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| Editors: | |
| James Blasingame | James.Blasingame@asu.edu |
| Lori A. Goodson | lagoodson@cox.net |
From Dynamite Dinahto Dinah Forever:
Managing a Character's Growth through a Series
I have a feeling that down deep every author would like to write a series, or at least a sequel, or at least, having written the first book, findsherself hankering for some glimpse into the future, some peek into herprotagonist's later escapades and adventures, some need to discover whathappened after happily ever after. I know that in my own case,having created a fictional world and the characters who inhabit it, it hasalways been hard for me to let go at the end of one book and go on to thenext.
On the other hand, for many years I doubted whether I would ever write a secondbook about any of my characters for the following reason. While all goodfiction, I believe, deals with the growth of its characters, my books center onthe protagonist's growth so strongly that at the end of the book my maincharacter is different enough from the girl she was in the beginning that therebegins to seem no point in writing about her rather than about someother girl with some other set of problems and challenges that will occasionher growth. My characters seemed to me almost defined by the problemthat grips them in Chapter One, and as they overcome this problem and maturetoward their growth in Chapter Fourteen, their change along the way isextremely deep. They are shaken to the core of their being. And how manytimes in a row can you shake the same character to the core of her being? Soafter triumphantly scrawling THE END at the conclusion of each of my books, Imoved on, reluctantly, to the next.
But when I wrote Dynamite Dinah (Macmillan, 1990), I knew at the endthat I simply could not bear to move on. I had to know more about whathappened to Dinah, even though Dinah, as much or more than her predecessors,had been shaken to the core of her being and was thoroughly transformed overthe course of the first book.
The central problem in the first book, the problem that defines Dinah as acharacter, is, not to put too fine a point on it, an over-abundance of ego.Both at home and at school, Dinah has always been the center of attention. Anindulged only-child, a talented actress, Dinah believes that a disproportionateshare of the world's attention is rightfully hers. After all, interestingpeople should be the ones talking, and boring people should be the oneslistening, right? And in her own view, Dinah is exceedingly interesting. Inmy other life, I teach philosophy; so to throw in a bit of professional jargon,we could say that Dinah is an adherent of the philosophical view known assolipsism, "the view that nothing exists or is real but the self," here,Dinah's self. Thus, when Dinah momentarily forgets the text of the poem shehas memorized for a class recitation, she compares this failure to her bestfriend Suzanne's past memory lapses at piano recitals: "This was like Suzanne'spiano recitals, but a hundred times worse. Suzanne's piano recitals hadhappened to Suzanne. This was happening to Dinah." But in the courseof the book Dinah is faced with a brand new baby brother at home and a teacherat school who casts not Dinah, but Suzanne, as Becky Thatcher in TheAdventures of Tom Sawyer. (To her disgust Dinah plays Village Girl NumberTwo.) And by the end of the book, Dinah learns to accept that she mustsometimes share the spotlight, that "The way she felt about herself was the waythat other people felt about themselves." What could I possibly do inthe next book, given the centrality of this revelation to Dinah?
Now, as an autobiographical aside, I must say that as a child I was very likeDinah, only it was my kindergarten teacher who failed to cast me in myaccustomed starring role. At Christmas time we performed a little class playbased on The Nutcracker, and I was the girl who danced around theChristmas tree with tinsel in my hair. At Valentine's Day we offered anotherholiday play, and I was Miss Valentine, wearing a big red heart, all edged withlace. Then we put on a classroom production of Peter Pan. When I talkto children, I ask them to guess what part they think I played. "Peter Pan!"they call out. "Wendy?" "Captain Hook?" "Tinker Bell?" No, I tell them. Myteacher decided that it was someone else's turn to have a part! I served onthe backstage crew. I never got over it -- probably I still haven't -- andthat experience was very much the seed for Dynamite Dinah. I alsoremember distinctly the moment that my own solipsism was first explicitlyshaken. I was in third grade, at a rehearsal of the Crusader Choir at ourchurch, sharing a hymnal with a girl named Paula Jo Hatfield, when suddenly itoccurred to me with an electrifying vividness that Paula Jo Hatfield was aperson, with her own thoughts and feelings, her own inner life. Just asI thought of her as the girl who sat next to me in choir sharing my hymnal, soshe thought of me as the girl who sat next to her in choirsharing her hymnal. But of course real life is not fiction, andin real life this realization, however earth-shattering at the time, neverquite "took." To this day, my ego is very large -- maybe a writer's ego has tobe, to survive the criticism and rejection that is part of our job description.In any case, I still run into trouble at the dinner table for operating onDinah's principle that interesting people should talk and boring people shouldlisten. Here, my husband, I must admit, is assigned the listening role, forhis preferred topics of conversation tend to be things like "Features ofWordPerfect 6.1 that differ from features of WordPerfect 5.1," while my storiesare, quite frankly, far more scintillating. Still, sometimes I must at leastpretend to listen, and, good wife that I am, I do -- but grudgingly.
So, in real life, we don't ever "learn our lesson" for once and for all. Wedon't overcome our problems neatly at age ten, or fourteen, or forty, but haveto keep facing the same problems over and over and over again. Yet, infiction, we do expect some progress forward. I had provided this for Dinah inDynamite Dinah. Now, how could I take this character forward to thenext book, still recognizably Dinah, still a child with an overly large ego,but with an ego chastened by her experiences in the first book?
Luckily, the action of Dynamite Dinah takes place in the spring offifth grade, so I could advance by moving Dinah to a new setting, on to thestart of sixth grade in middle school, where her growth from the first bookcould be tested against a whole new range of challenges. All children, I thinkit is safe to say, experience some shock of adjustment on moving fromelementary school to middle school, and the shock will only be intensified ifthe child has had an inflated sense of her own position in the former. SoDinah, once a big frog in a small pond, is moving to the big pond, where no oneknows or cares about her erstwhile glories. Casting about for some way to makeher mark on her new surroundings, she hits upon a run for the office ofsixth-grade class president. There is nothing she particularly wants todo or achieve as president; she just wants to bepresident. President Dinah: it has a satisfying big-froggish kind of sound.
I myself ran for class office unsuccessfully three times -- in seventh, eighth,and ninth grade -- before I finally astonished myself (and everyone else) bybeing elected president of my sophomore class. Each election had its ownparticular pains and humiliations: the time I ran against three boys, and theballoting produced a three-way tie, three winners, and only one loser -- yes,you guessed it, me; the time I ran against a boy I fancied myself in love with,and so on. Like Dinah, or at least Dinah at the outset of her race, I neverhad any platform or program for what I would do if I should actually win -- Ijust liked campaigning, especially the part where I would make a passionatespeech to the entire student body, assembled as a captive audience in theschool auditorium. When I finally did win, elected largely by a hefty "pity"vote -- "Poor Claudia -- it will look pretty bad if she doesn't get anyvotes!" -- I was faced with the dreary task of having actually to be classpresident. Let me tell you, the president of the sophomore class in NorthPlainfield, New Jersey, does not negotiate many peace treaties in the MiddleEast or unveil any packages of historic legislation or get to drop any nuclearbombs on anyone.
Dinah's race for class office, however, forces her to adopt, opportunistically,a platform of promised action. Half-heartedly, she settles on trying toestablish a recycling program at her school and finds that, as she campaignsfor it with her usual reckless exhibitionism, she ends up convincing herselfthat a schoolwide recycling program is urgently needed -- indeed, that it ismore important to the future of planet Earth than even her own election. Itdoesn't matter in the end, Dinah discovers, whether you are a big frog in alittle pond or a little frog in a big pond: what matters is what kind of pondyou live in, and what you can do to make it better. So in Dinah forPresident (Macmillan, 1992), Dinah takes another step forward in overcomingthe self, this time as she takes her part on a larger stage, entering andlearning to care about a world beyond her own school and family.
I thought I was done with Dinah then. But I had long harbored the seed foranother book, one that stubbornly refused all my attempts to grow it into anovel, until I suddenly had the idea of bringing Dinah back -- of course, Dinahsuitably matured through the course of the first two Dinah books -- to star init. I had always wanted to write a book about unrequited love, mainly becausethis was my chief activity from the fall of eighth grade -- October 17, 1967,to be exact, the day I fell in love with one poor, persecuted boy named DickThistle -- through the summer of my sophomore year in college, when, back inNorth Plainfield once more, I remember spending many a Saturday afternoondriving ten miles to the shoe store where Dick Thistle worked, glancing in thewindow to see if he was there, and then driving back home again. I still havea box of poems I wrote to him -- mostly sonnets, addressed to Apollo, the SunGod, from Clytie, the maiden who turned herself into a sunflower for love ofhim. One stray couplet I will quote here, because it combines the intensity oflove with the still ample size of the lover's ego: "I love you more than therainbow's sweet shades. I love you more than all my good grades."
I had to write a book about unrequited love. Now, there are severalways that such a story can end. (Usually the story doesn't end with the girlsix or seven years later still driving by the shoe store where the boy works.)In variation one, exemplified by the greatest of all unrequited love stories,Beverly Cleary's hilarious and heart-breaking Jean and Johnny, the girldiscovers that the unattainable boy isn't really worth attaining and that shewill be much happier with the kind of friendship between equals that she canfind with the attainable boy. I was intrigued, though, by variation two,encapsulated in a quote from Walt Whitman that my sister found for me. WaltWhitman apparently said something to the effect that there was no such thing asunrequited love: you always get something back. In his case -- and in mine --it was the poems he had written out of that love. In the most elementary case,it is just -- having loved. As in, "It's better to have loved and lost thannever to have loved at all." So I kept trying to write this second kind ofunrequited love story. The only problem was that the heroine in the grip ofher unreturned passion invariably turned out to be a strikingly unsympatheticfigure -- mopey and drippy and pathetic. That wouldn't do at all.
It was then that I had my idea: What if Dinah were the heroine of this story?Dinah could certainly do up unrequited love if anybody could. She couldpersecute her own quarry -- I called him Nick Tribble, in obvious homage to myDick Thistle -- with real theatrical flair. Then at the end of the book Dinahwould realize that she had never really been in love with Nick Tribble at all;she had only been in love with love, or more precisely, in love with the ideaof Dinah in love. Once again, Dinah's ego would play a real role in the story,but she wouldn't be left learning the same tired lessons from the first twobooks all over again.
I was ready! I sharpened my pencils! -- figuratively speaking, for I alwayswrite with a Pilot Razor Point pen. I chose a new pen and stared down at theblank page on which I had written Chapter One, Page One, with an expectantshiver. I began to write. Nick arrived on the scene with suitable fanfare.Dinah responded with suitable fireworks. The only problem was that by the endof Chapter One, Dinah wasn't the slightest bit in love with Nick. In fact, inher words, she hated the very marrow of his moldy bones. On to Chapter Two --but at the end of Chapter Two, Dinah was no closer to love than at the end ofChapter One. By this time I knew better than to think she'd capitulate inChapter Three. It was plain to me that if Nick could win Dinah's heart at all,it would be at the end of the book and not at its beginning. In short, insteadof my longed-for story of unrequited love, I had instead the chance to playfondly with the conventions of traditional romantic comedy, situated in thesixth grade. My favorite review of Dinah in Love (Macmillan, 1993),from Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, said of it, "It'spredictable, sure, but so were Tracy and Hepburn." What does Dinah learn atthe end of the book that ties the story line into her ongoing but ever evolvingpreoccupation with herself? All along Dinah has asserted that "Dinah Seabrookeisn't the type to like a boy"; at the end she realizes that people don't comein types, and that she isn't locked in to any particular image of herself.Dinah Seabrooke is whoever she is, and as she grows and changes,Dinah will, too.
Now I was done with Dinah forever. Or so I thought. But then it seemed to methat there was still one remaining project for a young woman with an overlysturdy ego, who has learned to share the spotlight at home and at school,learned to care about the wider world, and stumbled, over her own fierce inneropposition, toward her first experience with love. She should face the truthof her own mortality -- the fact that she -- even she -- will not liveforever. I had tried to address this theme -- one near and dear to myphilosopher's heart -- in an early, failed novel: All the Living(Macmillan, 1983), in which the protagonist, Karla, chiefly sits on a rockbrooding about death throughout most of the book. Dinah's brooding, true toher nature, is a much more flamboyant and better publicized affair. InDinah Forever (Farrar Straus Giroux, forthcoming 1995), it's triggeredby the seventh grade science teacher's casual announcement, on the first day ofschool, that the sun, like all stars, has a finite life span and is scheduledto burn itself out in another five billion years. Only five billionyears?! Dinah is horrified. Her enduring legacy and immortal fame are plainlythreatened, and her own inescapable death for the first time seems real to her.The book ends, as it has to end, with Dinah finally accepting her place in theuniverse, as one human being on one planet circling one of the hundred billionstars in one of her universe's hundred billion galaxies. So Dinah has come along way from her initial pre-Copernican view in Dynamite Dinah that sheis the center of the universe. That feels like a good place to end a series.
A good thing, too, for, in writing four books about the same heroine, I'vefound myself increasingly burdened in each successive book by the weight of allthe accumulated characters and concerns of the previous books. In DynamiteDinah I introduced Dinah's best friend, Suzanne; I gave Dinah a new babybrother, Benjamin; and I established her enduring interest in drama. InDinah for President I added an important new friend, an elderly woman,Mrs. Briscoe, and I ignited Dinah's concern with environmental issues. ByDinah in Love, I was beginning to be worried: I still had to haveSuzanne, and Benjamin, and plays, and Mrs. Briscoe, and environmentalism.These things were intensely important to Dinah in the other books; I couldn'tjust ignore or dismiss them now. And then, since a new book had to havesome new elements, I added Nick Tribble and a budding interest indebate. (Dinah debates capital punishment with Nick, as I once debated capitalpunishment with Dick Thistle.) It was beginning to feel like the fairy taleabout the goosegirl who goes dancing through town accumulating a motley trainof followers all stuck to each other and unable to break free. Could I reallycraft a story that made use of all these diverse elements? I think I did,though many the time I rued the day I had ever given Dinah a baby brother, as Iwould find that seven chapters had gone by with nary a mention of Benjamin (hegoes to bed early). And I was lucky that I had decided in the second book thatDinah couldn't sing, so I had an excuse to keep her out of any play that was amusical, thus freeing her for involvement in other activities.
Dinah Forever adds an interest in poetry, aroused by Dinah'sseventh-grade English teacher, and a fascination with astronomy and the cosmicquestions it inspires. And yes, it keeps Suzanne, Benjamin, plays, Mrs.Briscoe, environmentalism, debate, and Nick -- though I was sorely tempted toget rid of Nick somehow. Anthony Trollope briskly killed off his hero's youngIrish bride between the ending of Phineas Finn and the opening ofPhineas Redux. But you can't really get away with the offstage death ofthe heroine's first love in young adult fiction; I couldn't just make somebreezy statement in passing somewhere in Chapter One of the new book: "Dinahwas still sad that over the summer her first boyfriend Nick had unexpectedlytaken ill and died." Instead, since I essentially had no other choice, Idecided to take on the challenge of a second installment of Dinah and Nick'slove story. There aren't a lot of books for young readers that deal with whathappens in an evolving relationship after the first kiss which ends thefirst book. So I'm glad that I made myself canvass this rocky and stormyterrain. And the parallels between the twin concerns of the book -- theinevitable mortality of both life and love -- made for a stronger story,which I stumbled upon almost in spite of myself.
So Dinah is done. I will write no more about her, ever.
Unless... What if.... ???
Claudia Mills writes her Dinah novels and other works for young readers inBoulder, Colorado. She presented this article as a part of the 1994 ALANWorkshop.
