38 Characters and viewpoint

of bringing many audience members to your point of view or increasing their commitment to your cause.

The same is true when you are telling a story in order to put across an idea. This often happens in science fiction, where the writer wants to show readers a neat gadget or scientific discovery, and uses characters only to convey information. The same can happen in historical fiction, where certain characters exist only to demonstrate particular historical attitudes; or in academic/literary fiction, when a character is introduced solely to be a symbol of something, or to speak key words that explicate the story's theme.

All of these are legitimate starting points for a character-but if you actually expect your reader to get emotionally involved, to respond to your story as a story, you must wring more life from the character, so that she isn't so obviously being manipulated by the author to produce results that have nothing to do with the events of the story itself.

Of course, this can be done wrongheadedly. I've seen many writers "characterize" by having their one-dimensional cardboard character hop into bed with another one-dimensional cardboard character and have the cardboard equivalent of sex. You don't "flesh out" a character whose role is to put across an idea or point of view by having the character do a lot of things that have nothing to do with the story.

Instead, you must follow where the original idea leads. Why does the character care so much about this particular idea? And don't settle for the first answer, either. Why does Nora care so much about pollution? Because her father died of pollution-caused cancer! No, no. Let's twist that around. Let's say instead that her father used to spray the defoliant Agent Orange out of his helicopter in Vietnam. It never had any ill effect on him, but he has become increasingly despondent, knowing how much harm he might have done. No, no, let's twist it again. Nora only found out he sprayed Agent Orange by accident, overhearing him talk with some war buddies. When she challenged him, he answered with hostility, swearing that the chemical was harmless, and all the people claiming to have been damaged by the chemical are just trying to collect from the government to pay for health problems that have nothing to do with Vietnam. Now as she fights industrial pollution, she's really fighting her father-or, perhaps, trying to atone for his sin, though he refuses to admit he did anything wrong.

Isn't the character of Nora a lot more interesting now than she was when she was anti-pollution because her father died from it? Not that the death of a parent isn't good motivation. It's just too easy. "My father died of it," said Nora. It explains everything-it explains nothing. Do all the children of people who die from pollution go out and crusade against it? No. So we still haven't answered the question of why Nora reacted to her father's death by devoting her life to the crusade against pollution. The simple answer is never the complete answer.

To create effective persuasive or educational fiction, you must have believable, interesting characters. That means that you must be even more careful to make your characters balanced and well-rounded, not less so. If you're in doubt, go back to Chapter 1 and see how much you know

Where Do Characters Come From"? 39

about the character in each of the categories listed there. Go back to Chapter 2 and ask those questions of the character. The idea may be the source of your character, but it better not be the only source, or your story won't be either good fiction or good polemic.

SERENDIPITY

There are many other chance sources of character ideas. You aren't necessarily looking for stories or characters, but because your idea net is out, you catch them anyway. Some people get ideas from dreams, some from news stories, a letter to Ann Landers, an anecdote from a history or biography, the headline on a supermarket tabloid, a line from a song. Sometimes characters seem to come out of nowhere-they just start talking inside your head.

In every case, you'll need to examine them carefully, invent them

fully, help them come to life.

Two Ideas from Unrelated Sources

It's important to remember that ideas don't have to come at the same time for them to belong together. I've often been struggling with a problem in one story, only to find the solution by remembering a character or idea from a completely unrelated story, one I may have worked on years and years before. For instance, the basic idea for my novel Speaker for the Dead was going nowhere until I realized that my title character had to be the main character from another story, Ender's Game. Suddenly I knew the character's past, knew why he was "speaking for the dead," and the story unfolded much more easily.

My experience is that I have never done well writing a story from one idea or developing a character from one source. Only when I put together two previously unrelated ideas or characters do they come to life; it is in the process of connecting the unconnected that my stories grow. This may be true for some of you, also.

Wondering

You can help ideas come "by chance," however, by simply keeping your mind working-by often filling your mind with speculation. What if?

What if I lost my eyesight? What would I do then?

What if I accidentally threw away something priceless? Who might find it? How would 7 go about finding it? What could you possibly throw away without realizing it had value? A lottery ticket, of course. Anything else? A letter by someone famous. A priceless book. A jewel you thought was fake. An alien from another world who happened to look just like a paper clip. What then?

What if a person who had worked in an office all his life suddenly got assigned to work at home on a computer terminal, doing the same job without even leaving his house? How would his family respond? Would he

40

CHARACTERS AND VIEWPOINT

miss the office life? Revel in the new freedom to determine his own schedule? Would his wife start expecting him to be a househusband while she continued going off to work?

Or look at the landscapes you drive through or live in or remember, or landscapes you've seen in National Geographic. Wonder about them. Who lives here? Who has died here? How did they die?

What do children do to play here? Where would they find books? What would they daydream about? What are they afraid of? Where do they refuse to go after dark? What do they dare each other to do?

What is likely to be the first job of a person who grows up around here? What do parents fear and hope for their children? Where do people shop or trade? What is the worst thing the weather here does to people?

Where do their kinfolk live? What songs do they hear coming through the window on a hot summer night? What do they smell? And how do they feel about the smells, the songs, the weather, their jobs, each other, themselves?

There isn't a landscape on earth where you can't find wonderful stories in the answers to these questions.

"Wonderful stories." Exactly the right word, wonderful.

The stories that fill a reader with wonder are the stories that came from a wondering mind, your mind, constantly speculating, exaggerating, questioning, challenging, twisting, searching. Good stories and characters will wander through, by and by. You'll find them in your idea net, and you'll breathe on them and bring them all to life.

CHAPTER 4

MAKING DECISIONS

So FAR, I'VE BEEN TREATING CHARACTERS as if everything about them were negotiable. This is true, as long as the story still exists only in your head or in outline form. But at some point you're going to start writing the story down, and then you've got to make some decisions and stick to them.

NAMES

One of the earliest decisions to make is a character's name. I have a friend who doesn't name his characters at all, until a story or novel is almost through. He just names them things like XXX and YYY. Then, when he knows them better, he decides what their names should be and uses his word processor's global search-and-replace command to turn all the XXXs into Marions and the YYYs into Ednas. That just wouldn't work for me. A name is part of who a person is. It's the label that stands for everything you've done and everything you are.

What a Name Means to the Character

A name has many associations. Your last name links you to your family. If your character is a married adult, did he take his wife's name; did she take her husband's? If she's divorced, did she keep her husband's name or return to her maiden name? Or perhaps the character's parents were divorced, his mother got custody of the children, and she later remarried. Did he keep his birth father's name or take his stepfather's name? Surely these decisions had repercussions.

Your last name also suggests ethnicity. Wozniak does not have the same associations as O'Reilly, Bjornson, Redfeather, Goldfarb, Fitzwater, or Robles. The moment you choose a last name, you bring to the character a load of ethnic, national, even racial baggage. You will almost certainly find that the name opens up all kinds of character possibilities, inviting you to speculate on the character's upbringing. How much did his ethnicity make him who he is?

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42 CHARACTERS AND VIEWPOINT

You might be named for someone, too. Is your character a junior or II? Named for an uncle, aunt, grandparent? He's going to have an attitude toward his own name in part based on his attitude toward the person he's named for. What about a girl growing up as Scarlett or Meryl, or a boy named Elvis or Lennon? Not only does the name tell when the character was probably born, it would also have caused a lot of teasing from other kids. Maybe the girl named Scarlett O'Hara Watt insisted that her friends call her So Watt, from her initials? The name is almost too cute to stand- but that, too, may be a part of her character.

Robert Parker's best-known character is named Edmund Spenser. He at once follows his name, being a lover of poetry, and rejects it, insisting that people call him Spenser. He insists on people spelling the name correctly, with a middle s instead of c; yet having a name like Edmund when he was growing up may be why he always regarded it as essential that he be in top physical condition and know how to fight. Indeed, most of Spenser's main character attributes seem linked to his name-it's quite possible, though I have no way of knowing, that the choice of the name Edmund Spenser was how Robert Parker came up with the idea for his character in the first place.

You Can't Tell the Players Without a Program

There are other considerations involved in naming a character, however, besides the effect on the character himself. The name of a character is also the label the reader uses to help keep the characters straight. That's why it's always helpful to give characters memorable-and very different- names.

One rule I try to follow is to make sure all my major characters' names start with a different letter. I won't have a Myron in the same story with a Milton, unless there's some compelling reason to violate that rule.

I also try to vary lengths and sound patterns. It's hard for the reader to remember who is who if all the names follow the same pattern. Monosyllables like Bill, Bob, Tom, Jeff, Pete lead to boredom and confusion. These particular examples are such common-sounding names that the reader begins to feel that you gave these characters the first name that came to mind-it leads to a subliminal message that the characters' identities don't matter.

However, it also becomes distracting when you choose a lot of flamboyant, bizarre names, unless that is an important part of a story. If you're writing about a street gang, you might give them all odd nicknames like Mud-eater, Wall Man, Slime, and Lick. But you'll lose a lot of belief if all beautiful women in your stories have phony but euphonious names. And make sure your characters don't all have names that mean something, unless you are writing allegory and deliberately want them to be tagged with symbolic names, like the characters Patience, Will, and Angel in an allegorical fantasy I once wrote.

It's easy to fall into a rut, repeating the same patterns: Jackson, Waters, Deaver, Rudman. Change the number of syllables: Waters to Waterman. Change the accent position from the first to second syllable: Deaver

Making Decisions 43

to Despain. Start one name with a vowel instead of a consonant: Rudman to Urdman. Change one name so they don't all sound like WASPs: Jackson to Giaconni or Kabuto.

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One Name Per Character

Have you ever read a Russian novel? The Russian pattern of naming is different from ours-everybody has a first name, a family name, and a patronymic. Thus Ivan Denisovitch is Ivan the son of Denis-but the author might also refer to him by a completely unrelated name, like Dobrinin, which is his family name. The character might also have a nickname-and Russian authors feel no qualms about having characters refer to each other by any or all of the names in any combination, or so it seems. This is often hopelessly confusing to English-speaking readers.

Yet many a writer does exactly the same thing to his readers, with far less reason.

Bill heard the all-stations siren and wondered whether he was going to get in trouble this time. Well, too late to worry now. Lieutenant Waterman would help him if he could, and if he couldn't, well, that was the breaks. He got out of his berth and put on his clothes.

Johnson walked down the corridor until he got to the bridge of the ship. The executive officer was asking, "How much time do we have?"

The captain quickly surveyed the situation. "About three minutes, I'd say. Not enough time to avoid a collision. But we've got to try. Hard port, full speed."

Howard immediately relayed the command to the engine room, while his mentor made sure everyone else knew what to do.

OK, folks, guess: How many characters have we just seen? There are seven different names or tags here-yet this passage could just as easily refer to only two people. Lieutenant Howard Waterman is the executive officer of the ship; his mentor is Captain Bill Johnson.

This is an extreme example, but a lot of beginning writers (and some who should know better) make almost as bad a mess of naming.

The rule of thumb is that the narrator of the story will refer to each character the same way every time. You introduce the character by the name he's going to have most of the time through the story. For instance, you might decide to always refer to Captain Bill Johnson as Johnson. His junior officers, of course, will always call him Captain or Sir; his wife will call him Bill; his children will call him Dad. But the alert writer will make sure that we are constantly reminded who we're talking to. The first time somebody calls Johnson "Captain," make sure he calls him "Captain Johnson." From then on, the reader can make the connection. But "Captain Johnson" won't help if the only name we've seen so far is "Bill." It takes a little thought, but your job is to help your reader keep clear who is who, and you can't do that if you're busy playing musical chairs with the characters' names.

Sometimes amateurs play "musical names" because they're afraid that using the same name over and over again will become "repetitive."