Techniques of the Selling Writer (10 page)

Please don’t misunderstand, however. I’m
not
recommending that you always use all three components; but, rather, that you develop
your sensitivity to clarity, balance and the terse to the point where you can manipulate
your materials with a nice skill and discrimination.

How much time should elapse between motivation and reaction?

When you start to sneeze, you snatch for your handkerchief
right now
. Not tomorrow. Not next week.

The same way, think of each stimulus your focal character receives as a demand for
immediate
action. Don’t summarize, grouping a dozen or a hundred M-R units together. Break
the package down to its individual components.

Are you tempted to write, “He got up”? Maybe that single sentence is exactly the one
you need. But then again, maybe you’d do better to open as your character floats through
a dark and misty private world. Then, suddenly, sound breaks in upon him: a clanging,
strident cacophony, so loud that it seems it must surely split his skull. He flails
wildly, lurching up out of the mists and darkness into a grubby, dawn-gray scene:
his own room, with the alarm clock jangling beside him.

And so on. The thing to remember is that any motivation or reaction can be fragmented
into smaller bits; and, generally, you’ll achieve a greater sense of reality in your
copy by using the littlest pieces. It’s like a magician performing a coin trick. See
it as a unit and it seems a miracle. But if you do it in slow motion, a step at a
time, it becomes a completely understandable exhibition of manual dexterity.

In the same way, your copy should leave the impression of a continuing stream of reality,
in which effect follows cause like a burnt finger jerking back from a hot stove. Even
if the reaction is merely to stare numbly, it should start now, not five minutes after
the stimulus to shock is past and gone.
No time
should elapse between. If it does, odds are that you’ve broken the flow by leaving
out additional motivation-reaction units that should be included.

To what degree does each motivation-reaction unit stand alone?

To no degree. True, well-constructed units can be pulled out of context and analyzed
as here. But this is for purposes of study only. In any actual story, what your focal
character feels and does and says in his reaction will in turn link to the world outside
him.

Sometimes there’ll be a direct relation, a counterreaction: Bickham fires a shot.
His opponent fires back.

In other cases, the situation merely provides observation of further external change:
Bickham squirms forward a fraction, peering. Though still showing no awareness of
him, the tyrannosaur has moved a bit closer.

Or, on occasion when the heightening of suspense through delaying action is an issue,
there may not even be external change: Bickham studies the distant hillside. There
still is no sign of life.

A story is a succession of motivation-reaction units. The chain they form as they
link together is the pattern of emotion.

As a helpful step in learning how to forge such a chain successfully, it might be
wise to probe a bit deeper into the nature of the motivating stimulus.

The motivating stimulus

A motivating stimulus is anything outside your focal character to which he reacts.

For a motivating stimulus to do its job well, it must have:

A stimulus is
significant
to the degree that it presents the external world as your character experiences it.
Although we may not view it through his eyes, the picture we receive of it must reflect
his state of affairs and state of mind. A woman who goes to church to flirt with the
man in the next pew zeros in on one set of stimuli. Her neighbor, come to check on
the styling of other parishioners’ clothes, reacts to a different group. A friend
that seeks spiritual uplift and enrichment approaches with values that draw her attention
to things that, to her, mirror such uplift and enrichment.

Yet all three sit side by side within the sanctuary. It’s merely the stimuli they
note which make the difference.

It is, in brief, a matter of
selection
.

Or consider a tiny mountain lake. Thickly wooded slopes sweep down to the water’s
edge along half its shore line. Sheer cliffs rise gray and forbidding on the far side.
Two camping trailers and a tent stand in a patch of clear ground down close to the
narrow south beach, where a rutted dirt road terminates. There are children at play
. . . women cooking . . . a man who bait-casts a hundred yards or so off to one side.

The road, in turn, leads away from the lake, around a spur of brush, then off along
the edge of a meadow thick with wild-flowers—columbine, trillium, bellwort, violets.

Now a pickup truck approaches, bouncing noisily along the road. Far away across the
meadow, behind a hillock and almost in the shadow of another spur of brush, a pair
of bear cubs frolic under their black-furred mother’s watchful eye. Close to the center
of the lake, a rainbow trout jumps, and the bait-caster on shore pauses, rod poised
like some sort of long, strange, quivering, insectile antenna.

What will your focal character notice about this scene? To what specific fragment
will he react? Is his lens fixed on the trout? The bears? (And if so, which one?)
The blonde child peering from the tent? The approaching pickup? The sound of the pickup’s
motor? The gray rock faces of the cliff? The columbine? The bellwort? The big, raw-boned
woman in Levis who hunkers by the fire, poking sullenly at her frying bacon with a
stick?

It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of your focal character’s—and your—choice.
For to a very considerable degree, your readers will draw their conclusions as to
the meaning of the focal character’s reaction on the basis of context—that is, the
stimulus or motivation that provokes it.

Especially is this true if said reaction is objectively written, non-introspective,
physical reaction.

Thus, a film editor may place a close-up of an actor’s face directly after a shot
of an actress lying dead in a coffin. Invariably, the audience
will thereupon interpret the actor’s expression, however blank, as one of grief.

But suppose, instead, that our editor cuts the self-same reaction shot in after a
frightening scene—one in which a madman lunges at the camera with an ax, let’s say.

This time, the audience will promptly declare the actor to be registering fury, or
horror, or courage, or shock, or what have you.

Do you see the issue? The right reaction is the direct product of the right stimulus.
Choose the correct fragment of motivation and you control the direction of your story.
If you want a particular reaction, pick a stimulus that will evoke it. A good external
motivation makes your character’s consequent behavior completely logical to your reader.

Conversely, the
wrong
motivating stimulus is the meaningless or ambiguous one. It bores or confuses or
irritates the reader. Worse, it may become a false plant, a false pointer . . . prepare
him for something that isn’t going to happen; head him down the wrong road.

For unconsciously, your reader takes it for granted that every stimulus in your story
is brought in for a purpose. If a gun, or a car out of gas, or a loose board in the
porch floor is introduced, he assumes that you’ll pay him off for noting it by giving
it a function later. Not to do so will net you the same brand of deserved resentment
you’d draw from your wife if you were to have her bake a cake for a party which you
secretly knew had been canceled. For you to focus on a mysterious redhead or a scream
in the night or a stolen wallet and then not have it influence the course of your
story can only make you the target for reader outrage.

So, how do you emphasize the significance of a stimulus properly?

You use the technique of the motion-picture close-up. That is, you direct and control
your reader’s attention by telling him what you want him to know and that only . . .
just as the film director hammers home the importance of a trembling hand or an open
door or a shattered doll by filling the screen with it to the point that it dominates
everything else past all ignoring.

To this end:

By way of illustration, let’s go back to our scene at the mountain lake. Our focal
character lies high on a rocky, wooded slope with a pair of binoculars. His purpose
is to rescue an abused child whom he believes to be a prisoner in the camp below.
The effect we seek to achieve at the moment is one that will excite such intense feelings
of compassion and outrage in our focal character that he’ll be blinded to everything
except the absolute and urgent necessity of going ahead with the rescue, regardless
of personal peril.

Note, now, how sharply this choice of effect limits us; how strongly it turns us away
from most of the potential motivating stimuli laid out below. Meadow, bears, trout,
truck, landscape—all must be abandoned, because they offer little chance for the specific
kind of stimulus we need: a goad to compassion and to outrage.

Is there anything that offers more potential? Of course: the child herself—the little
blonde girl peering from the tent. She’ll be our motivating stimulus.

How to highlight the point we want to make?—Well, suppose the child’s been beaten
. . . punished for trying to run away, perhaps. Bring her up big in the binoculars,
all anguished, tear-streaked face. And, since kids do cry for a variety of reasons
and even our focal character knows it, maybe we should black one of her eyes—an ugly,
swollen bruise, rich with blues and purples.

Is the child sucking a thumb or a lollipop? Blowing her nose? Playing with a puppy?
No. All such are extraneous, introduce possibly conflicting notes, and thus shatter
the unity of the effect. So, we’ll avoid them.

On the other hand, perhaps it would be worth while to give her a rag doll to clutch
to her ragged breast. A
broken
rag doll with the stuffing coming out, to draw a nasty parallel with her own condition
and thus strengthen unity of effect.

Then, on to description, phrased in terms to reflect your focal character’s attitudes,
his mood. And here we come to an important point, already stated but worth beating
on a bit.

For all we know, this child is a brat, a hateful little monster. She received her
black eye when she climbed to the roof of one of the camping trailers in direct defiance
of her mother’s orders, then lost her balance and fell. In fact, she’d probably have
fractured her stupid skull if she hadn’t landed on another youngster, breaking his
arm. That’s why the pickup truck is bouncing along the road; the father had to take
the other child to town to get the fracture set. Meanwhile, Little Miss Noxious has
succeeded in floundering into the lake. It was the third time, and the rags she now
wears are the only clothes her distracted maternal parent can find for her. Also,
flailing in the water, the dear child lost the handsome new ten-dollar doll her father
bought her for her birthday. So the rag doll is one she stole from the little girl
of a poverty-stricken family down the line.

Now all the above and more may be true. However, for our purposes here, the important
thing is that the focal character doesn’t see it that way . . . and always, we describe
in terms of
his
state of affairs and state of mind. So though our little darling be Miss Lucrezia
Borgia, Jr., our story will present her with strong overtones of Little Eva.

So how
does
the focal character see her, maybe?

Miller lay very still, his knuckles white on the glasses. . . .

A motivating stimulus, and the start of the focal character’s reaction. One approach,
out of an infinity of possible approaches. Each of us would do it differently—differently
each minute, even—for each of us can only be himself as he is at this moment.