If a character is relatively powerful-powerful enough to make choices that change other characters' lives-the audience will remember her bet-

The Hierarchy 65

ter and expect her to amount to something more in the story. If the other characters all regard a character as dangerous or powerful, the readers will, too.

Focus

This leads to one of the most effective theatrical techniques for making the audience notice a character-have everyone on stage look at him, listen to him, or talk about him behind his back. If you do enough of this, you never have to bring the character on stage. We never see the title character in Waiting for Godot, for instance, and yet he is arguably the most important character in the play, and his failure to arrive is the most important "event."

You can use the same technique in fiction to focus the readers' attention on a character whether he's present or not. In The Lord of the Rings, the character of Sauron appears in person only once; beyond that, he personally intervenes in the story only a handful of times. Yet he is the engine driving almost every plot thread, the focus of everyone's attention far more often than any other character. The result is that readers "remember" Sauron as one of the most important characters in The Lord of the Rings-even though he almost never appears in the story at all.

Frequency of Appearance

If a character keeps coming back, even if she's not all that exciting or powerful, we begin to expect her to do something important-or else why would the writer keep bringing her up? This is why, when movie stars are evaluating a script, they'll keep track of how many scenes their character will be in. If they aren't in enough scenes, they won't loom large enough in the audience's mind-and therefore the film won't be a "star vehicle." Sometimes a character who should remain minor will keep coming back just because of her job-a bartender at the club where two major characters regularly meet, for instance. Then you need to reduce her importance-have her say very little, or have substitute bartenders show up on her night off, something to let the reader know that it doesn't matter much whether the bartender is there or not.

Action

A character doesn't have to appear all that often, as long as every time he does appear, what he says and does has an important effect on the plot. On the other hand, a character who is often present but does almost nothing can quickly fade in the readers' memory. In the play Romeo and Juliet, Romeo spends a lot of time with his two friends, Benvolio and Mercutio. In fact, as I remember it Benvolio is present in more scenes than Mercutio, including the first scene in which we see Romeo himself. Yet Benvolio is completely forgettable, while Mercutio is one of the most memorable characters in the play. Why? Because Benvolio never does anything but listen to people and make a few bland comments, while Mercutio is flamboyant and provocative and funny and outrageous, and when he is on-

66 CHARACTERS AND VIEWPOINT

stage he either incites or is deeply involved in every action.

Rule of thumb: Passive characters will not seem as important as active characters.

Sympathy

In another chapter I'll discuss techniques for making characters likable or sympathetic; for now, it's enough to say that the more endearing or charming a character is, the more the audience comes to like her as a human being, the more important that character will be to the audience, and the more they'll expect to see what becomes of her.

Point of View

One of the most potent devices for making a character important to your readers is to use the character's point of view. The third part of this book is devoted to explaining point of view, so this will be only a brief reference. Rule of thumb: When a character in the story is used as the narrator or viewpoint character, his importance is greatly increased.

There are also some variables that are out of your control. A character might be extremely important to some readers because they think they resemble him, or because the character resembles someone they love or hate. Or a character you think of as important may seem unimportant to some readers because they have seen too many characters like him-to them, the character has become a cliche. In fact, if your story is very popular, it is likely to be imitated-and the fact that the market is flooded with imitations of your best character will soon make your character feel like an imitation, too, even though he's the original!

But since these things are generally out of your control, you can't very well use them to help you establish your hierarchy of characters. The techniques you can control are:

Ordinariness vs. strangeness

The amount of time devoted to the character

The character's potential for making meaningful choices

Other characters' focus on him

The character's frequency of appearance

The character's degree of involvement in the action

Readers' sympathy for the character

Narration from the character's point of view

As you use these techniques to varying degrees with the many characters in your story, an unconscious ranking of the characters will emerge in the readers' minds, starting with the least important background characters, moving up through the minor characters, to the major characters, and finally to two or three main characters or a single protagonist-the people or person the story is mostly about.

Chances are you won't be fully aware of the hierarchy of characters

67

The Hierarchy

in your own story-it's almost impossible for a storyteller to have all these techniques completely under conscious control. But if you find that readers seem not to notice a character you think is important, or if a character starts "taking over" the story when you don't want him to, you can use these techniques to adjust the character's relative importance. And when these techniques are under your control, you can play your characters the way a harpist plays each string on the harp, a few at a time, for exactly the right balance and harmony.

CHAPTER 7

HOW TO RAISE THE EMOTIONAL STAKES

READING A STORY is NOT A PASSIVE PROCESS. While a reader may seem to be sitting still, slowly turning pages, in his own mind he is going through a great many emotions. Underlying all of them is a strong tension. The stronger it is, the more the reader concentrates on finding out what happens next, the more attention he pays, the more intensely he feels all the emotions of the tale.

The amount of tension the reader feels depends partly on her emotional state, her imagination, her ability as a reader. But the strength of the story's tension also depends on choices you make. Some of these choices have to do with the story's structure-hinted at in Chapter 5-and others are simply outside the scope of this book. However, there are several things you can do with characters to raise the readers' emotional stake in the story, make them more emotionally involved in what's happening, make them care more about the outcome.

SUFFERING

Pain is a sword with two edges. The character who suffers pain and the character who inflicts it are both made more memorable and more important.

Pain can be either physical or emotional. Great grief and great physical agony, well presented in the tale, can greatly increase the reader's emotional involvement. Remember, though, that you aren't using grief to make the reader grieve any more than you're using physical pain to make the reader bleed. Readers don't necessarily feel what the characters are feeling-when the villain cries out in his agony of defeat, the reader may be cheering inside. But the intensity of the characters' feeling, as long as it remains believable and bearable, will greatly intensify the reader's feelings-whatever they are.

Of course, not all pain is alike. A cut finger doesn't magnify a character very much. Ghastly physical torture can become unbearable to imagine, so that the reader refuses to remain engaged with the story and you

68

69

How to Raise the Emotional Stakes

lose him completely. The most powerful uses of physical and emotional pain are somewhere between the trivial and the unbearable.

In Stephen King's The Dead Zone, the main character suffers terribly: A traffic accident puts him in a coma for many years; he loses his career, the woman he loves, and many years of his life. Furthermore, when he finally recovers, he continues to suffer in body and soul. And with each twinge of pain and grief, the reader's emotional involvement in the story becomes more intense.

Notice that his pain is both physical and emotional. The loss of a loved one can weigh as heavily in the mind of the audience as the loss of a limb. However, physical pain is much easier to use because it doesn't have to be prepared for. If a character is tortured, as in King's novel Misery, the audience will wince in sympathetic agony even if they don't know the character very well-even if they have never seen the character before. Emotional loss does not come so easily. In The Dead Zone, King devoted several pages to creating a warm, valuable love relationship between the main character and the woman he loves. It is at a vital moment in their relationship that he has his terrible traffic accident. Now when he discovers that she married someone else during his coma, the readers know how much he loved her, and so the pain of losing her actually outweighs the physical pain he suffered.

Suffering loses effectiveness with repetition. The first time a character is hit in the head, the pain raises her importance; the third or fourth time, the character becomes comic, and her pain is a joke. Likewise, the first time you mention a character's grief, it raises his stature and makes the reader more emotionally involved. But if you keep harping on the character's suffering, the reader begins to feel that the character is whining, and the reader's emotional involvement decreases.

You can see this with audience reactions to slasher movies-those horror flicks in which the special effects department keeps coming up with cool new ways to dismember the characters. The hideous murders in these movies were originally devised to jack up the audience's emotions, higher and higher with each death. Rather sooner than they expected, however, many in the audience stopped being horrified and began to laugh. This is not really a sign of the audience's moral decay or inability to empathize; it's simply that an audience reaches a point when fictional pain is too difficult to bear. When pain or grief become unbearable in real life, human beings often develop fictions to cope with it-we call it insanity. When pain or grief become unbearable in fiction, readers simply disengage from the story, and either abandon the tale or laugh at it.

Does this mean that pain is a sharply limited character device? No- it is almost unlimited in its potential. But you must remember that you increase the power of suffering, not by describing the injury or loss in greater detail, but rather by showing more of its causes and effect. Blood and gore eventually make the audience gag; sobbing and moaning eventually earn the audience's laughter or contempt. On the other hand, if you make us understand how intensely the character loved before losing the loved one or trusted before being betrayed, then his grief will have far greater