If your strategy were exaggeration, you could have the heroine irn-

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mediately begin to plead for her life in a comically exaggerated way. She would start to cry, fall to her knees, grovel, whine, and if you carry it just far enough, the audience will laugh.

But you could also have her downplay her fear. She could plead for her life with comic nonchalance: "I think we've got a little misunderstanding here. I don't know how you ever got the impression that I didn't like you. Actually I look up to you. I want to be just like you. Where did you buy that great knife?"

That same exaggerated nonchalance, that comic coolness, can show up in the narration.

His ex-wife left him with so little that when his apartment got burglarized it took him an hour to notice it. He took a shower, fixed dinner, and read the paper; only when he went to turn on the TV did he realize it was gone.

A mild exaggeration; a mild amount of humor. But now we'll make it first person and exaggerate his nonchalant attitude a little more.

I got home, saw the drawers dumped out, the couch ripped open, all the books off the shelves, and the TV missing. At first I figured my ex-wife had sent her lawyers over for another round. I only realized it was burglars when I saw that there wasn't a message in lipstick on the mirror. Usually she wrote things like "Die, capitalist pig" or "Helter-Skelter."

Not for a moment do you believe that the narrator thought any such thing. He's just being nonchalant about the burglary-and exaggerating his ex-wife's behavior, too. We aren't expected to believe his nonchalance. He is going through things that would make a normal person angry and afraid; but by downplaying his response to them, the narrator makes it amusing instead of infuriating.

ODDNESS

When eccentricity is taken to extremes it becomes less believable, eventually leading to farce or melodrama. Oddness is the prime tool of the comic storyteller.

The use of a Jewish accent for Miracle Max is an example of simple oddness. The misplacement of a stereotype makes us laugh, makes us take all that the character does a bit less seriously. But stereotypes can only take you so far.

The same thing is often done with the way a character dresses. Costume is a stereotype-a construction worker dresses a certain way, a ballet dancer another. Putting a character in inappropriate dress can also make us laugh. That's why we have seen so many comedies with men in drag. Show a character wearing white socks with brown shoes and a blue suit, and we know he's a geek. Shakespeare makes Malvolio in Twelfth Night appear on stage comically dressed and cross-gartered as the result of a practical joke, and we laugh. It makes him funny-but it doesn't make us care.

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Malvolio is made ridiculous by his absurd apparel; he is made important by the reasons for his strange clothing. The clothing, by itself, would be a trivial effect.

The trouble is that oddness is a tool you normally use for minor characters. Oddness, by itself, can't make a character major. It can even diminish a character.

If you have a major comic character, you'll use all the Romantic and Realistic techniques of characterization. So what makes him comic? It's a matter of timing. Very early in our acquaintance with the character, before the other techniques have had a chance to win the audience's firm belief, you undercut those other techniques by making the character just a little too odd or extreme to believe completely.

It's hard to imagine a serious play that couldn't be turned into a farce using this technique. King Lear could be hilarious with Bob Newhart in the lead. Imagine John Candy as Macbeth or Howie Mandel as Oedipus. If you recognize these comedians' names, you already know something about their eccentricities-Bob Newhart's resentful meekness, John Candy's cheerful but brutal insensitivity, Howie Mandel's manic indecision. If you saw them in these plays, their eccentricity would assert itself long before the other techniques of characterization came into play. Picture these moments:

Bob Newhart, looking slightly peeved and intoning, "Blow, winds! Crack your cheeks!"

Howie Mandel nervously rejecting several brooches until he finds just the right ones to jab out his eyes with.

John Candy's blustering confidence in himself as he tries to deal with the witches, while Gilda Radner, as Lady Macbeth, pushes him out of their room to go kill Duncan.

You would not believe any of these performers in the roles, not if they used their comic personas. But it is precisely their controlled disbelief that would make their performances hilariously funny.

Along these lines, it's worth pointing out that eccentricity, if carried to extremes in a major character, eventually becomes the subject of the comedy. Ben Jonson called it comedy of humors-comedy arising from a character being completely dominated by only one desire or temperament. Misers, hypochondriacs, hypocrites, cowards have traits that all humans share to some degree. Exaggerate the trait enough, and the characters are unbelievable enough to be funny. Exaggerate the trait out of all proportion, and they become either monstrous or utterly unbelievable. Comedy of humors carries exaggeration right to the edge of unbelievabil-ity or monstrosity. Your story can still be funny, but it also reduces your ability to move your audience. The Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers made people laugh, but they never really made people care.

CHAPTER 11

THE SERIOUS

CHARACTER:

MAKE US BELIEVE

Do YOU WANT YOUR READERS TO BELIEVE in your characters? The one thing you can never do is appeal to the facts. In a news story you quote sources; in history you cite documents. But in fiction you have no such recourse-the single worst defense of an unbelievable event or character is to say, "But that really happened once."

Fiction doesn't deal with what happened once. Fiction deals with what happens. Your job is not to create characters who exactly match reality. Your job is to create characters who seem real, who are plausible to the audience.

This chapter presents the tools of realism, the techniques that will earn your readers' trust. These methods won't make your story "truthful"-the truth of your tale arises from your unconscious choices, from your beliefs that are so ingrained that you may not even know you believe them, because it doesn't occur to you that they might not be true. What these tools provide is the illusion of truth.

Contradictory as that sounds, it's a vital part of storytelling. You must provide your audience with details that seem familiar and appropriate, so that they are constantly saying to themselves, "Yes, that's right, that's true, that's just the way it would be, people do that." With each "yes" the audience becomes more convinced that you are a storyteller who knows something.

They let down their barriers of skepticism and let you lead them through the world of your story, absorbing the people and events into their memories, identifying with your heroes, making their stories a part of themselves in a way that factual stories never can. Strike a false note, and barriers go back up; your readers pull out of the story a little, each time a little more, until you've lost them and your story has no more power over them.

I could make this chapter very short by telling you in a single word how to make your characters more believable: details. The more information about a character, the more the audience will believe in him.

It isn't really that simple, though. You don't want just any details, you want relevant, appropriate details. Nor do you want the details to stop

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the movement of the story any more than necessary. So the tools of realism are designed to present details about a character appropriately and effectively.

ELABORATION OF MOTIVE

The most important tool that will help your audience believe in your characters is elaboration of motive. If you don't tell your audience what a character's motives are, the audience will assume the obvious motive: a simple, single motive, a naked archetype or a cliche. To make characters more believable, more real, we give them more complex, even contradictory motives, and we justify them better.

In the heroic fantasy film Conan the Barbarian, young Conan's mother is killed before his eyes. He spends the rest of the film searching for the murderer. It isn't hard for the audience to grasp the idea that he's looking for revenge.

Let's suppose that you wanted to start with the same situation, but you wanted Conan to be a more believable human being. His relentless obsession with revenge is not enough to sustain a realistic novel. The easiest step is to diversify-give him other motives, other interests, purposes, and loyalties. There would be many times when he did not think of revenge.

A more daring step is to make him even more complex: He is searching for the murderer, not to kill him, but to serve him. In Conan's mind the man's cruelty has been transformed into justice-he killed my mother, thinks Conan, because she was weak and small. I will be strong and large, and he will find me worthy.

This kind of motivation is borderline pathological-but it is also intriguing and believable, not at all the predictable revenge cliche.

Let's go back to Eddie Murphy's character in Beverly Hills Cop. Like Conan, he is given the simplest of motives-revenge for the death of a friend. Since it is an almost purely Romantic story, and a comic one at that, no more realism is needed; the audience found his character believable enough for the needs of the film.

But what if we wanted to make his character more real? We'd then have to invent a richer set of motives. What if his murdered friend was someone that Murphy had treated, not well, but badly, so that Murphy's desire for revenge is prompted not just by love but also by guilt. And let's say Murphy's tenacity in the case is not just because he's competitive and doesn't like to lose, but also because he's afraid that he's not very good as a cop, and if he doesn't succeed in this hard and dangerous case he won't be able to believe in himself. Add to this a bit of arrogance-there are times when he believes he can't fail, that he can't even die. And maybe he needs to show off a little, too.

One of the advantages of prose fiction is that you can bring all of a character's motives into the open. Because we can sometimes see into the characters' minds, their thoughts and feelings, their plans and reactions, we can also watch them shift from one motive to another. We can go one

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layer deeper, and discover motives that the characters don't even know they have.

Since motive is the character's purpose or intent when he takes an action, it is not something you can add to a character and then leave the rest of the story unchanged. The pursuit of ever-deeper motives is not a trivial game played on the surface of the story. Motive is at the story's heart. It is the most potent form of causal connection. So every revision of motive is a revision of the story.

Nora tells Pete that the man who was in her apartment was just a salesman. Pete reacts by saying cruel, vicious things to her, breaking a lamp, and storming out of her apartment. What does that scene mean?

At first glance, we might suppose Pete is insanely jealous. But what if we then learn that Pete knows the man-knows that he is a drug dealer and a former pimp? Now we understand that his rage doesn't come from a desire to control Nora, but rather from real concern for her welfare. Nora's lie is a silent witness to him that she is somehow involved with this man-in one way or another.

After a while, Nora confesses to Pete that the man in her apartment was her brother, but she hates him and doesn't want anyone she cares about to know that he has any connection with her. Now Pete understands her motive for lying. He's relieved.

Still later, the reader is shown a scene that makes it clear that the visitor was not her brother at all-he has been Nora's husband for ten years, and they have never been divorced. Now Nora's real motives are a mystery again.

Each new revelation of a main character's motive is not a simple matter of adding more information-it revises all the information that has gone before. Events that we thought meant one thing now mean another. The present constantly revises the meaning of the past. Revelation of the past constantly revises the meaning of the present. This is the primary device of detective fiction (and psychoanalysis), but all other genres use the technique as well.

There is a cost. The discovery of motive always requires examination of a character's thoughts, either through her dialogue with other characters, through direct telling of those thoughts, or by implication as new facts are revealed. All these examinations of motive come at the expense of action. A character who endlessly tries to understand her own motives eventually becomes a bore.

ATTITUDE

One of the surest signs of an amateur story is when strange or important events happen around the narrator or point-of-view character, and he doesn't have an attitude toward them. Attitude is the other side of the coin of causation. Motive tells why he acts as he does; attitude is the way he reacts to outside events.