Techniques of the Selling Writer (39 page)

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:

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 bring 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.

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.

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:

Next question: How do you deal with each?

Here, we’ll limit ourselves to two points only.

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.

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.

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:

Role-wise
, the strength of the villain is the strength of your story.