Stein on Writing (10 page)

Another way is to have your character complain bitterly about something. In life, complaining is more effective when it is done in a normal voice, the words speaking for themselves. However, bitter complaining connotes an emotional overload. At such times, your character is speaking, as it were, from the gut or the heart rather than the head. Listen to the character in that state. It will help you with the part of characterization that is normally hidden from public view.

Imagine your adult character secretly dressed in children’s clothes. Why is he doing that? What you want is not your answer, but the character’s answer to that question. The child in an adult character may have a poignant memory of a lasting hurt. Or a marvelous secret to reveal.

Yet another way is to visualize your character as suddenly rather old. How would that change her appearance, dress, walk? Is there anything that you can incorporate in your characterization at your character’s present age? Some people preserve characteristics of their childhood, others seem prematurely old in some way. So do some characters.

Imagine your character in an armchair talking to you. Ask your character questions that are provocative. Let your character challenge you. Disagree with your character. Let him win the argument.

Unfetter your imagination. Can you see your character flapping arms, trying to fly? Or trying to kiss everyone at a party? Or walking in the snow without shoes? Readers are interested in the out-of-the-ordinary. All these questions involve the character in action, the ideal way to characterize.

Last, imagine your character in the nude. This one almost always works if you portray your character in the nude honestly and in detail. People in the nude become especially vulnerable. This doesn’t mean you should necessarily portray your character actually in the nude. Your character may not want to get undressed, or may want to dress quickly to cover up. Or your character can just be thinking in the bath or shower. An author of mine, Edwin Corley, had a remarkable success with a first novel called
Siege,
which started with a scene of a black general in his bathtub. Everything the general did later was more believable because a person seen realistically in the nude is immediately credible.

CHARACTERIZING VILLAINS

Once upon a time, readers tolerated mustache-twirling villains with no countervailing virtues in their makeup. Today’s readers can be roughly divided into two groups, those who accept the fantasy villains of childhood, as in the James Bond stories and Arnold Schwarzenegger films, and those who insist on credibility. In life, villains do not uncurl whips and snarl. They seem like normal human beings. But normal humans are not villains. What distinguishes the true villain is not just the degree to which he hides his villainy under an attractive patina to snare his victims, but his contact with evil. There is no social solution to the true villain’s villainy, he cannot be reeducated and become a nice guy. His villainy is an ineradicable part of his nature.

In the successful TV series
NYPD Blue,
a senior police official from outside the precinct makes the precinct captain’s life miserable at every opportunity. The official is not a nice guy, he is a bad guy. The audience dislikes him more than it dislikes the criminals who are brought in. Every time the official hurts one of the good cops, we wish something bad would happen to him. Then, when the official overreaches and blunders, we are exhilarated. The official has boxed himself into a corner. We like that. Finally, when the official has to choose between defending a civil lawsuit he can’t win and resigning from the force, we are joyful. The villain is getting his due.

What the writers have been doing with this character all along, of course, is manipulating our emotions, which is exactly what your role is when you are pitting characters against each other to create a story.

Some suggestions to consider in characterizing an antagonist:

Can he have a physical mannerism that would be at least slightly disturbing to most people, for instance an involuntary blinking of one eye? Or sniffing? Frequent nose-wrinkling? Earlobe-pulling? Elbow-scratching? It is the repetitive nature of such mannerisms that grates on readers.

How does your antagonist behave toward people he’s never met before? Does he effuse charm, is he overly deferential, or is he discourteous, uninterested, openly bored, arrogant? All of these are characteristics that would help form the reader’s attitude toward your villain.

Another possibility is to have your antagonist do something frequently that most people do only occasionally. For instance, does he blow his nose every few minutes (though he is not sick), does his forehead sweat a lot though it is not especially hot, does he scratch himself, cough unnecessarily, wink at others as if there were some implied meaning in what they or he were saying?

To weave individual characteristics into a story, as much as possible let them come out during or as part of an action. The object is to avoid holding up the story and to keep the writer’s explanations out of it. To see how it’s done, let’s examine a work-in-progress in which a successful young businessman, driving to work in what becomes a severe rainstorm, passes a hitchhiker, then out of compassion and guilt, turns his car around to pick the man up:

As the man clambered in I could see he was one of those assless thin fellows who hikes his pants up higher than most men do.

The hitchhiker had his hand stretched out to shake. I was of the belief that hitchhikers, like waiters and mailmen, don’t offer their hand, but this man’s was stuck out there like an embarrassment, so I held on to the wheel hard with my left hand and put my right hand out to shake the man’s rain-wet palm.

I could tell the man’s breath was the kind that toothpaste didn’t cure.

The hitchhiker introduces himself. Even his name has an evil sound. He is characterized by clothing, sight, smell, and now touch:

The skin of Uck’s hand seemed flaked, reptilian. Even when the man tried to smile, his face didn’t cooperate. Like Peter Lorre’s, his lips thinned, but that was all. I thought if this man’s mother had pressed a pillow on his nose and mouth when he was a baby, would anyone have convicted her?

The protagonist is so repulsed by what he sees, smells, and touches of the hitchhiker, that his mind jumps to wishing the man dead. That puts the reader’s emotion on the defensive. The reader—whatever his conduct in private life—doesn’t believe or wish to believe that he would hope a man would drop dead just because he was repulsive. “Hey,” the reader thinks, “this guy’s human.”

That’s the key, of course. Uck
is
human. We meet his wife and child. He can be charming if he wants to. Nevertheless, he is fundamentally evil in the way he attaches himself to the life of the protagonist and won’t let go. He is not just getting a lift in the rain, he is the leech that cannot be pulled off the skin. Uck has taken the first step in pushing himself into the protagonist’s life and has begun the process of forcing the protagonist out of his job and home, a true villain.

You need to ask yourself about your antagonist, Is he curable? Is he bad but can be straightened out? Bad will work, but evil will provide a more profound experience for the reader.

We have seen that wimpishness is off-putting in a protagonist. We have a sense that
will
—desire reinforced by ambition—is what makes protagonists drive us through their stories. In the example just given, the protagonist is intensely interested in his work that has brought him a comfortable life, his wife, his house. The hitchhiker who appears in the rainstorm is set to take that from him and cannot be bought off by ransom of any kind. From that clash of these two characters, we get the kind of conflict that attracts readers.

CHARACTERIZING MINOR PLAYERS

Major characters deserve and get our primary attention. That doesn’t mean we should settle for stereotypes for minor characters. Sometimes they are given a name, a sex, an age, and no characterization. I’ve seen minor characters given too much characterization, fooling the reader into thinking they had some larger role to play. Sometimes all you want is for the reader to be able to
see
the minor character. Here’s how Nanci Kincaid does it:

You think you never saw white completely until you see Roy’s butt.

The most efficient technique for making minor characters come alive is to select one memorable characteristic that singles them out from the rest of humanity. This is particularly true for fleeting characters, those that appear and vanish, not to return. Early in Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms
the reader comes upon:

The priest was young and blushed easily.

In just seven words, the priest is visible even before his special uniform is described. Note that blushing is an action that characterizes, important here because the priest, in military service, is about to be picked on by a senior officer.

Irwin Shaw, in a story called “No Jury Would Convict,” shows us this:

The man in the green sweater took off his yellow straw hat and carefully wiped the sweatband with his handkerchief.

Simple enough, but what makes us see that man is not a description of what he is wearing but an action, wiping the sweatband.

When a writer characterizes beautifully, we indulge him. Every page of Dennis McFarland’s first novel,
The Music Room,
is a delight because it is so well written. McFarland doesn’t pass up any opportunity to characterize. Here’s how he deals with the most minor of characters, a hotel desk clerk, seen from the point of view of the protagonist, whose brother has just died:

... the man behind the hotel desk, whom I had never seen before—dark, and sporting the handlebar mustache of a lion tamer in a circus—seemed to know me, and to know my trouble. I watched him cheerfully help a man just ahead of me, then turn decidedly sorrowful as he shifted his gaze in my direction. It was with great sympathy that he handed me the pink slips of paper on which my telephone messages were written, and I couldn’t help noticing that the skin on his hand appeared a bit too moist and white, and the several hairs on the back of it were a bit too coarse and black, individual, and rooted, as if magnified.

Characterizing a minor character through the eyes of an important character is a valuable technique. Note how Anne Richardson Roiphe does it in
Up the Sandbox!:

...
the dwarf lady who lives in our building is hurrying across the street, her shopping bag filled, her fat legs bare and her feet encased in their usual heavy orthopedic shoes. Her face is round and her features are broad, distorted by thick glasses. I had never seen a dwarf till we moved to this building. It’s been four years now, and each time we pass my skin crawls. Despite all the humane teachings I have of course heard, I still feel not considerate, compassionate or easy in the company of cripples. I hold to the medieval conviction that someone has been criminal, perhaps in bed, or maybe only in imagination, but someone has committed a crime, perhaps the victim herself.

Minor characters can not only help characterize the major players in a story, but can also advance the plot. In the first three pages of
The Best Revenge,
I introduced five characters in addition to the protagonist in order to characterize the protagonist, Ben Riller, and to get the main plot line going: Ben is in trouble.

A theatrical producer, Ben is just entering the reception room of his office. An elderly messenger is at the desk of Ben’s assistant, Charlotte. She is trying to signal to him, but Ben’s attention is on the waiting actors. Let’s see how the messenger is used:

The geriatric who’d been wrangling with Charlotte spots me at last. Some of the best actors in the world are close to eighty. Their age-lined faces exude character. In the movies you can do repeated takes, but in theater the scourges of the body haunt eight performances a week. Old people chip at my heart. I see my father, Louie, in every one of their faces. ... It aches to turn an old man down. I smile as he approaches me. I think he wants to shake my hand.

What he wants to do, it turns out, is to provide me with personal service of a subpoena.

I try to hand it back to him, but he’s out the door with a gait a younger man would envy.

I used the messenger to help fill out the characterization of the protagonist, Ben. Characterizing a minor player gives us a chance to characterize a major player.

In that same paragraph, several other things come across. The reader learns the producer’s feelings about the theater, age, the differences for actors in film and on the stage. It also introduces the producer’s father,
Louie, a major character. The point to note is that when depicting a minor character, you can seize the opportunity to convey much else. The most important thing in that brief bit with the messenger is that it takes us—through an action—into the heart of the plot: the hero, Ben Riller the successful producer, is in trouble.

The point I want to leave you with is that the permutations of character are endless and the techniques for achieving them are many. When you are engaged in the complex task of characterization, consider the techniques in this chapter the equivalent of calling 911.

I have tried in this chapter to convey a variety of ways to characterize both minor and major characters. I have an additional suggestion. Spend some time reading or rereading two or three of the classics in which characterization is both profound and memorable: the novels of Dostoevsky and Flaubert from other cultures; Shakespeare’s great plays, particularly the tragedies; such twentieth-century writers as Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Henry James, to pluck a few from among the many. You’ll find that one of the characters resonates in your memory or speaks to your view of life more than most. As you are readying yourself for sleep, imagine a scene in which that character and the character you are working on have a conversation about the story of your book. Imagine what one says and how the other answers. In due course, let yourself sleep. You might find that in the first moments of wakefulness the next morning, you’ll want to reach for a pad and paper at your bedside to record some thoughts about your character, enriched by his or her conversation with a character you loved.