Techniques of the Selling Writer (9 page)

Now most of us realize all this, of course. The weird chains of reasoning set up in
TV headache-tablet commercials intrigue us and whet our curiosity far more than they
convince us. But we lack time or energy to debate the logic of the casual. It’s easier
to stick with our fictions and stereotypes and oversimplifications, that’s all—just
as in other days it was easier to take it for granted that you’d sail off the edge
of the world if you cruised too far, or that the cows had gone dry because the old
witch-woman down the road had hexed them, or that the sun was really Apollo driving
a golden chariot across the sky.

Further, these same fictions and stereotypes and oversimplifications are perfectly
legitimate as tools for living. Perhaps it isn’t entirely correct to say that cars
cause smog, or poverty causes crime, or carelessness causes accidents. But the complex
is like Medusa. It can paralyze us. Sometimes we just can’t wait for all the evidence
to come in before we act. Even a wrong assumption may guide us adequately until Ultimate
Truth reveals itself.

So we talk, however loosely, in terms of cause and effect.

How does this cause-effect pattern relate to change?

Change means simply that something happens—a woman bursts into tears, a plane explodes
in mid-air, the cover comes off a book, it rains this particular afternoon. It’s an
event in a vacuum, as it were, presently unlinked to anything before or after.

When we talk about cause and effect, on the other hand, we aren’t just saying that
something happens—but that it happens
because
something else happened previously; that
in consequence of
Event Number 1, Event Number 2 comes to pass.

A useful concept, all in all. It helps give meaning to our world. But before we can
get maximum mileage from it, for story purposes, we must carry it just a bit further,
so that we understand it as it applies to people.

. . .
equals motivation and reaction

Scene: a schoolroom. A tack, point up, rests on the teacher’s chair. She sits down,
then abruptly rises with a cry of anguish.

Here illustrated we have a specialized type of cause-effect pattern which we term
motivation-reaction. It is cause and effect applied to people. Cause becomes
motivating stimulus
. . . effect,
character reaction
.

What is a motivating stimulus?

Anything outside your focal character to which he reacts.

What is a character reaction?

Anything your focal character does in consequence of the motivating stimuli that impinge
upon him.

More specifically?

A character may react
to
anything . . . from the world coming to an end to a puppy’s snuffling; from a breath
of fresh air to the thunder of jet bombers overhead. He may react
by
anything . . . from dropping dead of shock to feeling a momentary pang of doubt;
from smiling, ever so slightly, in his sleep to signing the order that sends a million
Jews to the gas chamber.

A motivating stimulus may come to you on a level at which you aren’t even consciously
aware of it . . . at night, for example, when the temperature drops unexpectedly,
chilling you in your sleep because your covers are too light.

You may react just as unconsciously, without waking, by huddling into a cramped fetal
ball in an effort to defeat the cold.

And so it goes. Someone pulls a gun; you stop short. A girl casts a sidewise glance;
you start forward. The clock strikes; you get up. The music ends; you sit down. There’s
a whiff of perfume; you straighten your shoulders. A skunk blasts at you from beneath
the porch; you cringe into your coat. Each time, one motivating stimulus; one character
reaction.

Together, they constitute a motivation-reaction unit. Each unit
indicates some change, however small—change in state of affairs; change in state of
mind.

Properly selected and presented, each one moves your story a step forward. Link unit
to unit, one after another, and your prose picks up momentum. Strength and impact
build. Before you know it, the sentences race down the page like a fast freight hurtling
through the night. The situation cannot but develop!

That is, it cannot if you also understand such technicalities as . . .

The pattern of emotion

On this particular night the house is dark when you get home. A note on the hall table
tells you that your wife has left you for another man.

You stare at the message stupidly at first, numb with disbelief. Then, in intermingling
waves, shock washes through you, and horror, and pain, and rage, and grief. Falling
into the nearest chair, you curse aloud. Only then, in spite of all your efforts to
control yourself, the curses change to a strange sort of laughter. And even while
you laugh, you find, tears somehow are coursing down your cheeks.

What has happened?

This is the note. It points up a change in your state of affairs, your situation.

Your emotional balance, your equilibrium, is shattered. Feelings, ordinarily neatly
restrained and disciplined, break loose in a surging chaos.

You fall into a chair. You curse, you laugh, you cry.

And there is the pattern of emotion. It’s the mechanism which creates feeling in your
readers, and then helps them keep those feelings straight.

Its secret lies in the
order
in which you present your material . . . a strictly
chronological
order, so that one item follows another exactly as they occur in point of time. Never
is any doubt left as to which element comes first, or which is cause and which effect.

To that end, you pretend that only one thing can happen at a time: Your bridge partner
studies his own hand,
and then
he looks across at the dummy,
and then
he eyes your opponents,
and then
he frowns,
and then
he tugs at his ear lobe,
and then
he twists in his chair,
and then
he puffs at his cigarette,
and then
he smiles wryly,
and then
he says, “Think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”
and then
he plays the ace.

He does
not
do all these things at once, the way it really happened.

Now I grant you that I am, to a degree, exaggerating here. It’s entirely legitimate
for you to write, “Frowning, he twisted in his chair,” or “Puffing at his cigarette,
he eyed Steve’s cards briefly.” But
in general
you avoid all hints of simultaneity, of events that take place at the same time.

The reason you do this is rooted in the very nature of written communication. For
in writing, one word
follows
another, instead of being overprinted in the same space.

Which makes it impossible truly to capture on paper the fact that a man breathes and
sweats and scowls and digests his dinner all at the same time.

Furthermore, any attempt to present simultaneity rather than sequence is bound to
confuse your reader.

Why?

Because simultaneity obscures the cause-effect, motivation-reaction relationship that
gives your story meaning to him.

(You can
say
that things happened simultaneously, you understand. But in point of fact you emphasize
sequence, chronological order: “After that, everything happened at once. Hans swung
the bottle, and Melville, ducking, whipped out his knife. Across the room, Scarne
slashed at the rope that held the chandelier. The next instant, the brackets gave
way,” and so on.)

To repeat, then, you present your material so that one thing follows another in strictly
chronological order.

In terms of constructing a motivation-reaction unit, that order is this:

Next question:
Whom
do you motivate?
Who
does the reacting?

The answer, of course, takes us back to your focal character. He’s the man on whom
the spotlight shines. He’s the center around which the action revolves. He’s the orientational
figure whose feelings give meaning to the events that transpire within your fiction’s
framework. Everything in your story, everything, relates to him.

Especially, this pattern of emotion.

The pattern itself isn’t at all difficult to handle. The big thing to remember is
that motivation
always
precedes reaction. Our world would turn topsy-turvy indeed if the teacher first jumped
and cried out . . .
then
sat on the tack! Even worse, to have motivation follow reaction is to invite your
reader to make his own interpretation of said reaction and, on the basis of it, then
to refuse to believe the motive
you
assign.—Though even if he accepts it, as a matter of fact, its displacement from
normal order will jar him at least slightly. “Far across on the hillside, a shot rang
out. John stiffened,” reads not too badly. “John stiffened when a shot rang out far
across on the hillside,” is awkward.

Given enough such minor jolts, your reader will develop a vague dissatisfaction with
your copy. He may remark only that it’s “jerky, sort of.” But you’ve lost him.

Back to reaction. It breaks down into three components, you will note: feeling . . .
action . . . speech.

These components’ order too is set. Feeling precedes action, and action, speech, because
feeling provides the drive for both the others. Without some such inner force, some
source of motive impulse, there would be no overt behavior to reveal your focal character’s
state of mind.

Feeling, it might be well to point out too, is
not
the same as thought. Let a car horn blast behind you, and your heart leaps without
conscious mental process.

In a word, you
feel
.

As a matter of fact, you probably jump also. That is, you
act
, and that action is an involuntary and well-nigh automatic process. Later, you may
get around to speech, to snarling at whoever honked. But feeling comes first, and
then action.

Behind this sequential order lies the fact that feeling is beyond the control of the
person feeling. You don’t
decide
to feel a particular way; you just
do
.

Action, in turn, can be to a degree controlled. And where speech is concerned, control
is almost absolute.

Thus, speech demands conscious thought; a certain amount of organization. Action’s
demands are lower . . . closer to the instinctive: An old friend unexpectedly appears.
Incoherent, you still embrace him. A car runs down your child. You race toward him,
not even able to cry out.

Or, you enter an office for a job interview. You care what happens, so you already
have feelings—uncomfortable feelings, negative feelings, resentful feelings that you’re
being studied like a paramecium under a microscope. But the personnel manager, far
from appreciating your unease or asking you to sit down, merely leans back and considers
you with cold, wordless disdain.

“Who’re you?” he snaps finally.

His tone—the whole situation, for that matter—is a unit of motivation. In spite of
all you can do, panic races through you.

Panic is feeling.

Like magic, sweat slicks your palms and soaks your armpits and trickles down your
spine. Your collar is suddenly too tight, your clothes are too small. You twist and
choke.

Actions, one and all.

All this time, you also grope desperately for words—words that just won’t come.

“I—I—” you mumble inanely.

“Young man, I asked your name. . . .”

Shall we draw a kindly veil, and trust that we’ve made it clear that feeling precedes
action, and action precedes speech?—And,
of course, on a larger basis, that motivating stimulus precedes character reaction?

Time out for a few questions:

Must all three reaction components—feeling, action, speech—be included every time?

Of course not, as almost any fragment of dialogue will demonstrate. Here, Jill is
the focal character:

“Hi, Jill!” he called. “How’s it going?”

“Just fine, thanks.”

“Hi, Jill!” he called. “How’s it going?”
is the motivating stimulus.

Jill’s character reaction, in turn, spelled out, might read like this:

Feeling:
A glow of warmth at his friendliness crept through Jill.

Action:
She smiled.

Speech:
“Just fine, thanks,” she said.

Because they’re so obvious, however, the writer doesn’t feel it necessary to detail
feeling and action. So speech alone carries the ball.

Alternatively, action might have been dropped . . . feeling and speech left in:

Motivating stimulus:
“Hi, Jill,” he called. “How’s it going?”

Character reaction:
 

Feeling:
A glow of warmth at his friendliness crept through Jill.

Action
: (
NOT STATED
)

Speech:
“Just fine, thanks.”

. . . And so on, through all the various possibilities.

Are there any particular hazards to leaving out one or two of the reaction components?

Primarily, there’s the danger that you’ll confuse your reader . . . especially when
the feeling component is the one you leave out. To make clear the meaning a given
action or speech is supposed to convey often requires interpretation only feeling
can provide.
He turned away
is action that might fit feelings ranging
from boredom to helplessness, from preoccupation to scorn, from hurt to rage. “Kiss
me, darling!” could mirror passion, anguish, tenderness, contempt, or what have you.