Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Because we’re men, humans, we consider each phenomenon that touches us in terms of its immediate and/or ultimate effect on man.

  Opinion as to what constitutes man’s welfare varies markedly from time to time and place to place, however. St. Augustine hews to one line, Adolf Hitler to another. And as for Norman Mailer—!

  In the case of our rainstorm, are we to view it through the eyes and feelings of carnival owner or farmer? Power-company trouble-shooter or umbrella salesman? Housewife-with-a-batch-of-clean-clothes-to-hang-out, or housewife-looking-for-an-excuse-not-to-wash-today? The issue is never the event itself; never what happens. A thing matters only insofar as it relates to and affects and is judged by people. Meaning and significance are virtual synonyms in this context. We decide how significant a thing is by the way a particular somebody behaves when faced with a specific instance.

  In other words, a thing isn’t just significant. It’s significant to somebody.

  Next question: Which somebody?

  Most of us draw our conclusions about the good, the true, and the beautiful according to how the specific event involved affects our individual situation. The bombing raid is rated by whether we or our enemies are on the receiving end. The strike, by our personal attitudes toward unions. I view seduction one way if I’m the seducer; another, if it’s my sister or wife or daughter who’s seduced. Chocolate bars are good, if I’m hungry; bad, if I’m trying to reduce; and so on.

  Thus, all value judgments are, in the last analysis, highly personal. We can never be sure where the individual stands until we check him out in detail.—Which last may not prove the easiest task in the world, incidentally, as witness government’s periodic failures in security screening. The secret thought walled up within the human mind still stands well-nigh impregnable against external onslaughts.

  But if the individual is the yardstick, how does he make his evaluations? Does he go by intelligence and logic?

  Well, hardly. I may marry because a girl dances like a dream . . . divorce because her snoring gives me nightmares . . . take or quit a job on no better grounds than the company’s coffee-break policy . . . and smoke up a storm in the face of tons of research findings and the dire predictions of my physician.

  So, again, how does the individual make his value judgments?

  He responds to facts with feelings.

  What is a fact?

  A fact is data upon the interpretation of which we (or a considerable number of us, at least) agree. It’s a consensus of opinion: The world is round, the United States has 200,000,000 population, certain disorders of the pancreas result in diabetes, sirloin steak ordinarily proves more tender than round.

  What is a feeling?

  A feeling is private interpretation of data. It’s a man’s uniquely personal and individual response to his world: I love this woman, I pity that dog, I hate hot cereals, I’m sad or happy or confused. Most often welling unbidden, without benefit of intellect or logic, it’s a subjective awareness of the ebb and flow of inner tensions, expressing itself in a reaction.

  “Reaction” is convenient verbal shorthand for “I desire to behave in a particular way.”—I may not act, you understand. But the impulse is with me. If, magically, all my restraints and inhibitions were to vanish, I’d embrace the woman, soothe the dog, throw out the cereal, weep or laugh or throw a temper tantrum.

  Behavior, in turn, seldom stands neutral. It confirms or denies, moves you forward or back. All reactions, all feelings, boil down to “This is good,” or “This is bad.” You like peach pie, or you dislike it. You’re pleased with your new office, or displeased. You enjoy parties, or they make you uncomfortable.

  Facts exist independently, outside people. But they have meaning and/or significance only as we have feelings about them; react to them. Seven inches of rain in a night is a fact, so long as you merely see an item about it in the paper. Let it wash through your living room and ruin two thousand dollars’ worth of furnishings, and it takes on true meaning and significance for you. For significance, remember, starts within the individual, in feeling. Beauty still rests in the eye of the beholder. Evil is a thing that lurks in the hearts of men.

  Things don’t have feelings. Events don’t. Places don’t. But people do. And things and events and places can create feelings in people . . . trigger an amazing range of individual reactions. Let a harmless snake slither across a room—even in circumstances which make it impossible for the snake to be dangerous—and someone screams. Does he scream at the snake? No. He screams at his own feelings. In the same way, we “know” that most baldness is incurable, that aspirin is aspirin, that no soap will make an ugly woman beautiful. But we go right on spending fortunes annually for baldness cures and brand-name aspirin and beauty soaps.

  Indeed, in the largest sense, all objectivity is an outrageous myth. To assume that finite minds can successfully catalogue the infinite is in itself presumptuous, and indicative of infinite ego. Our whole pattern of life demonstrates how tightly we’re shackled to the limitations of our species; how closely confined by our very humanness. Boy turns to girl instinctively. We talk of communicating with extraterrestrial beings when we can’t even converse meaningfully with a chimpanzee. The scientist takes it for granted that human life is more important than that of the laboratory animals he uses in his research.

  What does all this say?

  Merely that each of us has an orientation to the world . . . a built-in polarity, an emotional compass. Though we bow down before that useful tool, the concept of objectivity, most of the time our feelings still tell us which man to trust, which girl to marry; the car to buy, the price to pay, the faith to believe in, the candidate to vote for.

  Understand, these feelings of ours may tell us wrong as well as right, as any woman knows when her husband first glimpses her new twenty-dollar hat. They offer no guarantee of intelligence or morality or taste. But they do at least give us an intimately personal guide, a standard.

  Take away a man’s feelings, by lobotomy or otherwise, and he’s reduced to a human vegetable.

  Persuade him to mistrust those same feelings—via an objectivist education, perhaps—and he bobs like a chip on the sea of life: drifting, aimless, without force or focus.

  For as we earlier implied, each of us is by nature an egocentric sun around which a private world revolves. I know where I stand, so everything else falls into place because it’s in a set relation to me.

  In fact, that’s the way it should be, unless we stand ready to give up all sense of purpose and direction.

  Which brings us, next, to the matter of what bearing all this has on your story.

  The focal character: your reader’s compass

  How do you make readers care about what happens in your story?

  —They must care, you know. Otherwise, they won’t read!

  So, how do you make them care?

  You give them a stake in what happens. You put them in a position where they stand to win or lose, emotionally.

  To that end, you center your story on a character who stands to win or lose also, so that your readers can feel for him or against him.

  A story recounts events. But those events can’t or won’t stand alone. They need to be explained, interpreted, evaluated, made meaningful.

  Above all, they must be translated into feeling.

  What that means is that a story is essentially subjective, not objective. Consequently, it needs to be as strongly oriented as a person.

  What is orientation?

  Originally, to orient meant to cause to face the east, as in building a church so that its altar stood at the east end. Later, the term was broadened to include any activity which made clear to somebody what his proper relationship was to a given situation.

  Thus, to orient means to point somebody in the right direction.

  In story, that somebody is the reader.

  “To give the reader an experience is only a part, not the whole, of the writer’s function,” obs
erves critic Edmund Fuller. “It is giving us evaluated experience that distinguishes the great or the good writer, whether the evaluation be spelled out specifically, or whether it is tacit in the total context of characters, actions, and conditions that he sets before us to represent his world. (It is always the writer’s world that we enter in art—never the objective world.)”

  But though this evaluation of experience is the writer’s task, and though it is the writer’s world the reader enters, there are all sorts of opportunities for confusion. Too often, the writer falls into the trap of writing about things—about sex, about violence, about scenery, about war, about domestic bliss or discord. Historical fact or clinical detail overwhelm him. The implications and evaluations, tacit in his thinking, never quite reach the reader.

  In brief, although his work may on the face of it be cast rigidly in story form, it isn’t actually fiction. For a story is never really about anything. Always it concerns, instead, someone’s reactions to what happens: his feelings; his emotions; his impulses; his dreams; his ambitions; his clashing drives and inner conflicts. The external serves only to bring them into focus.

  Or, as the old rule-of-thumb has it, “Every story is somebody’s story.”

  So, enter an individual who, for our purposes, shall be termed the focal character.

  This figure is precisely what his title indicates: the person on whom the spotlight focuses; the center of attention; the man whose reactions dominate the screen.

  The focal character has three main functions:

  a. To provide continuity.

  b. To give meaning.

  c. To create feeling.

  What about continuity?

  Given half a chance, events in a story tend to hang in space, like so many screams in the night. The focal character is a continuing factor to link them into a cohesive whole and tie them to past and future, even though the action moves from 2000 B.C. to A.D. 2000, from New York to San Francisco, and from music hall to morgue. Our attention is on him and his reactions, first and foremost, so everything else falls into place.

  He also gives meaning and significance to whatever happens.—Meaning, remember, is always a conclusion you and I draw about something from the way a particular somebody behaves when faced with a specific instance. If that somebody is our focal character, and if he lets go a scream of horror or a gurgle of delight at the sight of the crown jewels or tomorrow’s headlines or a hot-pastrami sandwich, then we have grounds for assuming that something about the item in question is uniquely significant to him. Therefore, until something happens to change our minds, we’ll deal with such fragments with the same degree of attention or consideration he shows . . . use them to measure and judge all the story’s dimensions.

  As a reader, thus, my attitude toward the rainstorm we cited earlier will be determined by whether the rain helps or handicaps the focal character. Whether a setting is colorful or drab . . . whether an incident is important or inconsequential . . . whether another character is good or bad—each point will be judged and interpreted with the focal character’s reactions as a guide.

  At the same time, your reader judges and interprets the focal character himself.

  It’s in this judging of the focal character that we enter the area of said focal character’s third function . . . the creation of feelings.

  What kind of feelings?

  Favorable feelings or unfavorable feelings. Feelings for or feelings against.

  It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of these feelings. The biggest single reason that a focal character exists is to evoke them.

  Why?

  Because your reader needs someone on whom to pass judgment.

  It works this way: Sneering, our focal character pours a glass of beer over the head of the saloon’s crippled swamper, a harmless, helpless, half-bright type.

  Instantly, without volition, your reader bristles with feelings of hostility and outrage.

  Or again: A murderous bully threatens our unarmed focal character with instant death unless he pours the beer over the swamper. Instead, the focal character throws the beer into the bully’s face.

  Like magic, your reader’s heart hammers with a different kind of feeling. Excitement races through him and he reads on eagerly, thrilling to the stiff-necked courage laid out before him on the page. Unconsciously—perhaps in spite of himself—he passes judgment on the focal character, just as he did before.

  Why does your reader judge the focal character?

  Because he can’t help doing it; can’t restrain himself. Convictions, feelings, are part of him—his most inner being. When he bumps into the right stimulus, they come boiling forth, reaffirming their own existence in heightened tension and speeded pulse.

  If your reader doesn’t judge, count on it that the focal character is too bland and innocuous and uncommitted to be worth writing about.

  Without some character of whom he can approve or disapprove, in varying degree, your reader will have no stimulus to feeling.

  Without feeling, he won’t care what happens in your story.

  If he doesn’t care, he stops reading.

  And you’re dead.

  Even while your reader judges, however, his feelings merge with those of the focal character.

  That is, he lives through the story with him.

  “When you understand the feelings of one of the characters in the moving picture,” says psychiatrist David Fink, “you are copying his tensions. You are feeling in yourself something of what he feels in the fictional situation. You are understanding the story with your own muscle tensions and with the spasms of your intestines and with your own glandular secretions. Without these reactions, the show would have no meaning. Without these reactions, nothing in life would have meaning.”

  So, your reader’s feelings about your focal character, plus the focal character’s own feelings as communicated to said reader, unite to bring the story itself to life. Together, they provide the sense of purpose and direction that a good story needs.

  Without a focal character, your reader is in the position of a city boy plunked down in the middle of some mountain fastness in backwoods Colorado or Montana. He’s completely free to travel, but he doesn’t know which way to go.

  The boy is, in a word, disoriented. Until he finds a landmark, or a tree to climb, or a compass to point him north, or a stream or an Indian guide to follow, he’s in deep trouble.

  Double that in spades for your poor reader. He stands confronted by a story world fully as baffling to him as are the Rockies to the tenderfoot.

  People move through this story world. Events transpire. Situation and scenery change.

  Yet somehow, it remains drab and empty to your reader, without significance or excitement, because he has no home base from which to judge it. He simply doesn’t know where he stands.

  What he needs is merely a light in the window to guide him—a contemporary version of those old Hollywood story-conference clichés, “Which is our ball team?” and “Who do we cheer for?”

  He needs, indeed, a focal character whose actions reveal to him which end of the gun he’s on . . . whether he’s cat or mouse, wife or other woman, winning or losing coach, good guy or bad.

  Does this mean that the term “focal character” is a synonym for “hero”?

  Not unless Sammy Glick is a hero in Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run. Or Macbeth. Or Dracula. Or Elmer Gantry.

  Thing is, “hero” has come to have connotations of the positive and desirable in our thinking. A focal character may prove the opposite, yet still intrigue us even as we loathe him.

  Therefore, he may—ordinarily will—be the hero. But not always.

  Are “focal character” and “viewpoint character” the same?

  A viewpoint character is someone through whose eyes we see all or part of a story. In effect, we get inside his skin.

  He is not necessarily the person around whom the yarn revolves, however. Sherlock Holmes is a focal ch
aracter; the viewpoint is Watson’s. In Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is the focal character . . . the viewpoint, author-objective.

  On the other hand, François Villon is both focal character and viewpoint character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Lodging for the Night. Same for Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Walter Huff in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, and an infinity of others.

  So, a focal character may be a viewpoint character; but then again, he may not.

  But definitely, he will be the central and most important character, because he’s the one who determines your reader’s orientation.

  Isn’t it possible to write a story without a focal character?

  Of course it is. But the penalties frequently are much the same as might descend upon our city boy if we were to give him a gimmicked compass, whose needle points in one direction one moment, in another the next. The lack of a strong central figure to cheer for or throw rocks at takes the steam out of the story. Direction, continuity, and perspective all tend to disintegrate.

  In William March’s Company K, for example, each chapter is from the first-person viewpoint of a different member of a World War I infantry unit. The writing is superior, individual episodes hold considerable interest, and the author eliminates possible confusion in advance by explaining the whys and wherefores of his procedure in the opening episode.

  But the unity a focal character would give just isn’t there. The book ends up as a series of sketches rather than a novel. The all-encompassing montage of war the author attempts is reduced to a blur by sheer diffuseness.

  How do you present a focal character most effectively, so that maximum meaning and feeling are conveyed?

  An intriguing question. To answer it, we first need to give attention to that fascinating microcosm which we term . . .

  The story world

  You need to remember three key points about the world in which your story takes place: