Kress, Nancy by Beginnings Middles & Ends

Author:Beginnings, Middles & Ends [Middles, Beginnings, & Ends]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

UNDER

DEVELOPMENT:

YOUR CHARACTERS

AT MIDSTORY

YOUR CHARACTER IS HAVING a mid-life crisis. His life exists in your

story, and midway through your page count he is supposed to

undergo a significant change. He sees the error of his ways, or

he is made wise by experience, or he has a religious conversion,

or he simply grows up. By the end of the story he will behave

much differently than he did at the beginning. He will be a differ-

ent person—while, of course, remaining the same person the

reader has come to know.

How do you pull off that one?

It's not always easy. The danger is that the character's change

of heart will seem arbitrary and unmotivated. Sam has been be-

having like an evasive husband and father for two hundred pages,

and then suddenly he "comes to realize" that his family is the most important thing in the world to him and he moves back

home, listens attentively to Jane, and takes Martha to ball games.

Jane and Martha are bewildered, but not nearly as bewildered

as the reader, who is likely to think, "Huh? Sam? Give me a break!

I don't believe it for a minute!"

And yet writers do create convincing character changes all

the time. Elizabeth Bennet, in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice,

starts out by disliking Mr. Darcy and ends up in love with him (a

change still used by romance writers). W. Somerset Maugham's

Philip Carey begins Of Human Bondage ashamed of his physical

deformity, defenseless against his own emotions, conventional in

his beliefs, and something of a snob. Five hundred sixty-five

pages later, Philip has made his peace with his lameness, gained

80

Under Development: Your Characters at Midstory 81

at least some control over his passions, tested his beliefs against

the world, and now is preparing to marry the uneducated

daughter of a penniless clerk. Even a short story allows for at

least the beginning of a genuine character change, as we have

already seen in Carver's "Fat."

To make character changes convincing, four things must

happen (we'll look at each in detail in this chapter):

• The reader must understand your character's initial per-

sonality, and especially her motivation: why she's behaving

the way she is.

• The reader must see evidence that your character is capa-

ble of change (not everyone is).

• The reader must see dramatized a pattern of experiences

that might reasonably be expected to affect someone.

• The reader must see a plausible new motivation replace

the old one.

The first three of these should occur mostly in the middle of

your story (the fourth may also occur there). If you take care to

set up character changes in the middle, such changes won't seem

arbitrary or contrived at the end. In addition, if you maintain

control over your character's motivation, you will automatically

enhance other story elements: plot, tension and theme. This is

because stories grow out of what characters do, and, in turn, what

characters do grows out of what they want.

A READER'S VIEW:

TWO KINDS OF MOTIVATION

As anyone who reads a newspaper already knows, human beings

are capable of anything. Something motivates those people who

collect Victorian underwear, leave eight million dollars to their

cat, commit axe murders, risk their lives for strangers, or tap-

dance the length of California.

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