Such divergences, such contrasts, such apparent contradictions—in large part, a story’s sense of reality springs from them.
But do keep one trait in the spotlight. For the moment your reader grows confused because emphasis is too evenly divided—(Is Tom primarily honest or primarily greedy?)—you’ve lost him.
/3/ The characterizing act must be both pertinent and characteristic.
This simply means that you should match characterizing act to role. If your story demands a man whose dominant trait is courage, with all other aspects of personality ignored, then for heaven’s sake don’t show him at the start behaving in a manner that places prime emphasis on how kindly he is.
In the same way, and for the same reason, try not to present a character in a characterizing act that’s non-typical of him. Don’t bring on a sourpuss in one of his rare moments of congeniality, for example. Your reader will, justifiably, resent it, when he later discovers that the guy ordinarily goes round biting babies.
So much for dynamics. On the “how-to” side of introducing characters, there are three main points to remember:
/1/ Introduce characters realistically.
That is, give an impression of the person first—“a cute little chick with red hair,” “a shambling, slab-like man,” “a shadowy little woman in a big feathered hat that would always be remembered long after she herself was forgotten.”
Why handle it this way?
Because that’s the way most of us see people. We pay no heed to details until person and/or detail become important to us.
Apply the same idea when you write.
Your handiest tool in capturing a first impression is our old friend the significant detail. Center your description on whatever sticks out like a sore thumb, the way a cartoonist does when he caricatures a prominent person. The big ears, the buck teeth, the potbelly, the turned-up nose—these are the handy tags to tie to. Further, failure to note such at the start will breed all sorts of trouble for you later, when your reader discovers that the girl he assumed was pretty and petite actually is tall, sallow, and overweight.
Many characters—the minor ones—will need no more than the most obvious, abbreviated kind of label. The others you can build as you go, salting in more detail and description as it’s required.
On the other hand, there is one situation that warrants more than impressionistic detail to begin with. That’s when another character is for some reason eager to appraise the person to be introduced. Exhibit A: Mama, as she glimpses Sonny’s bride-to-be for the first time. But even here, a little restraint ordinarily is desirable.
/2/ Bring your characters on in action.
The day when readers would hold still for a long-winded, static description of a character, complete with family tree, is long gone. Now, they want him alive, breathing, doing something—preferably, something interesting.
So, figure out some business for your boy or girl, as if you were a theatrical director blocking out a play. And prepare your reader for each impending entrance, whether by a knock at the door or a sudden awareness of the scent of lilacs or the sound of running feet. Do not just let someone pop out of nowhere. A menace, especially, loses half its punch for Friend Reader if he’s not aware that something unpleasant is about to happen.
/3/ Don’t bring on too many people at once.
Here I have no choice but to contradict flatly all the hallowed advice you’ve read about the need to introduce all your characters in a hurry. True, it’s good to get them on stage early. But it’s even more to the point that no one will remember or give a hoot about them if they’re presented as a mere jumble of names and/or faces. A vivid entrance that hooks your reader’s interest is infinitely more vital.
(3) Whose skin am I in?
To begin a story, traditionally, you must first establish time, place, circumstance, and viewpoint.
Time, place, and circumstance we’ve already dealt with. Now, what about viewpoint?
Viewpoint is the spot from which you see a story. It’s the position and perspective you occupy in order best to savor a fictional experience.
Ordinarily, that vantage point is inside somebody’s skin.
That is, your reader will live through your story as some specific character experiences it. He’ll see and hear and smell and taste and touch and think and feel precisely what that person sees and hears and smells and what have you.
And he’ll see, etc., nothing which that character doesn’t. No looking through walls. No second-guessing motives. No sneaking around inside somebody else’s brain.
Maybe this puts Friend Reader inside the focal character, the center of attention. Or perhaps he’ll be another major participant in the action.
Or, he may be a minor player—an observer, a bystander, a sideliner.
Or, he may be the author, or even (though not so commonly these days) God.
Or, if your story’s long enough, you conceivably will introduce several different viewpoints—major, minor, author-objective, or what have you.
How do you establish viewpoint at the beginning of your story?
The trick is simple: As early as possible, you let your reader know that he’s looking at the story world through a particular person’s eyes . . . living the story, as it were, inside that person’s skin.
Like this:
Smiling greasily, Quintus Kerr spread his cards on the table. “Three aces, Mr. Devereaux,” he observed.
Mr. Devereaux eyed the cards bleakly. Why was it, he wondered, that he so often seemed to run afoul of cutthroats and connivers?
Here, viewpoint—specifically, Mr. Devereaux’s viewpoint—is established the moment we introduce that word wondered. The only way you can know that someone is wondering—or thinking, or feeling, or aching, or what have you—is to be inside his skin, living and experiencing with him. It’s an effective device, and one that does the job in a hurry.
But suppose we played it a different way:
Smiling greasily, Quintus Kerr spread his cards on the table. “Three aces, Mr. Devereaux,” he observed.
Mr. Devereaux’s eyes flicked to the pasteboards. His lips seemed to draw a trifle thinner. “I see them.”
“Well, then . . .” Beaming now, Kerr reached for the pot.
Here, we see externals only . . . what’s done, what’s said. And precisely because nothing’s revealed which would place us inside either character’s mind or skin, your reader realizes that you’re making like some sort of literary motion-picture camera equipped for sound. Viewpoint: author-objective.
Author-objective it will stay, too, until you move into the heart or brain of some particular person.—Or, you can write the entire story on an objective level, if that appeals to your taste.
Thus it goes. One way or another, viewpoint is established. Your reader, in his turn, makes appropriate assumptions as to where he stands . . . considers the events that transpire in properly objective or subjective fashion.
In the process he also becomes aware, to a greater or lesser degree, of each character’s traits and attitudes and state of mind. But that’s a subject that calls for greater detail later.
Meanwhile, it’s enough that your reader’s found a skin to be in!
Where am I? What’s up? Whose skin am I in? Those are the questions your reader asks when he begins a story.
In answering him, bear in mind two do’s and two don’ts:
(a) Do prepare your reader for what’s ahead.
The habit of planting and pointing is one of the easiest yet most effective ways to strengthen your story.
(b) Don’t give bum steers.
A wrong assumption infuriates your reader. Help him to guess right by careful planting.
(c) Do establish in action.
This is just another way of saying, “Don’t tell it; show it!” Wherever possible, translate information into people doing things.
(d) Don’t get too eager.
Try to crowd in too much too fast, and you’r
e on a sure short cut to disaster.
d. What to leave out.
The thing to leave out of the beginning of your story is past history.
Why?
Because your reader’s interest centers on the future, not the past. He wants to know what will happen as desire struggles against danger; not what did happen that led to the present conflict. Fans pay a lot more for prize-fight tickets than they do for reminiscence.
The reason for this is as ridiculously simple as it is often overlooked: Nothing can change the past. It’s over; done. So, what suspense can it possibly hold?
Your story’s beginning thus should stick to present action . . . what’s happening right now.
What’s happening, in turn, should center on desire colliding head-on with danger . . . the conflict of irresistible force with immovable object, as it were.
How about the background of this conflict? Must it forever be forgotten?
On the contrary. Background can add insight to present problems . . . provide motivation for future action. Quite possibly it’s of major importance to your story. You need merely to be careful as to where and how you bring it in.
Ways to present it? Try these:
(1) Flashback.
Flashback is someone remembering in the present what happened in the past.
There’s one key point to remember where flashback is concerned: Don’t open with it!
In the early stages of a story, you see, interest often is a fragile and tenuous thing. Though your reader is in search of entertainment, he’s by no means sure that he’ll find precisely what he wants in your particular story.
Bore him with flashback, past history, even briefly, and likely as not he’ll turn to someone else’s yarn.
Once his interest is aroused, however, it’s entirely possible that he’ll ache to acquire the self-same data he’d have spurned a page or two or three before.
So, do try to open on a striking, self-explanatory scene. Hold the flashback for later, after the end of the beginning (a subject with which we’ll deal shortly), when the story question is established and Reader firmly hooked. If a girl’s going to slap a boy’s face, and he in his turn then will knock her down, let me see the bit first, before you explain the background of their quarrel. Believe me, the delay will make me an infinitely better listener!
(2) Discussion of past action.
Such discussion is flashback verbalized. Don’t put it at the beginning either.
Also, and no matter where in your story you present it, don’t let it drag out and become a bore.
To avoid such, use these three tricks:
(a) Figure out a way to show the event itself, instead of having people talk about it.
(b) Reduce the content of the comments, by consolidating two or three events into one, limiting the number of points to be made, and the like.
(c) Reduce the length of the comments, by making the speakers talk with normal succinctness, instead of with that phony fulsome quality that marks speech for the convenience of the author.—More about this, too, later, when we get to the technique of exposition.
(3) Summary of past action.
This amounts to flashback in the author’s words.
Two solutions:
(a) Translate history into action.
(b) Quit thinking your reader needs to know as much background to read your story as you need to know to write it.
Is there anything else you shouldn’t put into your opening?
Yes: too much.
For example, too many characters, too detailed a setting, too involved a setting situation—the list could go on forever.
Clutter and confusion are mortal enemies of good fiction. The thing to strive for is the clean, sharp, simple line.
To that end, you need to devote some attention to . . .
e. Techniques of exposition.
What is exposition?
Exposition is whatever your reader needs to know about what happened in the past, in order better to appreciate what’s going to happen in the future.
Your worst foe here is a literary plague called author convenience.
Author convenience is what makes a writer have a character say, “Father, is your sister Lucille, whose husband Gregory died last August and left her penniless, coming to visit us?”
Is this a normal question for anyone to ask his father?
Of course it isn’t. But a less-than-inspired writer could think of no more intelligent way to get the facts of past action before his reader.
This is the same writer who insists on telling us how the heroine’s twin sister was born with a horn-shaped birthmark because a bull chased their mother across the pasture while she was enceinte.
He also has the villain’s accomplice explain the villain’s proposed plot against the hero to the villain. Nor is it any problem for Hero to acquire this same data, since the villain’s mistress is happy to volunteer it to him.
Further discussion reveals that the killer is a dangerous man with a knife. And Author, in ever-so-convenient asides, remarks that a minor character is a diabetic, and that the hero is still very much emotionally involved with the villain’s sister.
Need I say more? This obviously is not the right way to present background information!
To write successful exposition, motivate your reader to want to know the past.
That means: Make the past important to him.
Which is to say, make the facts to be presented important to your story—and to the people in your story.
Then, set said facts forth in a manner that allows your characters to appear as normal, intelligent human beings, and not cretins.
Techniques which may help you to achieve this worthy end include the following:
(1) Cut to the bone the amount of information you give your reader.
Is all the data as to what caused that horn-shaped birthmark really necessary?
(2) Break up the essential content.
Instead of shoving a half-page of past history at me in a lump, like soggy, dripping laundry, maybe you could plant the pasture in one spot, as part of the setting; the bull in another, as a continuing menace; sister’s birthmark in a third, with a sex-tinted situation to carry it, and so on.
(3) Make someone need the information.
You motivate reader attention when you set someone in search of needed information. But your reader recognizes that the villain already knows the details of his own plot, so any scene that involves his accomplice telling him about it automatically rings as phony as a lead nickel.
(4) Make that “someone” have to fight to learn what he needs to know.
If I want you to Tell All and you don’t want to, conflict and story interest are in the making.
On the other hand, if the villain’s mistress starts to volunteer information, Hero and Reader likely will head for the nearest exit . . . much the way you do when Auntie decides the time has come to share all the details of her latest operation with you.
(5) Tie information to action.
Tell me a given man is dangerous with a knife, and I may or not believe you. Let me see him carve somebody up, and my hair stands on end with no resort at all to conscious logic.
I may even grow willing to listen to a few lurid details about the guy’s past history!
(6) Motivate some character to pay attention to anything you want your reader to notice.
You establish a character’s diabetes—a vital plot issue, perhaps—more vividly if you let him give himself a shot of insulin in another character’s presence. Whereupon, Character Number 2 is appropriately motivated to ask if your diabetic is on heroin, and an explanation of the facts becomes in order.
(7) Present your data subjectively, in most instances.
If the hero is emotionally involved with anyone, your reader rates the inside dope. Let him experience the pain or passion or yearning in viewpoint . . . not hear about it through the writer, secondhand.
(8) Above all, let no
one talk about anything he wouldn’t normally discuss.
There’s a thing in this world called reticence. It prevents some women from discussing the clinical details of their sex lives; some men from talking about their dreams or failures; some children and adolescents from opening up to adults; some older people from dwelling too much verbally on death.
All of us feel a certain reticence, at one time or another, to some degree or another, on some subject or another.
Consider reticence, next time, when in the name of exposition you’re tempted to endow a character with an unduly loose lip.
Intelligence also must be considered. Just because you need a particular fragment of data doesn’t mean that you can legitimately wring inane observations from an otherwise sharp character and have your readers accept it.
In fact, intelligence is an element you might very well apply to the whole cotton-pickin’ business of techniques of exposition.
f. The end of the beginning.
Desire plus danger give you a beginning for any story.
But what determines where the beginning of your story ends?
This is anything but an academic question. A beginning that drags on too long inevitably costs you readers.
Not to mention sales.
Yet that drag, that fumbling, is totally unnecessary. One simple rule eliminates it.
So, again: What determines where the beginning of your story ends?
Decision.
As early as possible, make your focal character commit himself. Let him decide to fight the danger that threatens his desire, instead of stalling or backing off or running from it.
The moment he so decides, by word or deed, your beginning is over. Your story has begun.
Techniques of the Selling Writer Page 17