Wasn’t it because of her attitude that you took interest in her at all? Notice that it is primarily through attitudes that we establish the meaning of relationships between people. Attitude tells us what people notice about each other, and what value they assign to what they see. Look at these brief scenes, all from Pete’s point of view, all giving his attitude:

  “What a day,” she said.

  Yeah, right. Poor dear, couldn’t she find a single dress that fit right?

  “What a day,” she said.

  She could say anything right now, and it would be music. He didn’t realize how much he missed her until she came back.

  “What a day,” she said.

  She would tell him about it. They’d have dinner, watch TV, go to bed; if she didn’t talk about how tired she was, they’d have sex. It was Tuesday. Moonlighting. So they’d definitely have sex, unless it was a rerun.

  “What a day,” she said.

  He looked at her sharply. Did she guess where he had been today? What he had done? No. She was too dull for that. An intelligent idea, even if one came along, would never get past her faded blue housedress.

  You get the idea. The particular way your character responds to events lets the reader know who he is. It also helps you discover your character, since each bit of attitude you come up with will help you decide what your character will do next. Attitude and motive thus become inextricably intertwined. The character’s response to event X will provide his motive for doing Y and Z.

  THE REMEMBERED PAST

  One of the things I noticed as I started working with science fiction was that so many of the main characters seemed to come out of nowhere. They had no families; they all seemed to be loners and drifters who had no roots. This is fine within the romantic tradition; does Dirty Harry have a mother? Does Aragorn? Darcy? Natty Bumppo? Rhett Butler? There’s not much evidence for it. But it doesn’t matter in romance because the story becomes the character’s past. That is, by the end of the story, you know all the things the character did earlier in the story, so that now he does have connections with other people.

  To fully realize a character, however, you must give him a whole life. He has a past, an elaborate set of meaningful connections to other people: family, friends, enemies, teachers, employers.

  The most obvious way to tell a character’s whole life is, of course, to begin the story with her birth. This is, however, the romantic tradition again. After all, whether you’re writing romance or realism, you have to begin the story at exactly the point where the main character becomes interesting and unique. If you start at her birth, then she must be bigger than life from the cradle. John Irving made the title character of The World According to Garp extraordinary from the moment of conception, when his very odd mother, a nurse in a hospital, impregnated herself using the body of a serviceman with terminal brain damage. But you can’t always begin your stories with such bizarre events.

  Instead, you will probably begin your story when your main characters are already nearly adults, with a wealth of experience behind them. How can you give a sense of the past?

  Flashback

  The most obvious technique — and the least effective and most overused — is the flashback. The present action stops for a while as the character (or, worse yet, the narrator) remembers some key event from days of yore. The problem with this technique is exactly that: The action stops for the flashback. Time after time I have seen student stories or stories submitted to me as an editor that began like this:

  Nora peered through her windshield, trying to see through the heavy snowfall. “I can’t be late,” she murmured. It took all her concentration just to stay at forty miles per hour. Yet the events of the last few weeks kept intruding, taking her mind off the road. She thought back to her last quarrel with Pete.

  [Here we get a fifteen-paragraph summary of all the stuff that happened up to yesterday.]

  Her mind returned to the snowy road before her. There was her house. She pulled into the driveway and went inside. She ate dinner and watched TV, unable to concentrate, waiting for Pete’s phone call. When he hadn’t called by midnight, she went to bed.

  The next morning …

  Cringe along with me, please. Whatever is in that flashback wouldn’t really give Nora a past, because she has no present. The flashback won’t provide us with additional information about the character — it will provide us with our only information. Nothing happens on that snowy road except the flashback. The character has not yet been made important in the present moment — she is merely a stereotyped image, and a singularly dull one at that: a woman driving in the snow. By the time the flashback is over, the reader will have forgotten about the snow — there’s nothing to remember anyway. We have no anchor in the present moment, so we are soon hopelessly a drift in memory.

  A rule of thumb: If you feel a need to have a flashback on the first or second page of your story, either your story should begin with the events of the flashback or you should get us involved with some compelling present characters and events before flashing back.

  I usually prefer the former choice — beginning the story with the first events that matter. However, sometimes, many pages into a story, there’s a real need for the character to remember some key event. If we’re well rooted in the story, if we know enough and care enough about the character for the flashback to be important to us, then it can work very well. But it still has a serious cost. It stops the present action. The longer the flashback takes, the harder it is for the audience to remember what was happening just before the flashback began. So flashbacks should be rare, they should be brief, and they should take place only after you have anchored the story in the present action.

  Memory as a Present Event

  Slightly more effective is having one character tell another a story out of the past. If you set it up properly, the telling of the story, besides conveying past information, can also be present action. Take, for example, the hiding-behind- tapestries scene in James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter. Each of King Henry’s three sons has come to King Philip of France, trying to make a deal with him to destroy all the others. Now Henry himself comes, and his sons hide behind tapestries as the two kings confront each other.

  Provoked beyond endurance, Philip tells Henry a story about his childhood. But the story he tells does not stop the action — it is the action. Philip tells how he was homosexually seduced by Henry’s son Richard, and how he went along with the act, though he loathed it, in order to be able to tell Henry about it now.

  With the pain that this revelation causes Henry — not to mention Richard, behind the curtain — the story is doing double duty. It gives us some of the past of Richard and Philip, fleshing them out as characters; it also causes terrible emotional pain in the present, which strengthens Henry and Richard as victims and Philip as tormentor.

  Notice, though, that the story is not just any story. It is about pain in the past, Philip’s pain. It isn’t enough just to tell random stories from a character’s past. They have to be stories that are important.

  Flashbacks can also follow this rule, and become part of a present event. If, for instance, a character’s memory of a past event causes him to make a key decision, or take an action he would otherwise not have taken, then the memory is part of the present action, not really an interruption at all.

  However, convenient memories can strain the reader’s credulity. If it’s a memory the character could have called to mind at any point, having her think of it just in time to make a key decision may seem like an implausible coincidence, as if the author is controlling events too tightly. If the memory is going to prompt a present decision, then the memory in turn must have been prompted by a recent event. Better yet, it should be a memory of something that the character never understood; new information or a new experience has changed the meaning of that event in her mind, so she isn’t just remembering, she’s also revising. Then the memory isn’t passive, it’s an active part of the story.

  Quick References

  It’s possible to drop in memories with only a slight pause in the forward movement of the story:

  I stood on the edge and saw how far down the bay was and suddenly remembered the cat I threw off the roof when I was a kid, how it twisted and snapped and clawed at the air. Never did find anything to hold onto till it hit the ground, and after that it didn’t snap or claw or twist or breathe or anything. Took me fifteen minutes to crawl down the ladder off the roof after watching the cat fall. I was sure wishing for a ladder now.

  She pretended to be interested in his stories, but he knew that glazed look she got, her eyes not quite focused as she murmured occasionally to make him think she was listening. He used to murmur just like that during all those excruciating breakfasts when Nora insisted on telling him her dreams from the night before. It always felt to him like her dreams lasted longer than she slept. But it had never occurred to him that he could bore somebody else that badly.

  If these quick references to the past are pertinent to the present events in the story, they won’t feel like they’re much of a break in the action, even if they don’ t make a significant change in the events of the story.

  A rule of thumb: The shorter the memory, the less important it needs to be in order to justify stopping the story for it. If memories are short enough, they can be completely irrelevant:

  I don’t recommend the restaurant. Worst food I ever had since I ate six live crickets on a two-dollar bet.

  The six live crickets have nothing to do with the story. And it doesn’t really tell you much specific information about the character. You certainly don’t expect this information to make a difference in the story. But this brief memory still enriches the audience’s concept of the character by implying some strangeness in his past; the audience will assume that there are plenty of other stories he could tell if he had the time. Without saying very much, you give the audience the impression that they know this character very well.

  THE IMPLIED PAST

  It’s possible to add to your character’s past without stopping the action or even overtly mentioning her past at all, by giving her an implied past. You give readers a sense that the character has already lived a full life without telling them exactly what that past was.

  Expectation

  What a character expects will happen in the present tells us instantly what has happened before in his past.

  Suppose Pete steps toward a young girl, smiling, and extends his hand to give her a doughnut. To his surprise, she cringes away as if afraid she’ll be struck. The audience knows at once — without the narrator having to say it — that the child has been beaten often enough that she expects a beating. Without slowing down the action at all, you have given a sense of the character’s past and told us something of her pain.

  Each of the following passages implies things about a character’s past:

  The clerk repeated, “Cash or charge?” Nora looked helplessly at Pete. He spread his hands as if to show he wasn’t holding a Gold Card. “You’re the one doing the shopping,” he said. “I can’t afford this stuff.” Still she made no move to pay. Finally he gave up and opened her purse for her. It was stuffed full of cash. He peeled two hundreds off an inch-thick stack and gave them to the clerk. Then he put the change and the receipt into the purse and snapped it shut.

  “You ought to use some of that to hire a bodyguard,” he said. “The junkie who mugs you could o.d. and die, and then his family would sue you.”

  She smiled and shrugged a little.

  As they left, Pete heard the clerk telling somebody, “And it was all hundreds! The whole purse!”

  Pete watched for a gap in the speeding cars and stepped out into the road. Immediately drivers began swerving and slamming on their brakes. If everybody had kept going smoothly, he would have made it across the road easily; as it was, he barely made it back to the curb alive. How can people ever cross streets in America, he thought, if drivers go crazy every time they see a pedestrian?

  As soon as Pete got in the door Nora began to cry. “I didn’t mean to do it,” she said over and over again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” It took fifteen minutes before she’d believe him when he said it was no big deal. “But it’s completely smashed,” she said. Hadn’t she ever heard of insurance?

  Pete noticed that Nora kept sliding the bills between her thumb and fingers. Finally he realized she was counting them, again and again, as if she had to make sure they were all there.

  Nora was finally calm enough that she could talk to Pete again, but when she went into the living room, there he was, straightening the magazines, dusting, arranging the pillows, trying to make her feel guilty for being such a slob. It made her so angry that there was no way she could take part in a reasonable discussion.

  She rushed out of the apartment, ignoring him when he called her name. “Nora! Nora!” His wheedling tone reminded her of the way bratty children say mommy. “Mawmee! Nawrah!”

  As she waited for the elevator, she imagined Pete calling out to his mother in just the same tone he had used with her. Then she remembered her mother-in-law’s immaculate house, and realized that Pete’s house-cleaning routine was probably what he had done as a child to placate the old bitch when she was angry at him.

  After these bitter, terrible arguments, did you really think that cleaning the house would make everything all right again? I’ll never kill you, Pete, no matter how angry you make me — but I might just kill your mother.

  Every one of these vignettes reveals a character’s expectations, implying a story from his or her past. Yet not one of them slows the action very much. They add depth to the characterization without subtracting momentum from the forward movement of the story.

  Habits

  Everyone alive has habits, some of them meaningless, but many of them the result of the patterns of our lives. If a character paces or drums his fingers on the table, you know that he’s tense and this is the way he shows it. But your characters should also have specific habits that tell something about their lives:

  “Where are you going?” Pete asked. “I didn’t say to turn there.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nora said, flustered. “This is the way I always take Ryan to school. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Pete was back in an hour with the groceries and the change. He counted it out backward into her hand. “Seventeen sixty-two, sixty-five, seventy-five, eighteen, nineteen, and twenty.”

  Nora laughed.

  Only then did he realize what he had done. He laughed ruefully. “Twenty years since I worked in Dad’s store, and I’m still counting change like a clerk.”

  Nora looked carefully to the left and stepped out into the street. A taxi slammed on its brakes and swerved to avoid hitting her — from the right. Oh yes, thought Nora. They drive on the wrong side of the road here. My pedestrian survival training from New York won’t be much help in London.

  Pete left a 6:30 wake-up order with the hotel operator, turned off the television, and climbed into bed. He slept on the left side, of course, even though Nora hadn’t been there to sleep on the right side since they separated four years before.

  Nora noticed that every time Pete wrote a check, he drew three horizontal lines in every space between the words and numbers. “Do you really think the grocery store people are going to alter your check to say one million and thirty-three dollars and forty-four cents?”

  “It’s like fastening your seatbelt or locking your car,” said Pete. “Do it even when it doesn’t matter, and you won’t forget to do it when it does.”

  Too many habits, of course, and your characters will seem obsessive-compulsive. But anybody who’s been alive for any length of time has some habits, and it helps us believe in and understand your characters when we see what their habits are.

  Networks

  Anyone who has been alive for any length of time has also made many connections with other people. Unless a character has been torn from his or her normal milieu, those connections are going to show up.

  Pete noticed the way people in the store looked at Nora. Quick, furtive glances. He couldn’t see anything wrong with her — no run in her stocking, no underwear showing. He didn’t catch on until he realized that the store detective was shadowing them. Apparently Nora was known here, and not as a big spender.

  Nora knew that Pete was not the man of her dreams when the motel clerk took his check without asking for ID. She thought it might be classy to be recognized at the Hilton, but not at a motel that rents a room for ten dollars an hour. Still, a man who pays by check is probably telling the truth when he says he isn’t married.

  Everybody Pete and Nora ran into did the same thing. Just as they were about to ask her a question, they’d glance at Pete and then smile and say something noncommittal. Nora and Pete stopped for lunch at a diner called the White Trash Saloon. It took a few minutes before Nora realized that the used-up looking waitress was Suzy Parker from high school. The last ten years hadn’t been good to her.

  Suzy recognized Nora too and finally asked the question the others had sidestepped: “How’s Joe Bob?”

  Nora smiled icily back. “He’s home taking care of our seven children while Pete and I have a madcap, whirlwind affair.”

  The waitress thought about this for a moment. “You don’t have no seven children,” she finally said. “Too damn thin.”

  Nora couldn’t help noticing that all the unopened letters on the kitchen table had transparent windows, and a lot of them said FINAL NOTICE. Even through the closed door, she could hear Pete shouting into the telephone. “I’ll make payments on that piece of junk any month that it runs! And if you send somebody to pick it up, I’ll blast their head off!” A minute later he came back in, grinning. “An old girlfriend,” he said.