Techniques of the Selling Writer (36 page)

Appearance
is obvious. Some men are tall, others short; some handsome, others ugly; some blue-eyed,
some brown, some black. Women may be well-groomed or sloppy, old or young, with good
posture or bad.

Speech
, too, individualizes. Most college professors talk differently than most truck drivers.
Most prostitutes have a vocabulary miles apart from that of most preachers’ wives.
A Texas drawl is distinct from New Yorkese. Each of us has habitual expressions, from
“Well, now . . .” to “Looking at this businesswise. . . .” We fumble, grope, speak
precisely or pedantically or slangily or to the point. Our use of language reflects
background, experience, occupation, social status, psychology, and a host of other
things

Mannerism
? Some men scowl. Some women flutter. You know hand-rubbers, ear-lobe tuggers, eye-dodgers,
buttonholers. The doodler, the nail-cleaner, the pipe-puffer, the gesticulator, and
the seat-squirmer all are commonplace.

Tags of
attitude
—sometimes called
traits
—mark the habitually apologetic, fearful, irritable, breezy, vain, or shy. Obsequiousness
is an attitude, and so is the habit of command. Here, too, are
found the men and women preoccupied with a single subject, whether it be golf or
babies, business or yard or stamps or fishing. For all preoccupations, in their way,
represent habit of thought or view of life.

The key thing to remember about tags is that their primary purpose is to distinguish
. . . to separate one character from another in your reader’s eyes.

Therefore, it’s important that you don’t accidentally confuse said reader. Don’t duplicate
tags. One fat man, one lush blonde, one profane engineer to a story is enough.

Same way for names.
J
ack,
J
ohn, and
J
oe in the same scene will mix up readers. Likewise for Han
son
, Thom
son
, John
son
. There are worse rules than to check off each initial letter and terminal syllable
as you use it, just so no careless scanner goes astray.

A second function of the tag is to characterize. To that end, fit label to personality.
If a man is timid, let it show in handshake and diffidence and speech. A woman who
glances sidewise at a stranger and hitches her skirt above her knees as she sits down
tells more about herself than a paragraph of author comment.

Again, names enter. While “John Strongheart” and “Tess True-love” have gone out of
style, it still doesn’t hurt to choose John’s cognomen with an eye to its connotations
of vigor and/or masculinity. As for Tess, styles in girls’ names change. “Agatha,”
“Beatrice,” and “Chris” each tends to point to a different decade of birth.

Now, three points of application to remember:

Sometimes, one or two tags for a given character are enough. “Now the door opened,
and a heavy-set, crew-cut man poked his head in. ’Hey, anybody here drive a blue Buick?’”
may prove entirely adequate for someone with only a walk-on bit.

But if a character is going to play a major part, constant reference to his wavy hair
or bulging eyes or grimy nails eventually will get to be a bore.

Solution? More tags. Often, you’ll find it desirable to use labels of all four types
for a single individual . . . maybe even several
of each. Thus, our man may be burly, black-haired, and stubble-chinned . . . fumble
for words and speak in incoherent fragments . . . lick his lips and scratch his chest
and shift from foot to foot . . . combine belligerence with a tendency to beat around
the bush whenever he’s asked a direct question.

“He had blue eyes” is the worst possible approach. “The blue eyes glinted coldly”?
Better!

Often, the best trick is to try to find some bit of stage business on which to hang
the tag. Thus, for a proud woman: “She stood there for a moment, the violet eyes ever
so steady. Only the slightest trace of heightened color showed in the smooth cheeks.

“Then, with a quick, deft movement, she snapped the purse shut, turned still without
a word and, blonde head high, left the room.”

An irascible character? “’Get out!’ he roared, jowls purpling.” A haughty character?
“Kurt brought up the monocle, studying Frances as if she were some sort of bug.” An
awkward character? “A strange, shambling figure, he moved to the chair. But as he
reached it, something seemed to happen to the too-large feet, and all at once the
drink was flying one way and the ashtray another while he and the chair crashed to
the floor together in a tangle of gangling arms and legs and ill-fitted clothing and
shaggy hair.”

Well, you get the idea.

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:

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:

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:

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.