Techniques of the Selling Writer (34 page)

Thus do you write the ending to your story. The key issue to bear in mind is that
the thing your reader remembers best is what he reads last. In consequence, a strong
ending may save a weak story. If the ending disappoints, on the other hand, Reader
quite possibly will feel that the story as a whole is a failure.

Beginning plus middle plus end equal story.

Here in this chapter we’ve chopped them up, dissected them, dealt with each almost
as if it were a separate entity.

They’re not. Except analytically, as here, story components have no life separate
from the whole, any more than a hand or a head or a stomach can survive apart from
the parent body. To allow atomistic concepts to rule your thinking when you write
is as futile as to try to assemble a living cow from hamburger.

“What’s wrong with my third act?” a playwright asked dramatist George Kaufman.

“Your first,” Kaufman answered.

That’s a lesson every new writer needs to take to heart. A successful story is always
an integrated unit. Treat it as a mishmash of bits and fragments and it disintegrates.

Neither should you accept a breakdown such as this chapter offers as attempting to
establish a set pattern. The purpose of
fragmentation is to show you what makes a story tick . . . devices with which you
create effects; a few of the tools you use to manipulate reader feeling.

Each story, however, is unique and individual. Tricks and techniques must be adapted
to its special problems. No universal blueprint is worth the paper on which it’s reproduced.

That’s the reason I put such stress on function and dynamics . . . the
why
behind the superstructure. For the thing a beginner needs is understanding, not a
copy camera. A rule is a rock around your neck, if you let it dominate intelligence
and imagination.

Especially is this true when you set out to create people to populate your stories
. . . which same is the subject of our next chapter.

CHAPTER 7

The People in Your Story

A character is a person in a story.

To create story people, you grab the first stick figures that come handy; then flesh
them out until they spring to life.

This process of character creation is no more or less difficult than any other phase
of authorship. Yet the mere mention of it fills too many would-be writers with all
sorts of trepidation.

Why?

Because we spend our lives with people, but we seldom pay attention to them. As the
late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once caused Sherlock Holmes to comment, “You see, but
you do not observe.”

Which is just another way of saying that the human animal is really a mystery to us.
We don’t know what he looks like, we don’t know how he behaves or why, we don’t understand
what it is about him that bores us or excites us.

The unknown is always frightening. To be forced to deal with it, face to face, sends
us into panic.

No such consternation is warranted. You learn to build characters the same way you
learn anything else in this writing business: You take the job a step at a time, working
in terms of function and process and device.

What specific points do you need to master? You’ll find them in the answers to five
questions:

So much for generalities. Now, let’s get down to cases.

How does a character come into being?

To what extent is a character like a real person—a living, breathing human being?

At a generous estimate, about one one-thousandth of 1 per cent.

The reason this is so is because a living person is infinitely complex. A story person,
on the other hand, is merely a
simulation
of a living person. So, he’s infinitely simpler. Space and function limit him.

Thus, even the longest book can capture only a tiny segment of any human being. To
try to get down the real person would demand a library at least. The cortex of a man’s
brain has more than ten billion nerve cells. The Empire State Building couldn’t house
a computer with that many tubes, and a scientist says that a machine to play unbeatable
chess would have to be “slightly larger than the universe.”

What’s more, there’s no need in fiction to go into all the facets of a living being.
A story is the record of how somebody deals with danger.
One
danger, for a simple story; a series of interrelated dangers, for one more complex.
In neither case can you possibly involve the full range of a personality.

So?

So, you develop a character only to that limited degree that he needs to be developed,
in order to fulfill his function in the story. You give an impression and approximation
of life, rather than attempting to duplicate life itself.

To that end, you oversimplify the facts of human personality, since to do otherwise
complicates your task to the point where it becomes completely impractical, if not
impossible.

And that brings us back to our original question: How do you bring a character into
being?

You plan a story.

Sometimes, in so doing, you begin with a character. But sometimes
you don’t. For despite a host of literary folk-tales, a story may start from anything—the
most evanescent of fragments in a writer’s mind.

Sometimes, that fragment may be a person, or some aspect of a person. But it may equally
well be a mood, a situation, a setting, an object, an incident, a conflict, a complication,
a word, a flash of imagery or sensory perception.

Once you have this fragment, you begin to build your story. By
accretion
, as mystery writer Fredric Brown once phrased it. By gradual addition, bouncing your
idea around in free association until other thought-fragments, magnetized, cling to
it.

Eventually, it adds up to a story.

Your characters, too, come into being gradually. Often, in the early stages, they
may be faceless; mere designations of role—“hero,” “villain,” “girl,” and the like.

Then, a little at a time, you find yourself individualizing them. Pictures begin to
form in your mind—vague at first; then sharper. The girl becomes a redhead, the hero
has a habit of gulping and staring blankly, the villain beams cordially at the very
moment that he twists the knife.

Where do you get these fragments?

From observation. From thought and insight. From imagination.

Take
observation
. All your life long, automatically, you store up a reservoir of impressions. Impressions
of people are among them. You see what they look like, how they behave, the way in
which they think. Then, when you take to writing, and need characters, you find yourself
selecting and juggling and recombining these components.

And there stands a major source of writer trouble. For observation isn’t always an
automatic process. Soon, if you’re at all perceptive, you discover that your eye for
detail tends too often to be sloppy, inaccurate.

Whereupon, you take to paying closer attention to people . . . seeking out types and
individuals that intrigue you . . . studying them consciously in an effort to enrich
your store of raw material.

Particularly, you stop taking so much for granted. Instead of accepting vague impressions,
you hunt for specifics. You break down behavior into cause and effect, motivating
stimulus and
character reaction. You search out significant details—the trivia that create or
betray feeling.

But observation alone isn’t quite enough. We have to supplement it with
thought and insight
.

Why?

Because, in day-to-day living, we tend to accept rather than analyze; to take for
granted, more than understand.

Consequently, when we try to build story people, we find that we lack a grasp of mental
mechanisms; motivations.

To remedy this demands conscious study.

Sometimes, that study takes us to the library. But life itself may prove a better
teacher. Even psychiatrists admit that novelists pioneered the behavioral area before
them.

Certainly, in any event, you need all the understanding you can get. Character, human
personality, is a subject no writer ever masters completely. But with a little effort,
you can broaden your discernment enough to satisfy your reader.

Enter
imagination
.

A human being is more than observed fragments; more than mental mechanisms too.

Specifically, each of us is an entity, a personal and private whole that transcends
its components.

To understand a man, you have to grasp the essence of that wholeness . . . its
Gestalt;
the totality of its configuration.

So also with story people. The parts just aren’t enough. You have to integrate them
into a larger pattern. Until you do, they won’t coalesce into what appears to be a
living person.

Conceptualizing this
Gestalt
, this wholeness, is imagination’s task. It brings the character to life.

To claim that this is always simple would be to lie to you. Character creation can
be a complex operation . . . one that calls for every bit of skill and inspiration
you can muster.

Further, each character constitutes a separate problem, individual and unique. Some
demand much labor, some little. Some spring to a semblance of life full-grown, with
virtually no conscious effort. Others require endless floor-pacing. And still others,
for no perceptible reason, never come through clearly, fully believable, no matter
how much you sweat or strain. You simply can’t seem to tune in on their wave-length.

Which means?

You too are human and have private limitations. And that’s good. The writer who sees
himself as a surrogate of God is on the road to paranoia.

It’s question time again:

No more than absolutely necessary. Each takes extra words, extra space, extra effort.
Throw in too many, and you may even lose or confuse your reader.

The best rule is to bring in no one who doesn’t in some way or other advance the conflict
. . . which is to say, the story. If a story person isn’t for or against your hero,
leave him out. Every character should contribute something: action or information
that helps or harms, advances or holds back.

Of course. The trick here, however, is to consolidate. Ask yourself if waiter and
bellhop and room clerk can’t be combined; if the contributions they make can’t be
attended to as well by one person as by two or three.

They are. A story isn’t facts or history; it’s the product of a writer’s imagination.

Consequently,
everything
about it is contrived. The only issue is, do you contrive skillfully, so that your
reader doesn’t detect that element of contrivance? Or, is the job inept and awkward,
with your hand as obvious as that of a bumbling puppeteer?

No; and for three reasons:

He can resent this, in terms of a—for you—disastrous lawsuit.

So long as you write fiction and not fact, you need to work with people exactly suited
to their tasks. Create a character, and you can tailor him to fit the situation. Pick
one from life, and more often than not reality gets in the way.