(7) Don’t overbuild.
Even in a novel, there’ll be only half-a-dozen people you or your reader need to know in depth. Where the rest are concerned, type casting and surface freshness via tags will do the job nicely.
Which is to say, you waste time and energy when you overbuild. Beware the temptation to make every spear-bearer a major project. More likely than not, it’s just an unconscious excuse to avoid getting on with the story.
(8) Learn your craft.
No writer can ever know too much about people.
Much of this knowledge can be gained from thought and careful observation. However, a little preliminary reading may help to orient you to the task.
Two simply written books that will add to your insight are Understanding Other People, by Stuart Palmer, and The Importance of Feeling Inferior, by Marie Beynon Ray. Both are available in paperback.
In addition, if your library has a copy, you should check out Modern Clinical Psychiatry, by Arthur P. Noyes. Since it’s a medical text, and fairly heavy going, I’d suggest that you read just Chapter 4: “Mental Mechanisms and Their Functions.” It describes briefly the various ways in which people try to adjust to problem situations, and the things you’ll learn are well worth whatever effort you expend.
How do you make a character fascinate your reader?
When a character excites and fascinates a reader, said reader wants to read about him . . . experience with him.
Or, as an editor would phrase it, the reader identifies with Jack or Susie.
If your characters don’t thus intrigue readers, your stories won’t sell. Therefore, it’s worth your while to learn how to inject the elements that excite and fascinate, just in case they fail to develop spontaneously as you characterize by ear.
How do you persuade your reader to identify?
You shackle him to the character with chains of envy.
That is, you make the character someone who does what your reader would like to do, yet can’t. You establish him as the kind of person Reader would like to be like . . . a figure to envy.
Further, and no matter what you may have heard to the contrary, Reader identifies with every truly successful character, not just one per story.
Why?
Because envy knows no limits. You may envy one man his wealth, another his poise, a third his success with women. In one way or another, in one degree or another, consciously or unconsciously, and whether you admit it or not, you envy a host of other writers their achievements. The fact that you focus on one in particular at a given moment doesn’t mean that you can’t feel just as strongly about another, instants later.
What is envy?
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary speaking: “To envy is to be discontented at another’s possessing what one would like for oneself.”
What do exciting, fascinating, successful story people possess that your reader would like to have?
Courage.
Courage to do what?
Courage to attempt to control reality.
What is reality?
Reality is limitations. It’s law, natural or man-made . . . physical, statutory, psychological.
What opposes reality?
Imagination. Fantasy. All the things that man conceives of, yet cannot or dare not do.
Specifically?
The impossible. The unattainable. The forbidden. The disastrous.
This isn’t to say your character must achieve such things, of course. The issue is courage, not victory. Conflict is what counts: man’s struggle against the world and all the overwhelming odds it mounts against him. The exciting character is the one who challenges fate and attempts to dominate reality, despite all common sense and logic.
Now I know this doesn’t sound like what editors mean when they talk about identification. The word is used so loosely that it’s become a sort of meaningless literary catchall, into which people throw anything and everything for which they lack a proper pigeonhole.
Actually, identification is a specialized psychological term, variously defined: “A method of tension reduction through the achievements of other persons or groups or in some cases through the merit of inanimate objects.” “A process by which an individual imagines himself behaving as if he were another person.” “A mental mechanism by which an individual endeavors to pattern himself after another.”
When an editor uses the word, what he really means is—and here we complete the circle—that a particular character excites and/or fascinates him to the point that he lives through the story with that character, enthusiastically.
Because Editor fails to recognize the true issues, he develops a series of private rationalizations as to what constitutes identification. These fall into three major categories:
a. He decides that you identify with the recognizable character.
What makes a character recognizable?
The familiar. That is, the character chews tobacco or likes cucumbers or spends all his spare time fishing or takes great pains with his dress.
All this is good. As pointed out earlier, when we dealt with techniques of character presentation, it adds reality to your story people.
But it has little to do with identification as such.
b. He claims that you identify with the likable character.
What makes a character likable?
The similar. Or, to put it even more simply, the likable person is someone who agrees with us. If you’re a Baptist deacon, you’ll have difficulty liking a character who’s an outspoken atheist. If you’re a staunch Republican, you probably won’t like a Communist character.
And while this has some small bearing on identification, it still isn’t the heart of the matter.
c. He decides that you identify with the interesting character.
What makes a character interesting?
The contradictory. In fiction as in life, we tend to take the totally predictable for granted. If you know in advance that Good Old Joe always will react to trouble with a temper tantrum, or to good news with an order for another beer, you quite possibly may find him pleasant enough, but you’re unlikely to pay too much attention to him. Your interest and attention are saved for the man who, while consistent in his inconsistencies, has elements of the paradoxical in his personality that keep you guessing.
John D. MacDonald’s burly soldier of fortune, Travis McGee, is a good case in point. He’s kind and sensitive. Yet when a girl is sufficiently upset, he may slap her face instead of trying to console her. Why? Because he sees she’s drawn too tight to benefit from solace. What she needs is an excuse to break loose, to cry. The time for gentleness comes later.
Is this behavior consistent with McGee’s character? Yes. But it’s also unanticipated and, at first glance, contradictory. Consequently, it sharpens interest.
But though close to the target, interest in a character won’t necessarily make you identify with him.
Actually, the factor on which identification rests, and the thing too many editors miss, is a concept called wish-fulfillment.
What is wish-fulfillment?
Break it down for yourself: A wish is a desire. To wish is to want, to yearn for, to crave.
Fulfillment, in turn, is satisfaction. To fulfill a person is to gratify entirely his desires in a particular area.
Put the two together, and you get wish-fulfillment: the satisfaction of a craving.
How does this tie in with fiction, and identification?
Let’s take it a step at a time, starting from reality itself.
Reality frustrates us. We cannot or dare not overstep the various laws laid down for us by man, nature, and practicality.
Frustration, as pointed out earlier, is anything but pleasant. Therefore, emotionally, we yearn for a world more to our liking. We crave to control our destinies. Yet by and large, day to day, most of us are afraid even to try to do so.
A fictional character, on the other hand, knows no such limits. He’s free to acknowledge for
bidden impulses, gamble with disaster, challenge the impossible, reach for the unattainable.
By living through a story with such a character, your reader shares these experiences. Vicariously, his repressed desires come out into the open. Emotional needs find satisfaction. Without endangering himself, he gets to expand his horizons . . . do things he’d never dare attempt in life.
Thus, to a degree, he relieves tensions built up by life’s frustrations.
And there stands the real reason you find a character exciting and fascinating: His story activities help to satisfy some aspect of your own emotional hunger.
Or, as we put it to begin with, you identify because, unconsciously, you envy the courage of the character who challenges world and fate.
To create a character who’ll fascinate your reader, then, you must give said character the opportunity to display such courage.
To that end, make him attempt:
(1) The impossible.
(2) The unattainable.
(3) The forbidden.
(4) The disastrous.
The impossible is the stuff that dreams are made of . . . pure fantasy; man’s revolt against natural law itself. When you visualize yourself walking through walls, or flying across the sky without benefit of aircraft, or rising from the grave, you take this route.
The unattainable lies closer to hand. Here we confront The Clerk Who Aspires to Marry the Boss’s Daughter. Close beside him stand The Detective Who Must Find the Murderer before His Beloved Is Executed Tomorrow Morning . . . The Young Entrepreneur Who Must Translate $100,000 in Liabilities into $10,000,000 in Assets by the Time the Bank Opens . . . The Aging Housewife Who Must Delight Daughter’s Rich Fiancé with Life as She Is Lived in Ye Olde Family Hovel. Whatever the issue, somebody must reach for something that appears to be beyond his grasp.
The forbidden? Deny me even a wormy green apple, and in my thoughts it will taste indescribably sweet; for as any psychologist will tell you, no nice girl would dream of doing the things that every nice girl dreams of doing. So, in fiction, your minister may read delightedly of murder, your banker of theft. Adultery has a tantalizing flavor to a host of suburban housewives who’d be truly horrified to learn that the girl next door had kissed the milkman. Which explains, in large part, the success of Lolita as a novel, Playboy as a magazine.
Disaster constitutes a challenge epitomized in our fascination with the human fly and the airplane-wing walker of the 1920s. We thrill to the hideous threat of atomic war. Our excitement feeds on cataclysm. The narcotics addict, the racing driver, the rebel, the surgeon fighting death—all hold us spellbound because they flirt with calamity.
The impossible, the unattainable, the forbidden, the disastrous: These constitute the raw materials with which you combine courage, in order to create story people who excite and fascinate.
Conversely, you cut deep into your chances for any broad success if you choose your major characters from the ranks of the weak and passive. Nothing is drearier than the story that centers on dull, apathetic people borne down by trivial problems, without the strength or imagination—the courage—to rally and fight back. As Howard Browne once phrased it, “Readers want heroes, not victims.”
Even a minor character acquires allure when he steps out of his rut and in some way defies fate. Here, you have the girl who’s sexually promiscuous. There, the man who overextends himself financially in order to promote a new housing project. Another man tries to maneuver political favors from an old enemy. A woman dreams that her crippled child may somehow be made whole.
Because the girl toys with the forbidden, your reader reads about her eagerly. Man Number 1 gambles with disaster—again, you have a fascinating character. Attempting the unattainable, Man 2 grips your audience. Poignancy vibrates in the mother’s impossible dream.
Some of these people may play mere bit parts. But because they hazard so much; because they face such odds, your reader finds himself striving with them for the moment as they challenge fate, however casually or briefly.
It’s entirely possible, of course, that reality will overwhelm such characters. The girl may end up dead in an alley or a cheap hotel room. Man 1, gambling so desperately, might lose and jump out an office window . . . Man 2 go down into humiliating oblivion . . . the woman with the crippled child fade to a tearful, heart-broken specter.
But that’s all right too. For the moment, each of them played his role and held your reader, because they dared to fight against all odds.
Is this a device for melodrama only?
No, it isn’t. Macbeth is here, and also Nelson Algren’s Man with the Golden Arm . . . Robert E. Lee Prewitt of From Here to Eternity, and Walter Tevis’ Hustler.
There’s nothing about the character who dares that isn’t true to life. You meet him every day. The difference between him and other people is that one way or another, in one degree or another, as saint or sinner, crook or chancellor, he insists on trying to stand up on his own two feet like a man and control his destiny.
Which is what makes anyone worth writing about.
What else is there to say about how to make characters fascinate your reader?
Three things:
(1) Pinpoint the emotional needs of your specific reader group.
When an editor tells you that his teen-age public has trouble identifying with your eighty-year-old heroine, he means that this particular coterie of readers finds little about said heroine to envy. Her situation is so remote from theirs that, courageous or not, she isn’t a person they’d like to be like.
Which is to say, at least one character in any story should in some way show and satisfy needs that parallel those of your reader. And the more specifically this is done, the better.
Such a character needn’t necessarily be like your reader on the surface, understand. Differences in age and sex and background can, to some degree, be overcome. You don’t even have to cast your man as a dominant figure in the story.
But it’s well-nigh essential that he possess and satisfy specific reader emotional cravings. The general is not enough.
Why?
Because emotional response isn’t something you, the writer, can impose. The hunger is there first, always, deep inside the reader.
The focus of that hunger varies from reader to reader and group to group. Wish-fulfillment, control of destiny, may center on curiosity about and desire for sexual experience, in an adolescent boy. In his father, the issue perhaps is escape from a drab world of routine work. Loss of status and fear of death quite possibly preoccupy his grandmother. His mother longs for an end to poverty . . . some touch of grace and beauty; glamour.
To appeal to a given member of this family, your story must provide some character who challenges fate, and who does so in an area and manner that fits the specific reader’s special needs.
In other words, to bring a reader’s emotional hunger to the surface, you must give him a character who reflects and projects it.
Take Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, with his violence and abuse of women. As a character, he’d prove a failure if the men who read about him didn’t already unconsciously feel pent-up aggression and hate—much of it focused on frustrations created by the females in their lives.
In the same way, a young girl may yearn for affection, romantic love. So, you offer her some character who demonstrates the power to evoke such. The meek, the rebellious, the lonely, the withdrawn, the fanciful, the cautious, the power-hungry—all have their private patterns. And each searches fiction for the character whom he’d like to be like, in some specific way or other.
Because this is so, there can be no true universality of appeal in fiction. The story or the character who fascinates everyone is a myth and non-existent. The writer must pick a target audience and shoot for it—with a rifle, not a shotgun. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had the right idea when he prefaced his famous adventure novel The Lost World with this verse:
I have wrought my simple plan
If I br
ing one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man,
Or the man who’s half a boy.
But even when you find the character or characters who spark the needs of your particular reader group, often there are other matters that you must consider—feelings of guilt, for instance.
These spring from the very pleasure the reader derives from a character’s violation of taboos. To ease these qualms, you may have to insert punishment for misdeeds, or provide your hero with a private morality that justifies deviation from established codes.
How do you decide just what to do, in the face of such a host of problems?
You study your reader group. Learn to understand its members, collectively and as individuals. Talk with them face to face, every chance you get—not as a writer, but as a casual acquaintance. Search out their interests, their problems, their favorite topics, their enthusiasms, their feelings.
Then, design characters to fit these readers’ needs.
Does all this sound difficult?
It is.
But it also can prove—pardon the word—fascinating, to the writer eager to achieve control of his own destiny.
(2) Don’t try to make virtue take the place of courage.
Admirable qualities are fine as subordinate characterizing elements. But fascination is born of valor, not virtue.
You may loathe Harry Diadem, in Calder Willingham’s Eternal Fire. Probably you despise his goals. But he continues to fascinate, even if with horror, simply because he moves ahead so ruthlessly in his defiance of all that most of us hold dear.
A saintly character, on the other hand, may fall ever so flat—not because he’s saintly, but because he doesn’t, in addition, challenge fate.
(3) Have faith in your own judgment.
Techniques of the Selling Writer Page 26
