18 Characters and viewpoint

Twelve? Why twelve? What happens to you when you're twelve?

-You can stay up later.

Oh? What do you do when you stay up later?

-Watch TV!

-The good shows!

-Scary shows!

What else can you do?

-Go places by yourself!

Where would you go?

-The mall!

-Friends'houses!

-Wherever I want!

Heck, I'm thirty-seven and I can't do that.

-When you're twelve you get more money.

How does that happen?

-Bigger allowance.

-Babysitting.

So twelve-year-olds can babysit. Have any of you ever done any babysitting?

-My brothers.

-The baby.

-I have.

What can go wrong when you're babysitting?

-The house burns down.

Yeah, but that doesn't happen very often.

-The kids start a fire!

What do you do then?

-Put it out!

-Call the fire department!

-Get out of the house!

-Get the kids out of the house!

-Leave the one who started the fire!

Oh, you're all heart. A fire would make an exciting story, but I don't feel like doing that one right now. What else can go wrong when you're babysitting?

-Messy diapers.

That's just part of the job.

-The baby crying.

OK, the baby's crying. What do you do?

-Change his diaper.

T

What Makes a Good Fictional Character? 19

You changed the diaper. He's still crying. What do you do?

-Feed him.

-Burp him.

-Tell him to be quiet.

You do all that, he's still crying.

-Maybe he's sick.

There's a chance of that. What do you do?

-Call your mother!

She isn't home. She had a meeting that night.

-Call the people. The people you're babysitting for.

They're driving somewhere and they don't have a car phone.

-Go next door!

You don't know those people, and it's dark and there are a lot of trees and they aren't home anyway.

-You're cheating!

-You won't let us do anything!

It's no fun if it isn't hard. All these things you're telling me, they're part of the story. You try everything, and it doesn't work. What do you do now?

-Put it to bed and let it cry.

You do that, and it screams louder and louder until it starts choking and coughing and you pick it up again. What next?

-Call the doctor.

His office is closed.

-Call the hospital!

-The emergency room!

-They never close.

You've got me; I can't weasel out of that. They never close. So you call. What happens? They tell you to try doing all the stuff you've already tried. They tell you to call all the people you already tried to call. Then what?

-Woooooooo!

-Ambulance!

OK, you called an ambulance. It pulls up, siren going, lights flashing. What happens?

-The baby stops crying.

-The parents come home!

Wonderful! The baby stops crying and the parents come home. They see an ambulance at their house, they come inside-

-The baby's sleeping.

-Like a baby!

20 Characters and viewpoint

What do you do?

-Tell them what happened.

-They won't believe you.

-They never believe kids.

-They yell at you.

Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But do they ever hire you again?

-Never!

-Nobody does!

-They tell your parents!

-Your mom never lets you babysit again.

-You go back and smack the baby!

You want to, anyway.

-This isn't a fair story! It wasn't your fault!

j, Right. It wasn't your fault. So what do you do about it?

-Make your parents believe you.

How do you do that?

-Have your mom babysit the stupid kid.

Great idea! Only you don't make her do it. Let's say that a couple of months later the parents call and ask your mom to watch the baby for a while. You don't even go downstairs to see them, you're so embarrassed. You just sit in your room, studying, reading, whatever.

-Listening to tapes.

-Watching TV.

What happens?

-The baby starts crying.

The baby cries. You can hear it up in your room, you listen, you enjoy. You know your mom's changing the diapers, feeding it, all the stuff you did. Trying to call the parents. She even tries to call her mother.

-She calls an ambulance!

Maybe! But I think it's enough if she comes upstairs, opens your door, holding the baby screaming its head off, and says, "OK, kid, you were right. You can babysit again."

-Not if it's that baby!

Right! That's what you tell her. And the story's over.

Notice the process that's going on here. We started out knowing nothing more than the character's age. But that gave us enough that we could start asking why and what result.

What happens because you're twelve? There were several answers. Any one of them would have been useful-in fact, later in that same session we

What Makes a Good Fictional Character? 21

went back and got another story out of the idea of twelve-year-olds staying up late and watching scary movies. But I happened to choose babysitting.

What can go wrong? This is a fundamental story question, asking for complications and difficulties. But it's also a what result question-only I slanted the question to get negative answers. After all, there's no story if nothing goes wrong. The idea of a fire was too melodramatic for me, though of course a wonderful story could be told about saving the children you're babysitting. But it just wasn't what I felt like working with then, so I kept asking the same question till I got an answer that I liked.

Once we had the idea of the baby crying, I again asked a what result question. What do you do to stop the baby from crying? Each time they came up with a possible solution to the problem, I agreed that the babysitter would try that, but kept saying that it didn't work. Why? Because the minute something worked to stop the crying, the story would be over.

If one of them had suggested that the babysitter should examine the baby's body, then I would have asked what the babysitter found. Maybe a bruise, maybe a horrible bug-who knows what they would have come up with? It might have led to the babysitter finding out the cause of the crying. But since nobody came up with any suggestions except the obvious and uninteresting ones, I made them keep going-I wouldn't let the baby stop crying.

I could have asked more sophisticated motive questions. Why doesn't the babysitter just put the kid to bed, close the door, and ignore the screaming? Then they might have said such things as: The babysitter was once locked in a dark room when she was little and she can't stand to leave anybody else alone. Or: She can't stand to hear babies cry.

Or: She's afraid the baby might die.

Why would she be afraid of that?

-Her little brother died.

-He cried all the time before he died.

Do you see how the answer to this simple why question opens up new possibilities in the story? The version we actually came up with was fine. It would be a cute, funny story. But coming up with a reason why this crying baby would mean far more than annoyance to the babysitter adds an element of urgency, of poignancy. Now the glib ending might not be enough. Now the babysitter's mother might understand why the babysitter called an ambulance, might explain to the baby's parents. We might even want to have it end with the paramedics discovering that there really was something wrong with the baby. Or we might want to lead up to the babysitter's mother driving them both to the little brother's grave, and talking about it in a way they never had before.

But such possibilities only emerge when we demand more from the idea, when we ask more why and what result questions. If you stop with the first acceptable answer, the first "good enough" version of the story, you lose the chance to move from shallowness to depth, from simplicity to complexity, from a merely fun story to a fun but powerful one.