The Fire in Fiction (7 page)

"Do you know," Chris said softly, "what it's like to love someone so much, that you can't see yourself without picturing her? Or what it's like to touch someone, and feel like you've come home?" He made a fist, and rested it in the palm of his other hand. "What we had wasn't about sex, or about being with someone just to show off what you've got, the way it was for other kids our
age. We were, well, meant to be together. Some people spend their whole lives looking for that one person," he said. "I was lucky enough to have her all along."

Picoult has a tough job in
The Pact.
For plot reasons she must withhold from us for most of the novel the truth of what really happened. Finally it comes out: Chris procured the suicide gun and helped Emily hold it to her head. He did this because he cared profoundly about her. She wanted suicide, he hoped to talk her out of it, but in the end he helped her because it was the only thing that would relieve her pain.

That, anyway, is what Picoult wants both the jury and her readers to swallow. We have to, for the jury is going to find Chris not guilty. That's quite a trick. For it to work, Chris has to sway us with a heartfelt declaration of love. Picoult's passage above does the job; at any rate, it did for many readers. To my eye it's clear that for Chris, Emily was special.

Who have been the special people in your life, the ones whose presence looms larger, whose friendships are fundamental, who are indelibly part of your personal story? You have such people in your life, I'm sure. Me too. How is it, then, that protagonists in many manuscripts seem to live in blissful isolation, self-sufficient, wholly self-made, and dependent on no one? Who are these people? They are not real. Consequently they are also unreal for readers. If they are to keep us deeply involved for several hundred pages, protagonists need a personal history.

Who in your story has special stature? Is there an influential teacher, a spouse, a past love, a friend of long standing, a wizard at math, an egotistical-but-gifted auto mechanic? Is there a character in your story who could be given such elevated importance? It isn't that difficult to do. Explore the effect that this paragon has on your protagonist, then find a meaningful moment for that effect to be expressed.

Singular human beings may be rare in life, but this is fiction. You can build them as needed. Who knows? You might even construct for yourself a whole new incarnation of the femme fatale.

ORDINARY

Who are the people in your life whom you take for granted, the ones who are always there, reliable, rock steady? Your family? Your co-workers? Your Starbucks barista? When was the last time you really spent time thinking about them, deep down contemplating who they are and what makes them go?

If it's been a while, you can be forgiven. We've all got a lot to deal with. Part of the gift of steady people in your life is precisely that they
are
steady. You don't have to worry about them. That's fine in life, but in fiction, characters who remain unexamined will be forgettable, even bland.

To see what I mean, let's look at some outstanding sidekicks in recent novels.

Dean Koontz is our indisputable ruler of supernatural and paranoid thrillers. In recent successes like
Life Expectancy
(2004),
The Husband
(2006), and
The Good Guy
(2007), Koontz's paranoid plotting has equaled that of masters like Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) and Philip K. Dick (1928-1982). It isn't only ordinary men whom Koontz torments, either. In his series of novels featuring southern California short-order cook Odd Thomas, the supernatural plays a big part.

Odd Thomas is perfectly ordinary, except that the dead talk to him. Unfortunately, they usually want something too; frequently revenge. In
Odd Thomas
(2003), a stranger comes to Thomas's town of Pico Mundo. Thomas dubs him "Fungus Man" and suspects something's amiss. It is. In Fungus Man's house, Thomas detects the presence of hundreds of
bodachs,
pain-eating spirits whose presence signals a coming catastrophe.

Many writers would make Odd Thomas a loner. Koontz, though, has a knack for countering our expectations. Thus, Thomas has friends, albeit strange ones like Little Ozzie, a 400-pound man with six fingers on his left hand. Thomas also has a girlfriend. Now, what kind of girlfriend would you give a guy who chats with the recently deceased? Koontz wants to keep the tone of the novel light, so he goes for kooky.

Kooky?

Thomas's girlfriend, Stormy Llewellyn, is introduced buying her and Thomas ice cream cones (coconut cherry chocolate chunk flavor) from the ice cream parlor where she works:

Her uniform included pink shoes, white socks, a hot-pink skirt, a matching pink-and-white blouse, and a perky pink cap. With her Mediterranean complexion, jet-black hair, and mysterious dark eyes, she looked like a sultry espionage agent who had gone undercover as a hospital candy striper.

Sensing my thoughts, as usual, she sat beside me on the bench and said, "When I have my own shop, the employees won't have to wear stupid uniforms."

"I think you look adorable."

"I look like a goth Gidget."

Stormy gave one of the cones to me, and for a minute or two we sat in silence, watching shoppers stroll past, enjoying our ice cream.

"Under the hamburger and bacon grease," she said, "I can still smell the peach shampoo."

"I'm an olfactory delight."

"Maybe one day when I have my own shop, we can work together and smell the same."

"The ice-cream business doesn't move me. I love to fry."

"I guess it's true," she said.

"What?"

"Opposites attract."

Contrast is the operating principle in creating sidekicks. What distinguishes Koontz, in my mind, is that he doesn't go for the obvious. The obvious contrast to Thomas would be his philosophical opposite: a skeptic or scientific type, say, or perhaps someone who deals with the dead in a practical way, like a funeral parlor director. Thomas's opposite would be serious and goal-driven, unlike lackadaisical Thomas. Their relationship would not be easy but instead knotty.

Instead, Stormy works at an ice cream parlor. An orphan, she has been Thomas's girlfriend since the age of sixteen. Now twenty, her ambition is to own her own ice cream place by twenty-four. She believes she and Thomas are soul mates. (They have a gypsy's fortune telling card that says so.) She teases him and won't have sex with him. She believes in delayed gratification and wants their first time to be pure.

The classic series pattern would be to establish conflicts in their relationship and play them out book after book. In
Odd Thomas,
the first in the series, Stormy dies. (Since Thomas talks to the dead, though, that is not the end of their relationship.)

The point here is that Koontz plays against what we expect. A diametrically opposite Stormy would have been sufficient for his story. The kooky, sweet, innocent-yet-self-aware Stormy that we get is both more endearing and more interesting. Why? Because this Stormy keeps us off balance.

Another principle of effective sidekicks is making them human. That means giving them conflicts. But what kinds of conflicts? Ah. Authors' answers to that question are telling indicators that divide run-of-the-mill writers from true storytellers.

Tess Gerritsen's tense thrillers are noted for their gruesome killers. On that score,
The Mephisto Club
(2006) doesn't disappoint. At Christmastime, Boston is hit with a series of dismemberments—body parts cunningly switched between crime scenes and mystery messages (such as PECCAVI, Latin for "I have sinned") written on the walls in blood. Assigned to this case, their sixth, are medical examiner Maura Isles and homicide detective Jane Rizzoli, who are in a sense each other's sidekicks. Like any good M.E., Maura is detached. Like any good homicide detective, Jane is fiery in her dedication and wounded (literally) by her past.

Gerritsen could easily have left Maura and Jane that way: central casting thriller leads, nicely contrasted and all-too-predictable. But she knows better. Both need other, human, sides. Maura's is shown on this Christmas Eve when she attends a Roman Catholic mass. Afterward, it is clear that she and the priest, Father Daniel Brophy, have a history:

"Hello, Maura."

She looked up and met Daniel's gaze. The church was not yet empty. The organist was still packing up her sheet music, and several choir members were still pulling on their coats, yet at that moment Daniel's attention was so centered on Maura, she might have been the only other person in the room.

"It's been a long time since you visited," he said.

"I suppose it has been."

"Not since August, wasn't it?"

So you've been keeping track, too.

Need a road map, here? Maura's cool and scientific side is softened up in this excruciating flirtation with a priest, which continues over a number of books. Meanwhile, on Christmas day, Jane goes home for dinner with her tension-fraught family. Present this year is someone new: Jane's four-month-old daughter, Regina:

"Let me hold her." Jane opened her arms and hugged a squirming Regina against her chest.
Only four months old,
she thought,
and already my baby is trying to wriggle away from me.
Ferocious little Regina had come into the world with fists swinging, her face purple from screaming.
Are you so impatient to grow up?
Jane wondered as she rocked her daughter.
Won't you stay a baby for a while and let me hold you, enjoy you, before the passing years send you walking out our door?

Jane's maternal tenderness is not quite what we expect from a woman who, at the crime scene, says to Maura coolly, "I see you found the left hand." Maura's search for a connection and Jane's struggle with her family not only provide extra plot layers, they make human two professionals who could be too easily stereotyped.

Sidekicks can be regular folk (although different than expected and three-dimensional, we hope) or they can be eccentrics. It's a matter of choice and what serves the story, but if you're using misfits or originals, there are issues for you to consider.

David Baldacci regularly climbs to the top of best-seller lists with his political thrillers, many involving the Secret Service.
The Camel Club
(2005) introduces a group of oddball Washington, D.C., conspiracy theorists, the club of the title, who meet once a month to share information and keep tabs on threats to American freedom. A less high-powered group of individuals would be hard to imagine.

Their leader and the series protagonist is a mystery man who has taken the name of his favorite film director, Oliver Stone. He lives in a cemetery caretaker's cottage and in a tent across from the White House in a designated protest area. On the tent is a sign that reads simply, "I want the truth."

Oliver clearly has manifold skills, keen smarts, and some sort of intelligence background. We learn little except that his past is a forgotten life, which is now replaced by his unusual lifestyle and the Camel Club. The club members, on the other hand, have detailed histories and distinct personalities.

The first is Caleb Shaw, a fussy academic type with twin doctorates in political science and eighteenth-century literature. A lifelong protester, his antiestablishment views have exiled him from academia. He works instead in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. What one notices about him first is his manner of dress: suits straight from the nineteenth century, complete with bowler hats, vest pocket watches, and long sideburns and mustache.

The second member of the Camel Club is Reuben Rhodes, a six-foot-four West Point graduate, multi-medal-winning veteran, and former Defense Intelligence Agency operative. Lacking purpose after Vietnam, his life slid into drug use until he ran into Oliver Stone, who helped him turn his life around. When not helping the Camel Club, he works on a loading dock.

The third member is Milton Farb who is able to add long strings of numbers, is possessed of a photographic memory, and once had a promising career at the National Institutes of Health that was unfortunately destroyed by his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition born in his childhood in the sideshow of a traveling
carnival. His paranoid personality had him close to destitution until he was persuaded by Oliver to become a contestant on the TV show
Jeopardy!
on which he earned a small fortune. Now he runs a successful business designing corporate websites, even though he is prone to ritualistic foot shuffling and adding aloud long strings of numbers meaningful only to him.

A ragtag bunch to be sure; not a collection of people one would expect to be battlers against conspiracy and effective early warning watchdogs for America. But that's the point. Who are the most eccentric people of your acquaintance? Anyone who dresses in antique suits? Any dockworkers who are multiply decorated war heroes? Maybe an obsessive-compulsive math genius sideshow freak or two?

No? Then you see my point. For oddballs and misfits to come across in a sea of secondary characters, they must be genuinely eccentric. But that comes with a problem: Such characters are hard to swallow. We won't buy them unless they are carefully and convincingly constructed, and remain true to their weirdo selves. That's not easy to do. David Baldacci does it.