Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Swain, Dwight V.

  To repeat, then, you present your material so that one thing follows another in strictly chronological order.

  In terms of constructing a motivation-reaction unit, that order is this:

  a. Motivating stimulus.

  b. Character reaction.

  (1) Feeling.

  (2) Action.

  (3) Speech.

  Next question: Whom do you motivate? Who does the reacting?

  The answer, of course, takes us back to your focal character. He’s the man on whom the spotlight shines. He’s the center around which the action revolves. He’s the orientational figure whose feelings give meaning to the events that transpire within your fiction’s framework. Everything in your story, everything, relates to him.

  Especially, this pattern of emotion.

  The pattern itself isn’t at all difficult to handle. The big thing to remember is that motivation always precedes reaction. Our world would turn topsy-turvy indeed if the teacher first jumped and cried out . . . then sat on the tack! Even worse, to have motivation follow reaction is to invite your reader to make his own interpretation of said reaction and, on the basis of it, then to refuse to believe the motive you assign.—Though even if he accepts it, as a matter of fact, its displacement from normal order will jar him at least slightly. “Far across on the hillside, a shot rang out. John stiffened,” reads not too badly. “John stiffened when a shot rang out far across on the hillside,” is awkward.

  Given enough such minor jolts, your reader will develop a vague dissatisfaction with your copy. He may remark only that it’s “jerky, sort of.” But you’ve lost him.

  Back to reaction. It breaks down into three components, you will note: feeling . . . action . . . speech.

  These components’ order too is set. Feeling precedes action, and action, speech, because feeling provides the drive for both the others. Without some such inner force, some source of motive impulse, there would be no overt behavior to reveal your focal character’s state of mind.

  Feeling, it might be well to point out too, is not the same as thought. Let a car horn blast behind you, and your heart leaps without conscious mental process.

  In a word, you feel.

  As a matter of fact, you probably jump also. That is, you act, and that action is an involuntary and well-nigh automatic process. Later, you may get around to speech, to snarling at whoever honked. But feeling comes first, and then action.

  Behind this sequential order lies the fact that feeling is beyond the control of the person feeling. You don’t decide to feel a particular way; you just do.

  Action, in turn, can be to a degree controlled. And where speech is concerned, control is almost absolute.

  Thus, speech demands conscious thought; a certain amount of organization. Action’s demands are lower . . . closer to the instinctive: An old friend unexpectedly appears. Incoherent, you still embrace him. A car runs down your child. You race toward him, not even able to cry out.

  Or, you enter an office for a job interview. You care what happens, so you already have feelings—uncomfortable feelings, negative feelings, resentful feelings that you’re being studied like a paramecium under a microscope. But the personnel manager, far from appreciating your unease or asking you to sit down, merely leans back and considers you with cold, wordless disdain.

  “Who’re you?” he snaps finally.

  His tone—the whole situation, for that matter—is a unit of motivation. In spite of all you can do, panic races through you.

  Panic is feeling.

  Like magic, sweat slicks your palms and soaks your armpits and trickles down your spine. Your collar is suddenly too tight, your clothes are too small. You twist and choke.

  Actions, one and all.

  All this time, you also grope desperately for words—words that just won’t come.

  “I—I—” you mumble inanely.

  “Young man, I asked your name. . . .”

  Shall we draw a kindly veil, and trust that we’ve made it clear that feeling precedes action, and action precedes speech?—And, of course, on a larger basis, that motivating stimulus precedes character reaction?

  Time out for a few questions:

  Must all three reaction components—feeling, action, speech—be included every time?

  Of course not, as almost any fragment of dialogue will demonstrate. Here, Jill is the focal character:

  “Hi, Jill!” he called. “How’s it going?”

  “Just fine, thanks.”

  “Hi, Jill!” he called. “How’s it going?” is the motivating stimulus.

  Jill’s character reaction, in turn, spelled out, might read like this:

  Feeling: A glow of warmth at his friendliness crept through Jill.

  Action: She smiled.

  Speech: “Just fine, thanks,” she said.

  Because they’re so obvious, however, the writer doesn’t feel it necessary to detail feeling and action. So speech alone carries the ball.

  Alternatively, action might have been dropped . . . feeling and speech left in:

  Motivating stimulus: “Hi, Jill,” he called. “How’s it going?”

  Character reaction:

  Feeling: A glow of warmth at his friendliness crept through Jill.

  Action: (NOT STATED)

  Speech: “Just fine, thanks.”

  . . . And so on, through all the various possibilities.

  Are there any particular hazards to leaving out one or two of the reaction components?

  Primarily, there’s the danger that you’ll confuse your reader . . . especially when the feeling component is the one you leave out. To make clear the meaning a given action or speech is supposed to convey often requires interpretation only feeling can provide. He turned away is action that might fit feelings ranging from boredom to helplessness, from preoccupation to scorn, from hurt to rage. “Kiss me, darling!” could mirror passion, anguish, tenderness, contempt, or what have you.

  Please don’t misunderstand, however. I’m not recommending that you always use all three components; but, rather, that you develop your sensitivity to clarity, balance and the terse to the point where you can manipulate your materials with a nice skill and discrimination.

  How much time should elapse between motivation and reaction?

  When you start to sneeze, you snatch for your handkerchief right now. Not tomorrow. Not next week.

  The same way, think of each stimulus your focal character receives as a demand for immediate action. Don’t summarize, grouping a dozen or a hundred M-R units together. Break the package down to its individual components.

  Are you tempted to write, “He got up”? Maybe that single sentence is exactly the one you need. But then again, maybe you’d do better to open as your character floats through a dark and misty private world. Then, suddenly, sound breaks in upon him: a clanging, strident cacophony, so loud that it seems it must surely split his skull. He flails wildly, lurching up out of the mists and darkness into a grubby, dawn-gray scene: his own room, with the alarm clock jangling beside him.

  And so on. The thing to remember is that any motivation or reaction can be fragmented into smaller bits; and, generally, you’ll achieve a greater sense of reality in your copy by using the littlest pieces. It’s like a magician performing a coin trick. See it as a unit and it seems a miracle. But if you do it in slow motion, a step at a time, it becomes a completely understandable exhibition of manual dexterity.

  In the same way, your copy should leave the impression of a continuing stream of reality, in which effect follows cause like a burnt finger jerking back from a hot stove. Even if the reaction is merely to stare numbly, it should start now, not five minutes after the stimulus to shock is past and gone. No time should elapse between. If it does, odds are that you’ve broken the flow by leaving out additional motivation-reaction units that should be included.

  To what degree does each motivation-reaction unit stand alone?

  To no degree. True, well-constructed units can be p
ulled out of context and analyzed as here. But this is for purposes of study only. In any actual story, what your focal character feels and does and says in his reaction will in turn link to the world outside him.

  Sometimes there’ll be a direct relation, a counterreaction: Bickham fires a shot. His opponent fires back.

  In other cases, the situation merely provides observation of further external change: Bickham squirms forward a fraction, peering. Though still showing no awareness of him, the tyrannosaur has moved a bit closer.

  Or, on occasion when the heightening of suspense through delaying action is an issue, there may not even be external change: Bickham studies the distant hillside. There still is no sign of life.

  A story is a succession of motivation-reaction units. The chain they form as they link together is the pattern of emotion.

  As a helpful step in learning how to forge such a chain successfully, it might be wise to probe a bit deeper into the nature of the motivating stimulus.

  The motivating stimulus

  A motivating stimulus is anything outside your focal character to which he reacts.

  For a motivating stimulus to do its job well, it must have:

  a. Significance to your character.

  b. Pertinence to your story.

  c. Motivity to your reader.

  A stimulus is significant to the degree that it presents the external world as your character experiences it. Although we may not view it through his eyes, the picture we receive of it must reflect his state of affairs and state of mind. A woman who goes to church to flirt with the man in the next pew zeros in on one set of stimuli. Her neighbor, come to check on the styling of other parishioners’ clothes, reacts to a different group. A friend that seeks spiritual uplift and enrichment approaches with values that draw her attention to things that, to her, mirror such uplift and enrichment.

  Yet all three sit side by side within the sanctuary. It’s merely the stimuli they note which make the difference.

  It is, in brief, a matter of selection.

  Or consider a tiny mountain lake. Thickly wooded slopes sweep down to the water’s edge along half its shore line. Sheer cliffs rise gray and forbidding on the far side. Two camping trailers and a tent stand in a patch of clear ground down close to the narrow south beach, where a rutted dirt road terminates. There are children at play . . . women cooking . . . a man who bait-casts a hundred yards or so off to one side.

  The road, in turn, leads away from the lake, around a spur of brush, then off along the edge of a meadow thick with wild-flowers—columbine, trillium, bellwort, violets.

  Now a pickup truck approaches, bouncing noisily along the road. Far away across the meadow, behind a hillock and almost in the shadow of another spur of brush, a pair of bear cubs frolic under their black-furred mother’s watchful eye. Close to the center of the lake, a rainbow trout jumps, and the bait-caster on shore pauses, rod poised like some sort of long, strange, quivering, insectile antenna.

  What will your focal character notice about this scene? To what specific fragment will he react? Is his lens fixed on the trout? The bears? (And if so, which one?) The blonde child peering from the tent? The approaching pickup? The sound of the pickup’s motor? The gray rock faces of the cliff? The columbine? The bellwort? The big, raw-boned woman in Levis who hunkers by the fire, poking sullenly at her frying bacon with a stick?

  It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of your focal character’s—and your—choice. For to a very considerable degree, your readers will draw their conclusions as to the meaning of the focal character’s reaction on the basis of context—that is, the stimulus or motivation that provokes it.

  Especially is this true if said reaction is objectively written, non-introspective, physical reaction.

  Thus, a film editor may place a close-up of an actor’s face directly after a shot of an actress lying dead in a coffin. Invariably, the audience will thereupon interpret the actor’s expression, however blank, as one of grief.

  But suppose, instead, that our editor cuts the self-same reaction shot in after a frightening scene—one in which a madman lunges at the camera with an ax, let’s say.

  This time, the audience will promptly declare the actor to be registering fury, or horror, or courage, or shock, or what have you.

  Do you see the issue? The right reaction is the direct product of the right stimulus. Choose the correct fragment of motivation and you control the direction of your story. If you want a particular reaction, pick a stimulus that will evoke it. A good external motivation makes your character’s consequent behavior completely logical to your reader.

  Conversely, the wrong motivating stimulus is the meaningless or ambiguous one. It bores or confuses or irritates the reader. Worse, it may become a false plant, a false pointer . . . prepare him for something that isn’t going to happen; head him down the wrong road.

  For unconsciously, your reader takes it for granted that every stimulus in your story is brought in for a purpose. If a gun, or a car out of gas, or a loose board in the porch floor is introduced, he assumes that you’ll pay him off for noting it by giving it a function later. Not to do so will net you the same brand of deserved resentment you’d draw from your wife if you were to have her bake a cake for a party which you secretly knew had been canceled. For you to focus on a mysterious redhead or a scream in the night or a stolen wallet and then not have it influence the course of your story can only make you the target for reader outrage.

  So, how do you emphasize the significance of a stimulus properly?

  You use the technique of the motion-picture close-up. That is, you direct and control your reader’s attention by telling him what you want him to know and that only . . . just as the film director hammers home the importance of a trembling hand or an open door or a shattered doll by filling the screen with it to the point that it dominates everything else past all ignoring.

  To this end:

  (1) You choose the effect you want this particular stimulus to create, in terms of motivating your focal character to desired reaction and, at the same time, guiding your reader to feel with him.

  (2) You pick some external phenomenon—thing, person, event—that you think will create this effect.

  (3) You frame this stimulus so as to pinpoint the precise detail that highlights the point you seek to make.

  (4) You exclude whatever is extraneous or confusing.

  (5) You heighten the effect, by describing the stimulus in terms that reflect your focal character’s attitude.

  By way of illustration, let’s go back to our scene at the mountain lake. Our focal character lies high on a rocky, wooded slope with a pair of binoculars. His purpose is to rescue an abused child whom he believes to be a prisoner in the camp below. The effect we seek to achieve at the moment is one that will excite such intense feelings of compassion and outrage in our focal character that he’ll be blinded to everything except the absolute and urgent necessity of going ahead with the rescue, regardless of personal peril.

  Note, now, how sharply this choice of effect limits us; how strongly it turns us away from most of the potential motivating stimuli laid out below. Meadow, bears, trout, truck, landscape—all must be abandoned, because they offer little chance for the specific kind of stimulus we need: a goad to compassion and to outrage.

  Is there anything that offers more potential? Of course: the child herself—the little blonde girl peering from the tent. She’ll be our motivating stimulus.

  How to highlight the point we want to make?—Well, suppose the child’s been beaten . . . punished for trying to run away, perhaps. Bring her up big in the binoculars, all anguished, tear-streaked face. And, since kids do cry for a variety of reasons and even our focal character knows it, maybe we should black one of her eyes—an ugly, swollen bruise, rich with blues and purples.

  Is the child sucking a thumb or a lollipop? Blowing her nose? Playing with a puppy? No. All such are extraneous, introduce possibly conflicting notes, and thus s
hatter the unity of the effect. So, we’ll avoid them.

  On the other hand, perhaps it would be worth while to give her a rag doll to clutch to her ragged breast. A broken rag doll with the stuffing coming out, to draw a nasty parallel with her own condition and thus strengthen unity of effect.

  Then, on to description, phrased in terms to reflect your focal character’s attitudes, his mood. And here we come to an important point, already stated but worth beating on a bit.

  For all we know, this child is a brat, a hateful little monster. She received her black eye when she climbed to the roof of one of the camping trailers in direct defiance of her mother’s orders, then lost her balance and fell. In fact, she’d probably have fractured her stupid skull if she hadn’t landed on another youngster, breaking his arm. That’s why the pickup truck is bouncing along the road; the father had to take the other child to town to get the fracture set. Meanwhile, Little Miss Noxious has succeeded in floundering into the lake. It was the third time, and the rags she now wears are the only clothes her distracted maternal parent can find for her. Also, flailing in the water, the dear child lost the handsome new ten-dollar doll her father bought her for her birthday. So the rag doll is one she stole from the little girl of a poverty-stricken family down the line.

  Now all the above and more may be true. However, for our purposes here, the important thing is that the focal character doesn’t see it that way . . . and always, we describe in terms of his state of affairs and state of mind. So though our little darling be Miss Lucrezia Borgia, Jr., our story will present her with strong overtones of Little Eva.

  So how does the focal character see her, maybe?

  Agnes’ face came into focus, then. The blonde hair was matted, the worn plaid dress in rags. She’d been crying too, apparently, for there were tear-streaks on her grime-smudged cheeks. Dark circles rimmed the great, frightened, little-girl eyes, and when she turned her head to the left a fraction, a bruise came into view, all ugly blues and purples, swelling shut the lids, as if she were a grown man slugged in a barroom brawl.