How do you resolve a story?
You know your focal character.
Then, you let him know and be true to himself.
As a writer, you have no higher duty, to yourself or to your reader.
And this in spite of the fact that said reader may never realize the source of his satisfaction.—Which is as it should be, of course. Story technique is the writer’s business only. It’s like plastic surgery: The best nose-bob or face-lift is the one that goes undetected.
What about the negative character . . . the weak man, the evil man, the man who can’t or won’t make the right decision at a story’s climax? How do you resolve his story?
You punish him.
That is, you deny him his goal, in letter and/or in spirit.
You do this because such a character prizes self-interest above principle. He proves this in climax, when he chooses the easy road instead of standing firm for right.
In so doing, he demonstrates himself to be unworthy of reward.
If, then, in spite of his misdeed, you do reward him, you create a conflict in your reader.
How?
Your reader, too, has emotional needs. One of the deepest of these, as we’ve pointed out, is his desire to believe that there is order in the world; that life holds meaning.
In reading, Reader seeks reaffirmation of this belief. He wants to feel that cause leads to effect; that deed influences reward.
Deny this, in your story, and in effect you tell him that his whole philosophy is wrong; that he’s a fool for all the sacrifices he himself makes daily.
Result: frustration. So, tension doesn’t slack; it builds. And Reader loses his precious sense of story satisfaction.
This is why adolescent cynicism proves such a blind alley as a theme for fiction. The clever criminal who gets away with crime, the man of principle made a fool of or destroyed by circumstance, the woman who cheats successfully on her husband, the triumph of the ruthless and the evil—they mark your work as amateur. In life, such people stand as the exception, not the rule. In fiction, almost invariably, they draw a quick rejection.
As a matter of fact, even the so-called “biter-bit” story (in which the central character receives richly deserved punishment at the climax) has only the narrowest of markets. Make your “hero” a murderer who’s trapped because he overlooks one tiny clue and, count on it, the yarn will prove twice or three times as hard to sell as the story with a positive central character.
Part of the reason for this is because the pattern itself has grown so worn and trite.
More important, however, is the established fact that most of the time, most readers would rather read about the worthy man who wins.
So much for the mechanics and dynamics of reward.
Once reward is bestowed, the story question is answered. Suspense drops sharply. Most reader tension is released.
But you still need to round out your story, briefly, and bring it to a neat conclusion.
With that in mind . . .
(5) You tie up any loose ends.
Face one fact: The moment your story question is answered, your story itself ends, for all practical purposes.
Therefore, don’t hold your reader any further past that point than need be. Stall a bit too long, and you may lose him. Your job from here on out is to say good-by, in as few words and pages as you can.
At the same time, you don’t dare move too fast, or you’ll lose emotional impact.
Ordinarily, a few pages—certainly not more than a chapter, even in a novel—of denouement should be enough. Long explanations will prove unnecessary, if you’ve snipped off subordinate threads early, in accordance with instructions.
So, work for a short concluding section.
On the other hand, be careful not to leave characters unaccounted for or loose ends dangling.
How do you avoid such?
You go back over your work. Painstakingly. Check plot development, point by point. Ask yourself if there are questions that you’ve left unanswered.
Often, too, a reading by someone who doesn’t know the story will bring holes and loose thinking to your attention.
Be careful, though. What you need is honest appraisal, not flattery or half-baked critical opinion.
Finally . . .
(6) You focus fulfillment into a punch line.
How do you write a proper punch line?
You strive for euphoria.
Euphoria may be defined as a sense of well-being and buoyancy. It’s the feeling that follows the draining off of the last vestiges of reader tension.
To create it, you hunt for a final paragraph, and a line to end it, that will epitomize your character’s or characters’ fulfillment.
Since a story is the record of how somebody deals with danger, this final paragraph and line should make clear to your reader that said danger—and the tension and trouble it created—are at an end, so far as the characters are concerned. Completely.
On the other hand, “. . . and so they lived happily ever after” isn’t quite enough. Life goes on, and your reader knows it.
Therefore, you need to include some indication that your characters still have a future. Other troubles may come. In fact, assorted woes may be hanging fire right now. But they’re not yet on stage, so your people can still glow happily in the relief and release of this moment’s triumph.
The actual writing of a good punch line can be a nerve-racking, floor-pacing, time-consuming job. The most common approach, perhaps, is simply to jot down each and every idea that comes to mind, no matter how remote. Then, settle for whichever one seems best.
Beyond this, here are three tricks which may help:
(a) Try, earlier, to establish the idea that a particular event, a significant detail, represents fulfillment to your hero.
Throughout the story, Hero’s been striving to make time with Girl, without success. You conclude, “This time, she was kissing him.”
Conceivably, your reader may decide that Hero has indeed attained his goal.
(b) A comic or apparently pointless line may turn the trick—if only because it demonstrates conclusively that trouble and tension are over.
Exhibit A: “Words came through the tears: ’Steve . . . oh, Steve, you’re home!’
“The steeldust kept on grazing.”
Actually, no one gives a hoot about the horse. It’s just that by shifting attention to him, we confirm that danger is dissipated.
(c) Ignoring the present for the future may carry the implication that all’s ended and all’s well.
“Seth cut in: ’I’ll take care of it soon’s I can, Ed. But right now, Helen and me need to run over to Red Rock. We got some things to take care of.’ ”
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 story is people given life on paper.
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:
1. How does a character come into being?
2. How do you bring a character to life?
3. How do you give a character direction?
4. How do you make a character fascinate your reader?
5. How do you fit a character to the role he has to play?
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. So
me 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:
a. How many characters should you have in a story?
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.
b. How do you decide whether or not a character is necessary?
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.
c. Can’t this still leave you with more characters than you can safely handle?
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.
d. Are good characters really as contrived as this would make them seem to be?
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?
e. Wouldn’t it be better to write about real people?
No; and for three reasons:
(1) A real person may recognize himself in your story.
Techniques of the Selling Writer Page 23