The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (6 page)

Let's consider a bit further.

The chapter just before this one looked at character background and plot motivation before mentioning stimulus and response because it's important for you clearly to understand the difference. Background, as we have seen, goes to earlier actions affecting the character's life. Motivation has to do with the character's desires and plans, which grow out of that background, as well as out of what's been going on earlier in the story. Stimulus is much more immediate: it's what happens
right now
, outside the character, to make him do what he's going to do in the next few moments.

For example, if in your story you want your character Martha to walk into the personnel director's office to seek a job, you need some
background
to explain why she needs a job; perhaps she comes from a poor family and has no means of support (long-term background) and maybe she just lost some other job, and so needs a new one right away (short-term background). She has made the decision to apply at this company because she just spent her last few dollars to pay her rent (even shorter-term background, combined with motivation).

Even so, you can't just have Martha sitting there in the office, suddenly get up, and walk into the personnel director's office. In fiction, that won't work; it will seem unreal, incredible. What you have to have is an immediate stimulus to get Martha to get up and walk in
now
.

So you write something like:

The secretary looked up at Martha and said, "You can go in now." (Stimulus.)

Martha got up and walked into the office. (Response.)

This is how stimulus-response writing works. It's a bit like a game of baseball. The pitcher throws the ball; the batter swings at the ball. You wouldn't have the pitcher throwing the ball and nobody at the plate swinging at it, would you? And you couldn't have the batter swinging at the ball without a pitcher being out there to throw it, could you?

Strangely enough, novice fiction writers often mess up their copy by doing something almost as obviously wrong as the pitcher-batter mistakes just cited. What happens is that the writer either doesn't know about stimulus-response movement in fiction, or else she forgets it.

The latter error is more common. Almost anyone can see the innate logic of stimulus-response transactions once it is pointed out to them. But in writing, it's amazing how easy it is for some of these same fictioneers to let their imagination get ahead of their logic and see the whole transaction in their mind,
but then forget to provide the reader all the steps
.

My student Wally provided me with a classic example of such forgetfulness once. He wrote:

Max walked into the room. He ducked just in time.

I looked up from Wally's page and asked, "Why did Max duck? What did he duck? What's going on here?"

Wally scratched his head. "Well, Sally was mad at him. You knew that "

"Wally," I protested, "the fact she was angry is
background
. If I'm to understand why Max ducks, I've got to see an immediate stimulus. Why
did
he duck?"

"She threw a hand mirror at him," Wally said.

"Then you've got to put that in your copy!"

"You mean," Wally said, "I've got to put in
every step?"

Of course.

Stimulus and response seems so simple, but it's so easy to forget or overlook. I urge you to examine some of your own fiction copy very minutely. Every moment two characters are in interaction, look for the stimulus, then look for the immediate response. Then look for how the other character responds in turn. The stimuli and responses fly back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball,
and no step can be left out
.

And please let me add a few more words to emphasize a point that might otherwise be skimmed over or misunderstood. Stimulus-response transactions—the heart of logic in fiction copy—are
external
. They are played outside the characters, onstage now.

Background is not stimulus.

Motivation is not stimulus.

Character
thought or feeling
is not stimulus.

The stimulus must come from outside, so if put on a stage the audience could see or hear it.

The response that completes the transaction must be outside, too, if the interaction is to continue. Only if the interaction of the characters is to end immediately can the response be wholly internal.

I mention all this because so many of my writing students over the years have tried so hard to evade the precept of stimulus and response. Whenever I explain the procedure in a classroom, it's virtually inevitable that someone will pipe up with, "Can I have the character do something in response to a thought or feeling, without anything happening outside?"

My reply is no, you can't.

Consider: If you start having your character get random thoughts or feelings, and acting on them all the time, the logic of the character and your story will break down. In real life, you might get a random thought for no apparent reason, and as a consequence do or say something. But as we discussed in Chapter Ten, among other places, fiction has to be better than life, clearer and more logical. It is
always
possible to dream up something—some stimulus—that can happen to
cause
the thought or feeling internally, and it is
always
possible to dream up something the responding character can then
do
in the physical sense as the visible, onstage response to the stimulus. Response always follows stimulus onstage now. Response is always caused by a stimulus, onstage now. The fact that there may be some thought or emotional process inside the character between the two events does not mean they both don't always have to be there.

If you find yourself skipping stimuli or responses, or substituting shooting-star internal impulses for stimuli—or failing to show external responses after stimuli—it is certain that your fiction isn't making good sense to the reader. He will complain that, in your stories, things are happening for no reason. And he'll hate your stuff. He may not know why, but he won't believe it.

So, no matter how good you think you are in these logical terms, wouldn't it be a good idea to take just a few minutes someday soon and comb over your copy to make doubly sure?

Viewpoint
.

That's what this section—and the one to follow—are all about.

Viewpoint is perhaps the most-discussed aspect of fiction, yet the one most often screwed up. But perhaps you will never have serious technical problems with the technique of viewpoint again if you will simply follow the advice that heads this page.

Figure out whose story it is.

Get inside that character—and stay there.

That's all there is to it. Except that in its simplicity, viewpoint has many angles to its application.

I'm sure you realize why fiction is told from a viewpoint, a character inside the story. It's because each of us lives our real life from a single viewpoint—our own—and none other, ever. The fiction writer wants her story to be as convincing and lifelike as possible. So she sets things up so that readers will experience the story just like they experience real life: from one viewpoint inside the action.

Each of us is the hero of his own life. The next time you are in a group of people, take a moment to realize how you see everything and everyone around you as interesting—but essentially as role players
in your life
. Then try to observe others around you... try to imagine how each of them sees the scene in exactly the same way, from their own unique and centrally important viewpoint.

If fiction is to work, your central character has to experience the story action this way too. How do you as the writer make it happen? Very simply by showing all the action from inside the head and heart—the thought, senses and emotions—of the person you have chosen as the viewpoint character.

It matters not whether you choose to write the story first person:
"Worried, I walked down the lonely street.... "
or third person:
"Worried, she walked down the lonely street."
The device is the same. You let your reader experience everything from inside that viewpoint character.

In short fiction there will usually be a single viewpoint per story.

Changing viewpoint in a short story, where unity of effect is so crucial, usually makes the story seem disjointed. In a novel, there may be several viewpoints, but one must clearly dominate. That's because every story is ultimately one person's story above all others, just as your life story is yours and yours alone. It's a fatal error to let your viewpoint jump around from character to character, with no viewpoint clearly dominating, in terms of how much of the story is experienced from that viewpoint. Life isn't like that. Fiction shouldn't be, either.

To put this in other words: even in a novel of 100,000 words, well over 50 percent—probably closer to 70 percent—should be clearly and rigidly in the viewpoint of the main character. That character's thoughts, feelings, perceptions and intentions should unmistakably dominate the action. When you change viewpoint—if you must—it should be only when the change in viewpoint serves to illuminate for readers the problems of the main viewpoint character.

Where do you put the viewpoint? The easy and obvious answer is that you give the viewpoint to the character who will be in all the right places to experience the crucial stuff in the plot (It's pretty clear, for example, that if you want to tell the story of a mountain-climbing expedition in Tibet, you can't very well put the viewpoint inside a child who never gets outside of Topeka, Kansas.)

Beyond this point, however, other factors must be considered. Readers like to worry through their stories. They'll worry most about the viewpoint character. And what are readers likely to worry about most?
Whether the character with the most important goal will reach that goal
. Therefore it follows that you should give the viewpoint to the character who has the goal motivation that makes the story go... the character who will be in action toward some worthwhile end... the story person with the most to win or lose in the story action.

This character—the one threatened at the outset who vows to struggle—will be the character who ultimately is most
moved
by what takes place. That's why some fiction theorists say the viewpoint should be invested in the character who will be most changed by the story action.

It has been pointed out, however, that it's an inevitable result in fiction that the viewpoint character and the moved character will become one and the same. If you don't start out planning your story that way, it will either end up that way—or the story will be a flop. Because the viewpoint character is the focus of all the story's actions and meanings, the viewpoint character
must
become the moved character; it can be no other way.

What does this mean for you as a writer working with viewpoint? For one thing, it means that you simply can't write a story in which the viewpoint is put inside a neutral observer. It won't work. Even in a novel like
The Great Gatsby
, the character Gatsby ultimately is not the most important character. Nick Carraway is the one who is finally moved... changed... made to see a different vision of the world, and so decides to go back to the Midwest at the end of the story. Nick is the narrator, the viewpoint character, and finally the story is his, and the meaning derived from his sensibilities, whatever the novel may be titled.

To sum up, then, this is what I meant when I say you mustn't forget whose story it is:

Probably since the dawn of time, beginning writers have wrestled with these principles, hoping to find a way around them. They seem harsh and restrictive. But after you have worked with them a while, you will find them to be very useful in focusing your story. A storyteller has plenty to worry about without wondering whose story it is, or from what vantage point the reader is supposed to experience the story! And, even more to the point from a practical standpoint, you might as well accept viewpoint as a central—perhaps
the
central—device of fiction. You can't escape it. It's simply at the center of how fiction works on readers.

You mustn't forget.

Let's suppose you're writing
a story about Bob, and you have decided that he is the viewpoint character. How do you make sure that your handling of his viewpoint is as powerful as it can possibly be?

The first thing you must do is imagine the story as it would seem to Bob, and only to Here you really get to exercise your imagination.

As you write the story, you the writer must
become
Bob. You see what he sees, and nothing more. You know what he knows, and nothing more. You hear only what he hears, feel only the emotions he feels, plan only what he can plan, and so on. When you start a scene in which Bob walks into a large room, for example, you
do not
imagine how the room looks from some god-like authorial stance high above the room, or as a television camera might see it; you see it only as Bob sees it, coming in... perhaps first being aware only of the light from the far windows glaring in his face, then noticing how warm the air is, then becoming aware of the blurry sea of faces in the audience, then detecting an interior nudge of apprehension, then thinking,
"I'll convince these people that my opinion is right. "

If you'll stop to ponder it a moment, you'll see that this imaginative linking with your viewpoint character not only makes the story more like real life, but also makes your creative task somewhat easier. You don't have to know what Sally in the back room is seeing or thinking. All that kind of complication is out of Bob's awareness, and therefore out of the story. All you have to do is track along with Bob, and make his experience of the scene as vivid and meaningful as you can.