Techniques of the Selling Writer (7 page)

What is a feeling?

A feeling is private interpretation of data. It’s a man’s uniquely personal and individual
response to his world: I love this woman, I pity that dog, I hate hot cereals, I’m
sad or happy or confused. Most often welling unbidden, without benefit of intellect
or logic, it’s a subjective awareness of the ebb and flow of inner tensions, expressing
itself in a reaction.

“Reaction” is convenient verbal shorthand for “I desire to behave in a particular
way.”—I may not act, you understand. But the impulse is with me. If, magically, all
my restraints and inhibitions were to vanish, I’d embrace the woman, soothe the dog,
throw out the cereal, weep or laugh or throw a temper tantrum.

Behavior, in turn, seldom stands neutral. It confirms or denies, moves you forward
or back. All reactions, all feelings, boil down to “This is good,” or “This is bad.”
You like peach pie, or you dislike it. You’re pleased with your new office, or displeased.
You enjoy parties, or they make you uncomfortable.

Facts exist independently, outside people. But they have meaning and/or significance
only as we have feelings about them; react to them. Seven inches of rain in a night
is a fact, so long as you merely see an item about it in the paper. Let it wash through
your living room and ruin two thousand dollars’ worth of furnishings, and it takes
on true meaning and significance for you. For significance, remember, starts within
the individual, in feeling. Beauty still rests in the eye of the beholder. Evil is
a thing that lurks in the hearts of men.

Things don’t have feelings. Events don’t. Places don’t. But people do. And things
and events and places can
create
feelings in people . . . trigger an amazing range of individual reactions. Let a
harmless snake slither across a room—even in circumstances which make it impossible
for the snake to be dangerous—and someone screams. Does he scream at the snake? No.
He screams
at his own feelings. In the same way, we “know” that most baldness is incurable, that
aspirin is aspirin, that no soap will make an ugly woman beautiful. But we go right
on spending fortunes annually for baldness cures and brand-name aspirin and beauty
soaps.

Indeed, in the largest sense, all objectivity is an outrageous myth. To assume that
finite minds can successfully catalogue the infinite is in itself presumptuous, and
indicative of infinite ego. Our whole pattern of life demonstrates how tightly we’re
shackled to the limitations of our species; how closely confined by our very humanness.
Boy turns to girl instinctively. We talk of communicating with extraterrestrial beings
when we can’t even converse meaningfully with a chimpanzee. The scientist takes it
for granted that human life is more important than that of the laboratory animals
he uses in his research.

What does all this say?

Merely that each of us has an orientation to the world . . . a built-in polarity,
an emotional compass. Though we bow down before that useful tool, the concept of objectivity,
most of the time our feelings still tell us which man to trust, which girl to marry;
the car to buy, the price to pay, the faith to believe in, the candidate to vote for.

Understand, these feelings of ours may tell us wrong as well as right, as any woman
knows when her husband first glimpses her new twenty-dollar hat. They offer no guarantee
of intelligence or morality or taste. But they do at least give us an intimately personal
guide, a standard.

Take away a man’s feelings, by lobotomy or otherwise, and he’s reduced to a human
vegetable.

Persuade him to mistrust those same feelings—via an objectivist education, perhaps—and
he bobs like a chip on the sea of life: drifting, aimless, without force or focus.

For as we earlier implied, each of us is by nature an egocentric sun around which
a private world revolves. I know where I stand, so everything else falls into place
because it’s in a set relation to me.

In fact, that’s the way it
should
be, unless we stand ready to give up all sense of purpose and direction.

Which brings us, next, to the matter of what bearing all this has on your story.

The focal character: your reader’s compass

How do you make readers care about what happens in your story?

—They
must
care, you know. Otherwise, they won’t read!

So, how do you make them care?

You give them a stake in what happens. You put them in a position where they stand
to win or lose, emotionally.

To that end, you center your story on a character who stands to win or lose also,
so that your readers can feel for him or against him.

A story recounts events. But those events can’t or won’t stand alone. They need to
be explained, interpreted, evaluated, made meaningful.

Above all, they must be translated into feeling.

What that means is that a story is essentially subjective, not objective. Consequently,
it needs to be as strongly oriented as a person.

What is orientation?

Originally,
to orient
meant to cause to face the east, as in building a church so that its altar stood
at the east end. Later, the term was broadened to include any activity which made
clear to somebody what his proper relationship was to a given situation.

Thus, to orient means to point somebody in the right direction.

In story, that somebody is the reader.

“To give the reader an experience is only a part, not the whole, of the writer’s function,”
observes critic Edmund Fuller. “It is giving us evaluated experience that distinguishes
the great or the good writer, whether the evaluation be spelled out specifically,
or whether it is tacit in the total context of characters, actions, and conditions
that he sets before us to represent his world. (It is always the writer’s world that
we enter in art—never the objective world.)”

But though this evaluation of experience is the writer’s task, and though it is the
writer’s world the reader enters, there are
all sorts of opportunities for confusion. Too often, the writer falls into the trap
of writing about
things
—about sex, about violence, about scenery, about war, about domestic bliss or discord.
Historical fact or clinical detail overwhelm him. The implications and evaluations,
tacit in his thinking, never quite reach the reader.

In brief, although his work may on the face of it be cast rigidly in story form, it
isn’t actually fiction. For a story is never really
about
anything. Always it concerns, instead, someone’s
reactions
to what happens: his feelings; his emotions; his impulses; his dreams; his ambitions;
his clashing drives and inner conflicts. The external serves only to bring them into
focus.

Or, as the old rule-of-thumb has it, “Every story is somebody’s story.”

So, enter an individual who, for our purposes, shall be termed the
focal character
.

This figure is precisely what his title indicates: the person on whom the spotlight
focuses; the center of attention; the man whose reactions dominate the screen.

The focal character has three main functions:

What about
continuity?

Given half a chance, events in a story tend to hang in space, like so many screams
in the night. The focal character is a continuing factor to link them into a cohesive
whole and tie them to past and future, even though the action moves from 2000
B.C.
to
A.D.
2000, from New York to San Francisco, and from music hall to morgue. Our attention
is on him and his reactions, first and foremost, so everything else falls into place.

He also gives
meaning
and significance to whatever happens.—Meaning, remember, is always a conclusion you
and I draw about something from the way a particular somebody behaves when faced with
a specific instance. If that somebody is our focal character, and if he lets go a
scream of horror or a gurgle of delight at the sight of the crown jewels or tomorrow’s
headlines or a hot-pastrami sandwich, then we have grounds for assuming
that something about the item in question is uniquely significant
to him
. Therefore, until something happens to change our minds, we’ll deal with such fragments
with the same degree of attention or consideration he shows . . . use them to measure
and judge all the story’s dimensions.

As a reader, thus, my attitude toward the rainstorm we cited earlier will be determined
by whether the rain helps or handicaps the focal character. Whether a setting is colorful
or drab . . . whether an incident is important or inconsequential . . . whether another
character is good or bad—each point will be judged and interpreted with the focal
character’s reactions as a guide.

At the same time, your reader judges and interprets the focal character himself.

It’s in this judging of the focal character that we enter the area of said focal character’s
third function . . . the creation of
feelings
.

What kind of feelings?

Favorable feelings or unfavorable feelings. Feelings for or feelings against.

It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of these feelings. The biggest single
reason that a focal character exists is to evoke them.

Why?

Because your reader needs someone on whom to pass judgment.

It works this way: Sneering, our focal character pours a glass of beer over the head
of the saloon’s crippled swamper, a harmless, helpless, half-bright type.

Instantly, without volition, your reader bristles with feelings of hostility and outrage.

Or again: A murderous bully threatens our unarmed focal character with instant death
unless he pours the beer over the swamper. Instead, the focal character throws the
beer into the bully’s face.

Like magic, your reader’s heart hammers with a different kind of feeling. Excitement
races through him and he reads on eagerly, thrilling to the stiff-necked courage laid
out before him on
the page. Unconsciously—perhaps in spite of himself—he passes judgment on the focal
character, just as he did before.

Why does your reader judge the focal character?

Because he can’t help doing it; can’t restrain himself. Convictions, feelings, are
part of him—his most inner being. When he bumps into the right stimulus, they come
boiling forth, reaffirming their own existence in heightened tension and speeded pulse.

If your reader
doesn’t
judge, count on it that the focal character is too bland and innocuous and uncommitted
to be worth writing about.

Without some character of whom he can approve or disapprove, in varying degree, your
reader will have no stimulus to feeling.

Without feeling, he won’t care what happens in your story.

If he doesn’t care, he stops reading.

And you’re dead.

Even while your reader judges, however, his feelings merge with those of the focal
character.

That is, he lives through the story with him.

“When you understand the feelings of one of the characters in the moving picture,”
says psychiatrist David Fink, “you are copying his tensions. You are feeling in yourself
something of what he feels in the fictional situation. You are understanding the story
with your own muscle tensions and with the spasms of your intestines and with your
own glandular secretions. Without these reactions, the show would have no meaning.
Without these reactions, nothing in life would have meaning.”

So, your reader’s feelings
about
your focal character, plus the focal character’s own feelings as communicated to
said reader, unite to bring the story itself to life. Together, they provide the sense
of purpose and direction that a good story needs.

Without
a focal character, your reader is in the position of a city boy plunked down in the
middle of some mountain fastness in backwoods Colorado or Montana. He’s completely
free to travel, but he doesn’t know which way to go.

The boy is, in a word, disoriented. Until he finds a landmark,
or a tree to climb, or a compass to point him north, or a stream or an Indian guide
to follow, he’s in deep trouble.

Double that in spades for your poor reader. He stands confronted by a story world
fully as baffling to him as are the Rockies to the tenderfoot.

People move through this story world. Events transpire. Situation and scenery change.

Yet somehow, it remains drab and empty to your reader, without significance or excitement,
because he has no home base from which to judge it. He simply doesn’t know where he
stands.

What he needs is merely a light in the window to guide him—a contemporary version
of those old Hollywood story-conference clichés, “Which is our ball team?” and “Who
do we cheer for?”

He needs, indeed, a focal character whose actions reveal to him which end of the gun
he’s on . . . whether he’s cat or mouse, wife or other woman, winning or losing coach,
good guy or bad.