How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (12 page)

While a television show can get away with having a captain who acts like the leader of an exploratory team, the readers of prose science fiction have no tolerance for such nonsense. If your hero needs to act like a

landing team leader or an industrual spy or a frontline grunt, then you’d better not make him an admiral or a general or a corporate CEO.

Novice writers continue to make this same mistake, choosing as the main character people who don’t-or shouldn’t-have enough freedom to be interesting. If the story is about a great war, they assume their hero must be the commanding general or the king, when in fact the story might be most powerfully told if the main character is a sergeant or a common soldier-someone who is making choices and then carrying out those choices
himself.
Or the main character might even be a civilian, whose life is transformed as the great events flow over and around him. Think of the movie
Shenandoah,
and then imagine what the story might have been if Jimmy Stewart had played the commander of an army corps. A character who is a loner or who leads a small group -a squad of soldiers, a single family-has so much more freedom to act than people in high office that it’s far easier to tell stories about them.

Sometimes the main character
must
be the commander, of course. But don’t just assume that to be the case. In fact, a good rule of thumb is to start with the assumption that your story is
not
about the king or president, the admiral or general, the CEO or the hospital administrator. Only move to the characters in the positions of highest authority when you arc forced to because the story can’t be told any other way. And then be very sure that you understand how people in such positions make their decisions, how power actually works.

Think of the movie
Dirty Harry.
Whatever you may think of the moral message of the film, the author was aware of the fact that real policemen don’t go around blowing people’s brains out week after week. Yet that was precisely the cliche on television and in the movies in those days-cops who were, in essence, quick-draw gunfighters transposed from the dusty streets of Dodge City to the asphalt of New York or L.A. So the writer played with that cliche-he created a character who, precisely because he acted like a western sheriff, was always in trouble with his superiors.

Furthermore, just like the cliche cops on TV, his partners were constantly getting shot-but in
Dirty Harry
people actually noticed this and considered an assignment as Harry’s partner to be a virtual death sentence. They
blamed
him and he actually had to live with the consequences of his decisions. Whatever else the filmmakers might have done wrong, they certainly did that one thing right: They knew something about how a police department works and took that into account in developing their

main character. Or at least they did it better than most other cop stories of that time.

Who is your story about? A person who has a strong reason to want the situation to change-and has both the power and freedom to set about trying to change it.

The Protagonist

Who do we hope succeeds? Usually you’ll want your audience’s sympathy to be with your main character, if only because it’s a lot harder for a writer to make an anti-hero work well in a story. But sometimes you can’t get away from the fact that wherever the action is, the story must follow. If all the important and interesting choices are being made by the bad guyespecially if the climax depends on what the bad guy does-chances are he’s the main character of your story whether you like it or not.

Take the third
Star Wars
movie,
Return of the Jedi.
The first two movies had focused on Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo-but it was clear that the story was
about
Luke Skywalker. As the movies became hits and penetrated American culture, however, a curious thing was happening. An extraordinary number of children seemed to admire the monstrous villain, Darth Vader. Why did they want to act out the part of this casual murderer?

I suspect it’s because, no matter how busy the good guys were, everything they did was in reaction to Darth Vader.
He
was the one calling the shots. He was the one with the power and freedom to act-and, too, he was made somewhat sympathetic by the fact that his body had been ruined and he depended on a machine for survival.

Darth Vader was also the most mysterious-how did he become the way he is? Why did he turn to the dark side of the force? How did he become so powerful? This sense of mystery and awe is one of the things you must look for when searching for the main character of your story. The audience is drawn to the strange, the powerful, the inexplicable.

By the third movie, probably without any of the filmmakers’ being aware of it, Darth Vader was the main character, even though Luke, Leia, and Han remained protagonists. Yes, they have neat adventures and discover things about each other (Don’t kiss me, Luke: you’re my long-lost brother), but all of these events are just devices to get them ready for their confrontation with the one character whose choices actually matter: Darth Vader. It’s no accident that the climax of
Return of the Jedi is
Darth

Vader’s choice to turn against the evil emperor and save the life of his son-his choice to reject the dark side of the force. Everything came down to Darth Vader’s choice. He was the center of the film. It was his story. And yet we never, not once, hoped that he would win.

The Viewpoint Character

Often-perhaps I should say usually-your main character will also be your viewpoint character. Since I’ve written a book that is in large measure about what a viewpoint character is
(Character and Viewpoint),
I’m not going to say much more here than this: The viewpoint character is the person through whose eyes we see the action. If it’s a first-person narrative, then the viewpoint character is the person telling the tale. If it’s a thirdperson narrative, then the viewpoint character is the person that we follow most closely, seeing not only what he does, but also why; seeing not only what he sees, but knowing how he interprets it, what he thinks about it. A quick example, from Octavia Butler’s novel
Wild Seed
(Warner/Popular Library/Questar, 1980/1988, pp. 138-39):
“Anyanwu
would
say you
have on your leopard face
now, ” Isaac
commented.

Doro shrugged. He knew what Anyanwu would say, and that she meant it when she compared him to one kind of animal or another. Once she had said such things out of fear or anger. Now she said them out of grim hatred. She had made herself the nearest thing he had to an enemy. She obeyed. She was civil. But she could hold a grudge as no one Doro had ever
known.

The viewpoint character at this moment is Doro, and so we are shown not only what was said, but also what Doro thinks of it, how he interprets it.

The passage tells of a conversation between Isaac and Doro, but it is largely
about
a character who is not present, Anyanwu. Obviously, though, she is very important to the viewpoint character, Doro. In fact, she is the protagonist of the story, the person whose side we are on, the person that we hope will win. Doro, on the other hand, is like Arslan and Darth Vader, in that his choices are the cause of almost everything that happens in the story-and his choices are often dark and terrible, so that we hope the

good characters can overcome him. He is the main character, an anti-hero whom we only gradually come to understand.

Wild Seed is
thus about the struggle between the main character, Doro, and the protagonist, Anyanwu. And Butler quite properly alternates between the two of them as her viewpoint character. There are chapters from Anyanwu’s point of view, so that we can see how she interprets events, what she wants, and why; and there are chapters from Doro’s point of view, so we can also see the world the way he sees it and get some idea of his purposes. The story could probably be told from just one of these viewpoints-but it would be much harder for us to understand and sympathize with the character whose viewpoint we never saw.

The viewpoint character will always be important to the audience, if only because the audience has come to understand that character better than anyone else. Usually this means you’ll want your main character to be the viewpoint character, just as you’ll usually want your main character to be the protagonist.

But there are times when you simply can’t do this. In mysteries, for instance, where the point of the story is to discover who committed the murder, it is traditional to make the viewpoint character the detective’s sidekick. Why? Because the detective usually knows the identity of the murderer a good while before the end of the book. If he were the viewpoint character-if we were inside his head-the suspense would bleed away far too soon. So Nero Wolfe’s stories are told by Archie Goodwin and Sherlock Holmes’s by Dr. Watson.

There’s another strategy, however, and that is to make the detective not be the main character of the novel. This is the strategy Ross MacDonald and other “hard-boiled detective” authors use. The detective is the viewpoint character-we see everything through his eyes-but the story’s focus is on the characters caught up in the events surrounding the murder. Theirs are the lives in turmoil; they are the people in pain. While the detective often gets emotionally involved, he is not the person whose life needs to be resolved. And the suspense now is moved, at least in part, away from the question of whodunnit and toward the question of how these people are going to reestablish their lives. Thus we can find out a bit earlier in the story who the murderer was-and still be eager to read on and discover the whole outcome.

Yet even when the viewpoint character is not the main character of a novel, he is nevertheless a major character, if only because we get to know

him so well. So he has to be well developed, and his personal dilemmas must also be resolved by the end of the story or the audience will, quite properly, feel cheated.

Who should your viewpoint character be? If it isn’t the main character or the protagonist, your viewpoint character must be someone in a position to see-and usually take part in-the major events of the story. If you find that your viewpoint character is constantly finding out about the most important events as people tell him about it after the fact, you can be almost certain you have chosen the wrong viewpoint character.

Here are some guidelines for choosing a viewpoint character who isn’t the main character:

1. The viewpoint character must be present at the main events.

2. The viewpoint character must be actively involved in those events, not always a chance witness.

3. The viewpoint character must have a personal stake in the outcome, even though the outcome depends on the main character’s choices.

(Of course, like all rules, these can be broken. You can have a viewpoint character who is
never
there for the main events-if your story is at least partly about the fact that he is frustrated because he constantly misses the important moments. But this moves your story toward comedy, which is fine if comedy is what you’re writing; and it focuses your story on the viewpoint character’s absence and not the events themselves. Break the rules if you like-but make sure you understand the consequences and know how to turn them to your story’s advantage.

2. Where Does the Story Begin and End?

Once again we must distinguish between some terms that are often used interchangeably.

The
myth
of the story, as opposed to the
text,
consists of what happens and why. The myth is usually very simple, but it also begins long before the beginning and goes on long after the end. This is because causal chains are infinite. For instance, the story of Oedipus is usually thought to begin when his parents, to save themselves from the prophecy that their son will kill his father and marry his mother, bind his ankles and abandon him to die.

But the causal chain actually begins long before. The parents did what

they did because they lived in a culture that believed in prophecy and in which it was not thought to be a heinous crime to leave a monstrous child to die. And there are reasons why their society adopted these beliefs and attitudes, and reasons for those reasons. The causal chain also continues long after-as we know from the plays
Oedipus
at Colonus and Antigone, which are about the consequences of the events and choices made in the play
Oedipus Rex.

So the myth of the story is actually a long network of cause and effect that begins long before the story and continues long afterward. You, however, must choose a point where the story begins and a point where it ends. You must decide the story’s structure.