96 Characters and viewpoint

ness for himself and his children and his failure to achieve it destroyed him. The fact that Loman reached such a point of despair that he killed himself moves him out of the ordinary-but what really makes Loman a figure of awe is that he expected himself and his sons to be great, that he measured himself against such high standards that, by trying to meet them, he became exactly the Romantic hero that Arthur Miller was trying to avoid. He was one of the knights of the round table who failed to find the Holy Grail-but he was nobly searching for it nonetheless.

The writers in the Realistic tradition-for instance, Updike, Bellow, and Fowles-still give their characters heroic proportion; only it's more restrained, used less boldly, better disguised. By the end of Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift, Humboldt is definitely bigger than life; he is, in his own way, as romantically "enlarged" as Captain Blood or Rhett Butler. The difference is that Captain Blood was involved in jeopardy on page one and bigger than life by page thirty, while Humboldt didn't really become recognizably heroic in size until near the end of the book.

Without giving the audience some reason to feel awe toward the hero, there would be no story. Eliminate the usual sources of awe, the usual ways of making a character larger than life, and the storyteller will either find another or lose interest in the tale.

More recently, many academic/literary writers have striven to avoid "naive identification" by creating "aesthetic distance"-but these writers have merely replaced the character-hero with the author-as-hero, so that the admiration that used to be directed toward a character is now directed toward the artist who created the exquisite, extraordinary text.

If there is no awe, there is no audience. In every successful story- every story that is loved and admired by at least one reader who is not a close friend or blood relative of the author-the author has created characters who somehow inspire enough admiration, respect, or awe that readers are willing to identify with them, to become their disciples for the duration of the tale.

I'm not for a moment advocating that you artificially juice up your characters to make them more Romantic. That's no more likely to result in good characterization than overwhelming your heroes with humdrum details. You'll do much better if you trust your own instincts to choose the balance between Romance and Realism that's right for you and for your natural audience.

What you need is not a specific recipe but rather a general awareness: It's vital that along with making Nora seem exciting and wonderful, you also help your readers understand and believe in her, so they can connect her with their own lives. Along with making Pete seem understandable and believable, you should also show your readers why he is important enough and admirable enough to deserve a place in their memories, to be a worthy exemplar of the meanings of life.

Often when you find yourself blocked-when you can't bring yourself to start or continue a story-the reason is that you have forgotten or have not yet discovered what is extraordinary about your main character. Go back over your notes, over the part of the story you've already told, and ask yourself: What's so special about this woman that people should

The Hero and the Common Man 97

hear the story of her life? Or, more to the point, ask yourself: Why does her story matter to me?

You've got a story going. Pete's just an ordinary twenty-three-year-old man, just finishing college after a three-year stint in the army. Degree in business administration with good-enough but not spectacular grades, a few failed romances just like everybody else's failed romances. He's hired by a major corporation and put in charge of a department. After a year on the job, others are getting promoted-but not him. He just isn't doing all that good a job. He keeps getting distracted.

Then you don't know what to do. You sit down to write, and what you say doesn't seem to make any difference, it's all lousy. You're blocked. So you take a look at Pete's character. There's no reason to notice him, nothing obviously special about him. You realize that until you find-or invent-something extraordinary about him, you've got no story.

So you look for what it is that makes him not just different, but better or more admirable than the others. Why isn't he succeeding? What is it about the others that gets them promoted? You search through what you've written so far and you haven't answered that question. You did a great job of making him ordinary and common. But there is something different about him: He isn't getting promoted on the normal track. Why?

It's not that he's unambitious-he read lacocca just like everybody else in the M.B.A. program, and he dreams of seven-figure salaries and million-dollar bonuses, of heading a company with a budget larger than Brazil's. So maybe his "lack" is that he can't bring himself to have the attitude toward his underlings that most other managers in his company seem to have. He doesn't regard them as machines that must run at maximum efficiency or be replaced; he can't bring himself to judge their worth according to the bottom line. Pete just can't stop caring about them as human beings.

If this is what makes Pete special, how does that affect your story? You've already got a character, an office manager named Nora. In the present draft you had Pete try to joke with her, but she took it as flirting and shut him down fast with a nasty little speech about sexual harassment. You never meant that relationship to go anywhere-you were just using Nora as a minor character to show Pete making an ordinary dumb mistake. But now that you have keyed in on Pete's extraordinary tendency to care about people even when it's bad for his company and his career, why not use Nora to develop that trait? Pete has good reason to think she's a jerk-if he could fire anybody, he could surely fire her, right?

So when Nora starts having problems, the solution is obvious: Get rid of her. She's inattentive. She makes mistakes. She isn't assigning work to her staff-one of her typists has even gone around asking for work because Nora hasn't assigned her anything in a week. Some of your other people are beginning to complain that Nora's office is slow in returning paperwork. Nora has been snapping at anyone who dares to ask about late or missing work, and morale in her office is awful.

But Pete can't just fire her. For one thing, he's afraid that she'll think he's firing her because she rejected his "sexual advances," even though he