A guy walks into a bar —This set-up is about as lame an opening as It was a dark and stormy night, yet all of us are willing to swallow the opener and go with it until we get the punch line. Why is that? Why are listeners or readers willing and able to hang in there long enough to groan in disgust or laugh their fannies off? For one thing, it’s low risk. For another, it’s over quickly. The audience or reader thinks – Whether I enjoy this or not, I’ll be onto other things in fifteen to twenty seconds.
None of the above applies to writing fiction. As far as risk goes, most readers I know have a ten-page rule. If they aren’t engaged in a new book after the first ten pages, the book dies. (Literary agents have a ten word rule, but that’s another topic for another time.) My point isn’t about writing super-amazing ten-page openers. Rather, it’s about sustaining the character you introduce in the first sentence throughout the rest of the book. The comedian will drop the guy in the bar and go onto the next gag the moment the bar laughs die down. The novelist who introduces a martinet who runs people into the ground, or a coward who has anonymously turned in a business rival for cheating on his wife, has planted some pretty fertile seeds that the reader expects to sprout, grow and bear fruit.
How does a writer sustain the qualities of a character throughout the changing circumstances put before him in the developing story? Think about Charles Dickens and Scrooge. My guess is that Dickens knew without a doubt that Ebenezer Scrooge would strike a low water mark right from the get-go, being a loathsome penny-pinching lender to the poor, and end up a kindly, charitable man who knew how to keep Christmas better than anyone. From the opening page Scrooge indiscriminately despised everyone. He hadn’t a sympathetic cell in his body for widows and orphans needing a helping hand. They and their unemployed or underemployed breadwinners were nothing more than “surplus population” that would be better off dying. Dickens was relentless in painting Scrooge’s dark side. He hated the poor and people that tried to help them. He did not mourn the loss of his business partner of many years, and made his one loyal employee miserable. He had no tolerance for holidays, religion, and family. Down deep he loathed himself.
Dickens must have had a ball cooking up all of the rottenness that makes Scrooge the timeless curmudgeon he is. He sustained all of that nastiness right up to the tipping point; then, when we could take it no more, he began pouring in the circumstances that would change Scrooge. By the end of this moral tale all of us are seeing a little bit of Ebenezer in ourselves. When we see the beautiful person that Scrooge changed into, it hits us right between the eyes – he had a second chance. If Dickens kept pushing the nasty button, Scrooge would have ignored the three visiting spirits, or more likely, would have sent them packing. Had that been the case, he never would have changed, and we’d have much less to watch on TV in December.
If your main character is going to change you have to know what he’s going to change into, what’s going to cause the change, and when will you bring those affecters into play. Through the visiting spirits we learned of Ebenezer’s estrangement from home, the death of the sister, and the loss of the woman he loved due to being consumed by work and the lust for wealth. All three of these circumstances built an unmistaken lonely man. His loneliness was his vulnerability. The innocent love Tiny Tim shows his family, and extends to Scrooge, chips away at his hard shell. Memories of a kindly first employer and the faithful nephew who invites him to dinner every Christmas are poignant barbs into his cold heart.
The reader is left with a sense of Yeah, all of that could happen. Deep down inside, the man didn’t want to be the way he was. As writers, how do we sustain our characters personality, beliefs, fears, yearnings? I attempt to do this by describing each of these traits in a mini-biography I create for every key character. You don’t want to become known as El Predicto, creator of simple characters and easy-to-figure story lines. Still, you need to know who your character is, how he’s going to change, and when that change will happen.
I wish I could say that planning all of the change-enabling events is a snap if you work with a detailed outline. All of that might be true, but I don’t write outlines. Instead, over a period of weeks usually, I write out the whole story, including major and some minor characters, conflicts, growth-engendering circumstances, set backs, breakthroughs….you name it. These notes can easily run twenty pages, single-spaced, of two and three-sentence paragraphs.
I read and re-read these notes, adding, deleting, and moving text around so that it’s all there and it flows. Next I’ll identify the logical breaks in the story, breaks that will probably denote new chapters. When all of that is mapped out I’ll number the places where the story pivots or jumps, again thinking of these places as chapter breaks. If I really know how the story will end I will go back into the notes and in boldface, or color, set the chapter of great change apart from the rest. If I’m satisfied that I haven’t waited too long to get the race-to-the-end underway, and that I haven’t written the major crossroads event so close to the beginning that the rest is slow and dull, I will begin writing.
Last thought: A writer should not worry about getting the opening chapter to be picture perfect before launching in earnest into writing the rest of the book. In draft form, all you want from that first chapter is to get you off square one. Be more concerned with how you want the story to end than how to begin it. What does my story teach? How did I entertain or uphold? Have I written in such a way that my readers anticipate certain questions to be answered or problems solved, and did I provide those answers and solutions? If so, I have written a credible, balanced book. If not, I’ve still got some revising to do.
How do you write sustainable characters and stories?
Till later,
Ken