One of the most successful characters I ever created was hero of a story written on assignment and paid for in advance.
The editor, previous purchaser of at least a quarter-million words of copy from me, bounced the yarn because, he said, no reader could identify with my man.
Later, the story was published in another magazine, and as a paperback by American, British, and German houses.
The lesson here is as stated above: Have faith in your own judgment.
Obversely, don’t confuse the editor with God.
Editors used to say that American readers couldn’t identify with oriental characters.—Then, Pearl Buck came along with The Good Earth.
They also claimed that a character had to be physically attractive.—Enter Clarence Budington Kelland with Scattergood Baines.
They insisted that characters to any degree amoral or immoral would outrage the public.—Check your corner newsstand on this point.
Editors have their prejudices and preconceptions, even as you and I. But you don’t have to accept their ideas as gospel. If a character fascinates you, then take it for granted that someone else also may be intrigued, regardless of any rules a given market lays down.
After all, there’s always another editor around the corner!
How do you fit a character to the role he has to play?
Certain people perform such vital functions in a story that often they determine its success or failure. Others, though perhaps less important, offer special problems.
Such characters rate a little extra attention, so that you’ll know how to make them effective in their roles.
These characters are:
a. The hero.
b. The villain.
c. The heroine.
d. The sensitive character.
e. The character-in-depth.
Next question: How do you deal with each?
a. The hero.
Here, we’ll limit ourselves to two points only.
(1) Do have an individual hero.
Must a hero be an individual? Can’t “he” be a group?
Both in theory and practice, the idea’s weak.
Why?
Because a group is made up of individual people, and danger is subjective. The thing that constitutes a menace to me may prove of little concern to you. Loss of a particular girl or job or cherished object devastates Hero A, perhaps, only to be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders by Hero B.
Thus, even though thousands or millions of people are affected—as by a war, a flood, a depression—your story becomes meaningful only as you zero in on individuals. The fact that a regiment marches into battle doesn’t change the fact that each soldier will react in his own intimately personal fashion. His private involvements, his past conditionings, his aspirations for the future—these are what count; for it’s through them that you focus the emotional responses of your reader. He needs someone to cheer for. The old Hollywood attack, “Which is our ball team?” remains valid in the vast majority of cases.
Give your hero associates, therefore, if you will. But don’t so submerge him among them that he gets lost. He must remain the center of attention and of interest. For without a clear and obvious hero, a story is liable to end up a pastiche—a patchwork of anecdotes and character sketches, intriguing as an experiment, but so diffuse as to be of doubtful appeal to most readers.
(2) Don’t let your hero resign from the story.
Where your hero’s concerned, the big problem is to keep him heroic.
A hero’s primary characteristic is indomitability. He has a goal he seeks to attain or a way of life he wants to retain. Even if he changes direction somewhat along the way, the road he follows is his very own. He sticks to his guns, no matter what. For in the words of Robert G. Ingersoll, “When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death—this is heroism.”
When a hero fails you, ordinarily it’s because your reader comes to realize that your man is, or should be, willing to abandon the fight and quit the story, even though you as writer continue to hold him on stage.
Solution? Give Hero strong motivation, both outside and in.
That is, let circumstance or the villain trap him so that he can’t run.
Then, in addition, make what’s at stake symbolic of Hero’s whole pattern of being, his style of life. For if the internal issue is vital enough, he’s left with no choice but to fight on, regardless of the odds against him, or forfeit his status as a man.
Exhibit A: Heroine is in dire peril. If Hero backs down, she’ll die for sure.
That’s external motivation.
In addition, Heroine has often expressed her doubt that Hero is capable of really loving anyone. He knows that if he abandons her to her fate, he’ll automatically prove her right and thus damn himself forever in his own eyes.
That’s internal motivation.
Put the two together, and you create a character who’ll fight, fight, fight.
At the same time, don’t confuse indomitability and idiocy. As a writer, you’re supposed to be able to think realistically and devise believable situations. There’s no virtue in the totally incredible hero who stands in the middle of Main Street, waiting for six sinister gunmen to shoot him down. Anyone in his right mind would run for cover like a scared rabbit, and your reader knows it.
So, do have an individual hero, and don’t let him resign.
Nor is there any rule that says you can’t use all other characterizing tricks and techniques in order to help said hero come to life.
b. The villain.
Psychologically, a story’s villain is ever so important. He constitutes a stranger figure—a scapegoat on whom your reader may concentrate unconscious impulses to hostility and aggression.
Your reader needs such a scapegoat. For through him, Reader releases feelings that conscience forbids him to purge in real life.
Further, and despite sociological theorizing to the contrary, villains do exist. A man with vested interests—whether these be economic, political, romantic, or otherwise—can defend said interests ruthlessly. If you don’t believe me, try telling your immediate superior that you’re out to get his job.
To develop a villain properly, you need to understand three things:
(1) The villain’s role.
(2) The villain’s characteristics.
(3) How to make a villain effective.
Role-wise, the strength of the villain is the strength of your story.
Why?
Because a villain is the personification of the danger that threatens your hero. If the danger—that is, the villain—is weak, then your story’s bound to be weak also.
Why should danger be personified?
For two reasons:
(a) Personification concentrates the danger down to a single source and thus gives unity to a story.
(b) The personal villain can react to your hero’s efforts and, through continuing attacks, sharpen and intensify conflict.
The primary characteristic of the villain, in turn, is ruthlessness.
Which means?
The villain is determined to have his own way, without regard to other people’s needs; and he’s uncompromising in this determination.
Must a villain be an unattractive person?
Far from it. A villain may very well be utterly charming. Given half a chance, he may quite possibly steal your story. His villainy lies in the fact that, where one specific issue is concerned, he also is utterly ruthless. A sweet and loving mother, determined to prevent a daughter’s marriage to a man said mother deems unsuitable; a brother set on forcing his aging sister to give up her apartment and come live with him, so that he can look after her properly; a wife pushing her husband into ambition and advancement even though he much prefers his present rut—these are villains, every bit as much as the murderer, the traitor, the rapist, the thief.
It follows that the villain is unlikely to be ruthless in everything. His com
pulsion to control often may be limited to a single area or situation.
The reason this is so is because the villain is a human being like any other. Consequently, he’s the product of his own background and lacks and compensations. When his self-concept—as conscientious mother, as solicitous brother, as adoring wife—is endangered, he acts to protect it; and circumstance forces relentlessness upon him.
Nor does this necessarily make him evil. In his own eyes he’s completely justified . . . as all of us justify ourselves in our own rigidities of behavior. Each of us, in some area or other, is a villain.
How do you make sure your villain will prove effective?
(a) You lay out a private plan of action for him—a “villain’s plot,” so-called, that sets him in continuing opposition to the hero.
(b) You think him through as a person, so that he’ll fight uncompromisingly to the bitter end.
Beyond the obvious steps you’ll take to do this, the central factor is, in large measure, timing. Ordinarily, danger has already confronted the villain before the story starts. His goals, his self-concept, have been threatened. He’s made his decision as to how to deal with that threat. Now, he carries out said decision. Ruthlessly.
How does that make him a villain?
The course of action he’s chosen endangers your hero; and this is the hero’s story.
Isn’t the hero ruthless also, in fighting back?
He may become so, as story pressures mount. But because we can see and feel those pressures with him, he remains heroic in our eyes.
Further, when you finally reach your story’s climax, you make the hero demonstrate that he deserves to win, in terms of adherence to principle, selflessness, and sacrificial decision.—Which same also helps to convince Reader that any prior misdeeds on Hero’s part are inconsequential and justified.
Isn’t it possible to have a satisfactory story without a personal villain?
Of course it is. Any number of such stories have been written, about heroes striving against nature or social forces or a hostile universe. Your hero’s foe may be a mountain, or time, or injustice, or the emptiness of outer space, or a machine that won’t work, or life itself.
So?
Ordinarily, these stories are a good deal harder to write than are those in which the villain is human. In fact, and because of this very problem, a writer frequently personifies such an impersonal foe as if it were a human being. That is, he conceives of or represents it as a person; gives it human attributes.
How do you give an impersonal object or force human attributes?
You write in such a manner as to give the impression that the object or force behaves as if it were a human being, with implied or explicit human feelings, human motivations. It’s an easy trick, and one that brings to life robots and ghosts, mountains and rivers, gods and animals, houses and towns, torpedoes and Tiger tanks—all the thousands of inanimate and subhuman and superhuman entities that have played roles in fiction down through the years.
But be your villain human or inanimate, his guiding principles remain the same: ruthlessness, and uncompromising determination.
c. The heroine.
How do you create a heroine who comes alive?
(1) You make her human.
(2) You develop her in conflict; that is, give her goals and opposition.
A heroine’s prime characteristic is desirability. Her main function in a story is to serve as part of the hero’s reward for being indomitable.
She’s not always essential. Many stories without female characters have been written. But most of today’s fiction does include her.
The main problem arising where the heroine is concerned is to prevent her deteriorating into a beautiful nonentity.
Solution: Give her direction in her own right. Make her just as much a dynamic character as hero or villain.
To that end, let the heroine have her own ideas as to the sort of world in which she wants to live . . . a self-concept which she seeks to maintain, compounded of lacks and compensations and reactions to external pressures. Only as you permit her to choose her own path and to fight to achieve or maintain her independence will she come alive. Only as you develop her in conflict will she play an integral part in your story. And though she’ll be harder to handle when developed thus, she’ll reward you for your efforts by doing her part to help intrigue and hold your reader.
d. The sensitive character.
The particularly sensitive or perceptive character doesn’t appear in every story, by any means. But when he does pop up, it helps if you have some notion of how best to develop him.
Three tricks put you in free:
(1) Let the sensitive character show more awareness than do your other story people.
This means, let him observe his world in shades of gray, rather than just black and white. He sees a smile or a frown as a thing of infinite subtle variations . . . draws conclusions from it. Small deviations from the norm attract his notice. Perhaps he exhibits a tendency to self-analysis. If a girl’s fingers tremble as she lights her cigarette, he spots it and guesses the reason for her reaction. Is he a kindly person? He compliments the old woman at the corner fruit stand on her hideous new hat, instead of laughing. Or, if hatred drives him, he knows precisely where to sink the knife in his adversary’s psyche.
The way he phrases his interpretations, in turn, reveals whether he’s illiterate, intellectual, or poet.
(2) Contrast the sensitive with the insensitive.
This old favorite of too many novels of army life plunks down one gentle soul in a barracks-ful of crude, crass, callous types. While the rest of the boys talk things over in four-letter words and leap to profane conclusions with no heed to evidence, he teases out nuances to half the diameter of a spider-thread.
Because the difference between him and his fellows is so marked, he sticks up like a sore thumb.
Though this procedure can descend easily to the ridiculous, its principle is sound. Contrast makes anything stand out more sharply.
(3) Set up situations which allow for a difference in reaction.
Fast action and violent conflict give little opportunity for you to establish a character’s sensitivity. The job needs to be taken care of earlier, before the explosion comes. Otherwise, your man is likely to register as foolish, inadequate, or a coward, instead of discerning or insightful.
Therefore, plan a scene or two in which nuance is important, so that your reader will see Ben or Horace as at least remotely understandable and justified in his habits of intuition or perceptiveness or analysis. Give him excuses to appraise people or behavior . . . reasons to notice small, vital differences. Then, when the big scene comes, our sensitive friend will be accepted for what he is, instead of appearing a mere buffoon.
In other words, decide in advance on the effect you want your character to create, and devise ways to achieve it.
e. The character-in-depth.
What factors help to round out a character and give him depth?
(1) Involvement in a wide variety of situations.
You don’t know a man in depth till you’ve seen him against diverse backdrops.
Thus, at home, he may be the soul of probity . . . in New York, a woman-chasing drunk . . . at the office, a quiet and respectful worker . . . in the army, a rank-happy martinet. His mother sees him as a dutiful son . . . his children as an erratic combination of cruel disciplinarian and fawning sentimentalist . . . his poker friends as a sucker for a bluff.
To round out a character in fiction you need, above all, space. That’s why you so seldom find the character-in-depth in anything short of a novel. In the more compact forms, you simply don’t have the room to display and integrate his conflicting images and expose his assorted attitudes to view.
But depth is a matter of degree, and our heading states one device to help you approximate it: Give your man as broad a range of situations as you can. Then, let him react, so that your reader gains insight into assorted fa
cets of Character’s personality.
Further, all this must be shown . . . not merely talked about. Long-winded statements of appraisal by an author accomplish little.
(2) Careful development of sequels.
A bit-player can act, and your reader will pretty much accept what’s done, even if motivation and/or explanation leave a good deal to be desired.
Depth treatment imposes greater demands on you. Reader wants to know why your man does the things he does and feels the way he feels. Attitudes, reasoning, background elements—all may need to be brought out into the open.
To that end, it’s to your advantage to develop sequels in considerable detail when you build a character in depth. For it’s in sequel that you reveal the factors that influence your character in his choice of goals, his selection of direction.
Why, for example, should Leo put up with his alcoholic wife? Does he see her as the cross he has to bear for earlier sins? As a social or financial mainstay that he doesn’t dare abandon? An excuse for martyrdom and self-pity? A convenient scapegoat for his own failures? Reaffirmation of his concept of himself as a man not to be swerved from duty?
Well, sequel’s a good hunting-ground for answers to such questions.
(3) Fragmentation of motivation and reaction.
To understand a man, break down his behavior to its root components.
Thus, how does Gil react to a sneer? With violence? With panic? With disdain? With hurt? With logic?
Or, does he simply ignore it?
Further: Is the panic revealed in quivering voice, or stiffened face? The disdain, in caustic words, or contemptuous glance, or turned back?
Whatever the answer, it helps to give your character depth.
So, this chapter ends; and with it, our analysis of the major elements that go into fiction: words, motivation-reaction units, scenes, story patterns, and character.
But there still are a number of things you need to know about the actual preparation, planning,, and production of a story.
Techniques of the Selling Writer Page 27
