Stein on Writing by Sol Stein Page B

severe rainstorm, passes a hitchhiker, then out of compassion and guilt, turns his car around to pick the man up:
     
    As the man clambered in I could see he was one of those assless thin fellows who hikes his pants up higher than most men do.
     
    The hitchhiker had his hand stretched out to shake. I was of the belief that hitchhikers, like waiters and mailmen, don’t offer their hand, but this man’s was stuck out there like an embarrassment, so I held on to the wheel hard with my left hand and put my right hand out to shake the man’s rain-wet palm.
     
    I could tell the man’s breath was the kind that toothpaste didn’t cure.
     
    The hitchhiker introduces himself. Even his name has an evil sound. He is characterized by clothing, sight, smell, and now touch:
     
    The skin of Uck’s hand seemed flaked, reptilian. Even when the man tried to smile, his face didn’t cooperate. Like Peter Lorre’s, his lips thinned, but that was all. I thought if this man’s mother had pressed a pillow on his nose and mouth when he was a baby, would anyone have convicted her?
     
    The protagonist is so repulsed by what he sees, smells, and touches of the hitchhiker, that his mind jumps to wishing the man dead. That puts the reader’s emotion on the defensive. The reader—whatever his conduct in private life—doesn’t believe or wish to believe that he would hope a man would drop dead just because he was repulsive. “Hey,” the reader thinks, “this guy’s human.”
    That’s the key, of course. Uck is human. We meet his wife and child. He can be charming if he wants to. Nevertheless, he is fundamentally evil in the way he attaches himself to the life of the protagonist and won’t let go. He is not just getting a lift in the rain, he is the leech that cannot be pulled off the skin. Uck has taken the first step in pushing himself into the protagonist’s life and has begun the process of forcing the protagonist out of his job and home, a true villain.
    You need to ask yourself about your antagonist, Is he curable? Is he bad but can be straightened out? Bad will work, but evil will provide a more profound experience for the reader.
    We have seen that wimpishness is off-putting in a protagonist. We have a sense that will —desire reinforced by ambition—is what makes protagonists drive us through their stories. In the example just given, the protagonist is intensely interested in his work that has brought him a comfortable life, his wife, his house. The hitchhiker who appears in the rainstorm is set to take that from him and cannot be bought off by ransom of any kind. From that clash of these two characters, we get the kind of conflict that attracts readers.
     
    CHARACTERIZING MINOR PLAYERS
     
    Major characters deserve and get our primary attention. That doesn’t mean we should settle for stereotypes for minor characters. Sometimes they are given a name, a sex, an age, and no characterization. I’ve seen minor characters given too much characterization, fooling the reader into thinking they had some larger role to play. Sometimes all you want is for the reader to be able to see the minor character. Here’s how Nanci Kincaid does it:
     
    You think you never saw white completely until you see Roy’s butt.
     
    The most efficient technique for making minor characters come alive is to select one memorable characteristic that singles them out from the rest of humanity. This is particularly true for fleeting characters, those that appear and vanish, not to return. Early in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms the reader comes upon:
     
    The priest was young and blushed easily.
     
    In just seven words, the priest is visible even before his special uniform is described. Note that blushing is an action that characterizes, important here because the priest, in military service, is about to be picked on by a senior officer.
    Irwin Shaw, in a story called “No Jury Would Convict,” shows us this:
     
    The man in the green sweater took