Techniques of the Selling Writer (37 page)

Environment?
The slum child and the country boy aren’t the same. Neither are the resident of the
sleepy college town and the New Yorker. East and West each molds its people. So do
Maine and Mississippi. Wilshire Boulevard may loom broad and deep as the Grand Canyon
to an aspiring actor who lives two blocks on the wrong side. Gopher Prairie breeds
rebellion and resentment in the nonconformist. The girl at home on Chicago’s Rush
Street finds she feels uncomfortable and ill at ease when, jerked out of context,
she’s forced to live in Keokuk. The boy from Painted Post has trouble adjusting to
Greenwich Village. The Louisiana Cajun or the West Virginia mountaineer may not fit
into life at an army post.

Experience
differentiates factory hand from cowman, preacher from peddler. Lack of it may petrify
the virgin on her wedding night, or panic the new recruit under fire for the first
time. The man perfectly at home at a banquet can feel hideously out of place in a
cheap bar . . . and so can the waitress who now enters the Waldorf dining room as
guest.

It’s the same with
ideas
. Among old friends, I may do well. But a glibly contemptuous son, fresh home from
college, makes me feel inadequate and inferior. Son, in turn, may writhe in helpless
fury when a Communist trained at the Lenin Institute exposes him as a babe in arms
politically. The boy who’s lost his religious faith feels acutely uncomfortable and
aware of difference under the accusing eyes of his devout family. And so does
the woman who thought her taste impeccable until, today, a visitor laughed at the
table setting.

Needless to say, all these analytical entities tend, in life, to overlap. Each of
us is a compounding of complexities. No one can say for sure that a man is the way
he is primarily because he was born with a tongue-tie that minor surgery corrected,
or grew up on a Grosse Pointe Farms estate, or nearly drowned at nine when a sailboat
overturned, or went from Michigan to Harvard Law School, or served as a naval officer
before he took an executive post with Chrysler Corporation, or married a girl from
Lake Forest and had two children by her, or chose to espouse the Democratic cause
in a district solidly Republican. But add them all together, and you have a personality
that’s individual and unique. Each factor colors our man’s feelings, his thinking,
his behavior. Know him in terms of those factors, and despite all surface similarities
he stands out in marked contrast to other men.

He is, in brief, a character you can work with in a story.

And that’s why it’s so well worth your while, in building characters, to survey each
person’s areas of uniqueness. From them, you can project some of the secret fears
and lacks and feelings of inadequacy that drive your man or woman, and thus determine
individual direction and make each appear to move independently, under his or her
own steam.

Beyond this, it also helps if you’ll take time to consider your character’s involvements
in:

Here, the issue is simple: Man doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A character without relationships
to his fellow men is bound to prove flat as a cardboard cutout.

Take
love
. How does your man feel about women? Why? Is he married? If not, why not? If so,
does he love his wife? As much now as when they married? Even more? And again, if
not, why not?

In the same way, how does a child feel about his parents? His brothers and sisters?
His playmates? His neighbors? His
teachers? How do these experiences and reactions color and shape his attitudes?

Work
, in our society, offers equal opportunities for study. Failure to take it into account
can bring into being such ridiculous figures as the cowboy who always has cash to
hang around the town saloon, yet never is observed actually punching cattle.

Further, employer and employee view the world from separate angles. Banker and grocer
and farmer and office manager operate in different frames of reference. Union and
non-union painter approach their problems in marked contrast. The attitudes of lawyer
and engineer are miles apart.

Society?
Whom does your character associate with, and why? Are his close friends on a level
with him—socially, educationally, in terms of income? If not, why not? Does he relax
alone or in company? Are his companions chosen from the stable or unstable, the homebound
or the rovers, the beatniks or the suburbanites?

Again, such information is of little value per se. It offers you no magic key to character
dynamics.

What it
does
provide is an additional method, more or less systematic, of tracking down possible
areas of inadequacy and lack.

Now, what about
compensation?

Compensation, as stated earlier, is what your character substitutes for what he hasn’t
got . . . the price he pays to make up for his lacks, the behavior with which he attempts
to ease the sting engendered by feelings of inadequacy.

Compensation breaks down into two basic reaction-patterns:

Thus, if I feel sufficiently at a loss about something, I may attempt to counterbalance
this feeling by striving toward some specific goal and/or way of life which, to me,
symbolizes superiority.

Or, overwhelmed by my own frustrations and sense of weakness, I may withdraw from
the battle and try to preserve my
ego from further bruises by refusing to strive, on one excuse or another . . . denying
the worth of striving in general, or focusing on a side issue, or developing physical
or psychological symptoms which prevent my taking action.

The fighter is a familiar figure. We see him daily in the ninety-seven-pound weakling
who becomes a Charles Atlas . . . the small man who makes up for his size by developing
such drive and ambition that he amasses a fortune . . . the homely woman who achieves
the charm of an Eleanor Roosevelt . . . the stutterer who rises to the heights of
a Demosthenes.

Those who resort to flight are with us too. Here’s the woman who forgets her fading
beauty in a bottle . . . the boy who thwarts successful parents’ pressure by failing
in school or on the job . . . the girl, secretly frightened by the sheer enormity
of life, who plays it so cool as to reject all emotional involvement . . . the man
who masks present failure with tales of college football glory . . . the hypochondriac
female, fearful of pain and responsibility alike, who claims her heart’s too weak
for her ever to bear children . . . the hoodlum whose sense of inferiority is so deep-seated
that he lives outside the law . . . the coed who makes up for an unsatisfactory love-life
with continual overeating.

Your character, too, forever seeks release from his frustrations.

Like other men, he finds that release in either fight or flight. How he achieves it
should be part of the past history you assign him.

If he’s a fighter, he seizes upon some specific thing, some act, the performance of
which will, he believes, give him the sense of fulfillment that he seeks.

If flight’s more his habit, he’ll dodge the issue—duck responsibility or involvement,
chase women, abandon ambition, go in for sweet lemons or sour grapes.

Or maybe, like many of us, he’ll combine the two: sometimes fighting, sometimes running,
in accord with circumstance and his own impulse.

Lack plus compensation equals rationalization of behavior equals a character who appears
to move under his own power.

Create your story people on that basis. Experience and experimentation will do the
rest.

As for specifics, here are a few miscellaneous points to bear in mind:

Consciously or otherwise, each of us sees himself in a particular light—as attractive
or honest or dashing or ugly or what have you.

Then, we react
as if
this subjective image were an accurate and objective picture, and attempt to live
up to the role in which we’ve cast ourselves.

When you write, you need to take into account this self-concept your character has
built up. If Ed considers himself first of all a gentleman, and if his idea of gentlemanliness
precludes loud or boisterous behavior, then hold his activities within the limits
of that image.

Often, the image itself is false, of course. A woman may still think of herself as
the “cute” girl she was twenty years ago. A child tries to live up to adult comments
that he’s a “little devil” instead of a normally mischievous boy.

Regardless, the image remains important. The psychic dividends the woman’s self-concept
originally paid her may have been so high that now she can’t break the chains of her
own conditioning. A loosely tossed-off label can blight a child so badly that it casts
a shadow across reality.

Consequently, whether a character’s mind-picture be true or false, you can’t afford
to ignore the image.

Habits, William James once said, tend to become habitual.

Characters’ reaction patterns operate on the habit level. The volatile girl stays
volatile, the stolid man stolid. Overreaction or underreaction or irrational reaction
often amount to a way of life for the individual concerned.

Recognition of this fact is your most useful tool where keeping a character consistent—and
thus believable—is the issue.

In life, you judge a man more by what he does than what he says. His powers of rationalization
may make his self-image sheer delusion—witness the familiar figure of the “great lover”
who’s seen by the girls in his office as a filthy-minded, foul-mouthed, clammy-handed
old lecher.

Therefore, be sparing of psychological analysis and conducted tours of the unconscious.
Implication can be golden. Let your reader draw his own conclusions as to the forces
at work within your story people. For your own part, most of the time, your best bet
is to
show
your man, in characteristic action, and let it go at that.

This is a plea that you
not
conceive characters by the numbers. Rather, play by ear wherever possible, especially
when you first start work on a story.

Then, later, ask yourself
why
Eugene tore up the fifty-dollar bill, or Kitty begged Blake to take her back. Hypothesizing
from possible lacks and compensations, you may come forth with startling—and effective—insights.

Tags and impressions mirror dynamics. If Marie is punctilious or Andy sullen, it says
a great deal about what’s going on inside them.

Therefore, match external behavior to dynamics, and vice versa. Ned’s fussiness about
perfect grooming may reflect doubts of inner worth. Linda’s secret guilts and hostilities
may reach the surface in a tendency to take more than her share of blame.

Understand, you don’t need to talk about or explain such. But you’ll write better
if you yourself have a pretty good idea of the motive forces behind everything each
character does.

Inside your characters as well as out, your reader likes variety. So, no two story
people should have inner drives that match precisely. If Alex cringes over his lack
of education, let Howard draw direction from loss of a mother who ran off when he
was
only ten. Does Laura build her ego by sleeping around? Then it might prove effective
contrast if Vivian takes pride in her competence at work.

Even in a novel, there’ll be only half-a-dozen people you or your reader need to know
in depth. Where the rest are concerned, type casting and surface freshness via tags
will do the job nicely.

Which is to say, you waste time and energy when you overbuild. Beware the temptation
to make every spear-bearer a major project. More likely than not, it’s just an unconscious
excuse to avoid getting on with the story.