Dynamic Characters (30 page)

You don't, of course, want to make these connections between secondary characters seem coincidental: The detective just
happens
to turn out to be the mother's cousin. Or, in Charles Dickens's nineteenth-century version in
A Tale of Two Cities,
the turnkey at Lucie's husband's prison just
happens
to be Lucie's governess's long-lost brother. That worked in the nineteenth century, but no longer.

The way to avoid such implausible coincidences is to build in the relationships from chapter one, not spring them on the reader in chapter forty-two. In other words, don't keep the connections among characters hidden. They aren't secrets; they're just facts.

THE FOUNDATION vs. THE WALLS

To sum up this whole chapter: Your main characters are the foundation of your novel. The poured concrete, the weight-bearing girders. Once such things are in place, they are difficult to move. The whole structure relies on their solidity to hold itself together.

Secondary characters, on the other hand, are non-weight-bearing walls. Certainly they help determine the final plan of the rooms: their shape, size, relationship, uses. But non-weight-bearing walls can be altered while a building is being built or remodeled, without causing structural collapse. You can move a wall, subdivide a major room, eliminate partitions—whatever seems to yield the most pleasing arrangement as the building goes up.

Secondary characters, plus spear carriers, can also be the colorful aspects of a building that determine its finished look: plaster, paint, wallpaper, carpets, window treatments. Should they be flashy or be neutral background? Ornate or severe? Sensual or cold marble? These are the things about a room that an observer notices first—but they are also the easiest things to change. Many writers, in fact, ''build'' their novels on the first draft, but leave nearly all the colorful decorating until revision time.

When you remodel, decorate or redecorate, look first to your secondary characters. It's much easier than moving a foundation that may be perfectly sound anyway.

However—and it's a big
however
—if your novel has serious problems in its basic architecture, fiddling with your secondary characters is not the answer. Realigning a wall will not cure a crack in the foundation. In that case, you need to rethink your major characters—starting back at chapter one.

SUMMARY: USING SECONDARY CHARACTERS EFFECTIVELY

• Secondary characters are not, by definition, as fully developed as main characters. There isn't room.

• Secondary characters, precisely because they have fewer dimensions than main characters, can often be more colorful and over-the-top.

• The more colorful a secondary character is, the greater will be the reader's interest in what happens to her at the novel's end.

• Secondary characters are much easier to revise than are complex main characters, whose emotional growth is tied into the story's main plotline.

^•
 Because they are easier to alter, secondary characters can be used to solve a number of second-draft problems, including unaccounted-for characters, undermotivated actions, insufficiently plausible situations, a less-than-inevitable climax, thin developmental sections, cliche scenes and unattached subplots.

• However, secondary characters are not gods. If your story has
several
of the above problems, you need to seriously rethink its basic foundations.

"Plus ga change,"
say the French,
"plus c'est la meme chose."
Which means, ''The more things change, the more they stay the same''—or, in a slightly rougher translation, "You can't fight city hall.'' But in a short story or novel,
change
is precisely what you must have if the fiction is to work, even though some story elements may stay the same. Change, as mentioned in the last chapter, is one thing that distinguishes main characters from spear carriers. And maybe fighting city hall is exactly what propels your characters toward change.

In other words, you the novelist not only have to know who your protagonist is, you also have to figure out who he becomes.

But is it really necessary that characters change? Well, no.
Something
has to change, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the characters. There are three possibilities: the situation-change novel, the reader-change novel and the character-change novel. Each has a different relationship to plot, and each requires different handling.

RETURNING NEXT WEEK: THE SITUATION-CHANGE NOVEL

The situation-change story opens with a problem for the characters, or else the problem develops shortly after the story begins. The detective is handed a murder case; the colonists on Titan discover an air leak in the security dome; the beautiful architect learns that someone has stolen her building designs. By the end of the book, the problem has been solved, and that solution is what makes the ending situation different from the opening one. The protagonists, however, are fundamentally unchanged.

This is the simplest kind of fiction. For that reason, it's usually the kind presented by TV series, since at the end of the story everyone important is left unaltered for next week's episode. Before television, much magazine fiction was also of this type: unchanging series characters recycled through endlessly different situations. The form still exists in some series fiction, although for the most part, TV took over the static major character, and print fiction moved on to concentrate on stories in which characters do personally grow and develop as a result of the events in the story.

Still, it's possible to write a nonseries novel in which character change is absent and plot is all. To do so, you need to invent characters interesting enough to hold our attention without any interior conflict; a plot complicated and fast-paced enough to absorb us by itself; and a setting or style outrageous enough that we don't need to take the whole thing very seriously.

A good example is Carl Hiaasen's hilarious 1993 novel,
Strip Tease.
Good-hearted exotic dancer Erin Grant, wheelchair-stealing scumbag Darrell Grant, cynical detective Al Garcia and lusty noodle-headed congressman David Dilbeck are, at the end of the book, just as good-hearted, cynical, lusty and noodle-headed as at the beginning (Darrell would be just as scumbaggy, except he's dead). The book's closing situation is different in several ways, including the fact that half the cast has been murdered. But the survivors are unchanged. The book is an outrageous romp, with only minimal relevance to real life, and that's enough. If your work is of this type, put your energies into exciting, over-the-top situations that make us gasp, and don't worry about character change. However, we'd better actually
gasp.

LIFE ARTFULLY OBSERVED: THE READER-CHANGE STORY

Much ''literary'' fiction, in direct contrast to a book like
Strip Tease,
tries to portray real life as real people actually experience it—but it may still feature characters that don't change. This is because literary authors have observed that, sadly, most people in real life don't change. They go on doing over and over again whatever has messed up their lives before: tunnel vision, denial, passivity, alcoholism, impul-sivity, whatever. The difference between this kind of story and Hiaasen's is that
something
besides plot situation is meant to change between the opening and closing. That something is the reader. Through careful piling of detail upon detail, the literary author hopes to change how the reader perceives the character(s) or their world, even though that world itself remains unaltered.

Consider a famous, much anthologized short story: James Thurber's ''The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.'' Hapless daydreamer Walter Mitty, sent on Saturday errands by his domineering and unpleasant wife, starts by imagining himself an ace pilot navigating a dangerous storm. At the end of the story he's still escaping his dreary afternoon through exciting daydreams. Walter Mitty has not changed. But the reader has gained insight into why Mitty daydreams and— more important—into the poignant contrast possible between a man's outer life and the hidden, vital power of his secret imagination. And who, asks the story, is to say that one is more ''real'' than the other? The story nudges the reader to face that question. And afterward the reader looks a little differently at bland, colorless men doing errands on Saturday afternoons.

It's harder to sustain this no-change structure throughout a novel, because a novel is so much longer. If we spend five hundred pages with a character, we're likely to want to see some growth from him. However, novels do exist in which the whole point is that the character has refused a chance (perhaps his last chance) for meaningful change, but the
reader
ends up with more insight about reality.

One famous example is Sinclair Lewis's
Babbitt.
George Babbitt, a self-satisfied, provincial, superficial and unthinking businessman, is thrust into circumstances that could make him less satisfied, less provincial, less superficial and more thinking. He actually progresses a way—a tiny way—down this path, starting to look more closely at the reality of his world. But the glimpse is too frightening. And the price of looking more closely is too high: George Babbitt would become different from those around him and, so, alone. He can't do it. He scurries back into safe modes of thinking, refusing change. At the end of the novel he's exactly the same as he was at the beginning, a point Lewis underlines by duplicating the book's first scene as its last.

Writing this kind of novel requires a keen appreciation of the complexity of the human mind. It also requires better-than-average prose (to compensate for the lack of flashy events). Put your energies into small faithful details, revealing and symbolic, that suggest ambiguities of character. When done right, such details lead to a change in perception in the reader; in other words, we think differently about the character at the end of the story than we did at the beginning. Under such circumstances, the protagonist can remain static. It's not, however, easy to pull off at book length.

A SADDER BUT WISER MAN: THE CHARACTER-CHANGE STORY

Because the reader-change story is not easy, most novels do feature characters that grow and change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Mitch McDeere
(The Firm,
by John Grisham) discovers he has abilities to cope with a world more treacherous than he suspected. Tom Rath
(The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
by Sloan Wilson) learns there are more important values than corporate success. The narrator of
Bright Lights, Big City
(by Jay Mclnerney) discovers you can't evade grief forever, no matter how hard and frantically you run. But
how
do these characters change with their discoveries? And how can you create plausible changes for your protagonist?

It's a four-step process: preparation, pressure, realization, validation.

PREPARATION: RIPENESS IS ALL

Preparation
refers to making us believe that this character is capable of change in the first place. You can do that one of two ways: Show us he has qualities in the present that could lead him to change, or show us he did have such qualities in the past.

Consider, for example, the famous transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens's
A Christmas Carol.
Scrooge starts out miserly, mean and isolated. By the end of the story he's become generous and joyful, giving away turkeys and hip operations. But Dickens prepares us early for this change. During Scrooge's first nocturnal trip, with the Ghost of Christmas Past, we see that Scrooge wasn't always as soul-shriveled as he is now. In the past he enjoyed himself. He danced at his employer's parties. He loved his sister, Fan. He was a person capable of inspiring in Fan a return love. When Scrooge finally becomes a ''new man'' at the end of the story, we find it plausible because it isn't really new; it's a return to qualities he once displayed.

You can do the same with your character. Show us that once she was different, closer to how she will be after the change in your story. You don't need a Christmas Ghost to do this. Show us through snatches of memory, brief allusions in other characters' dialogue, objects left over from a different life, old photographs—anything that will establish that another side of your character once existed. Then build on that submerged side to make plausible her subsequent change.