Elements of Fiction Writing, page 16
The same thing is often done with the way a character dresses. Costume is a stereotype — a construction worker dresses a certain way, a ballet dancer another. Putting a character in inappropriate dress can also make us laugh. That’s why we have seen so many comedies with men in drag. Show a character wearing white socks with brown shoes and a blue suit, and we know he’s a geek. Shakespeare makes Malvolio in Twelfth Night appear on stage comically dressed and cross-gartered as the result of a practical joke, and we laugh. It makes him funny — but it doesn’t make us care. Malvolio is made ridiculous by his absurd apparel; he is made important by the reasons for his strange clothing. The clothing, by itself, would be a trivial effect.
The trouble is that oddness is a tool you normally use for minor characters. Oddness, by itself, can’t make a character major. It can even diminish a character.
If you have a major comic character, you’ll use all the romantic and realistic techniques of characterization. So what makes him comic? It’s a matter of timing. Very early in our acquaintance with the character, before the other techniques have had a chance to win the audience’s firm belief, you undercut those other techniques by making the character just a little too odd or extreme to believe completely.
It’s hard to imagine a serious play that couldn’t be turned into a farce using this technique. King Lear would have been hilarious with Bob Newhart in the lead. Imagine if John Candy had played Macbeth or Howie Mandel as Oedipus. If you recognize these comedians’ names, you already know something about their eccentricities — Bob Newhart’s resentful meekness, John Candy’s cheerful but brutal insensitivity, Howie Mandel’s manic indecision. If they had been in these plays, their eccentricity would assert itself long before the other techniques of characterization came into play. Picture these moments:
Bob Newhart, looking slightly peeved and intoning, “Blow, winds! Crack your cheeks!”
Howie Mandel nervously rejecting several brooches until he finds just the right ones to jab out his eyes with.
John Candy’s blustering confidence in himself as he tries to deal with the witches, while Gilda Radner, as Lady Macbeth, pushes him out of their room to go kill Duncan.
You wouldn’t have believed any of these performers in the roles, not if they used their comic personas. But it is precisely their controlled disbelief that would have made their performances hilariously funny.
Along these lines, it’s worth pointing out that eccentricity, if carried to extremes in a major character, eventually becomes the subject of the comedy. Ben Jonson called it comedy of humors — comedy arising from a character being completely dominated by only one desire or temperament. Misers, hypochondriacs, hypocrites, cowards have traits that all humans share to some degree. Exaggerate the trait enough, and the characters are unbelievable enough to be funny. Exaggerate the trait out of all proportion, and they become either monstrous or utterly unbelievable. Comedy of humors carries exaggeration right to the edge of unbelievability or monstrosity. Your story can still be funny, but it also reduces your ability to move your audience. The Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers made people laugh, but they never really made people care.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE SERIOUS CHARACTER: MAKE US BELIEVE
Do you want your readers to believe in your characters? The one thing you can never do is appeal to the facts. In a news story you quote sources; in history you cite documents. But in fiction you have no such recourse — the single worst defense of an unbelievable event or character is to say, “But that really happened once.”
Fiction doesn’t deal with what happened once. Fiction deals with what happens. Your job is not to create characters who exactly match reality. Your job is to create characters who seem real, who are plausible to the audience.
This chapter presents the tools of realism, the techniques that will earn your readers’ trust. These methods won’t make your story “truthful” — the truth of your tale arises from your unconscious choices, from your beliefs that are so ingrained that you may not even know you believe them, because it doesn’t occur to you that they might not be true. What these tools provide is the illusion of truth.
Contradictory as that sounds, it’s a vital part of storytelling. You must provide your audience with details that seem familiar and appropriate, so that they are constantly saying to themselves, “Yes, that’s right, that’s true, that’s just the way it would be, people do that.” With each “yes” the audience becomes more convinced that you are a storyteller who knows something.
They let down their barriers of skepticism and let you lead them through the world of your story, absorbing the people and events into their memories, identifying with your heroes, making their stories a part of themselves in a way that factual stories never can. Strike a false note, and barriers go back up; your readers pull out of the story a little, each time a little more, until you’ve lost them and your story has no more power over them.
I could make this chapter very short by telling you in a single word how to make your characters more believable: details. The more information about a character, the more the audience will believe in him.
It isn’t really that simple, though. You don’t want just any details, you want relevant, appropriate details. Nor do you want the details to stop the movement of the story any more than necessary. So the tools of realism are designed to present details about a character appropriately and effectively.
ELABORATION OF MOTIVE
The most important tool that will help your audience believe in your characters is elaboration of motive. If you don’t tell your audience what a character’s motives are, the audience will assume the obvious motive: a simple, single motive, a naked archetype or a cliche. To make characters more believable, more real, we give them more complex, even contradictory motives, and we justify them better.
In the heroic fantasy film Conan the Barbarian, young Conan’s mother is killed before his eyes. He spends the rest of the film searching for the murderer. It isn’t hard for the audience to grasp the idea that he’s looking for revenge.
Let’s suppose that you wanted to start with the same situation, but you wanted Conan to be a more believable human being. His relentless obsession with revenge is not enough to sustain a realistic novel. The easiest step is to diversify — give him other motives, other interests, purposes, and loyalties. There would be many times when he did not think of revenge.
A more daring step is to make him even more complex: He is searching for the murderer, not to kill him, but to serve him. In Conan’s mind the man’s cruelty has been transformed into justice: He killed my mother, thinks Conan, because she was weak and small. I will be strong and large, and he will find me worthy.
This kind of motivation is borderline pathological — but it is also intriguing and believable, not at all the predictable revenge cliche.
Let’s go back to Eddie Murphy’s character in Beverly Hills Cop. Like Conan, he is given the simplest of motives: revenge for the death of a friend. Since it is an almost purely romantic story, and a comic one at that, no more realism is needed; the audience found his character believable enough for the needs of the film.
But what if we wanted to make his character more real? We’d then have to invent a richer set of motives. What if his murdered friend was someone that Murphy had treated, not well, but badly, so that Murphy’s desire for revenge is prompted not just by love but also by guilt. And let’s say Murphy’s tenacity in the case is not just because he’s competitive and doesn’t like to lose, but also because he’s afraid that he’s not very good as a cop, and if he doesn’t succeed in this hard and dangerous case he won’t be able to believe in himself. Add to this a bit of arrogance — there are times when he believes he can’t fail, that he can’t even die. And maybe he needs to show off a little, too.
One of the advantages of prose fiction is that you can bring all of a character’s motives into the open. Because we can sometimes see into the characters’ minds, their thoughts and feelings, their plans and reactions, we can also watch them shift from one motive to another. We can go one layer deeper and discover motives that the characters don’t even know they have.
Since motive is the character’s purpose or intent when he takes an action, it is not something you can add to a character and then leave the rest of the story unchanged. The pursuit of ever-deeper motives is not a trivial game played on the surface of the story. Motive is at the story’s heart. It is the most potent form of causal connection. So every revision of motive is a revision of the story.
Nora tells Pete that the man who was in her apartment was just a salesman. Pete reacts by saying cruel, vicious things to her, breaking a lamp, and storming out of her apartment. What does that scene mean?
At first glance, we might suppose Pete is insanely jealous. But what if we then learn that Pete knows the man — knows that he is a drug dealer and a former pimp? Now we understand that his rage doesn’t come from a desire to control Nora, but rather from real concern for her welfare. Nora’s lie is a silent witness to him that she is somehow involved with this man — in one way or another.
After a while, Nora confesses to Pete that the man in her apartment was her brother, but she hates him and doesn’t want anyone she cares about to know that he has any connection with her. Now Pete understands her motive for lying. He’s relieved.
Still later, the reader is shown a scene that makes it clear that the visitor was not her brother at all — he has been Nora’s husband for ten years, and they have never been divorced. Now Nora’s real motives are a mystery again.
Each new revelation of a main character’s motive is not a simple matter of adding more information — it revises all the information that has gone before. Events that we thought meant one thing now mean another. The present constantly revises the meaning of the past. Revelation of the past constantly revises the meaning of the present. This is the primary device of detective fiction (and psychoanalysis), but all other genres use the technique as well.
There is a cost. The discovery of motive always requires examination of a character’s thoughts, either through her dialogue with other characters, through direct telling of those thoughts, or by implication as new facts are revealed. All these examinations of motive come at the expense of action. A character who endlessly tries to understand her own motives eventually becomes a bore.
ATTITUDE
One of the surest signs of an amateur story is when strange or important events happen around the narrator or point-of-view character, and he doesn’t have an attitude toward them. Attitude is the other side of the coin of causation. Motive tells why he acts as he does; attitude is the way he reacts to outside events.
Packer talked serious business on the phone, but when he walked into the restaurant I knew it was all bluff. His suit was shiny and too small, too short in the sleeves; his tie didn’t come within six inches of his belt. I thought of asking him the name of his tailor, but he might be smart enough to know he was being insulted, and on the off chance he was an eccentric millionaire whose mother never taught him how to dress, I decided to hold off provoking him until after he paid for lunch.
This paragraph tells you something about Packer, of course — that he dresses awkwardly. You see Packer through the narrator’s eyes, and this will always color your perception of him. The narrator feels contemptuous; so will you.
At the same time, his attitude also tells you about the narrator. He judges people by their clothing — whether they’re worth taking seriously, whether he even thinks they’re smart. Furthermore, he decides to treat this man civilly only because of a chance that he might actually have money.
This can be a complicated game. Push the narrator’s contempt for Packer far enough, and we’ll come to dislike the narrator and sympathize with Packer. If that’s what you want, then it’s working. But if you want the reader to like the narrator, you have to make sure his attitude doesn’t get too flip-pant, that he never descends into meanness.
Jacob was early for his appointment with Ryan’s teacher; he stood by his car for a minute, looking at the place where Ryan spent his days. The Guilford Middle School looked bleak — long flat-roofed buildings of red brick, bare windows, lots of gravel and concrete. An institution.
Going inside, Jacob hit his head on the door’s low-hanging hinge assembly, a nasty bump that made him stop and close his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, it was as if the blow had made him color-blind. The corridor looked black and white. No, black and grey — nothing was clean enough to be called white. Bare fluorescent lights, blank walls interrupted only by doors with painted-over windows. Now Jacob understood why the only thing that ever seemed to go on at this place was discipline. It was a prison. The teacher was a warden, and poor Ryan had six months to go on his sentence.
Where does the attitude come from? At first only a few words: “bleak,” “institution.” But these words, which represent Jacob’s attitude toward the school, are enough to set the tone. After that, the reader knows to interpret all the description as negative.
Without the attitude, though, there would be no point in describing the school. If Jacob weren’t seeing it as a bleak institution, a dirty grey prison, the description would sound pretty much like every American school built since 1950. Might as well go straight to the scene with the teacher and not waste the reader’s time visualizing the school at all.
Attitude can provide the tension in the scene. Here’s the same scene twice, first without much attitude, then with more:
An attractive-looking man came up to Nora’s desk, glanced at her name-plate, and smiled at her. “Hi, Nora. Want some lunch?”
“No thanks,” she answered. “I’ll buy it somewhere else.”
He looked confused.
“Aren’t you the sandwich man? The last place I worked, they had a man who came around taking sandwich orders.”
Now let’s try the same opening, with attitude, and then go on, seeing how the scene develops.
He had a sharp, clean look about him. He was thin and wore clothes well, but Nora didn’t like the confident way he looked down at her. As if he had a right to decide things for her. She had had bosses with that look, and they always ended up talking about her clothing and how she ought to brighten up the office by wearing something a little lower in the neckline.
His gaze dropped to the nameplate on her desk, just for a moment. Then he looked her in the eye again. “Hi, Nora. Want some lunch?” he said.
That’s right, don’t ask if I want lunch with you, just ask if I want lunch. If I say no, does that mean I have to sit at my desk and go hungry? “No thanks,” she answered. “I’ll buy it somewhere else.”
He looked confused. She enjoyed that.
“Aren’t you the sandwich man?” she asked. “The last place I worked, they had a man who came around taking sandwich orders.”
He wasn’t stupid — he knew he was being put down. “I was too cocky, right?”
“Not at all. I think you were just cocky enough.”
That was a mistake. She was bantering with him now, and he was the kind who thought banter was a come-on. He started into some silly story about how a guy gets nervous when he sees a beautiful woman, his genes take over and he starts to swagger and preen.
“Preen?”
“Like peacocks and grouses. Put on a display. But that’s not me. I’m really a sensitive guy. I make Phil Donahue look like a truck driver.”
Time to put a stop to this. “You don’t want to have lunch with me. I have seven children at home and three different social diseases. I also lead men on and then yell rape when they get too close. I am every nightmare you ever had about a domineering career woman. I think a man like you would call a woman like me a castrating bitch.”
He didn’t answer right away. Just looked at her, his smile gone cold. “No,” he finally said. “That’s what my mother would call you.” He stood up. “You’re new here. I asked you to lunch. My mistake, sorry.” He walked on past her desk and out the door.
That’s right, act hurt. You were just being friendly, and I jumped all over you. But I know better than that. I’ve seen that smile on too many faces not to know what lies behind it and where it leads. The man I’ll go to lunch with is the one who doesn’t speak to me until the normal course of work brings us together, and he won’t ask me to lunch until he knows my name without looking at the nameplate on my desk.
Notice how the scene shifts, increasing the tension every time. At first, Nora’s attitude disposes us to see the man as an overconfident womanizer. She stereotypes him, and we share her perception. The moment he admits the stereotype, though, by saying, “Too cocky?” our sympathy changes a little. We begin to think he might be decent after all — at least he’s smart enough to know he’s being put down. Then, when she doesn’t pay attention to the next thing he says (we know she didn’t pay attention because his dialogue isn’t given in full), we begin to wonder if she isn’t losing a romantic opportunity. (In reading fiction, we’re always looking for romantic opportunities, and there is sexual tension in this scene, beginning from the moment she noticed that he was sharp-looking, thin, and wore clothes well.) Her speech about seven children and three social diseases is way too strong — we really lose sympathy with her.
In writing this, my first off -the-shelf follow-up was to have her reflect the audience perception at that point and feel regret for having treated him so badly. Since that was my first response, though, I questioned it, and instead let her recognize the effect that his “hurt “attitude was designed to have, and then counter it by reflecting on what she would respond favorably to. This put her attitude in perspective, and instead of our thinking that the man wasn’t so bad after all, we are now measuring him against her standard. We are fully on her side again, and though a romantic relationship with this guy is still a story possibility, we won’t be disappointed if she finds somebody else.
Also, it was because I was giving her attitude that I came up with the conflict in the first place. If I had written the whole scene the way the first version began, I would never have invented the relationship that emerged. She would have had no reason to turn him down. She would still have been a stranger to me, and so she would remain a stranger to the audience.
