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Nora looked carefully to the left and stepped out into the street. A taxi slammed on its brakes and swerved to avoid hitting her-from the right. Oh yes, thought Nora. They drive on the wrong side of the road here. My pedestrian survival training from New York won't be much help in London.

Pete left a 6:30 wake-up order with the hotel operator, turned off the television, and climbed into bed. He slept on the left side, of course, even though Nora hadn't been there to sleep on the right side since they separated four years before.

Nora noticed that every time Pete wrote a check, he drew three horizontal lines in every space between the words and numbers. "Do you really think the grocery store people are going to alter your check to say one million and thirty-

three dollars and forty-four cents?"

"It's like fastening your seatbelt or locking your car," said Pete. "Do it even

when it doesn't matter, and you won't forget to do it when it does."

Too many habits, of course, and your characters will seem obsessive-compulsive. But anybody who's been alive for any length of time has some habits, and it helps us believe in and understand your characters when we see what their habits are.

Networks

Anyone who has been alive for any length of time has also made many connections with other people. Unless a character has been torn from his or her normal milieu, those connections are going to show up.

Pete noticed the way people in the store looked at Nora. Quick, furtive glances. He couldn't see anything wrong with her-no run in her stocking, no underwear showing. He didn't catch on until he realized that the store detective was shadowing them. Apparently Nora was known here, and not as a big spender.

Nora knew that Pete was not the man of her dreams when the motel clerk took his check without asking for ID. She thought it might be classy to be recognized at the Hilton, but not at a motel that rents a room for ten dollars an hour. Still, a man who pays by check is probably telling the truth when he says he isn't married.

Everybody Pete and Nora ran into did the same thing. Just as they were about to ask her a question, they'd glance at Pete and then smile and say something noncommittal. Nora and Pete stopped for lunch at a diner called the White Trash Saloon. It took a few minutes before Nora realized that the used-up looking waitress was Suzy Parker from high school. The last ten years hadn't been good to her.

Suzy recognized Nora too and finally asked the question the others had sidestepped: "How's Joe Bob?"

Nora smiled icily back. "He's home taking care of our seven children while Pete and I have a madcap, whirlwind affair."

The waitress thought about this for a moment. "You don't have no seven children," she finally said. "Too damn thin."

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Nora couldn't help noticing that all the unopened letters on the kitchen table had transparent windows, and a lot of them said FINAL NOTICE. Even through the closed door, she could hear Pete shouting into the telephone. "I'll make payments on that piece of junk any month that it runs! And if you send somebody to pick it up, I'll blast their head off!" A minute later he came back in, grinning. "An old girlfriend," he said.

Sometimes the relationships that your character has with other people around him will be important to the story, but often they'll be there merely to give a sense that he has a full life, or to add an occasional comic touch. No matter how you use these mini-relationships in your story, though, the main benefit is that your characters won't seem to be puppets, alive only when they're on stage and someone is pulling the strings. They'll seem to have a real life outside the story as well, a network of relationships reaching far and wide. Though only a small part of that network is explored in your story, the reader senses that the rest of the network is there.

JUSTIFICATION

There is nothing so outre, so off-the-wall, so impossible or bizarre or outrageous that you cannot make it believable within a story. It all depends on how hard you want to work at justifying it.

Nora stood on the roof. She was only nine stories up, but it might as well be nine miles. There was no escape. Pete came toward her, the long knife glimmering in the moonlight. Nora trembled, but she knew what she had to do. So she reached out, slapped the knife out of his hand, picked him up over her head and threw him off the roof. All those years of lifting weights and taking judo classes had paid off at last.

If that last sentence is the first time Nora's weight lifting has ever been mentioned in the story, the audience will be outraged by this scene. Here they've been so worried about Pete and his knife, and all along Nora was apparently built like an orangutan.

Does that mean you can't have Nora throw Pete off the roof? Of course not. All you have to do is tell us about her weight lifting and judo classes much earlier in the story, so we already know that she's strong and well trained long before she gives Pete the heave-ho. Furthermore, you have to make Nora the kind of woman who would defy sexual stereotypes and go into heavy weight lifting. Why would she do that? Is it to get a muscular, healthy body? To be stronger than the man who once raped her? A reaction to her fear of her breast cancer recurring? Or did a close friend get her involved in body building just for sociability, and she discovered she liked it? Whatever reason you invent, she will have to become a different person in order to justify her being able to pick Pete up and throw him off the roof.

Of course, if we knew all that about her, we wouldn't have the same sense of jeopardy as Pete chased her-we'd know that Nora was a woman

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who could take care of herself. But that doesn't mean the scene would be without tension. There are several strategies available:

1. Give Pete a gun, so we'll fear that her strength will be useless against him. Then you'll have to figure out a way to deal with the gun- but you'll have the tension of jeopardy back again.

2. Change the source of the tension. Instead of fearing that Pete will kill her, she (and the audience) fears that she will have to kill Pete, and she could not bear to do so. She warns him, but he behaves as if he wants to die. Merely hurting him has not stopped him in the past. If she kills him, terrible things will happen. The audience fears that she might not kill him, yet knows that she will also suffer terribly if she does.

3. Make her feat less outlandish. Instead of having her slap away the knife, pick him up, and throw him off the building, have her sidestep the knife and use Pete's momentum to push him off. That doesn't require her to be anywhere near as strong; you could have her just beginning her judo lessons and can skip the whole weight lifting idea altogether. This still requires some preparation, and it requires more detail during the fight on the roof, but it will work.

4. Make the conclusion a believable accident. Pete actually stabs her. She nearly faints from the pain, stumbles, lurches into Pete. He loses his balance; she falls, but grabs at his legs, pleading with him not to stab her again. With her holding his feet, he can't recover his balance. He falls off the building. If you show this process in great detail, it will be believable; best of all, it requires no preparation at all, since it's well within a normal person's ability.

If you decide to spend a lot of time making Nora believable as a weight lifter, you have to be careful not to get carried away. If the weight lifting only affects the story by allowing Nora to throw Pete off the roof, then you should introduce the weight lifting early, but not keep harping on it, not show her doing nothing but weight lifting. If it becomes too dominant in the story, the reader will expect it to amount to much more than just a way for her to save her life. "Nora goes through all that weight lifting," the reader will say, "just so she can toss this guy? Will she stop weight lifting now?" The amount of justification must be in proportion to the event being justified, or it leads the reader to expect things that you aren't going to deliver.

As a general rule, the more bizarre and unbelievable the character's behavior and the more important it is to the story, the earlier in the story you have to begin justifying it and the more time you'll need to spend to make it believable.

CHAPTER 12

TRANSFORMATIONS

REAL PEOPLE SEEM TO CHANGE. There are physical changes: The little kid next door is suddenly great-looking-or a hoodlum. Your friends from youth get old; your fat friend suddenly loses weight; your husband grows a mustache; your wife changes her hair style and starts wearing a whole new style of clothes.

There are changes in people's roles: The rich man goes bankrupt; the farmer sells his land and opens a fast food outlet in another state; the intense young girl becomes a wife and mother; the wife and mother stays a mother but no longer is a wife; new management comes in and the forty-eight-year-old executive is suddenly unemployed.

All these changes can be pretty surprising, even jarring. But what really disturbs us is when people's basic nature seems to change. Somebody you trusted doesn't keep his word and doesn't even act sorry about it. Somebody you loved is suddenly cruel to you, and you can't think why, what you did to deserve it. Someone who was always boring suddenly becomes fascinating. Someone who never did anything well, who seemed like a complete failure, unexpectedly does something admirable and fine.

WHY PEOPLE CHANGE

In real life we never fully understand why people do these things. We have names for some of the changes-mid-life crisis, growing up, going through a phase, nervous breakdown, finding herself, a selfish streak, showing his true colors, born again, going off the deep end-but these labels are at best an attempt to reassure ourselves. Because there's already a name for the way we see somebody changing, we don't have to be quite so frightened by the change. But we still know nothing, or almost nothing, about the cause. We still know nothing, really, about what's going on inside other people's heads.

We try to bind people into their roles so that we can be sure of them. Slavery, serfdom, fealty, oaths of office, contracts, unions, corporations, laws, marriage, going steady, flattery, hypocrisy-all are strategies for

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controlling and predicting what the people around us are going to do. Yet still these people surprise us with escape, revolution, betrayal, lawsuits, strikes, sellouts, crime, divorce, faithlessness, gossip, confession, and we have to revise again our understanding of the world.

One of the reasons fiction exists at all is to deal with that fear of inexplicable change, that uncertain dread that lurks in the background of all our human relationships. Because fiction lets us see people's motives, the causes of their behavior, these stories about made-up people help us guess at the motives and causes of real people's behavior.

This doesn't mean that your fictional characters have to change. One of the common themes in fiction is that people's fundamental natures don't change, no matter how much you wish they might. Macbeth's desire to rise to high office seduces him into believing the witches' prophecy and agreeing to his wife's plan; that hunger for a lofty station is still with him at the end, making him seek death rather than endure the humiliation of public display in his defeat. The message of such stories is that once you truly know people, you can count on them staying the same. If they ever seem to change, it's because you didn't really understand them in the first place.

You Can't Change

Your fiction can develop this theme in three ways:

1. You can tell stories in which characters are who they are from beginning to end, working out their destinies along the same relentless lines. Some might criticize your stories because your characters never change, but many readers will be grateful to live in your fictional world, where some people, at least, can be counted on to stand firm. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Cathy try to resist their passionate childhood attachment to each other, but all the changes are futile, for they keep returning to be their true selves, wild children living like beautiful animals among the moors.

2. You can tell stories about people who seem to change, but then reveal that this was their true nature all along. They were only pretending to be what you thought they were; or perhaps they simply hadn't had the power or opportunity to reveal themselves. It wasn't until Macbeth had a victory under his belt, a new title after his name, and King Duncan asleep in a bedroom in his castle that he was able to reveal his true character as a murderer-but maybe he was a murderer all along. Another example: Oedipus was born to kill his mother and father. His parents can't stop him from fulfilling his nature even by trying to kill him; he can't stop himself from being himself even by fleeing what he thinks is his homeland. He was born to commit patricide and incest, and all his attempts to pretend to be another kind of man come to nothing.

3. Tell stories about people who want to change, but can't until they discover their own true nature; then, when they change the outward pattern of their lives, they are only becoming true to their newfound self. Ayn

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Rand's sympathetic characters in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged do not make themselves into geniuses, they don't develop greatness. Only when they break free of the shackles of society and discard the myths about what they ought to be do they discover the greatness that lay within them all along, and finally rise to fulfill their heroic role.

In all these stories, the characters are not transformed, they are unmasked.

Other Things Change You

Another great theme in fiction is that people do change, but for causes be

yond their control:

1. The cause of change in people might be the drives and hungers born in their genes. D.H. Lawrence told stories-The Rainbow, Lady Chat-terly's Lover-in which characters did not really act because of their motives at all. They might think they had a particular purpose in mind, but in fact their choices always came down to the needs of their bodies. This view of people as animals pretending to be human shows up as often in the bleak hard-boiled detective novels of Raymond Chandler and Ross Mac-donald as in the tragicomic Irish novels of James Joyce. This is not a message of despair-these writers all show a kind of nobility in their characters' struggle to transcend their nature.

2. The cause of change in people might be the way they're treated by others. George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion asserts the idea that a flower girl can become a lady, in soul as well as appearance, if only she is trained and educated properly. Robert Parker's Spenser novels often show people shaped by the pressures of the world around them; if the person is not too far gone, then by changing the environment, you can change the person. In one of his best novels, Parker has Spenser take a troubled young boy up to an isolated cabin in the woods, and through hard work and a whole new set of expectations, the boy becomes a new person and has a life completely different from the one he seemed destined to live out.

You Change Yourself

A third fictional theme dealing with human change is that we can change our own nature by an act of will. Never mind the argument that the will to change must have been part of a person's nature all along, so that by changing he is in fact remaining the same-that's a quibble compared to the important notion of becoming what you want rather than what you were born to be or what others force you to become. George Bernard Shaw's assertions and theories notwithstanding, before Eliza Dolittle in Pygmalion begins the training and education that transform her from a flower girl to a lady, she has the hunger to change-it's because of the force of her own will that she persuades Henry Higgins to teach her, and by the force of her own will that she succeeds. Shaw talked a lot about how