Dynamic Characters Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Yes, you'll end up with a stereotype if background is the only means by which you create a character. But it won't be (or at least, it shouldn't). Background is where you start. Then you consider how this individual, this specific person, has reacted to his background. There are a number of possibilities:
    He's rejected his background, deliberately re-creating himself on some other model. This is the entire premise of Margaret Drabble's wonderful novel Jerusalem the Golden. Clara, from working-class north
    England, meets Clelia at college. Clelia's background is upper-class arts/intellectual, and Clara is so entranced she immediately adopts Clelia's family, speech, tastes and judgments.
    Other famous rejecters of their background, whose rejection ends up shaping their personalities, include Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald), Becky Sharp ( Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray), and Rudolph Jordache (Rich Man, Poor Man, by Irwin Shaw).
    He's embraced his background, to the point of exaggerating its outer signs. The businessman who wears the boots, Stetson and hearty accent of his native Texas, even though he now lives in Philadelphia. The Frenchwoman whose accent, after thirty years in Boston, is more Parisian than Parisians' living on the Champs-Elys^es. The South Dakotan who's never left Sioux Falls, never will, and belongs to the same civic organizations her mother did. Check out Scotty Hoag, in Herman Wouk's Youngblood Hawke, who does multimillion-dollar real estate deals all over the country, yet sounds and acts like a good ol' boy who never left the Kentucky hills.
    What motivates such people? Pride, or contentment, or homesickness, or inertia, or lack of imagination, or lack of pretentiousness, or deliberate camouflage. You decide.
    He's ambivalent about his background, and so vacillates between erasing its signs and clinging to them. For a more complex portrait than Scotty Hoag, consider Wouk's hero in the same novel. Youngblood Hawke, a famous novelist, is from the Kentucky hills but now lives in Manhattan. His success has given him entree to upper-class social circles. Hawke, who's only twenty-six, buys expensive suits and shoes like those he sees on New Yorkers at parties. He also clings fiercely to his Kentucky accent. He buys an East Side brownstone, but ends up living in its cramped attic, which is ''much like his bedroom in his mother's house.'' He pursues a sophisticated concert manager who seems to him the epitome of the ''New York woman,'' but falls in love with a small-town girl of working-class parents. In short, he fumbles his way out of, back into, halfway out of his background—like most of us engaged in the lifelong process of growing up.
    Using a character's background to help create him does not have to lead to stereotypes. Not if you use your imagination to go beyond the obvious.
    A DIFFERENT OBJECTION TO BACKGROUND WORK
    Another objection to this process goes like this: OK, well and good, my character does indeed have to come from somewhere, but for the book I have in mind, her background doesn't matter. It's a book about (pick one) the FBI solving crimes/the military chasing foreign subs/ the spaceship crew trading with Deneb Four. There's a lot of action, and no time for explaining characters' earlier lives. All that matters is who they are now. There's no point in my inventing a geographical and social background, because I just won't use the information for anything. Right?
    Only half right.
    It's true that there are good books in which we never get a hint about where the protagonist comes from. Not a geographical name, not a whiff of accent, not a single childhood recollection. That's fine. It doesn't have to be in the book, or in your character's mind. But it should nonetheless be in your mind, because even if it's never mentioned, it will still influence the way you write him. And if you don't have some sense of his background, you are far more likely to