Dynamic Characters (19 page)

She is happy to be on the road again, doing, riding in the wind, drying up under the desert sun, collapsing exhausted in a dusty hotel or on a sleeping bag laid beneath palm trees, the smell of camel dung on the air, the camels' squeaks and grunts punctuating the silence, night as night never comes where she lives . . . smelling camel dung and desert flowers and thinking of her mother.

The daydream's divergence from the reality shows us a lot about Belle's expectations about her daughter—and the burden those expectations place upon Anastasia.

What kind of daydreams does your character have? Do they reveal anything sufficiently significant to justify including one in your text?

'' . . . AND NOW THE NEWS'': HOW DAN RATHER CAN ILLUMINATE YOUR CHARACTER

Just as the nature of a character's dreams shows us her hopes and fears, her reactions to the daily news can show us how she views the world she must actually inhabit. It doesn't matter whether this ''news'' comes to her via TV, radio, newspapers, letters, war drums, town crier or interstellar ansible. It doesn't even particularly matter what specifics the news contains. What matters is her
response.

Why? Let's explore that question through a detailed example.

A family is sitting around the living room after dinner, waiting for
Seinfeld.
The family consists of Grandma Ann, her son Bill and his wife Janet, sixteen-year-old Todd, Todd's girlfriend Karen, thirteen-year-old Melissa and ten-year-old Jack. All these people belong to the same socioeconomic group and ethnic background. They all talk roughly the same, which is with middle-class American diction. They all like potato chips, jeans and going to the mall. Except for the obvious differences of age and gender, they all look pretty much alike (even the girlfriend).

While they're waiting for their sitcom, they watch the news. These are the stories:

• Two major local companies are merging, causing both stocks to jump.

• One teen shot another fatally, allegedly during an argument over a leather jacket.

• Jimmy Carter has left on a peacemaking mission in a war-torn third-world country.

• Scientists have announced a major breakthrough in cancer research, involving experimental gene therapy.

• A storm will move in over the weekend, with heavy rain.

^•
 The Chicago Cubs lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, six to nothing.

As they listen to all this, what goes through the mind of each person in that living room?

First of all—does it matter? Yes, it does, even though none of these news stories has the slightest connection to your plot. These seven people's reactions matter because what
you
observe as you conveniently read their minds tells you more about
them
than about the news or their environment.

A wise man once said, "We see the world not as it is, but as we are.'' To discover what a person is really like, decipher his
map of reality.
We all carry one around inside, and it dictates which parts of reality we focus on and how we react to that focus.

For instance, Grandma Ann zeroes in on the shooting. Her inner monologue goes something like this:
Taking a life over a leather jacket! I don't know what's happened to people. It was never like this when I was young. The world has just gone downhill ever since . . . still, what can you expect from
those
people. If they'd all get jobs they could afford to buy their own jackets instead of. . . and leather isn't even a good buy, not warm enough, young people have no sense. We knew better when I was young. What a world! I'm glad my kids are all grown but still they certainly have room for improvement look at Jack drinking another beer he's going to get fat if he isn't careful.
. . .

And so on. Ann has chosen—although without being conscious of choosing—to focus on the shooting story. She remembers only vaguely that the news mentioned Jimmy Carter or a corporate merger, and she's under the impression that the Chicago Cubs are a football team. The shooting story matches her pre-existing beliefs about the world, her map of reality, and that's what dictates her reactions.

Bill, on the other hand, notices the shooting only in passing: one more act of modern urban violence. He's thinking about the merger of Acme Corporation and Widget Industries, because he owns stock in both. Would this be a good time to sell? And if he did, what should he invest in next? He thinks about this throughout the shooting, Jimmy Carter and cancer research, and returns his full attention to the screen during the weather report only, because he's planning on mowing the lawn on Saturday.

Janet munches potato chips mildly throughout the first three stories, half-listening. But her eyes fill with unexpected tears during the cancer research story. Her mother died of cancer just three months ago. Why couldn't the scientists have discovered this new gene-therapy breakthrough earlier, when it might have done her mother some good? Some people just never get a break.

Todd and Karen don't really register any of the news. They don't own stocks, don't attend schools where violence is a big issue, aren't interested in politics and are decades away from dying. They're most interested in gazing at each other.

Young Melissa, however, is an idealist. She pays close attention to the story about Jimmy Carter. How wonderful to have the power to help end war! When she grows up, she wants to do something like that. She won't just waste her life, like her parents. She's going to make a difference in the world: be a peace envoy, or a great spiritual leader. Or maybe—the cancer research story is on now—she'll be an important scientist and discover ways to save the planet from pollution. Her grades in science are very good.

Jack reads a comic book throughout the news until the sports come on. The Pirates won! All right! Now he can collect his fifty-cent bet from that stupid Keith Smith at school tomorrow!

All these people watched the same news program. But you'd never know it. Each saw the news not in terms of what happened that day, but mostly in terms of
who he or she is.
This is what makes imagining your characters' reactions to news broadcasts so valuable. You learn so much about them.

Try an experiment. Sit down and watch a news show not through your own eyes, but through your character's. Ask yourself:

• Which news story would interest him the most? Why?

• Which stories would he ignore, or only register peripherally?

• For the stories he does react to, what emotions are evoked? How intensely?

• What does all this say about his map of reality?

Once you know the answers to these questions, you're ready for the next step: deciding how to use your new insights into your character. You may decide the insights should be used only to help you better understand the way he views the world. Alternatively, you may decide to incorporate a news-watching scene directly into your story.

PUTTING THE NEWS INTO YOUR FICTION

A word of caution here. Scenes in fiction, especially short fiction, should do two things: deepen character
and
advance the plot. If a reacting-to-the-news scene is going to do only the former, you are much better off without the scene. Just let it form what journalists refer to as
deep background.

Sometimes, however, both plot
and
character can be advanced by including a session with the news. If so, it provides a good way to let the reader glimpse the protagonist's map of reality.

For instance, note what catches Harry ''Rabbit'' Angstrom's attention in John Updike's
Rabbit Is Rich:

The music stops, the news comes on. A young female voice reads it, with a twang like she knows she's wasting our time. Fuel, truckers. Three-Mile Island investigations continue. Date for Skylab Fall has been revised. Somoza in trouble too. Stay of execution of convicted Florida killer denied. Former leader of Great Britain's liberal party acquitted of charges of conspiring to murder his former homosexual lover. This annoys Rabbit, but his indignation at this pompous pansy's getting off scot-free dissolves in his curiosity about the next criminal case on the news, this of a Baltimore physician who was charged with murdering a Canada goose with a golf club.

There's Rabbit captured in a perfect cameo: passing over the weighty news, interested in the sexual, airing his prejudices and finally interested most in the trivially bizarre.

Don DeLillo's characters in
White Noise,
on the other hand, are captivated by the large scale:

That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We'd never before been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially-mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objections. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

Nothing could better capture this family's unhealthy, growing obsession with—and inhumane relish for—death and tragedy.

Sometimes news-reacting can be used to characterize not just an individual but an entire group. Here, in
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
are Betty Smith's first-generation, working-class men reacting to news in 1916. They're talking in a saloon, overheard by protagonist Francie Nolan:

It's a fact. They're gonna stop making liquor and in a few years the country will be dry.

A man that works hard has a right to his beer.

Tell that to the president and see how far you get. . . .

G'wan! They'll never give wimmen the vote.

Don't lay any bets on it.

If that comes, my wife votes like I do, otherwise I'll break her neck.

My old woman wouldn't go to the polls and mix in with a bunch of bums and rummies. . . .

Airplanes! Just a crazy fad. Won't last long.

An economical way to convey how fast the world is changing on these people.

But what if you write genre fiction, with its specialized conventions? Can you still use this device? Yes.

Regency romances, to take just one example, are set before radio or TV. But news is eternal. Georgette Heyer makes good use of this to differentiate her two heroines, Fanny and Serena, in
Bath Tangle.
The point of view is Fanny's:

. . . and in another moment they were in the thick of the sort of conversation Fanny had hoped might be averted. Rotherham seemed to have recovered from all his ill-humor; he was regaling Serena with a salted anecdote. Names and nicknames were tossed to and fro; it was Rotherham now who had taken charge of the conversation, Fanny thought, and once again she was laboring to keep pace with it. There was something about the Duke of Devonshire dining at Carlton House, and sitting between the Chancellor and Lord Caithness: what was there in that to make Serena exclaim? Ponsonby too idle, Tierney too unwell, Lord George Cavendish too insolent for leadership: what leadership?

''I
thought
they had made no way this session!'' Serena said.

Serena loves political news and has a sharp mind to understand it; timid and sweet Fanny is bored. The same device can be—and is— employed by writers of historical mysteries, medieval thrillers and even far-future science fiction.

BUT WON'T INCLUDING THE NEWS DATE MY STORY?

One final consideration: Including contemporary news events may or may not make your story seem dated. It all depends on how specific the news is.
Rabbit Is Rich
is clearly 1979; Skylab is falling, the fuel crisis is on, the President collapses in a marathon. Updike intends his novel to belong to a definite time and place. On the other hand, reread the passage from
White Noise.
The news is generic, thereby avoiding pinning the novel to any specific year and so dating it. The choice is yours.

SUMMARY: USING DREAMS AND NEWS IN FICTION

^•
 Except in special cases of fantasy, do not have your characters' dreams affect plot. Instead, use their dreams to characterize their personalities and/or current crises.

^•
 Keep dreams brief relative to other methods of characterization.

• Choose from among current dreams, recurrent dreams and childhood dreams recalled, using each when most applicable.

^•
 Consider having a character relate his dream to another, so that you can include either the dreamer's hidden thoughts or the listener's hidden reactions.