32 Characters and viewpoint

sonal cliches come from, constantly mining the same spot in memory, the way a child will keep picking at the same sore. You have to make a conscious effort to keep from remembering the same things in the same way. In other words, even when you take a character directly out of yourself at some particular time in your life or in some particular situation, you still have to invent that character-ask the causal questions, exaggerate, twist.

Finding "New" Memories

What I'm about to suggest smacks of self-psychoanalysis, and for all I know it may have therapeutic value. But I suggest that one way for you to discover good characters is to search randomly through your memory, just as you move randomly through the world around you, with your idea net extended.

The way you do this is to pick some arbitrary starting point. It might be a point in time: seventh grade, for instance. What school were you in in seventh grade? Who was your homeroom teacher? Who were your other teachers? I immediately remember Mr. Arella, the science teacher-a man I haven't thought of in twenty years, yet his name was there, waiting to be dredged up. His was the last class of the day for me, and I recall staying after school the first few days, talking to him, asking questions. Partly it was because I really was interested in science, but mostly it was because I was waiting for my mom to pick me up-I couldn't walk home carrying my tuba. By the end of the second day, he started calling me his "lab assistant" and talking about how I'd stay after school and help him clean test tubes and jars-not at all what I had in mind. I soon stopped staying after class; but I remember that later in the school year, I heard him refer to someone else as his lab assistant, whereupon he affixed me with a steady gaze for a few moments before moving on to talk about something else. Without meaning to, I had apparently hurt his feelings or let him down somehow-though he had never asked me whether I wanted to be his lab assistant.

I also remember that in the encyclopedia I happened upon a description of how to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen using an electric current. I talked to Mr. Arella about it, telling him what I had figured out about how to conduct the experiment. He encouraged me; I went to a great deal of trouble to find batteries, strips of copper, and a way to hold everything in place while hydrogen arose from the water to fill an overturned jar.

I set up the experiment for the first time in front of the class-it never occurred to me to rehearse in private. The experiment didn't work. I don't know why, and neither did Mr. Arella, but we never got that little puff of an explosion from a lighted match that tells you isolated hydrogen was present. It was frustrating and embarrassing.

But that was nothing compared to the frustration when, a month or so later, he got to the electrolysis section in the textbook, opened the cupboard, and took out a complete prefabricated electrolysis device. All the elements were there, professionally designed, pre-assembled, and ready to use. After class I demanded to know why he had let me go to all that trou-

Where Do Characters Come From? 33

ble when he had the experiment already in hand. "I wanted you to learn from your own experience," he said. A noble thought. But at the time all I could see was that he had let me waste a ridiculous amount of time and caused me much public embarrassment, when he could have said, "Want to see electrolysis work? I've got the whole setup right here in the cupboard."

My only consolation was that his professional setup didn't make any more hydrogen than my amateurish one did.

All these memories came flooding back the moment I typed the words "seventh grade" into my computer. Are any of them usable for a story? Probably not directly. I have no idea how interesting this story is, but I suspect your eyes were beginning to glaze over before I had finished. Still, if I interrogate the character of Mr. Arella-or of myself-I may find an interesting story there: