“What is it, you trying to impress me? Trying to show me you’re big time? Well, don’t suck ego out of me, lady! I only take what I earn!”

  Nora had no time for this. She hurried away from the cab. To her surprise, he jumped out and followed her, shouting at her with as much outrage as she’d expect if she hadn’t paid him at all. “You can’t do this to me in America!” he shouted. “I’m a Protestant, you never heard of the Protestant work ethic?”

  Finally she stopped. He caught up with her, still scolding. “You can’t do your rich-lady act with me, you hear me?”

  “Shut up,” she said. “Give me back the twenty.” He did, and she gave him a five. “There,” she said. “Satisfied?”

  His mouth hung open; he looked at the five in utter disbelief. “What is this!” he said. “No tip?”

  Now, that’s a guy who won’t let go. If you saw that scene in a movie or even read it in a novel, chances are you’d remember the cabdriver. Yet you wouldn’t expect him to be important in the plot. If he showed up again it would be for more comic relief, not for anything important. For instance, when the story is all but over and Nora is coming home with Pete for a well-earned rest, it could be funny if they get in a cab and it turns out to be the same driver. The audience would remember him well enough for that. But they would be outraged if the cabdriver turned out to be an assassin or a long-lost cousin.

  This would not be true, however, if this were the first scene in the story. At the beginning of the story, all the characters are equal — we don’t know any of them at all. So if in fact you wanted to tell the story of how Nora got involved with this obsessive-compulsive cabdriver — or how the cabdriver managed to get Nora’s attention so he could start dating her — this would be a pretty good beginning.

  The other side of that coin is that if the cabdriver is in fact supposed to be minor, you could not begin the story with this scene. If these were the first five paragraphs of the story, we would naturally expect that the story was going to be about Nora and the cabby, and when Nora goes on through the story without ever seeing or even thinking of the cabdriver again, at some point many readers are going to ask, “What was that business with the cabdriver all about?”

  This is because much of what makes the difference between major and minor characters is the amount of time you spend on them. And the amount of time is not absolute — it is relative to the total length of the story. In a 1,500-word story, this 150-word section would be 10 percent of the total — and that’s a lot. In an 80,000-word novel, this 150-word section would be almost vanishingly brief. So the cabby would seem more important in a short story than in a novel.

  However, if this scene comes at the beginning of a story, so that the reader doesn’t know yet what the story is about, then the cabby is present in the entire 150 words of the story’s first scene. At that point he seems to the reader to be almost as important as Nora — he is diminished only by the fact that he is not named and Nora is the point-of-view character. The reader has every reason to expect that the cabby will amount to something.

  This is why it’s a good idea to introduce at least a few major characters first, so that the first characters the reader meets — the characters who occupy 100 percent of the opening — really will turn out to matter to the story.

  MAJOR CHARACTERS

  By now it should be obvious that the major characters are the ones who really matter, the ones the story is, to one degree or another, about. Their choices turn the story, their needs drive the story forward.

  These are also the characters who most need to be characterized. Because they really matter to the story, you can devote as much time to them as strong characterization might require, and the rest of this book is devoted to showing you exactly how to do full characterization.

  There are other cues you use to let the audience know which characters are major, besides the raw amount of time devoted to characterization:

  Choices

  If a character is relatively powerful — powerful enough to make choices that change other characters’ lives — the audience will remember her better and expect her to amount to something more in the story. If the other characters all regard a character as dangerous or powerful, the readers will, too.

  Focus

  This leads to one of the most effective theatrical techniques for making the audience notice a character — have everyone on stage look at him, listen to him, or talk about him behind his back. If you do enough of this, you never have to bring the character on stage. We never see the title character in Waiting for Godot, for instance, and yet he is arguably the most important character in the play, and his failure to arrive is the most important “event.”

  You can use the same technique in fiction to focus the readers’ attention on a character whether he’s present or not. In The Lord of the Rings, the character of Sauron appears in person only once; beyond that, he personally intervenes in the story only a handful of times. Yet he is the engine driving almost every plot thread, the focus of everyone’s attention far more often than any other character. The result is that readers “remember” Sauron as one of the most important characters in The Lord of the Rings — even though he almost never appears in the story at all.

  Frequency of Appearance

  If a character keeps coming back, even if she’s not all that exciting or powerful, we begin to expect her to do something important — or else why would the writer keep bringing her up? This is why, when movie stars are evaluating a script, they’ll keep track of how many scenes their character will be in. If they aren’t in enough scenes, they won’t loom large enough in the audience’s mind — and therefore the film won’t be a “star vehicle.”

  Sometimes a character who should remain minor will keep coming back just because of her job — a bartender at the club where two major characters regularly meet, for instance. Then you need to reduce her importance — have her say very little or have substitute bartenders show up on her night off, something to let the reader know that it doesn’t matter much whether the bartender is there or not.

  Action

  A character doesn’t have to appear all that often, as long as every time he does appear, what he says and does has an important effect on the plot. On the other hand, a character who is often present but does almost nothing can quickly fade in the readers’ memory. In the play Romeo and Juliet, Romeo spends a lot of time with his two friends, Benvolio and Mercutio. In fact, as I remember it Benvolio is present in more scenes than Mercutio, including the first scene in which we see Romeo himself. Yet Benvolio is completely forgettable, while Mercutio is one of the most memorable characters in the play. Why? Because Benvolio never does anything but listen to people and make a few bland comments, while Mercutio is flamboyant and provocative and funny and outrageous, and when he is onstage he either incites or is deeply involved in every action.

  Rule of thumb: Passive characters will never seem as important as active characters.

  Sympathy

  In another chapter I’ll discuss techniques for making characters likable or sympathetic; for now, it’s enough to say that the more endearing or charming a character is, the more the audience comes to like her as a human being, the more important that character will be to the audience, and the more they’ll expect to see what becomes of her.

  Point of View

  One of the most potent devices for making a character important to your readers is to use the character’s point of view. The third part of this book is devoted to explaining point of view, so this will be only a brief reference. Rule of thumb: When a character in the story is used as the narrator or viewpoint character, his importance is greatly increased.

  There are also some variables that are out of your control. A character might be extremely important to some readers because they think they resemble him, or because the character resembles someone they love or hate. Or a character you think of as important may seem unimportant to some readers because they have seen too many characters like him — to them, the character has become a cliche. In fact, if your story is very popular, it is likely to be imitated — and the fact that the market is flooded with imitations of your best character will soon make your character feel like an imitation, too, even though he’s the original!

  But since these things are generally out of your control, you can’t very well use them to help you establish your hierarchy of characters. The techniques you can control are:

  Ordinariness vs. strangeness

  The amount of time devoted to the character

  The character’s potential for making meaningful choices

  Other characters’ focus on him

  The character’s frequency of appearance

  The character’s degree of involvement in the action

  Readers’ sympathy for the character

  Narration from the character’s point of view

  As you use these techniques to varying degrees with the many characters in your story, an unconscious ranking of the characters will emerge in the readers’ minds, starting with the least important background characters, moving up through the minor characters, to the major characters, and finally to two or three main characters or a single protagonist — the people or person the story is mostly about.

  Chances are you won’t be fully aware of the hierarchy of characters in your own story — it’s almost impossible for a storyteller to have all these techniques completely under conscious control. But if you find that readers seem not to notice a character you think is important, or if a character starts “taking over” the story when you don’t want him to, you can use these techniques to adjust the character’s relative importance. And when these techniques are under your control, you can play your characters the way a harpist plays each string on the harp, a few at a time, for exactly the right balance and harmony.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HOW TO RAISE THE EMOTIONAL STAKES

  Reading a story is not a passive process. While a reader may seem to be sitting still, slowly turning pages, in his own mind he is going through a great many emotions. Underlying all of them is a strong tension. The stronger it is, the more the reader concentrates on finding out what happens next, the more attention he pays, the more intensely he feels all the emotions of the tale.

  The amount of tension the reader feels depends partly on her emotional state, her imagination, her ability as a reader. But the strength of the story’s tension also depends on choices you make. Some of these choices have to do with the story’s structure — hinted at in chapter 5 — and others are simply outside the scope of this book. However, there are several things you can do with characters to raise the readers’ emotional stake in the story, make them more emotionally involved in what’s happening, make them care more about the outcome.

  SUFFERING

  Pain is a sword with two edges. The character who suffers pain and the character who inflicts it are both made more memorable and more important.

  Pain can be either physical or emotional. Great grief and great physical agony, well presented in the tale, can greatly increase the reader’s emotional involvement. Remember, though, that you aren’t using grief to make the reader grieve any more than you’re using physical pain to make the reader bleed. Readers don’t necessarily feel what the characters are feeling — when the villain cries out in his agony of defeat, the reader may be cheering inside. But the intensity of the characters’ feeling, as long as it remains believable and bearable, will greatly intensify the reader’s feelings — whatever they are.

  Of course, not all pain is alike. A cut finger doesn’t magnify a character very much. Ghastly physical torture can become unbearable to imagine, so that the reader refuses to remain engaged with the story and you lose him completely. The most powerful uses of physical and emotional pain are somewhere between the trivial and the unbearable.

  In Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, the main character suffers terribly: A traffic accident puts him in a coma for many years; he loses his career, the woman he loves, and many years of his life. Furthermore, when he finally recovers, he continues to suffer in body and soul. And with each twinge of pain and grief, the reader’s emotional involvement in the story becomes more intense.

  Notice that his pain is both physical and emotional. The loss of a loved one can weigh as heavily in the mind of the audience as the loss of a limb. However, physical pain is much easier to use because it doesn’t have to be prepared for. If a character is tortured, as in King’s novel Misery, the audience will wince in sympathetic agony even if they don’t know the character very well — even if they have never seen the character before. Emotional loss does not come so easily. In The Dead Zone, King devoted several pages to creating a warm, valuable love relationship between the main character and the woman he loves. It is at a vital moment in their relationship that he has his terrible traffic accident. Now when he discovers that she married someone else during his coma, the readers know how much he loved her, and so the pain of losing her actually outweighs the physical pain he suffered.

  Suffering loses effectiveness with repetition. The first time a character is hit in the head, the pain raises her importance; the third or fourth time, the character becomes comic, and her pain is a joke. Likewise, the first time you mention a character’s grief, it raises his stature and makes the reader more emotionally involved. But if you keep harping on the character’s suffering, the reader begins to feel that the character is whining, and the reader’s emotional involvement decreases.

  You can see this with audience reactions to slasher movies — those horror flicks in which the special effects department keeps coming up with cool new ways to dismember the characters. The hideous murders in these movies were originally devised to jack up the audience’s emotions, higher and higher with each death. Rather sooner than they expected, however, many in the audience stopped being horrified and began to laugh. This is not really a sign of the audience’s moral decay or inability to empathize; it’s simply that an audience reaches a point when fictional pain is too difficult to bear. When pain or grief become unbearable in real life, human beings often develop fictions to cope with it — we call it insanity. When pain or grief become unbearable in fiction, readers simply disengage from the story and either abandon the tale or laugh at it.

  Does this mean that pain is a sharply limited character device? No — it is almost unlimited in its potential. But you must remember that you increase the power of suffering, not by describing the injury or loss in greater detail, but rather by showing more of its causes and effect. Blood and gore eventually make the audience gag; sobbing and moaning eventually earn the audience’s laughter or contempt. On the other hand, if you make us understand how intensely the character loved before losing the loved one or trusted before being betrayed, then his grief will have far greater power, even if you show it with great economy. If you show a character coping with her pain or grief, refusing to succumb to it, then readers will wince or weep for her. Another rule of thumb: If your characters cry, your readers won’t have to; if your characters have good reason to cry, and don’t, your readers will do the weeping.

  SACRIFICE

  Pain or grief also increase a reader’s intensity in proportion to the character’s degree of choice. Pete has broken his leg on a hike, and Nora has to set it for him. That scene will be painful and will certainly magnify both characters as they cause and suffer pain. But Pete’s pain will be far more powerful if he is alone and has to set the leg himself. As he ties a rope to his ankle, passes it around a tree trunk, braces his good leg and pulls on the end of the rope, the agony which he inflicts on himself will make the scene utterly unforgettable, even if we never see his face, even if his agony is never described at all. This works with emotional suffering as well. The climax of the movie Broadcast News comes when Holly Hunter’s character is forced to choose between her desperate passion for William Hurt’s charming but shallow character and her integrity as a journalist, which up to now has been the foundation of her whole life. When we see her give up her lover in order to preserve her integrity, our emotions are far more intense than they would have been if she had lost him under circumstances beyond her control. Self-chosen suffering for the sake of a greater good — sacrifice, in other words — is far more intense than pain alone.

  When one character willingly inflicts pain on another, the torturer becomes as important, in our fear and loathing, as the victim becomes in our sympathy. This is the other side of the coin of sacrifice. If a character is driving a car and accidentally hits and injures a child, it has a powerful effect. But if a character deliberately chooses to cause someone else pain, the effect is even stronger. The audience may hate the character, but the intensity of feeling is much stronger than when the character caused pain without meaning to. It’s no accident that the most memorable character in many stories is the sadistic villain; the hero often seems bland and forgettable by comparison.

  JEOPARDY

  Jeopardy is anticipated pain or loss. As anyone who has been to a dentist knows, the anticipation of pain is often more potent than its actuality. When a character is threatened with something bad, the audience automatically focuses its attention on him. The more helpless the character and the more terrible the danger, the more importance the audience will attach to the character.

  That is why children in danger are such powerful characters; so powerful, in fact, that some films become unbearable to watch. The film Poltergeist was strong stuff for that reason. Some horror-movie buffs pooh-poohed the film because “nothing really happened”; nobody got gruesomely killed. What they didn’t realize is that a dozen creative slashings of teenage kids in a spatter movie won’t equal the power of a single scene in which children are being dragged toward terrible death while their mother struggles vainly to try to reach them in time.

  The films Alien and Aliens crossed the line for me. The jeopardy simply became unbearable. I had to leave the theater. I have since watched both films in their entirety — but never all at once. I could only watch them in sections, flipping cable channels now and then to break the tension caused by the unrelenting jeopardy.