Dynamic Characters by Nancy Kress Read Free Book Online Page B

human being.
    A JOB WITH CLASS
    A second way that a job characterizes your protagonist is to locate him in the socioeconomic structure. This can be a convenient shorthand for conveying information about background, because readers will make certain assumptions about certain jobs. If, for instance, your character teaches Greek at Yale, most readers will make certain assumptions about her: She's educated, her salary allows middle-class living, she is not going to say ''ain't'' or ''I give her three dollars for that hat.'' Starting from your readers' basic assumptions about professors (or doctors, or drug dealers, or NBA stars), you can then expend your wordage on individualizing your character and differentiating her from type.
    Or, you can play it another way. You can use our socioeconomic preconceptions to play against type, surprising us with intriguing anomalies. Show us your character on the job as a dishwasher—and then show us that he also collects reproductions of pre-Columbian art and reads the great French poets in the original. We'll be fascinated to learn this guy's background, including his reasons for choosing the work he has.
    Judith Rossner did this very well in her novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Her protagonist is an elementary-school teacher from a respectable family, who habitually picks up rough and dangerous men at bars. Eventually, one of them kills her. Because our expectations about primary-school teachers don't include this behavior, Rossner gets our immediate attention. What made this particular young woman behave so contrary to her class?
    A note of caution, however: When you play strongly against occupational type, you must spend time convincing us that your character really would do this sort of work. We have no trouble accepting that smart, ambitious Adam Silverstone would choose to be a doctor. You will have to work hard to show us why an art collector and admirer of French poets is employed as a dishwasher.
    POSITION WANTED:
    THE NOT-YET-EMPLOYED CHARACTER
    So much for the novel in which the job and the basic novel structure arrive in your mind in a single package. Detectives in mystery novels, doctors in medical thrillers, platoon leaders in war novels—piece of cake. But suppose you don't know what your character does?
    Then you have a marvelous opportunity to employ him. Don't reach unthinkingly for those staples of TV sitcoms: architect, advertising copywriter, waitress. Be more imaginative. He could be an antique dealer, a ballet dancer, a costumer, a diemaker, an engineer, a forger, a gunsmith. . .. You get the idea. The possibilities are wide.
    Wide, but not infinite. The right job for your character must fit in with both the rest of your novel and your own abilities. You couldn't, for instance, employ a major character in Looking for Mr. Goodbar as a circus clown. The book has no need for a circus clown; it would seem artificial. Descriptions of circus-clown duties would add nothing to Rossner's story, and might compete against its thematic concerns and general atmosphere.
    So employ your protagonist—and the major secondary characters as well—carefully. As you choose jobs for them, keep five criteria in mind: self-image, worldview, natural abilities, class and credibility.
    GIVE HIM A JOB THAT TELLS US SOMETHING ABOUT HIS SELF-IMAGE
    Did your protagonist choose to become a successful scientist, spending eight years in college and fifteen in intense research on plasma physics? This man is focused, disciplined, intelligent—and he knows it. Perhaps modestly, perhaps egotistically. Either way, he trusts himself to set a goal and follow through until he's achieved it.
    Similarly, the forty-year-old man who in the past two years has worked as a salesclerk, handyman, busboy, truck driver, day laborer, telemarketer and petty thief—and none of them for more than four months at a stretch—has a different self-image. He sees the world as hostile (''Look what they did to me now!'') and