Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (16 page)

The protagonist in a story is most often termed the hero or heroine. But that can be deceiving. Actually, the protagonist is the character who has a goal, the individual who’s trying to achieve something.

A good case in point is
Crossing Delancey
, a play by Susan Sandler that later was made into a movie. At first glance it appeared to be a simple love story about a Jewish girl, clerk in a bookstore, who’s moved Uptown from the Lower East Side. An East Side pickle peddler is her would-be suitor.

Who’s the protagonist, girl or suitor?

Surprisingly enough, it’s neither. The central figure, if you check closely, is the girl’s Jewish grandmother, who’s determined to see Girl married to a nice Jewish boy and secure in a traditional home.

Thing is, Girl is happy as she is. Boy isn’t at all certain that Girl is the right bride for him. But Grandmother, unhappy because a change has come into her life—that is, Girl has abandoned her heritage for Uptown—has a goal: She’s going to bring Girl back to her roots. To that end, she sets out to manipulate Girl into a proper marriage and acknowledgment of her Jewish values.

Do you see the pattern? As I’ve noted before, a story is the record of how somebody deals with danger. The protagonist is that somebody—a character made unhappy by a change in his or her situation and thus goal-motivated to a course of action that will return the happiness. Most often, that makes the protagonist what we commonly call the hero, but not always. Goal orientation or purpose is the issue.

Most often, too, the protagonist is the character readers care most about or are most interested in. But again, not always. The grandmother in
Crossing Delancey
has been so skillfully disguised that at first glance we tend to think of her as incidental, whereas actually she’s the key to the puzzle.

What’s your first step where building a protagonist is concerned, then? It’s to ask yourself the essential question, “Whose story is this?” Because, believe me, it
is
somebody’s, and that somebody is the person endangered, whether through threat to life, threat to happiness, or threat to dignity. Making the right decision as to who’s threatened, choosing the right person for the role, is vital.

Note, too, that “protagonist” is a neutral term where sex is concerned. The old days when it automatically called forth masculine images is gone. Today, female protagonists often hold center stage.

It’s also highly desirable to keep your protagonist an individual
rather than a group. While we may cheer for a ball team, zeroing in on one player who has a private world to win or lose makes for an infinitely stronger effect.

So you have a proper hero or heroine. How do you make the story turn out “right,” come to a proper conclusion?

You set your protagonist up with what I call climax potential. This means the protagonist has
two
things vitally important to him, not just one—love and security, for example; love being exemplified by a man or woman, security by the job he’s always wanted, one tremendously desirable and with fantastic pay.

At the climax, your protagonist faces some form of physical or emotional disaster that forces him to choose between the two big things he cares about. The job, the security, offers an easy way out of an impending disaster. To choose the love side of the equation—the man or woman the protagonist yearns for—can lead only to cataclysm. (Or vice versa, of course. Love doesn’t always triumph, nor does the other factor in the equation). But you plan and plant the story circumstances in such a manner that when Character makes the “right” choice—morally right, that is, in the view of your readers—he’s rewarded with the happiness he sought at the story’s beginning.

To cite Dashiell Hammett again, you’ll find a beautiful example of this pattern in
The Maltese Falcon
, when at the climax Sam Spade gives up the woman he loves because his integrity is more important to him.

This also brings into focus the answer to another oft-asked question: Must a story always have a “happy” ending?

Answer: That depends on what Character sees as constituting happiness.

Thus, for Sam Spade, happiness meant being able to live with himself. So
The Maltese Falcon
had a happy—even though in its way tragic—ending.

Similarly, in a magazine novel I once wrote, the ending saw hero and heroine starting off up a mountain pursued by New Guinea headhunters. Odds were they’d end up dead meat at a cannibal barbeque. But for now they had each other, and if they died, they’d die together.

Readers loved it.

On the other hand, the other night I watched a play by a new playwright unfold. It was a skillful job, until the end. But the end
ing, unhappily, proved nothing, demonstrated nothing about the characters except that, in the old phrase, “Life is real, life is earnest, and we all die sometime.” The audience left, muttering disappointment. Why? Because the story wasn’t set up to provide the hero with an opportunity to make a meaningful choice, a decision that would leave the audience feeling fulfilled and satisfied. As it was, the hero had taken no stand that left him in a decisive position in relation to what the future might bring, so the story came to no real conclusion. It wasn’t so planned as to give the protagonist climax potential.

Does a story have to have a happy ending? Not necessarily. After all, consider
Macbeth
or
Driving Miss Daisy,
which both end with the death of a main character. What you need is a
fitting
ending, one that is geared to the behavior of the character in the story. A good example is William Lindsay Gresham’s
Nightmare Alley
. It concerns a carnival con man who exploits, corrupts, and robs virtually everyone with whom he comes in contact. The ending, which left
me
gasping, found him with only one road open—to become a “geek,” a drunk who bites the heads off live chickens in a sideshow. Not a happy ending, certainly, but a
fitting
one the character had deserved.

Remember, too, that you, the writer, can make any ending happy if you build the characters in such a manner as to prove the protagonist worthy of happiness by his display, however subtly, of moral courage at the climax. Ever and always, the “right” ending is the satisfying ending, and a satisfying ending is happy.

Or, to put it another way, you the writer can make any ending a happy ending if you build your characters in such a manner as to give it meaning.

The antagonist, in the popular view, is the villain.

Unfortunately, people tend to think of villains as wearing black hats and twirling the traditional long black mustache while they tie hapless, helpless Sophronia to the railroad tracks. The protagonist/hero is the noble soul on a white horse who comes to rescue her.

While you may find this pattern of good guy-versus-bad guy in many stories, it’s far from a universally true picture these days. A villain may be better defined merely as Hero’s opponent and so
antagonist
. Thus, he’s not necessarily a bad person. He very well may be just as good a man as Hero. But if he gets what
he
wants, Hero can’t achieve
his
heart’s desire.

Consider, for example, two totally estimable astronauts, each seeking to be chosen for a Mars flight. Only one can go. That makes them antagonists. But you, the writer, by small details of phrasing and handling and choice of empathetic fragments of behavior, guide your audience to root for the one you’ve selected to win. That character is your hero.

Is the antagonist, the opponent, the villain, important? He is indeed. Dynamically speaking, he’s probably more vital than your hero, for as old hands used to hammer at me when I was learning the trade, “The strength of your villain is the strength of your story.”

You see, change, a disruption of your protagonist’s
status quo,
is where your story starts. Protagonist just can’t stand it, so he sets out to achieve a more satisfactory situation.

This brings him into conflict. Conflict with who? The antagonist, of course; the villain—for it’s the villain who’s instituted the change that’s shattered your hero’s
status quo
.

And as we’ve already pointed out with our astronauts, above, the villain quite possibly is just as decent a person as your hero. But he’s determined to win, to have his own way. Therefore, he fights back ruthlessly against Hero—just as Hero would, were he in Villain’s shoes.

Remember, then, that the villain is
not
necessarily villainous in the traditional sense. But he
is
determined and so he fights, meets Hero’s efforts to restore Hero’s
status quo
head-on.

Remember also that this isn’t necessarily a battle that’s waged with guns or daggers. It may involve no more than a developer’s efforts to gain control of a sylvan valley for a subdivision, while an environmentalist hero seeks to preserve its beauty untouched for nature lovers. The key issue, for you, is that both sides are convinced they’re right and both are willing to fight—with no bloodier weapons than votes or legal writs, quite possibly—to have their way.

Really, the only reason I feel it necessary to include the love interest character here is because, too often, he or she is pictured as merely a sexy part of the furniture.

Well, the sexy part is fine, especially if we substitute “desirable” for sexy. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as I’ve noted elsewhere. What counts is that Hero react favorably to the female paragon we set before him. Or, if the story is female-oriented, vice versa.

In these days, however, readers are no longer content to have the love component be just a mindless romance or sex romp. They insist that the female participant come through as a real person—that is, that she have goals and attitudes and preoccupations and a self-concept every bit as well-developed as her male compeer’s. It makes for a more complex, more realistic, more interesting story. If you want an example, put a tape of
The African Queen
on your VCR and watch Katharine Hepburn in action.

Often known as “incidental characters,” these are the relatively minor actors in your fictional worlds. They’re the passing suspects in mysteries, the incidental friends and co-workers and neighbors of Hero and Heroine, the waitresses and clerks and maintenance people who flesh out the cast.

You develop these to varying degrees, in accordance to their importance to your story. The more important ones should have some quirk, some bit of color or two that lift them above the dull gray level. Thus, a snuff-dipping man who repeatedly spits tobacco juice into a paper cup will be remembered, and so will a woman who wears black lipstick, or a child with a tendency to turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time in particularly irritating fashion. And that’s fine.

Do bear in mind, though, that it’s easy to become so intrigued with these bit-players that they come to dominate your story. A philosophical garbage man or a little old lady who fixes a beady eye through a cracked door on all visitors may mesh so perfectly with a clever line of dialogue that’s popped into your head that you develop them further and so find them overshadowing your more important story people. For if you devote a lot of words to a character, that character automatically becomes important, simply because your readers assume that the fact that you gave him so much attention means
you
saw him as important to the tale you’re telling.

What to do about it? The answer, of course, is to ask yourself, “Does this character advance the story with his cleverness or color
enough to warrant inclusion of all these lines or bits of business?” If he doesn’t, cut him back!

The same principle applies to your more important story people—Hero’s or Heroine’s intimates, Villain’s henchmen, victims on one level or another. Your story, ever and always, concerns one primary figure: a protagonist whose happiness is threatened by a change. All else is incidental and must be held to proper proportion. And if you need an example, consider that great movie,
Casablanca,
where the love story of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman is played out against a background of action and danger and a milling host of colorful passing players. But the key word remains
passing,
for those characters come and go and fall by the wayside, fascinating us while they hold the stage but never taking over to the point that we lose sight of the heart of the story. Rick and his love for Ilsa remain the core.

A high proportion of the time, story people tend to exist on one level. Hero lives only to save Heroine from the clutches of a villain—the Batman syndrome, as it were. Hence, Hero is portrayed only in terms of the brawn and brains necessary to fulfill that function, play that role.

People really aren’t like that, of course. We each have a past, a future, family, friends, job, reputation, beliefs, interests, prejudices, and so on.

Too much of the time fictional characters are caricatures, creatures that rise little or not at all above first—that is, dominant—impressions. Which is like our relationship with many people in life. We never get above that level with them—after all, how intimately do you know your postal carrier or taxi driver? When you refer to a person as a “red-neck” or “yuppie” or “egghead,” you’re setting him up as a caricature, a stereotype.

Building a character in depth means that you go beyond this. Instead of limiting your picture of an offbeat high school boy to such punk items as his purple mohawk haircut and the safety pin through his left earlobe, you can introduce his unvoiced passion for Jean Michel Jarre’s New Age music and his tenderness towards a crippled sister and his nightmares of his drunken father vomiting on his dying mother and his secret fears that one day he’ll kill himself. You give him background, dreams, doubts, inner conflicts,
and the like, until the first impression/caricature with which you started becomes an excruciatingly detailed portrait. If you do it well, you may come up with a tremendously satisfying individual.