How Bad Things Happen to Good Characters

It's not a matter of why bad things happen to our characters. Bad things, we know, must happen or else there is no story. But distinguishing between how it's done in the short form and how it's done in the longer form is key to successfully building conflict appropriate for the stories we want to tell.

We speak often of tension in fiction. What do we mean? Tension, if you will recall from fourth grade science, is the force applied to an object when it's being pulled in opposite directions. Sounds like a good definition for our purposes, but is it truly? What form of fiction are we talking about?

Compression vs. Tension



Short fiction is, well, short. Think about it that for a moment. It's brief. It's intense, compact. It demands a higher torque of pressure to be exerted on characters. If we could measure conflict per square inch or determine by some other such formula, we would find, I believe, that short story characters know better than their novel counterparts how to bear up under extreme compressive stress. When we write short stories, we squeeze our characters, we apply pressure, not tension. We pinch them until they say uncle. We press down until they buckle and break.

Tension, however, is the appropriate term, I think, for what happens to characters in a novel. Given the larger expanse a novel must cover, novelists don't so much squeeze their characters as they pull on them, always in many directions at once, stretching and twisting them to the snapping point. We think of novels as having "threads" or strands, multiple storylines that must be woven together. As the novelist works, she pulls each thread tautly.

But let us stay with the image of the bridge. Is it too much of a stretch (ha ha) to say that each strand in a novel forms a rope upon which the novelist continuously applies greater and greater tension until a bridge is erected that safely delivers a reader from one side of a dangerous gulch to the other?

Protagonists and Heroes

If you buy this idea of mine that stories work under the principles of compression and novels work under the principles of tension, then perhaps you'll venture a step further with me.

We use the terms "protagonist" and "hero" interchangably to mean the main character in a work of fiction, a misunderstanding, I think, which has been confusing to me as I switch to novel-writing. There is a subtle distinction between the two.

A protagonist, as I will try here to define it, is the most important or central character in a short story, whereby the plot is not incumbent upon any sort of "heroic" attributes of that character.

A hero, on the other hand, is the central character in a novel who exhibits certain heroic qualities (courage, sacrifice, honor, perseverance) upon which the action of the story depends completely.

Obviously, these definitions are drawn very loosely and don't hold water in every situation. Please bear with me.

I don't know about you, but I never think of short story protagonists in heroic terms. They don't have to be courageous, necessarily, or selfless or honorable. In fact, the ones I like best possess none of those traits. When I'm developing characters for stories, I don't think of any of that stuff. I think in terms of empathy, and motivation. Desire. Change. Revelation. I think of quiet desperation, bumblers, people who can't pay their rent and never will, not in the span of a single short story and certainly not in the length of a 400-page novel.

Can you imagine one of Raymond Carver's characters trying to occupy a novel? Of course, it's possible, and in fact, it happens all the time. But the result is episodic. And while episodic novels are fine, I'm thinking here of the more traditional unified structure of a novel whereby one of two stories is told (according to John Gardner): a hero goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Some people argue that every story is a journey story. Even if a stranger comes to town, he brings with him a whole new set of circumstances that forces the hero to embark upon a symbolic journey.

So, what am I saying? To transition between writing stories and novels requires a few big shifts in perspective. Some writers switch between the two effortlessly while others, like me, find it more of a challenge. It's slowly dawning on me that it's not as simple as stringing together a bunch of short narratives. Nor is it as straightforward as constructing one giant story. Just as writing short fiction is sometimes dismissed by novelists as being an easier form to master, so too is writing a novel a whole different animal, one that requires a completely different frame of reference.

What has your experience been like?