The Fire in Fiction (8 page)

What about you? How much development have you done of your sidekicks and other secondary characters? Do they provide contrast, yet also counter our expectations? Are they real and human, beset by conflicts with which we can identify? If eccentric, are they genuinely and deeply strange? In what ways? And are those ways justified and detailed?

Whether using sidekicks or secondary characters of other sorts, time spent developing them will considerably raise the interest quotient of your story.

ANTAGONISTS

Villains are some of the worst characters I meet in manuscripts, and not in a good way. What I mean is that they frequently are cardboard. Most are presented as purely evil:
Mwoo-ha-ha villains,
as we call them around the office.

Cardboard villains never work. Far from frightening us, they generally have us rolling our eyes. It's not that I don't enjoy a good baddie, understand; it's just that too many writers get lazy when it comes to these antagonists. Unchallenged by doubt, free of obstacles, never set back, blessed with infinite time and resources, able to work their nefarious schemes on a part-time basis (or, at least, that's how it seems since they crop up only occasionally), these villains strike us as unrealistic and therefore silly.

Even worse can be stories in which there is no villain as such. Literary fiction, women's fiction, romances, and coming-of-age tales are just a few types of story that do not necessarily call for a classic wrongdoer. In such manuscripts, even so, those who oppose the protagonist are often poorly developed and inactive. Lacking strong resistance, one wonders why the protagonist is having a hard time. It is possible to build conflict out of internal obstacles, of course, but over the long haul it's wearisome and hard to maintain readers' interest that way.

People are the most fascinating source of obstacles: that means antagonists, those who work against your protagonist. They can be active opponents or even friendly allies who cast doubt upon your protagonist's actions or undermine his resolve.

Do you go through your days without experiencing friction from others? I doubt it. Do you have ongoing problem people in your daily routine, possibly even active enemies? If you do, then you know that those who oppose you are not easily deterred, and they may even have the best of intentions. Have you ever noticed how your critics are eager to help you? They willingly share what they see as wrong with you and have valuable suggestions for your improvement. Our enemies do not hide.

Keith Ablow's series of thrillers featuring FBI forensic psychologist Frank Clevenger has been noted for its original and chilling villains. The fifth in the series,
The Architect
(2005), revolves around a killer who leaves his victims with one part of their anatomy (their spine, say) exquisitely and meticulously dissected, as if laid open for a medical school class. It's a different piece of anatomy each time,
too. All the victims come from money, so Clevenger's task is to make connections and find who is responsible.

Ablow, meanwhile, clues us in. The sick pervert who dissects people is an architect; not only that, a brilliant architect named West Crosse. Crosse is smart. Crosse is successful. Crosse is handsome. Bored yet? We would be except for the creepy and unusual touches that Ablow adds. For instance, when Crosse was twenty years old, he deliberately ruined his perfect face by cutting a jagged facial scar on himself. Professionally, he is blunt to the point of alienating potential clients. Toward the novel's beginning, Crosse brings preliminary plans for a new home in Montana to a rich Miami couple who are choosing an architect. Crosse is openly contemptuous of their ultra-modern digs:

Crosse sat down. The chair felt stiff and cold. He placed his rolled drawing on the table, laid a hand on the glass. Then he looked Ken Rawlings directly in the eyes. "You're living—or trying to live—in someone else's house. Because it feels safe. But it isn't."

"I'm not following you," Rawlings said.

"This is Walter Gropius's house," Crosse said. He glanced at Heather Rawlings. "It has nothing to do with you, nothing to do with your wife." He felt his own passion beginning to stir, the passion to liberate people from the tombs of fear that kept them from expressing the truest parts of themselves, kept them from feeling completely, exquisitely alive. ...

This from a guy who dissects different body parts on living victims? It is exactly that contradiction that makes Crosse so fascinating: He gives life through design; he takes life by design. What is up with this sicko? Of course we read ahead to find out. More to the point, Ablow has created a villain who helps his victims. If he finds them lacking in some respect, he fixes them. Just being helpful, you see? That's far from your usual
Mwoo-ha-ha villain
, and it works.

National Book Award nominee Charles Baxter devised in
The Soul Thief
(2008) a villain who doesn't kill but rather steals lives.

Baxter's protagonist is Nathaniel Mason, a graduate student in Buffalo, New York, in the 1970s. Nathaniel is infatuated with an artistic beauty, Theresa, who unfortunately is the lover of a romantic poseur named Jerome Coolberg.

Coolberg plays head games with Nathaniel, stealing his shirts and notebooks, claiming that episodes of Nathaniel's life happened to him instead. Events occur that are both tragic and that set Nathaniel's life on a disappointingly conventional track. Years later Nathaniel begins to feel that Coolberg had manipulated his fate in even more sinister ways. He tracks down his nemesis, now a famous interviewer on national radio in California, only to find that Coolberg expects him. They walk on to a pier, where Coolberg explains himself:

"... Are you looking down? Nathaniel? Good. Do you suffer from vertigo? I do. But you see what's down there? I don't mean the ocean. I don't mean the salt water. Nothing but idiotic marine life in there. Nothing but the whales and the Portuguese and the penguins. No, I mean the mainland. Everywhere down there, someone, believe me, is clothing himself in the robes of another. Someone is adopting someone else's personality, to his own advantage. Right? Absolutely right. Of this one truth I am absolutely certain. Somebody's working out a copycat strategy even now. Identity theft? Please. We're all copycats. Aren't we? Of course we are. How do you learn to do any little task? You copy. You model. So I didn't do anything all that unusual,
if I
did it. But suppose I did, let's suppose I managed a little con. So what? So I could be you for a while? And was that so bad? Aside from the collateral damage? ..."

That Nathaniel's life was messed up by Coolberg is bad; that Coolberg can rationalize what he did is even worse. (Worse still is Nathaniel's passive acquiescence, which is made sickeningly clear in the novel's last line.) To put it another way, there's no villain so scary as one who is right.

Not all antagonists are creepy or bad. Some are as human as a novel's protagonist. An example can be found in John Burnham Schwartz's
Reservation Road
(1998), a novel about the aftermath of a hit-and-run. The victim is a ten-year-old boy standing by a roadside near a gas station in a northern Connecticut town. His father, Ethan, sees him killed.

The driver of the car is Dwight, whose point of view is one of the three through which Schwartz tells his story. Dwight is at fault but is intended to be sympathetic. For the author, that is a challenge. How can a hit-and-run driver be sympathetic?

In the opening pages, Schwartz deftly sketches in Dwight's circumstances. He is driving his son Sam home from a Red Sox game. The game went to extra innings, so they are late. That's a problem because Dwight's ex, Sam's mother, is a bitch on wheels. Worse, Dwight screwed up a few years earlier after she told him she was leaving him for another man. Dwight struck both her and Sam; he landed on probation, lost his law practice, and was left with tenuous visitation rights to his son.

Thus, Dwight finds himself driving too fast down a nighttime road, one headlight out, distracted and worried. He hits Ethan's son, killing him. This is a crucial moment for Schwartz. Why doesn't Dwight stop? Schwartz has Dwight's son Sam dozing in the car, his face pressed against the passenger door handle. There is the impact. Schwartz executes the moment this way:

The impact made the car shudder. My foot came off the gas. And we were coasting, still there, but moving, fleeing. Unless I braked now:
Do it.
My foot started for the brake. But then Sam started to wail in pain and I froze. I looked over and he was holding his face in both hands and screaming in pain. I went cold. "Sam!" I shouted, his name coming from deep down in my gut and sounding louder and more desperate to my ears than any sound I'd ever made. He didn't respond. "Sam!"

In the rearview mirror I saw the dark-haired man sprinting up the road after us. His fury and his fear were in his half-shadowed face, the frenzied pumping of his arms. He was coming to punish me, and for a moment I wanted him to. My foot was inching toward the brake. But suddenly I felt Sam warm against my side, curling up and holding on and bawling like a baby. I put my foot on the gas.

Dwight makes a tragic mistake, but as
Reservation Road
progresses, it is Ethan who does something wrong, allowing himself to become consumed with a desire for revenge. His reasons are carefully developed—so carefully than when he discovers Dwight's name and goes to his house with a gun, it is unclear what will happen. Motives, in other words, abound on both sides. The two antagonists are perfectly understandable. We feel equally for them both.

That is the power of a three-dimensional antagonist: the power to sway our hearts in directions we would not expect them to be swayed. To get us to see, even accept, the antagonist's point of view. You may not want your story to be neutral. You may embrace right and wrong and write an outcome that makes your values obvious. That is your choice.

At the same time, a wholly black-and-white story cannot engage us very deeply. The deck is too stacked, the players too shallow to stir or scare us in memorable ways. Whatever your intension, it's worth investing time in your antagonist, opening up her unexpected sides, justifying her actions and even making her right. That only adds to the drama.

The term "secondary" for characters is misleading. As you can see, secondary characters have a major role to play in making your novel strong. Special, ordinary, or opposition, they are as important as your protagonist and worth some extra time.