is definitely bigger than life; he is, in his own way, as romantically “enlarged” as Captain Blood or Rhett Butler. The difference is that Captain Blood was involved in jeopardy on page one and bigger than life by page thirty, while Humboldt didn’t really become recognizably heroic in size until near the end of the book.
Without giving the audience some reason to feel awe toward the hero, there would be no story. Eliminate the usual sources of awe, the usual ways of making a character larger than life, and the storyteller will either find another or lose interest in the tale.
More recently, many academic/literary writers have striven to avoid “naive identification” by creating “aesthetic distance” — but these writers have merely replaced the character-hero with the author-as-hero, so that the admiration that used to be directed toward a character is now directed toward the artist who created the exquisite, extraordinary text.
If there is no awe, there is no audience. In every successful story — every story that is loved and admired by at least one reader who is not a close friend or blood relative of the author — the author has created characters who somehow inspire enough admiration, respect, or awe that readers are willing to identify with them, to become their disciples for the duration of the tale.
I’m not for a moment advocating that you artificially juice up your characters to make them more romantic. That’s no more likely to result in good characterization than overwhelming your heroes with humdrum details. You’ll do much better if you trust your own instincts to choose the balance between romance and realism that’s right for you and for your natural audience.
What you need is not a specific recipe but rather a general awareness: It’s vital that along with making Nora seem exciting and wonderful, you also help your readers understand and believe in her, so they can connect her with their own lives. Along with making Pete seem understandable and believable, you should also show your readers why he is important enough and admirable enough to deserve a place in their memories, to be a worthy exemplar of the meanings of life.
Often when you find yourself blocked — when you can’t bring yourself to start or continue a story — the reason is that you have forgotten or have not yet discovered what is extraordinary about your main character. Go back over your notes, over the part of the story you’ve already told, and ask yourself: What’s so special about this woman that people should hear the story of her life? Or, more to the point, ask yourself: Why does her story matter to me?
You’ve got a story going. Pete’s just an ordinary twenty-three-year-old man, just finishing college after a three-year stint in the army. Degree in business administration with good enough but not spectacular grades, a few failed romances just like everybody else’s failed romances. He’s hired by a major corporation and put in charge of a department. After a year on the job, others are getting promoted — but not him. He just isn’t doing all that good a job. He keeps getting distracted.
Then you don’t know what to do. You sit down to write, and what you say doesn’t seem to make any difference; it’s all lousy. You’re blocked. So you take a look at Pete’s character. There’s no reason to notice him, nothing obviously special about him. You realize that until you find — or invent — something extraordinary about him, you’ve got no story.
