Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Well, you get the idea.

  (c) Do wave tags often.

  Don’t assume that your reader will remember a character from page to page. Focus attention on your man’s tags, his labels, whenever he appears. If a girl has dark, wavy hair, let her run her fingers through it, smooth it, brush it back, complain how it won’t hold a permanent, or the like, at virtually every turn.

  So much for the five steps of character presentation.

  Of course, in applying such a guide, you won’t necessarily follow the order in which the steps are set forth here. A character ordinarily takes form a little at a time, as I’ve pointed out, so you don’t want to limit yourself to any set procedure.

  But the basic principles are those outlined, and if you use them as a checklist, working and studying and experimenting as you go, they’ll help you create realistic, believable story people, with the appearance of life stamped on them.

  How do you give a character direction?

  Though contrived by a writer, a good—that is, effective—character should appear to move under his own power. He needs to act without ostensible prodding from his creator.

  To that end, you provide a pattern of rationalization for said character . . . an excuse for him to behave the way you want him to.

  The simplest way to do this is to make the goal a character seeks symbolize, to him, satisfaction of personal, private inner needs.

  To make a goal symbolic of such needs demands that you supply your character with two elements:

  a. Lack.

  b. Compensation.

  Which means?

  Each of us wants to feel adequate to his world . . . in control of his situation and, thus, of his destiny.

  Anything that endangers a character’s sense of control indicates a lack in him . . . an inadequacy. If my wife nags, or my jokes fall flat, or the promotions I seek go to other men, I may eventually come to doubt myself.

  When a man becomes aware of such a lack, and even if he can’t figure out precisely what disturbs him, he grows tense and restless: unhappy, discontented, ill at ease.

  To relieve this tension, he takes some sort of action . . . escapes from the nagging wife in work, abandons humor for books, eases the sting of disappointment at failure to get ahead by taking refuge in gossip or sullenness or hobbies. Defeated, emotionally speaking, he substitutes one kind of behavior for another, in order to achieve a private victory. He pays for what he lacks, his inadequacies, with conduct designed to make up for them.

  As a psychologist would phrase it, he compensates for his deficiencies.

  Your character’s need to control destiny, to feel adequate to each developing situation, is what gives him his strength, his drive, his motive force: in a word, his direction.

  His goal, in turn, reflects that direction. If he can attain it, he feels, his sense of inadequacy will vanish, never to return.

  In other words, to your character, goal is a symbol of fulfillment.

  To you, as his creator, it’s the ultimate product of lack plus compensation . . . the objectified, finely-focused essence of his inner needs.

  So much for the general pattern. It constitutes a perfectly respectable, if limited, theory of personality. And where the psychiatrist frequently must deal with people who stubbornly refuse to fit into his diagnostic rule-book, you can make your character behave as if your theory were well-nigh absolute.

  Further, you stand free to deviate at will.—Which you’ll do, have no doubt, as you gain self-confidence, insight, and experience.

  In the interim, this approach provides you with a basic structure—a skeletal hypothesis to work from while you learn the ropes.

  Now, let’s consider each factor in more detail.

  Any feeling of inadequacy, it should be obvious, is an individual matter. The stimulus or situation that creates a sense of lack in one man may leave another utterly untouched.

  In the same way, there are as many ways to compensate as there are human beings.

  This is because a person—or a character—is primarily a point of view. His attitudes are the dynamic aspects of his being. The direction he takes and the road he travels depend on them. They constitute his private, subjective, individual mode of adjustment. They’re the reason one man runs from the threat of violence, and another tries to talk his way out, and a third reaches for the nearest club.

  A point of view is the sum of how a character sees and reacts to:

  (1) Himself.

  (2) His story plight.

  (3) His world and life in general.

  To establish a character’s point of view, you first must provide a background that will logically evoke it.

  Much of that background may never get down on paper. Much of what does get down will be for your eyes alone. Your reader needn’t know it. But if it doesn’t exist—if you yourself haven’t thought it through—then count on it, the day will surely come when your character won’t behave the way you want him to. Or, if he does, his reactions will prove so wildly inconsistent and out of character as to shatter the picture of him that you’ve tried so hard to build.

  So, you give your character a history.

  Because Character learns by experience, even as you and I, his patterns of thought and feeling and behavior will be distilled from the totality of his past lacks and compensations. Each successful or unsuccessful attack upon a problem shapes and molds his way of dealing with new crises. So does each failure, each frustration . . . each effort, each hurt, each false start, each withdrawal.

  To create a character’s background, you can do worse than to start with a survey of his areas of uniqueness.

  Specifically, consider what he, as an individual, has to work with, in terms of:

  (a) Body.

  (b) Environment.

  (c) Experience.

  (d) Ideas.

  Take body. A woman is different from a man. The fact of that difference, in our society, may make her feel frustrated, inadequate, inferior . . . deprived of opportunities that should rightfully be hers. In her mind, at least, because of her sex, a lack exists that tends to strip her of control over her own destiny.

  A small man, in turn, may be intensely, bitterly aware that he lacks the physical strength of his larger rival. An ugly girl reacts differently than one secure in beauty. A clumsy boy envies his brother’s better coordination. The bald head, the big nose, the withered hand, the crossed eye, the slow wit, the stiff knee, the weak heart, the ulcer—all are notorious for their effect on the person whom they afflict; all may constitute lacks that shape the attitudes and patterns of their hosts.

  Nor need any such add up to a handicap by objective standards. It’s not the physical fact that counts; but, rather, the way the individual views it. No one else may notice the drooped lid, the sagging stomach, the minor deafness. But if you resent it, it may color your whole approach to others. The slight freckling that charms a girl’s friends still may grow in her mind to sheer disfigurement.

  Environment? The slum child and the country boy aren’t the same. Neither are the resident of the sleepy college town and the New Yorker. East and West each molds its people. So do Maine and Mississippi. Wilshire Boulevard may loom broad and deep as the Grand Canyon to an aspiring actor who lives two blocks on the wrong side. Gopher Prairie breeds rebellion and resentment in the nonconformist. The girl at home on Chicago’s Rush Street finds she feels uncomfortable and ill at ease when, jerked out of context, she’s forced to live in Keokuk. The boy from Painted Post has trouble adjusting to Greenwich Village. The Louisiana Cajun or the West Virginia mountaineer may not fit into life at an army post.

  Experience differentiates factory hand from cowman, preacher from peddler. Lack of it may petrify the virgin on her wedding night, or panic the new recruit under fire for the first time. The man perfectly at home at a banquet can feel hideously out of place in a cheap bar . . . and so can the waitress who now enters the Waldorf dining room as guest.

  It’s the same with ide
as. Among old friends, I may do well. But a glibly contemptuous son, fresh home from college, makes me feel inadequate and inferior. Son, in turn, may writhe in helpless fury when a Communist trained at the Lenin Institute exposes him as a babe in arms politically. The boy who’s lost his religious faith feels acutely uncomfortable and aware of difference under the accusing eyes of his devout family. And so does the woman who thought her taste impeccable until, today, a visitor laughed at the table setting.

  Needless to say, all these analytical entities tend, in life, to overlap. Each of us is a compounding of complexities. No one can say for sure that a man is the way he is primarily because he was born with a tongue-tie that minor surgery corrected, or grew up on a Grosse Pointe Farms estate, or nearly drowned at nine when a sailboat overturned, or went from Michigan to Harvard Law School, or served as a naval officer before he took an executive post with Chrysler Corporation, or married a girl from Lake Forest and had two children by her, or chose to espouse the Democratic cause in a district solidly Republican. But add them all together, and you have a personality that’s individual and unique. Each factor colors our man’s feelings, his thinking, his behavior. Know him in terms of those factors, and despite all surface similarities he stands out in marked contrast to other men.

  He is, in brief, a character you can work with in a story.

  And that’s why it’s so well worth your while, in building characters, to survey each person’s areas of uniqueness. From them, you can project some of the secret fears and lacks and feelings of inadequacy that drive your man or woman, and thus determine individual direction and make each appear to move independently, under his or her own steam.

  Beyond this, it also helps if you’ll take time to consider your character’s involvements in:

  (a) Love.

  (b) Work.

  (c) Society.

  Here, the issue is simple: Man doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A character without relationships to his fellow men is bound to prove flat as a cardboard cutout.

  Take love. How does your man feel about women? Why? Is he married? If not, why not? If so, does he love his wife? As much now as when they married? Even more? And again, if not, why not?

  In the same way, how does a child feel about his parents? His brothers and sisters? His playmates? His neighbors? His teachers? How do these experiences and reactions color and shape his attitudes?

  Work, in our society, offers equal opportunities for study. Failure to take it into account can bring into being such ridiculous figures as the cowboy who always has cash to hang around the town saloon, yet never is observed actually punching cattle.

  Further, employer and employee view the world from separate angles. Banker and grocer and farmer and office manager operate in different frames of reference. Union and non-union painter approach their problems in marked contrast. The attitudes of lawyer and engineer are miles apart.

  Society? Whom does your character associate with, and why? Are his close friends on a level with him—socially, educationally, in terms of income? If not, why not? Does he relax alone or in company? Are his companions chosen from the stable or unstable, the homebound or the rovers, the beatniks or the suburbanites?

  Again, such information is of little value per se. It offers you no magic key to character dynamics.

  What it does provide is an additional method, more or less systematic, of tracking down possible areas of inadequacy and lack.

  Now, what about compensation?

  Compensation, as stated earlier, is what your character substitutes for what he hasn’t got . . . the price he pays to make up for his lacks, the behavior with which he attempts to ease the sting engendered by feelings of inadequacy.

  Compensation breaks down into two basic reaction-patterns:

  (1) Fight.

  (2) Flight.

  Thus, if I feel sufficiently at a loss about something, I may attempt to counterbalance this feeling by striving toward some specific goal and/or way of life which, to me, symbolizes superiority.

  Or, overwhelmed by my own frustrations and sense of weakness, I may withdraw from the battle and try to preserve my ego from further bruises by refusing to strive, on one excuse or another . . . denying the worth of striving in general, or focusing on a side issue, or developing physical or psychological symptoms which prevent my taking action.

  The fighter is a familiar figure. We see him daily in the ninety-seven-pound weakling who becomes a Charles Atlas . . . the small man who makes up for his size by developing such drive and ambition that he amasses a fortune . . . the homely woman who achieves the charm of an Eleanor Roosevelt . . . the stutterer who rises to the heights of a Demosthenes.

  Those who resort to flight are with us too. Here’s the woman who forgets her fading beauty in a bottle . . . the boy who thwarts successful parents’ pressure by failing in school or on the job . . . the girl, secretly frightened by the sheer enormity of life, who plays it so cool as to reject all emotional involvement . . . the man who masks present failure with tales of college football glory . . . the hypochondriac female, fearful of pain and responsibility alike, who claims her heart’s too weak for her ever to bear children . . . the hoodlum whose sense of inferiority is so deep-seated that he lives outside the law . . . the coed who makes up for an unsatisfactory love-life with continual overeating.

  Your character, too, forever seeks release from his frustrations.

  Like other men, he finds that release in either fight or flight. How he achieves it should be part of the past history you assign him.

  If he’s a fighter, he seizes upon some specific thing, some act, the performance of which will, he believes, give him the sense of fulfillment that he seeks.

  If flight’s more his habit, he’ll dodge the issue—duck responsibility or involvement, chase women, abandon ambition, go in for sweet lemons or sour grapes.

  Or maybe, like many of us, he’ll combine the two: sometimes fighting, sometimes running, in accord with circumstance and his own impulse.

  Lack plus compensation equals rationalization of behavior equals a character who appears to move under his own power.

  Create your story people on that basis. Experience and experimentation will do the rest.

  As for specifics, here are a few miscellaneous points to bear in mind:

  (1) Pay attention to self-image.

  Consciously or otherwise, each of us sees himself in a particular light—as attractive or honest or dashing or ugly or what have you.

  Then, we react as if this subjective image were an accurate and objective picture, and attempt to live up to the role in which we’ve cast ourselves.

  When you write, you need to take into account this self-concept your character has built up. If Ed considers himself first of all a gentleman, and if his idea of gentlemanliness precludes loud or boisterous behavior, then hold his activities within the limits of that image.

  Often, the image itself is false, of course. A woman may still think of herself as the “cute” girl she was twenty years ago. A child tries to live up to adult comments that he’s a “little devil” instead of a normally mischievous boy.

  Regardless, the image remains important. The psychic dividends the woman’s self-concept originally paid her may have been so high that now she can’t break the chains of her own conditioning. A loosely tossed-off label can blight a child so badly that it casts a shadow across reality.

  Consequently, whether a character’s mind-picture be true or false, you can’t afford to ignore the image.

  (2) Keep each character consistent.

  Habits, William James once said, tend to become habitual.

  Characters’ reaction patterns operate on the habit level. The volatile girl stays volatile, the stolid man stolid. Overreaction or underreaction or irrational reaction often amount to a way of life for the individual concerned.

  Recognition of this fact is your most useful tool where keeping a character consistent—and thus believable—is the issue.

 
; (3) Make behavior tell the story.

  In life, you judge a man more by what he does than what he says. His powers of rationalization may make his self-image sheer delusion—witness the familiar figure of the “great lover” who’s seen by the girls in his office as a filthy-minded, foul-mouthed, clammy-handed old lecher.

  Therefore, be sparing of psychological analysis and conducted tours of the unconscious. Implication can be golden. Let your reader draw his own conclusions as to the forces at work within your story people. For your own part, most of the time, your best bet is to show your man, in characteristic action, and let it go at that.

  (4) Deduce cause from effect.

  This is a plea that you not conceive characters by the numbers. Rather, play by ear wherever possible, especially when you first start work on a story.

  Then, later, ask yourself why Eugene tore up the fifty-dollar bill, or Kitty begged Blake to take her back. Hypothesizing from possible lacks and compensations, you may come forth with startling—and effective—insights.

  (5) Integrate inner and outer man.

  Tags and impressions mirror dynamics. If Marie is punctilious or Andy sullen, it says a great deal about what’s going on inside them.

  Therefore, match external behavior to dynamics, and vice versa. Ned’s fussiness about perfect grooming may reflect doubts of inner worth. Linda’s secret guilts and hostilities may reach the surface in a tendency to take more than her share of blame.

  Understand, you don’t need to talk about or explain such. But you’ll write better if you yourself have a pretty good idea of the motive forces behind everything each character does.

  (6) Strive for contrast.

  Inside your characters as well as out, your reader likes variety. So, no two story people should have inner drives that match precisely. If Alex cringes over his lack of education, let Howard draw direction from loss of a mother who ran off when he was only ten. Does Laura build her ego by sleeping around? Then it might prove effective contrast if Vivian takes pride in her competence at work.