Stein on Writing (12 page)

If your character brought his mouth down to his food rather than his food up to his mouth, the reader would likely draw an instant assumption about his upbringing. However, some distinctions in eating habits are
poor markers because they are too complex to describe succinctly. For instance, the British use a fork in the left hand and a knife in the right. The left hand brings the cut food to the mouth. Americans keep switching hands and bring food to the mouth with the right hand. Distinctions of that sort are not good markers for the writer because they require too much description and readers might still not get the point without the author telling them explicitly. A marker should convey its point instantly.

Perhaps the most frequently used marker is found in the vocabulary and expressions of a character’s dialogue. If a character uses words like “ostensibly,” “exacerbate,” “primordial” correctly, and with ease, what would you, as a reader, think about them? That vocabulary is indicative of someone who is well educated. But it could also reflect a pompous person. One of the most common vocabulary markers is heard on television when a police officer talks about a “perpetrator.”

In most of my novels I have at least one character with an accent, a distinguishing marker. In
The Best Revenge
at least three characters have accent markers that differ noticeably from each other. Many politicians speak in incomplete sentences peppered with clichés. Street people use four-letter words and vulgar expressions. All of these markers characterize quickly.

The content of a character’s speech can also generate markers. If a character displays knowledge of what went on in previous centuries, is interested in international issues, reads books and appreciates them as physical objects, and votes regularly as a matter of principle, what will the reader think about his or her background? Markers provide the writer with an opportunity to show the character’s background instead of telling the reader about it.

Attitudes can also be used as markers:

Arthur came to New York expecting to be insulted or mugged by every passerby.

An inexperienced attitude toward travel can be an important marker, for instance, a preference for group tours, being intimidated by foreign languages and customs, or buying up mass-produced souvenirs. However, be wary of cliché markers such as an American tourist abroad in search of a restaurant that serves hamburgers.

I have a strong preference for action markers, that is sentences that describe what a character does and at the same time reveal something about the character’s upbringing or background:

Every time Zelda ate in a restaurant, she found some reason to send food back to the kitchen.

Louis always played it safe by overtipping the waiter.

As usual, Angelica let her food get cold because she was busy watching everyone else in the restaurant.

We have just seen three quite different instant characterizations in the same location, a restaurant.

I have sometimes found that even accomplished writers neglect to ask themselves some fundamental questions about their important characters that could provide useful markers. For instance, what trait inherited by the protagonist has most influenced his adult life? What custom of the protagonist’s family still haunts his life? Which personal habit has he tried to break, unsuccessfully, for years? What family tradition has had the most positive influence on the protagonist? What is the single most important factor in the villain’s upbringing that contributed to his reprehensible conduct?

If you are presently writing a novel, have you examined it to see if there are some social or class differences between your two most important characters? How do those differences influence the story? If you have neglected such differences, how might you bolster your story by adding some social and cultural differences that arouse emotion?

And now that you’re mastering the creation of characters, it’s time to ask, “How do you plot that story?”

Thwarting Desire: The Basis of Plotting

W
e are driven through life by our needs and wants. So must the characters we create be motivated by what they want. The driving force of characters is their desire.

Inexperienced writers, sometimes ill read in the great works of their own and previous times, often try to write novels with a relatively passive protagonist who wants little or has largely given up wanting. I have met more than one writer who says that his character doesn’t want anything—he just wants to “live his life.” That always brings to mind something Kurt Vonnegut said:

“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”

The most interesting stories involve characters who want something badly. In Kafka’s
The Trial,
Joseph K. wants to know why he is being arrested, why he is being tried, what he is guilty of. In Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby,
the central character constructs his life with the sole object of reuniting with Daisy, the woman he loves. In Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary,
Emma Bovary, her head full of romantic notions, wants to escape the dreariness of her husband and her life. If your character doesn’t want anything badly enough, readers will have a hard time rooting for him to attain his goal, which is what compels readers to continue reading. The more urgent the want, the greater the reader’s interest. A far future want does not set the reader’s pulse going the way an immediate want does. The want can be negative, wanting something not to happen, as in Fred
erick Forsyth’s
The Day of the Jackal,
in which the reader hopes that de Gaulle will escape the assassin’s bullet.

In the chapter on characterization, I suggested that some of the most memorable characters in fiction were eccentric. To carry the point a step further, I suggest relating the character’s deepest desire to the character’s fundamental difference from other characters, especially the character of the antagonist.

Which brings us to the essence of plotting: putting the protagonist’s desire and the antagonist’s desire into sharp conflict. If the conflict isn’t sharp, the tension will be lax. One way to plan is to think of what would most thwart your protagonist’s want, then give the power to thwart that want to the antagonist. And be certain there is a two-way urgency: your protagonist wants a particular, important desire fulfilled as soon as possible, and the antagonist wants to wreck the chance of that happening, also as soon as possible.

Those are the three keys: the want and the opposition to the want need to be important, necessary, and urgent. The result should be the kind of conflict that interests readers.

A word of caution: these plotting guidelines are
basic
and to some degree simplistic. They are intended to provide the writer with the easiest route to publication. The well-read writer will be familiar with complex plots that deviate from the norm. What they do not deviate from is the fierce desire of the protagonist and the conflict engendered by obstacles.

The essence of dramatic conflict lies in the clash of wants. You need to be certain that the conflicting wants are connected significantly and are over something that the reader will view as important. For instance, if the hero wants to preserve his valuable stamp collection and the villain has stolen it and intends to sell the items in it piecemeal to conceal his theft, their wants are clearly on a collision course. However, ask yourself, does the reader care enough about the stamp collection? If the stamp collection belonged to President Franklin Roosevelt, an avid stamp collector, the theft of that collection could have interfered with matters of state until it was resolved. The reader will care about the stamp collection to the degree that he cares about the protagonist and what the protagonist loves. That’s one of the reasons why the best plots develop out of character.

It is easier for the reader to identify with a want that is close to universal and not too specialized (a stamp collection is relatively special
ized). The wants that interest a majority of readers include gaining or losing a love, achieving a lifetime ambition, seeing that justice is done, saving a life, seeking revenge, and accomplishing a task that at first seemed impossible.

In transient fiction (sometimes called “commercial” or “popular” fiction), the wants are less personal and often more melodramatic. Events happen rather than grow out of character. Though my personal preference is for literary fiction, I have worked with a number of highly successful professional bestselling novelists who didn’t seem to care whether their characters were remembered years later. They mastered craft; their storytelling was suspenseful and compelling for large numbers of readers. The wants of their characters tended to be different from those in literary fiction. For them and other writers of popular fiction, the following wants were paramount:

• Defeating the plans of a national enemy.
  
• Blocking an assassin out to kill an important person.
  
• Rescuing someone close to the hero.
  
• Solving an important crime.
  

The clash between your characters can be based on almost anything as long as it is involved with their desires. The most common causes of a clash are money, love, and power. Power connotes control, usually over other human beings. Therefore, in a community of two people, if one has power, the other doesn’t have it. Some of the most interesting plots involve a character who has power in one arena up against a character who has power in another arena, and both characters are caught in the same crucible. (We will deal with the crucible in its own chapter.)

When planning your story, it is important to remember that small clashes result in stories that seem relatively trivial. Larger clashes resonate for the reader. Ask yourself these questions: Does the conflict you are working on lead to profound unhappiness, injury, or death? Or is the conflict over an object that is exceedingly valuable to the main character? Is the conflict over an important life decision—to move far away, to change one’s career, to leave for another partner, to follow a hazardous opportunity, to avoid intolerable circumstances?

Ask yourself, will the clash between your protagonist and your antagonist seem inevitable to the reader? Have you avoided coincidence as the cause of their clash? Will the clash take place in a highly visible environment so that the reader will see the action?

If you have some concern about the intensity of your plot, ask yourself, Does the conflict you’ve invented involve the best possible thing that could happen to your protagonist? Is what happens a surprise to anyone? Can you make it surprising by setting up an action and then showing the opposite of what your reader is likely to expect?

Would the conflict you have described result in a verbal or physical struggle? Would that struggle call for strong scenes in which your characters clash in an exciting way? Remember your book is told in scenes each one of which should produce an excited reaction in the reader.

If any scene seems not yet exciting enough, think of introducing a new character into it, which always generates possibilities for conflict, especially if the new character has something important at stake in what is happening in that scene.

If you get stuck, there’s another device some writers use. Think of the worst thing that could possibly happen to you right now. Don’t censor. A layman instinctively covers up. A writer disciplines himself to uncover.

Now think of your very best friend. Conjure up a picture of him or her in your mind. Remember the good times with your best friend. What is the worst thing that could happen to him or her at this very moment? It has to be something different from the worst thing you imagined happening to you. It should be linked to your friend’s character, ambitions, or desire.

Now imagine the same worst thing happening not to your best friend but to the character in your story. Would that create a suitable obstacle in the plot you are developing?

The protagonist’s biggest obstacle is usually the antagonist and what he does. But there can be numerous other obstacles that will thwart the protagonist on the way to achieving his goal, including, perhaps, what you imagined happening to your friend.

There are other techniques to get your plotting motor going. By thinking of certain conventional obstacles, less conventional obstacles will occur to you. For instance, your character needs to get someplace right away. The car breaks down. (In a melodrama, the breakdown may have been precipitated by the villain or an accomplice.) Or the weather changes drastically and impedes progress. If the weather won’t do, think of any unexpected, uncontrollable event.

Here are some other stimuli. A deaf person fails to hear something. A blind person fails to see something. A recluse refuses to tell what he has
seen. An airplane flight is aborted on takeoff. Water is needed immediately for an urgent purpose; suddenly there is no water in the tap.

There are larger obstacles that can stimulate your plotting: a sudden illness of an important character. Help is unavailable. An accident happens on the highway to someone the reader cares about. Or an accident at home—someone falls in the bathtub or off a ladder. A natural disaster (flood, earthquake, hurricane, forest fire) puts your character at great risk.

It’s common to think of the obstacles of all being generated by the villain, but we’ve seen that acts of nature can also be obstacles. And there are always other people butting in. You can devise an unwanted intervention by someone who wants to help but makes things worse. Or you can have an unwanted intervention by someone unrelated to the villain who wants to block the protagonist for reasons of his own. You can have a previously absent person return who causes problems because she is not up on what has transpired during her absence. The list could go on. But you get the point. You can always check your daily newspaper for obstacles in the lives of people in news stories.

One caution. Some obstacles need to be planted ahead of time so as not to seem arbitrary devices of the author.

Writers who feel the need of discipline in plotting can sometimes benefit by preparing a list of every obstacle they plan to use in their plot. They then can ask themselves, is the first obstacle strong enough to hook the reader? Do the obstacles build? That means as each obstacle is faced and overcome by the protagonist, an even greater obstacle has to present itself.

I know novelists who have very strong first obstacles, but they do not follow up with stronger obstacles, with the consequence that the reader feels the story winding down. As a result, the reader either gives up reading before the end or, even if he’s persistent, won’t rush to get that author’s next book.

Some writers I’ve worked with find it difficult to develop plots because they’re not sure their plot ideas would be of interest to readers. Here are some clues to areas of reader interest:

• Reading about enemies trapped together. In life, one of the most uncomfortable experiences people have is being with someone they don’t want to be with. In fiction, when readers observe someone else in that predicament, it engages a strong concealed emotion. The reader wants to know the outcome.
  
• Experiencing a character’s embarrassment involves the reader. Causing a character to be embarrassed will almost always create an interesting plot development.
  
• Experiencing a character’s fear creates enormous tension. It can be fear of mortal danger, of course, but experienced novelists generate fear from small things. Eric Ambler’s
  The Light of Day
  has a scene in which the protagonist is chauffeuring a car with a loose door panel concealing smuggled arms. As the screws rattle, so does the reader, afraid that the car’s owner in the backseat will hear the rattling. The scene is full of tension.
  
• Change in a relationship invites the reader’s tense interest in the outcome. In life, people get bored when nothing changes even though changes in life are fraught with peril. If the perils of major change happen within the covers of a book, the reader will be absorbed.
  
• Readers enjoy being surprised. Nice surprises are one of the pleasures of life. We like to receive surprise presents, good news, the announcement of an unexpected visit by friends we want to see. Bad surprises in life bring hurt, sadness, misfortune. But in books readers thrill to the unexpected. A new obstacle, an unexpected confrontation by an enemy or a sudden twist of circumstance all start adrenaline pumping and pages turning. Novels, stories, plays, and screenplays thrive on bad as well as good surprises.
  

Surprises are not difficult to create. Look at each important incident in your plot and see what you would normally expect to happen next. Then have the exact opposite happen. At least half the time an idea will suggest itself that will surprise your characters as well as yourself.

You can surprise yourself (and your readers eventually) by picking an unusual locale that you know well enough to depict accurately. Then choose a character you have already created who is most unlikely to show up in that locale. Put that character in that locale. Imagine what happens when the character shows up there, and other characters react.

Finally, I would like to suggest an easy means for getting character-derived plot ideas. Sometimes even experienced writers get stuck. I counsel them to examine the classified personal ads, which frequently have the following characteristics: