Few stories, however, are “pure” milieu stories. Travelogues, Utopian fiction, satires, and natural science tend to be the only genres in which the pure milieu story can be found. More often, stories emphasize milieu but develop other story factors as well. Although the setting might be the primary focus, there is also a strong story line. The reader then absorbs the milieu indirectly. In these stories, the major characters don’t have to come from the readers’ own time; usually, in fact, they’ll be permanent residents of the story’s milieu. The characters’ own attitudes and expectations are part of the cultural ambience, and their very strangeness and unfamiliarity is part of the readers’ experience of the milieu.

  Such stories will seem to have the structure of another kind of tale — but the author will reveal that the milieu is a main concern by the close attention paid to the surroundings. The characters will be chosen, not just for their intrinsic interest, but also because they typify certain kinds or classes of people within the culture. The characters are meant to fascinate us, not because we understand them or share their desires, but because of their strangeness and what they can teach us about an alien culture.

  This kind of story is fairly common in science fiction and fantasy, where the milieu, the world of the story, is often the main attraction. Frank Herbert (Dune), and J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings) are most noted for works in which the story line is not tightly structured and the characters tend to be types rather than individuals, yet the milieu is carefully, lovingly drawn. In such milieu stories the author feels free to digress from the main story line with long passages of explanation, description, or depiction of the culture. The reader who isn’t interested in the milieu will quickly become bored and set the story aside; but the reader who is fascinated by the world of the story will read on, rapt, through pages of songs and poetry and rituals and ordinary daily life.

  How much characterization does a milieu story need? Not very much. Most characters need only be stereotypes within the culture of the milieu, acting out exactly the role their society expects of them, with perhaps a few eccentricities that help move the story along. It is no accident that when Tolkien assembled the Fellowship of the Ring in his The Lord of the Rings trilogy, there was only one dwarf and one elf — had there been more, it would have been nearly impossible to tell them apart, just as few readers can remember the difference between the two generic hobbits Merry and Pippin. Because The Lord of the Rings was not a pure milieu story, there are some heroic major characters who are more than local stereotypes, and some that approach full characterization — but characterization simply isn’t a major factor in the appeal of the book.

  Besides science fiction and fantasy, milieu stories often crop up in academic/literary fiction (“This story absolutely is contemporary suburban life”) and historical fiction (though most historicals nowadays focus on the romance rather than the setting), while milieu plays an important role in many thrillers. Milieu is the entire definition of the western.

  Are you writing a milieu story? Is it mostly the setting that you work on in loving detail? That doesn’t mean that you can ignore character, especially if you’re trying to tell a compelling story within the milieu; but it does mean that a lot of fully drawn characters aren’t really necessary to your story, and might even be distracting.

  IDEA

  The idea story has a simple structure. A problem or question is posed at the beginning of the story, and at the end of the tale the answer is revealed. Murder mysteries use this structure: Someone is found murdered, and the rest of the story is devoted to discovering who did it, why, and how. Caper stories also follow the idea story structure: A problem is posed at the beginning (a bank to rob, a rich and dangerous mark to con), the main character or characters devise a plan, and we read on to find out if their plan is in fact the “answer” to the problem. Invariably something goes wrong and the characters have to improvise, but the story is over when the problem is solved.

  How much characterization is needed? In puzzle or locked-room mysteries, there is no need for characterization at all; most authors use only a few eccentricities to “sweeten” the characters, particularly the detective.

  In classic English mysteries, like those of Agatha Christie, characterization rarely goes beyond the requirement that a fairly large group of people must have enough of a motive for murder that each can legitimately be suspected of having committed the crime.

  The American detective novel tends to demand a little more characterization. The detective himself is usually more than a tight little bundle of eccentricities; instead he responds to the people around him, not as pieces to be fitted into the puzzle, but as sad or dangerous or good or pathetic human beings. Such tales, like those of Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald, require the detective to be a keen observer of other people, and their individual natures often twist and turn the story line. However, such characters — including the detective — are rarely changed; the story only reveals who they are. In these novels, the characters’ true natures are among the questions that the detective — and the reader — tries to answer during the course of the story.

  Caper stories, on the other hand, generally don’t require that their characters be much more than charming or amusing, and only rarely is there any attempt to show a character being transformed by the events in the tale.

  In fact, it is the very lack of change in the characters in mystery, detective, and caper stories that allows writers to use the same characters over and over again, to the delight of their readers. A few writers have tried to change that, developing and changing their detective characters from book to book. But that very process of change can end up severely limiting the future possibilities of the character.

  When the title character of Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch series became very rich, it made it very difficult to put him in situations where he actually needed to solve a mystery; Mcdonald finally resorted to writing the prequels Fletch Won and Fletch, Too, which took place before Fletch got rich.

  Robert Parker took his character Spenser even further, showing him with ongoing and developing relationships, with friendships and transformations that begin in one book and are not forgotten in the next. The result, however, has been a tendency in recent years to reach for increasingly farfetched plots or to repeat story lines from the past. It’s hard to do full, rich characterization in an idea story.

  Don’t get me wrong, though — I don’t think it’s a mistake to attempt full characterization in idea stories; Fletch and Spenser are two of my favorite mystery characters precisely because of the richer-than-normal characterization and the possibility of permanent change. You simply need to recognize that if you choose to do full characterization in an idea story, complete with character transformation, there is a price.

  There are idea stories in other genres, of course. Many a science fiction story follows the idea structure perfectly: Characters are faced with a problem — a malfunctioning spaceship is one of the favorites — and, as with a caper, the story consists of finding a plan to solve the problem and carrying it out, with improvisations as needed. Characterization is not needed, except to make the characters entertaining — eccentricity is usually enough.

  Allegory is a form in which the idea is everything. The author has composed the story according to a plan; the reader’s job is to decode the plan. Characters in allegory are rarely more than figures standing for ideas. While allegory is rarely written today, many writers of academic/literary fiction use symbolism in much the same way — characters exist primarily to stand for an idea, and readers must decode the symbolic structure in order to receive the story.

  Does all this mean that idea stories require “bad” characterization? Not at all. It means that appropriate characterization for an idea story is not necessarily the same thing as appropriate characterization for another kind of story. Characters stand for ideas, or exist primarily to discover them; a character who fulfills her role perfectly may be no more than a stereotype or a bundle of eccentricities, and yet she’ll be characterized perfectly for that story.

  CHARACTER

  The character story is about a person trying to change his role in life. It begins at the point when the main character finds his present situation intolerable and sets out to change; it ends when the character either finds a new role, willingly returns to the old one, or despairs of improving his lot.

  What is a character’s “role”? It is his network of relationships with other people and with society at large. My role in life is father to my children — with a different relationship with each; husband to my wife; son and brother to the family I grew up with. I have a complex relationship with each of the literary communities I write for, with the full assortment of fans and critics; I also have a constantly shifting role within my religious community, for which I also write. Like every other human being, I have some interests and longings that aren’t satisfied within the present pattern of my life, but in most cases I foresee ways of fulfilling those desires within the reasonably near future. All of these relationships, together, are my “role in life.” I’m reasonably content with my life; it would be difficult to write a character story about me, because stories about happy people are boring.

  The character story emerges when some part of a character’s role in life becomes unbearable. A character dominated by a vicious, whimsical parent or spouse; an employee who has become discontented with his job, with growing distaste for the people he works with; a mother weary of her nurturing role and longing for respect from adults; a career criminal consumed by fear and longing to get away; a lover whose partner has been unfaithful and can’t bear to live with the betrayal. The impossible situation may have been going on for some time, but the story does not begin until the situation comes to a head — until the character reaches the point where the cost of staying becomes too high a price to pay.

  Sometimes the protagonist of a character story cuts loose from the old role very easily, and the story consists of a search for a new one. Sometimes the new role is easy to envision, but breaking away from the old bonds is very hard to do. “Cutting loose” doesn’t always mean physically leaving — the most complex and difficult character stories are the ones about people who try to change a relationship without abandoning the person.

  Needless to say, the character story is the one that requires the fullest characterization. No shortcuts are possible. Readers must understand the character in the original, impossible role, so that they comprehend and, usually, sympathize with the decision to change. Then the character’s changes must be justified so that the reader never doubts that the change is possible; you can’t just have a worn-out hooker suddenly go to college without showing us that the hunger for education and the intellectual ability to pursue it have always been part of her character.

  Remember, though, that not all the people in a character story must be fully characterized. The protagonist — the character whose change is the subject of the story — must be fully characterized; so, too, must each person whose relationship with the protagonist is part of his need for change or his new and satisfactory role. But other people in the story will be characterized less fully, just as in many milieu, idea, and event stories. Characterization is not a virtue, it is a technique; you use it when it will enhance your story, and when it won’t, you don’t.

  EVENT

  Every story is an event story in the sense that from time to time something happens that has causes and results. But the story in which the events are the central concern follows a particular pattern: The world is somehow out of order — call it imbalance, injustice, breakdown, evil, decay, disease — and the story is about the effort to restore the old order or establish a new one.

  The event story structure is simple: It begins when the main characters become involved in the effort to heal the world’s disease, and ends when they either accomplish their goal or utterly fail to do so.

  The world’s disorder can take many forms. It can be a crime unpunished or unavenged: The Count of Monte Cristo is a prime example, as is Oedipus Rex. The disorder can be a usurper — Macbeth, for instance — who has stolen a place that doesn’t belong to him, or a person who has lost his true position in the world, like Prince Edward in The Prince and the Pauper. The disorder can be an evil force, bent on destruction, like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings or Lord Foul in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever — that is also the way Nazis, communists, and terrorists are often used in thrillers. The disorder can be an illicit love that cannot be allowed to endure and yet cannot be denied, as in Wuthering Heights and the traditional stories of Lancelot and Guinevere or Tristan and Isolde. The disorder can be a betrayal of trust, as in the medieval romance Havelok the Dane — or the romance of Watergate that was enacted in America’s newspapers and television news during the early 1970s.

  I think that the event story — the structure at the heart of the romantic tradition for more than two thousand years — might well be the reason for the existence of Story itself. It arises out of the human need to make sense of the things happening around us; the event story starts with the assumption that some sort of order should exist in the world, and our very belief in order in fiction helps us to create order in reality.

  How important is characterization in the event story? Most of the time, it’s up to the author. It’s possible to tell a powerful event story in which the characters are nothing more than what they do and why they do it — we can come out of such tales feeling as if we know the character because we have lived through so much with her, even though we’ve learned almost nothing about the other aspects of her character. (Although Lancelot, for instance, is a major actor in the Arthurian legends, he’s seldom been depicted as a complex individual beyond the simple facts of his relationship to Arthur and to Guinevere.) Yet it is also possible to characterize several people in the story without at all interfering with the forward movement of the tale. In fact, the process of inventing characters often introduces more story possibilities, so that event and character both grow.

  THE CONTRACT WITH THE READER

  Whenever you tell a story, you make an implicit contract with the reader. Within the first few paragraphs or pages, you tell the reader implicitly what kind of story this is going to be; the reader then knows what to expect, and holds the thread of that structure throughout the tale.

  If you begin with a murder, for instance, and focus on those characters who have reason to find out how, why, and by whom the murder was committed, the reader can reasonably expect that the story will continue until those questions are answered — the reader expects an idea story.

  If, on the other hand, you begin with the murder victim’s wife, concentrating on how widowhood has caused a sudden, unbearable disruption in the patterns of her life, the reader can fairly expect that the story will use the character structure, following the widow until she finds an acceptable new role for herself.

  Choosing one structure does not preclude using another. For instance, in the first version of the story, the murder mystery, you can also follow the widow’s attempts to find a new role for herself. The reader will gladly follow that story line as a subplot, and will be delighted if you resolve it along with the mystery. However, the reader would feel cheated if you began the novel as a mystery, but ended it when the widow falls in love and remarries — without ever solving the mystery at all! You can do that once, perhaps, for effect — but readers will feel, rightly, that you misled them.

  On the other hand, if you establish at the beginning of the story that it is about the widow herself and her search for a new role in life, you can also weave the mystery into the story line as a subplot; if you do, readers will expect you to resolve the mystery, but they won’t regard that as the climax of the story. They would rightly be outraged if you ended the book with the explanation of the mystery and left the widow still in a state of flux.

  The rule of thumb is this: Readers will expect a story to end when the first major source of structural tension is resolved. If the story begins as an idea story, the reader expects it to end when the idea is discovered, the plan unfolded. If the story begins as a milieu story, readers will gladly follow any number of story lines of every type, letting them be resolved here and there as needed, continuing to read in order to discover more of the milieu. A story that begins with a character in an intolerable situation will not feel finished until the character is fully content or finally resigned. A story that begins with an unbalanced world will not end until the world is balanced, justified, reordered, healed — or utterly destroyed beyond hope of restoration.

  It’s as if you begin the story by pushing a boulder off the top of a hill. No matter what else happens before the end of the story, the reader will not be satisfied until the boulder comes to rest somewhere.

  That is your first contract with the reader — you will end what you began. Digressions will be tolerated, to a point; but digressions will almost never be accepted as a substitute for fulfilling the original contract.

  You also make a second contract all the way through a story: Anything you spend much time on will amount to something in the story. I remember seeing one of Bob Hope’s and Bing Crosby’s road movies when I was a child — The Road to Rio, I think. In it, the director constantly interrupts the main story to show Jerry Colonna, their mustachioed comic sidekick, leading a troop of mounted soldiers to rescue our heroes. In the end, however, the story is completely resolved without Colonna’s cavalry ever arriving. The director cuts one last time to Colonna, who pulls his horse to a stop, looks at the camera, and says something like, “It didn’t amount to anything, but it was thrilling, wasn’t it?” It was very funny — but the humor rested entirely on the fact that when a story spends time on a character, an event, a question, or a setting, the audience expects that the main thread of the story will somehow be affected by it.