Dynamic Characters by Nancy Kress Read Free Book Online

Michel Duval, a long way from his home of Provence, France (he's on Mars), is first numbingly homesick, and later learns to translate his feeling for Provence into a similar feeling for the much different landscapes of an alien planet (Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson).
    Whether your character leaves home, stays put or returns home, your setting can be a rich source of both characterization and plot. Setting can do so many things: furnish motivation, illuminate internal conflicts, bolster the plausibility of action, provide a larger context for choices. But, of course, setting can do these things only if you take the time and imagination to explore its implications in your own mind, in order to decide which aspects of a particular setting you wish to emphasize in your fiction.
    Then send us there.
    SUMMARY: A CHECKLIST TO START THINKING ABOUT SETTING
    • Who lives in this place? How do they make their living? How stable is the economic situation? What does a household usually consist of? How stable are most households?
    •  What values are held in the community as a whole about material possessions? Religion? Children? Patriotism? Education? Crime? Sex? Working? Leaving? Newcomers? Privacy? Loyalty to kin?
    •  Who has status here—who is looked up to? For what reasons? Are high-status people treated differently from low-status people? How? How hard is it to change social groups? (Contrast Edwardian England, where it was very hard, with contemporary Los Angeles, where one good movie deal opens all doors.)
    • How are little boys expected to behave? Little girls? Teenagers? Young adults? Wives? Husbands? Community leaders? Old people? What usually happens if each of these people violates behavioral expectations?
    • What is the best personal future most of the people in this setting can imagine? The worst? The best community future? The worst?
    • How does your protagonist match—or differ from—the general community answers to the above questions? What are his preferences in dress, hair, books, music, food, etc.? Which of the prevailing cultural values does he share, which does he reject, which is he ambivalent about?
    • What plot incidents might result from mismatches between character and setting?
    Work is important.
    Of course, you already believe that, or else why are you reading this book, and why are you trying to write fiction in the first place? But I'm not talking now about your work in creating characters. I'm talking about their work. In the words of that perennial cocktail-party question, "What do you do?''
    And even more important, "Why and how do you do it?'' Knowing the answers to these three questions—really knowing them, in detail—can give your novel a tremendous boost.
    THE CASE FOR CHARACTER EMPLOYMENT
    In a short story, it may not matter how a protagonist earns his living. A successful short story is pared down and tight, with everything extraneous to the plot and theme left out, which may include careers.
    In Irwin Shaw's much-anthologized short story, ''The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,'' we never find out what the two characters, Michael and Frances, do when they're not having a Sunday stroll on Fifth Avenue. It doesn't matter. The story is concerned with a powerful moment in the deceptions and desires that make up a marriage, and not with anything else. As far as we readers are concerned, Michael and Frances are eternally walking Fifth Avenue.
    Novels are different. When we spend five hundred pages with a character, we want more than a powerful moment. We want to know this person.
    That's why occupation is important. It lets us see how your protagonist spends his days, structures his time, invests his energies, realizes his dreams. Or doesn't. A job can be many things, and sometimes a paycheck is the least important aspect.
    The right job for your character can do three things for your novel:
    • characterize the protagonist
    • gain credibility for the author
    • provide