36 Characters and viewpoint

back home, so she has constant thoughts of her boyfriend even as she gets more and more attracted to the 7-11 clerk. Those guys from back home are never "present" in the story, and yet her relationship with them is very important.

Or perhaps as she tries to get along with her aunt and uncle, she finds that the real difficulty is her long-dead grandmother-the mother of her father and her uncle, a woman who always favored the girl's father and disapproved of the uncle. At first the girl will agree with the grandmother's assessment of the uncle, especially because the uncle clearly feels a strong antipathy toward the girl. Gradually, though, she'll come to appreciate some aspects of her uncle's character that neither her father nor her grandmother ever saw. In fact, the story might come to focus on the relationship between the girl and her dead grandmother, with the girl becoming angrier and angrier at a woman who exists now only in her memory. Finally, she has it out with her uncle, in a complicated scene in which she is angry at him for acting out the grandmother's image of him. It might end up transforming both of them.

Yet that story would be impossible to tell if we hadn't first wondered about characters who might have been there in the story's past, but who are not physically present in the story.

SERVANTS OF THE IDEA

Often a story emerges, not from characters or events, but from an idea that you want to put across. Maybe you're concerned about the danger of pollution, the arms race, the escalating cost of medical care, or the unfairness of American immigration policy. Maybe you worry about abortion, women's rights, racism, or poverty. Maybe you want to speak for disarmament, more humane prisons, justice for an oppressed people, or the rights of intelligent marine mammals.

All of these are causes that many wise and concerned people find to be worthy and important. But the first thing you must decide is whether to write a polemic essay or a story.

These are not mutually exclusive forms. That is, if you decide to write an essay-for a newspaper's op-ed page, a pamphlet, or even a book-length essay-you will find that stories are effective tools in persuading people to pay attention. No amount of philosophizing about the rights of dolphins will have as much effect on readers as a simple story of the life of one dolphin-his birth, upbringing, family life, playfulness, all leading to his senseless drowning when he is caught in a tuna net. One story is worth a thousand abstractions or statistics, when it comes to having an emotional impact on people.

And if you decide to write a story, this doesn't mean you can't also make your point.

The problems arise when you forget that you're writing a story, and let the idea take over. Forget about fully inventing characters! I'm going to show how bad pollution is, so I'll have all the polluters be evil conspirators so eager to make a buck that they don't care how many people die be-

37

Where Do Characters Come From?

cause of the poisons they put in the ground or in the water.

The trouble is that when such a story is finished, who will want to read it? People who already agree with you, who already think polluting corporations are run by inhuman monsters, will think the story is right on the mark; but what about the people who don't yet agree with you, the ones who have never thought much about pollution? If your characters are too one-dimensional to believe in, you won't persuade anybody. Your uncommitted readers will sense that they're being lied to. "Nobody's that evil," they'll say. Few will be convinced. You'll end up preaching to the choir.

When you have a point to make, an idea to put across, it is all the more important to be a good storyteller, to examine every character and wring from him all possible truth. If you want to write a story that makes the dangers of industrial pollution really come home to people, you don't make the "bad guys" into villainous conspirators. Instead, you focus on a "bad guy" who thinks of himself as a good guy. His factory makes a product that people need, and he's following all the regulations. He's also trying to keep costs down so the product will be affordable and competitive. When people start complaining that the company is polluting the community's water, he doesn't oppose these people because he's evil, he opposes them because he thinks they're wrong. To him, they're just extremists who think that nothing but distilled water should ever be emitted by any factory; to him, these people would rather see everybody live in caves than allow any modern progress.

And, in fact, some of the people attacking his factory are just as mindlessly anti-technology as he thinks they are. But there is one of them who means more to him than any of the strangers. It might be a neighbor; or perhaps it's a lab technician that he hired because he knew her folks years before, but now he has to fire her because she has leaked the contents of lab reports to the press. He knows that he's right to fire her-she violated company regulations-but he also worries that her reports might be right. After all, he knows she isn't crazy, and so he talks to her, learns from her, gradually comes to realize that while his factory isn't causing the death of civilization as we know it, the pollution problem might be real. He works to solve the problem from the inside.

Do you recognize this story? You should, at least if you've seen the movie The China Syndrome, about the violation of safety regulations at a nuclear power plant, leading to a dangerous near-meltdown. The situations are not identical, but the basic movement of the stories is similar. The China Syndrome did settle for a few trite and obvious villains-which weakened the movie-but all the people we focused on were ordinary and decent, neither perfectly good nor perfectly evil. That movie turned out to be effective persuasive writing, precisely because the characters were so believable. Of course, it helped believability when the nuclear accident happened at Three Mile Island around the time the movie was released.

Polemic-persuasive writing-only works when it doesn't feel like propaganda. The audience must feel that you're being absolutely fair to people on the other side. If you depict them as devils, the uncommitted members of the audience will be disgusted, and you'll convince none of them. But if you show all the characters as human, you have a good chance