Dynamic Characters by Nancy Kress Read Free Book Online Page A

plot ideas
    However, it must be the right job. What job is that? THE PRE-EMPLOYED PROTAGONIST
    In some novels, you don't really have a choice. The job is the novel. If P.D. James's protagonist, Adam Dalgliesh, weren't a detective, he wouldn't have murders to solve. If Herman Wouk's Willie Keith weren't an officer aboard the U.S.S. Caine, he couldn't have participated in The Caine Mutiny. In such books, employment comes tightly bound to the original idea.
    However, employment can still be used to characterize. What is most important about a job is not just what a person works at but why, how and with what results. Did your character choose his job? Is he doing it from financial necessity, because it's the only work he could find, because his parents wanted him to, only temporarily while he qualifies for something else, or as the realization of a lifelong dream?
    Does he like his work? Hate it? Regard it as a necessary but boring interruption to the parts of his life he really likes? Resent it because he considers it beneath him? A fourth-grade teacher who wakes up every morning eager to rush to the classroom is a different person from the fourth-grade teacher who loathes the very sight of a chalkboard.
    Is he good at it? Mediocre? Downright terrible? Does he care? How much of his ego is bound up in his work?
    Dramatizing answers to questions like these can show us a lot more about your protagonist than merely telling us he works as a salesman, or a lathe operator, or a doctor. Some examples:
    • Charles Paris, the recurring amateur sleuth in Simon Brett's mystery series, is a British actor. But Olivier he's not. We see Charles appearing in a string of bad productions, knowing they're bad, yet taking comfort in the fact that his small parts give him plenty of time backstage to drink Bell's whiskey. When he's supposed to be a corpse, hidden on-stage during the whole first act, he can't keep from giggling. Yet, touchingly, he collects his own reviews, which are usually of the type, ''Also appearing in the cast was Charles Paris.'' Through his attitudes toward his lamentable parts, we come to know Charles's real interests (drinking), his detached but acute powers of perception, his acceptance of his own mediocrity and his nearly dead traces of failed hope.
    • The unnamed, second-person protagonist of Jay McInerney's novel Bright Lights, Big City has a different attitude. He works in the ''Department of Factual Verification'' of a national magazine. His job is to verify facts in articles by big-name authors. He hates the job and hates his boss. As his life unravels, so does his work performance. McInerney uses job details to illuminate his character's confusion about the world, himself and his future. Had we known this protagonist only in social settings, we wouldn't have known him nearly as well, nor realized the full extent of his personal crisis.
    • Violet Clay, in Gail Godwin's eponymous novel, is similarly confused. Violet knows what she wants to do: paint. But she expects easy success, and when it doesn't come, she panics. She turns instead to painting covers for trashy paperback books, because there she can be a star. Violet's career is only one aspect of her self-centered attitude (she also expects love and money to be instantly available to her), but an important one. When she finally grows up, she starts making the sacrifices necessary to genuinely learn her art.
    • At the opposite end of the attitude scale, Adam Silverstone, in Noah Gordon's medical novel The Death Committee, is totally committed to his profession. Chief resident in a great Boston hospital, he has always wanted to be a doctor, has struggled against great economic odds to realize his dream and knows he is talented. Author Gordon uses Silverstone's committed, professional attitude toward his work as a counterpoint to his halfway, ungiving attitude toward human relationships. Silverstone is a wonderful doctor, but must learn to become an ethical