a. Your reader has never been there.
b. It’s a sensory world.
c. It’s a subjective world.
Each of these items is of quite crucial importance. To build a story world is to play God in a sort of private Genesis. You can understand the issues best if you consider them as they relate to the world of reality—the world in which you and your readers move from day to day.
Thus, our own world is a vast, echoing, drafty place, in which it’s easy to get lost. No matter how much you travel, there always are new corners to explore . . . odd alleyways you haven’t seen before.
Equally, you dare assume little about your reader’s background. He may not be familiar with the jungles of Mount Kenya, or the rush of commerce along Singapore’s Raffles Place, or Chicago’s South State Street in those blocks sleazy with decay, or even the garish tastelessness or slick contemporary note struck by the living room of the house next door. So, the only course is to paint each setting before said reader’s very eyes, in full color and sufficient—not to mention pertinent—detail to bring it completely alive for him.
Next question: How do you bring a setting to life?
The answer, of course, lies in the human animal himself. His world is a sensory world—a world of green grass and white houses . . . purring kittens and thundering trucks . . . Chanel No. 5 and curling wood smoke . . . fresh cold orange juice and hot crisp bacon . . . silk’s rich smoothness and the harsh grit of volcanic ash.
So, you build your story world of these same sensory impressions—the seen, the heard, the smelled, the touched, the tasted. Emphasis is on the vivid image and the impactful figure of speech.
Then, with analogies, you link it all to the familiar, even if it costs you an extra word or two or three. It will be worth it. Someone who’s never smelled the lunar pits now may come to realize that they have a parallel in the acrid, sulfurous, flaming smoke that belches from the shaft of an exploding mine.
Finally, and perhaps most important of all, you consider the frame of reference in which this world exists.
Here is where you relate all that has gone before to your reference point, your focal character.
You do this by presenting your material subjectively, as your focal character receives it.
Why?
Because each of us, on the basis of his goals and attitudes and past experiences, reacts to his environment in his own unique and private way. The manner in which I see things depends as much or more on my own mood as it does on the external stimulus—the place or person or event. One man shudders at slum dirt; another bristles at the sullen hostility that pervades each grime-stained, gutter-stinking door front; another relaxes, unaware of filth or fear, because here he’s at home in his own world.
The words a writer uses to describe a setting must mirror such feelings. Your very phrases distinguish a thing you like from one you dislike, all efforts at objectivity notwithstanding.
And so you build your story world—a moody, subjective bailiwick, brought to life so vividly with sensory images that each and every reader automatically finds himself transported there, no matter how limited his experience.
But don’t relax, even then. Your job is just beginning. For the story world, far from being static, is an ever-changing place.
Story equals change . . .
A story records change. It sets forth the details of how your focal character moves from one state of affairs and state of mind to another.
Take the typical mystery. It begins with your hero somehow plunged into jeopardy via murder. It ends when he brings the killer to justice and, in so doing, eliminates the peril.
Between those two points is movement—a duality of movement, in point of fact. External, physical movement carries Hero through assorted clashes with Villain, until one or the other is defeated. Parallel with this runs a thread of internal emotional movement. Most often, it’s presented introspectively—at least in part in thoughts or feelings. Sometimes, however, it’s merely implied, or demonstrated in physical terms.
This internal movement reveals the continually fluctuating levels of tension that eddy through Hero in the course of the external struggle. Too, here are the categories of reactive feeling—such items as shock and grief and rage and panic and grim resolve, and a host of others so complex that they really can’t be labeled.
A love story? We begin with boy wants girl; we end with boy gets girl. Between lie an infinity of possible physical complications, with emotional turmoil to match.
And so it goes. In fantasy, heroine becomes witch; in science fiction, spaceman battles monster; in domestic romance, wife improves husband; in western, marshal cleans up town; in business novel, executive wins top post.
In each and every case, however, one thing stands out: Somebody does something. The situation, the state of affairs, at the end of a successful story is not the same as it was at the beginning. And neither is the focal character’s state of mind. In greater or lesser degree, he’s revised his evaluations, his attitudes, his ideas of who is good and what is bad and how to deal with specific kinds of trouble. His future is different than it would have been had the story not taken place. If nothing else, he’s relieved of uncertainty as to just how his problem will work out!
Why is this factor of change so vital?
The answer lies in your reader’s attention span. Boredom attacks in seconds when no new stimulus—for which read, “change”—impinges on him. If you want proof, see how long—or, rather, how briefly—you can force yourself to concentrate fully on a given object or fixed point. There’s no story in a static situation. A still life will never hold your reader. Word photography isn’t enough.
But change alone isn’t enough either, if your goal is a successful story. What you seek isn’t action for its own sake, but those specific changes that affect story development. The things that happen must move your character along toward his goal, closer and closer to the place you want him to go.
Concretely, you want external developments that will lead him to feel—and therefore behave—in a constructive manner where the story problem is concerned.
Shall we contrast this with much of the gobbledygook that passes for complication in beginners’ stories?—At dinner one evening, Hero orders steak. But the waiter warns him against it . . . persuades him to try oysters instead. After eating them, Hero feels a bit queasy. Oysters, he decides, always seem to upset his stomach. He’ll avoid them in the future.
Now, you do have change here. There’s a switch both in the hero’s state of affairs (an external force, the waiter, leads him to change his original order for steak) and in his state of mind (feeling illish, he decides not to eat oysters again). But unless his queasiness and/or his decision not to eat any more oysters have marked bearing on the rest of the story, you’ve merely wasted time, space, and effort.
On the other hand, suppose a love-story hero drops by to surprise his sweetheart.
He does indeed—she’s in the arms of another man.
Shaken, Hero tells her off, or punches his rival’s nose, or decides to go call Margie, or leaves town in a blind rage, cursing the fickleness of all women.
Have changes taken place? Yes. Do they affect the rest of the story—its development, its outcome? Yes. Is your focal character’s state of mind changed by it? Indeed it is, even if only in terms of never again taking too much for granted.
Does this mean you must eliminate all your pet fragments, on grounds that they contribute too little?
On the contrary. The issue, ever and always, is to make them important to the development of your story. If you want a brilliant example of what I’m talking about, get hold of a copy of Clifton Adams’ The Dangerous Days of Kiowa Jones and read Chapter 4. It concerns a sunset.
Generations of editors have screamed imprecations at writers who dragged in lengthy descriptions of such natural phenomena. Now, here’s a sunset that occupies the better part of a chapter. Yet everyone loves it.
Why?
Because Br’er Adams, a skilled hand and then some, has motivated its inclusion; has made it a matter of vital importance to his hero; has centered a life-and-death struggle on it.
And there, in a nutshell, is the whole issue involved in the duality of story movement. External events have no meaning in themselves, no matter how bland or how violent they may be. Their inclusion or exclusion per se is completely inconsequential. They aid in story development only as someone has feelings about them and reacts to them.
Therefore, we must have change in both the external world, your focal character’s state of affairs, and his internal world, his state of mind. Neither can stand without the other. Only as they interact, meshing like finely tooled gears, will your story roll forward.
Precisely how does this interplay, this dual movement, take place?
That’s a question that calls for more detailed analysis of the patterns of causation that rule the story world.
. . . equals cause and effect . . .
There’s a story about a Chinese who sought to divorce his wife for infidelity when she gave birth to a child with obviously Caucasian features. The judge granted the decree . . . on grounds that two Wongs don’t make a white.
Or consider the light switch. You flip it. A lamp comes on, and all’s right with the world.
In the same way, you pull the trigger, and your gun fires. You put a coin in a slot; a candy bar comes down the chute. You overeat; your weight goes up.
We expect things to proceed in an accustomed fashion, a fashion that makes sense to us. When they don’t, we’re upset. If you take out a cigarette and it starts to smoke you, you have a right to be surprised.
“Science is based upon the belief that the universe is reliable in its operation,” says scientist and science writer Anthony Standen. People like the idea that there’s a reason behind everything that happens . . . a cause for every effect, as we so glibly put it. It gives us a sense of security; a nice, tidy feeling that everything is in order and that we’re in control so far as understanding is concerned, even if not physically.
So, in idle conversation—and sometimes, unfortunately, even in that not so idle—we act as if cause and effect link together at a one-to-one ratio. Each cause, we imply, brings about a single effect. Each effect results from a single cause.
Actually, our world seldom operates quite this simply or neatly. The situations with which reality presents us more often than not prove nightmarishly complex. When a traffic patrolman makes out an accident report, he checks items ranging from type of pavement to weather, from presence or absence of stop signs to time of day, from speed of vehicle to alcoholic content of drivers. Similarly, an ulcer may be described as the result of too much hydrochloric acid in the stomach—but just why is that excess acid there? Tell a psychiatrist that you slugged your wife because she bought a new mink coat, and he’ll have a field day lecturing you on displacement, repressed hostilities, and veiled aggressions.
Now most of us realize all this, of course. The weird chains of reasoning set up in TV headache-tablet commercials intrigue us and whet our curiosity far more than they convince us. But we lack time or energy to debate the logic of the casual. It’s easier to stick with our fictions and stereotypes and oversimplifications, that’s all—just as in other days it was easier to take it for granted that you’d sail off the edge of the world if you cruised too far, or that the cows had gone dry because the old witch-woman down the road had hexed them, or that the sun was really Apollo driving a golden chariot across the sky.
Further, these same fictions and stereotypes and oversimplifications are perfectly legitimate as tools for living. Perhaps it isn’t entirely correct to say that cars cause smog, or poverty causes crime, or carelessness causes accidents. But the complex is like Medusa. It can paralyze us. Sometimes we just can’t wait for all the evidence to come in before we act. Even a wrong assumption may guide us adequately until Ultimate Truth reveals itself.
So we talk, however loosely, in terms of cause and effect.
How does this cause-effect pattern relate to change?
Change means simply that something happens—a woman bursts into tears, a plane explodes in mid-air, the cover comes off a book, it rains this particular afternoon. It’s an event in a vacuum, as it were, presently unlinked to anything before or after.
When we talk about cause and effect, on the other hand, we aren’t just saying that something happens—but that it happens because something else happened previously; that in consequence of Event Number 1, Event Number 2 comes to pass.
A useful concept, all in all. It helps give meaning to our world. But before we can get maximum mileage from it, for story purposes, we must carry it just a bit further, so that we understand it as it applies to people.
. . . equals motivation and reaction
Scene: a schoolroom. A tack, point up, rests on the teacher’s chair. She sits down, then abruptly rises with a cry of anguish.
Here illustrated we have a specialized type of cause-effect pattern which we term motivation-reaction. It is cause and effect applied to people. Cause becomes motivating stimulus . . . effect, character reaction.
What is a motivating stimulus?
Anything outside your focal character to which he reacts.
What is a character reaction?
Anything your focal character does in consequence of the motivating stimuli that impinge upon him.
More specifically?
A character may react to anything . . . from the world coming to an end to a puppy’s snuffling; from a breath of fresh air to the thunder of jet bombers overhead. He may react by anything . . . from dropping dead of shock to feeling a momentary pang of doubt; from smiling, ever so slightly, in his sleep to signing the order that sends a million Jews to the gas chamber.
A motivating stimulus may come to you on a level at which you aren’t even consciously aware of it . . . at night, for example, when the temperature drops unexpectedly, chilling you in your sleep because your covers are too light.
You may react just as unconsciously, without waking, by huddling into a cramped fetal ball in an effort to defeat the cold.
And so it goes. Someone pulls a gun; you stop short. A girl casts a sidewise glance; you start forward. The clock strikes; you get up. The music ends; you sit down. There’s a whiff of perfume; you straighten your shoulders. A skunk blasts at you from beneath the porch; you cringe into your coat. Each time, one motivating stimulus; one character reaction.
Together, they constitute a motivation-reaction unit. Each unit indicates some change, however small—change in state of affairs; change in state of mind.
Properly selected and presented, each one moves your story a step forward. Link unit to unit, one after another, and your prose picks up momentum. Strength and impact build. Before you know it, the sentences race down the page like a fast freight hurtling through the night. The situation cannot but develop!
That is, it cannot if you also understand such technicalities as . . .
The pattern of emotion
On this particular night the house is dark when you get home. A note on the hall table tells you that your wife has left you for another man.
You stare at the message stupidly at first, numb with disbelief. Then, in intermingling waves, shock washes through you, and horror, and pain, and rage, and grief. Falling into the nearest chair, you curse aloud. Only then, in spite of all your efforts to control yourself, the curses change to a strange sort of laughter. And even while you laugh, you find, tears somehow are coursing down your cheeks.
What has happened?
a. You have received a motivating stimulus.
This is the note. It points up a change in your state of affairs, your situation.
b. This change in state of affairs causes changes in your state of mind.
Your emotional balance, your equilibrium, is shattered. Feelings, ordinarily neatly restrained and disciplined, break loose in a surging chaos.
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c. These feelings take the overt form of observable reaction.
You fall into a chair. You curse, you laugh, you cry.
And there is the pattern of emotion. It’s the mechanism which creates feeling in your readers, and then helps them keep those feelings straight.
Its secret lies in the order in which you present your material . . . a strictly chronological order, so that one item follows another exactly as they occur in point of time. Never is any doubt left as to which element comes first, or which is cause and which effect.
To that end, you pretend that only one thing can happen at a time: Your bridge partner studies his own hand, and then he looks across at the dummy, and then he eyes your opponents, and then he frowns, and then he tugs at his ear lobe, and then he twists in his chair, and then he puffs at his cigarette, and then he smiles wryly, and then he says, “Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?” and then he plays the ace.
He does not do all these things at once, the way it really happened.
Now I grant you that I am, to a degree, exaggerating here. It’s entirely legitimate for you to write, “Frowning, he twisted in his chair,” or “Puffing at his cigarette, he eyed Steve’s cards briefly.” But in general you avoid all hints of simultaneity, of events that take place at the same time.
The reason you do this is rooted in the very nature of written communication. For in writing, one word follows another, instead of being overprinted in the same space.
Which makes it impossible truly to capture on paper the fact that a man breathes and sweats and scowls and digests his dinner all at the same time.
Furthermore, any attempt to present simultaneity rather than sequence is bound to confuse your reader.
Why?
Because simultaneity obscures the cause-effect, motivation-reaction relationship that gives your story meaning to him.
(You can say that things happened simultaneously, you understand. But in point of fact you emphasize sequence, chronological order: “After that, everything happened at once. Hans swung the bottle, and Melville, ducking, whipped out his knife. Across the room, Scarne slashed at the rope that held the chandelier. The next instant, the brackets gave way,” and so on.)
Techniques of the Selling Writer Page 6
