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CHAPTER 1
THE FICTIVE DREAM AND HOW TO INDUCE IT
TO DREAM IS NOT TO SLEEP
If you're going to succeed in a service business, you've got to know why people come to you for services and what you can do to satisfy them.
If you run a janitorial business, say, you've got to know that people like shiny floors and sparkling porcelain. If you're a divorce lawyer, you've got to know your client not only wants a big settlement and alimony, but also wants his or her ex to suffer. Fiction writing is a service business. Before you sit down to write a damn good novel, you ought to know what your readers want.
If you were writing nonfiction, what your readers want would depend on the kind of book you're writing. A self-help book on how to get rich will have chapters on keeping faith in yourself, sticking to it, stroking the IRS, and so on. A sex manual should have lots of pictures and make exaggerated claims about the spiritual growth of the practitioners of the prescribed contortions. A biography of Sir Wilbur Mugaby should deliver all the scandalous facts of the old reprobate's life. If you were going to write a nonfiction book, you would concern yourself mainly with informing the reader. A nonfiction writer makes arguments and relates facts.
A fiction writer isn't arguing anything, and what the fiction writer is relating is hardly fact. There's little knowledge, in the ordinary sense, to be gained. It's all made-up stuff, totally fraudulent, a rendering of events that never happened concerning people who never were. Why would anyone with half a brain in his or her melon buy this pap?
Some of the reasons are obvious. A mystery reader expects to be baffled in the beginning and dazzled with the detective's brilliance in the end. In a historical novel, say, the reader expects to get a taste for the way things were in the good old days. In a romance, the reader expects a plucky heroine, a handsome hero, and a lot of steamy passion.
Bernard DeVoto in The World of Fiction (1956) says people read for "pleasure ... professional and semi-professional people aside, no one ever reads fiction for aught else." And it's true, people do read for pleasure, but there's far more to it than that. As a fiction writer, you're expected to transport a reader. Readers are said to be transported when, while they are reading, they feel that they are actually living in the story world and the real world around them evaporates.
A transported reader is dreaming the fictive dream. "This," says John Gardner in The Art of Fiction (1984), "no matter the genre, [the fictive dream] is the way fiction does its work."
The fictive dream is created by the power of suggestion. The power of suggestion is the operant tool of the ad man, the con man, the propagandist, the priest, the hypnotist, and, yes, the fiction writer. The ad man, the con man, the propagandist, and the priest use the power of suggestion to persuade. Both the hypnotist and the fiction writer use it to invoke a state of altered consciousness.
Wow, you say, sounds mystical almost. And in a way it is.
When the power of suggestion is used by the hypnotist, the result is a trance. A hypnotist sits you in a chair and you look at a shiny object, say a pendant. The hypnotist gently swings the pendant and intones: "Your eyelids are getting heavy, you feel yourself getting more and more relaxed, more and more relaxed, as you listen to the sound of my voice.... As your eyes begin to close you find yourself on a stairway in your mind, going down, down, down to where it's dark and quiet, dark and quiet ..." And, amazingly, you find yourself feeling more and more relaxed.
The hypnotist continues: "You find yourself on a path in a beautiful garden. It is quiet and peaceful here. It's a lazy summer's day, the sun is out, there's a warm breeze blowing, the magnolias are in bloom ..."
As the hypnotist says these words, the objects that the hypnotist mentions — the garden, the path, the magnolias — appear on the viewing screen of your mind. You will experience the breeze, the sun, the smell of the flowers. You are now in a trance.
The fiction writer uses identical devices to bring the reader into the fictive dream. The fiction writer offers specific images that create a scene on the viewing screen of the reader's mind. In hypnosis, the protagonist of the little story the hypnotist tells is "you," meaning the subject. The fiction writer may use "you," but the more usual practice is to use "I" or "he" or "she." The effect is the same.
Most books on fiction writing advise the writer to "show, not tell." An example of "telling" is this: "He walked into the garden and found it very beautiful." The writer is telling how it was, not showing how it was. An example of "showing" is this: "He walked into the silent garden at sundown and felt the soft breeze blowing through the holly bushes and found the scent of jasmine strong in the air."
As John Gardner, again in The Art of Fiction, says, "vivid detail is the life blood of fiction ... the reader is regularly presented with proofs — in the form of closely observed details ... it's physical detail that pulls us into a story, makes us believe." When a writer is "showing," he or she is suggesting the sensuous detail that draws the reader into the fictive dream. "Telling" pushes the reader out of the fictive dream, because it requires the reader to make a conscious analysis of what's being told, which brings the reader into a waking state. It forces the reader to think, not feel.
The reading of fiction, then, is the experience of a dream working at the subconscious level. This is the reason most sensible people hate the academic study of literature. Academics attempt to make rational and logical something that is intended to make you dream. Reading Moby Dick and analyzing the imagery is to read it in a waking state. The author wants you to be absorbed into the story world, to go on a voyage on the Pequod halfway around the globe in search of a whale, not to be bogged down figuring how he did it, or to be looking for the hidden meaning of the symbolism as if it were a game of hide-and-seek played by the author and the reader.
Once the writer has created a word picture for the reader, the next step is to get the reader involved emotionally. This is done by gaining the reader's sympathy.
SYMPATHY
Sympathy is often given little more than a passing nod by the authors of how-to-write-fiction books. Gaining the reader's sympathy for your characters is crucial to inducing the fictive dream, and if you don't effectively induce the fictive dream, you haven't written a damn good novel.
Sympathy is a frequently misunderstood concept. Some how-to-write-fiction authors have made a pseudo-rule that says that for a reader to have sympathy for a character, the character must be admirable. This is patently not true. Most readers have a lot of sympathy for a character like, say, Defoe's Moll Flanders, or Dickens's Fagin in Oliver Twist, or Long John Silver in Stevenson's Treasure Island. Yet these characters are not admirable in the least. Moll Flanders is a liar, a thief, and a bigamist; Fagin corrupts youth; and Long John Silver is a rascal, a cheat, and a pirate.
A few years ago there was a film called Raging Bull about former middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta. The character in the film beat his wife, then divorced her when he started to succeed in the ring. He seduced girls who were not of legal age, had a violent temper fueled by paranoia, and spoke in grunts. He was a total savage in the ring and on the street. Yet the character of LaMotta, played by Robert De Niro in the film, garnered a great deal of audience sympathy.
How was this miracle accomplished?
Jake LaMotta at the start of the film was living in ignorance, degradation, and poverty, and the audience felt sorry for him. This is the key: To gain the sympathy of your reader, make the reader feel sorry for the character. In Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, as an example, Jean Valjean is introduced to the reader as he arrives wearily at a town and goes to the inn to eat. Although he has money, he is refused service. He is starving. The reader must feel sorry for this hapless man, no matter what dreadful crime he may have committed.
• In Jaws (1974), Peter Benchley introduces his protagonist Brody at the moment he gets the call to go out and look for a girl missing in the sea. Already aware that the girl is the victim of a shark attack, the reader knows what Brody is about to face. The reader will feel sorry for him.
• In Carrie (1974), Stephen King introduces Carrie in this manner: "Girls stretched and writhed under the hot water, squalling, flicking water, squirting white bars of soap from hand to hand. Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans." King describes her as fat, pimply, and so on. She's ugly and picked on. Readers feel sorry for Carrie.
• In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Austen introduces us to her heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, at a dance, where Mr. Bingley tries to induce his friend, Mr. Darcy, to dance with her. Darcy says: "'Which do you mean?' and turning round he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, 'She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me ...'" Obviously, the reader feels sorry for Elizabeth in her humiliation.
• In Crime and Punishment (1872), Dostoevsky introduces Raskolnikov in a state of "morbid terror" because he owes his landlady money and has fallen into a state of "nervous depression." The reader is compelled to feel sorry for a man in a state of such dire poverty.
• In The Trial (1937), Kafka introduces us to Joseph K. at the moment he is arrested, compelling the reader to feel sorry for poor K.
• In The Red Badge of Courage (1895), we meet Henry, the protagonist, as a "youthful private" who's in an army about to go on the attack. He's terrified. The reader, again, will feel sorry for him.
• The very first thing we're told about Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1936) is that she is not beautiful and she's trying to get a beau. In matters of amour, the reader always feels sorry for those who haven't found it.
Certain other situations will also automatically guarantee winning the reader's sympathy. Situations of loneliness, lovelessness, humiliation, privation, repression, embarrassment, danger — virtually any predicament that brings physical, mental, or spiritual suffering to the character — will earn the reader's sympathy.
Sympathy is the doorway through which the reader gains emotional access to a story. Without sympathy, the reader has no emotional involvement in the story. Having gained sympathy, bring the reader further into the fictive dream by getting him or her to identify with the character.
IDENTIFICATION
Identification is often confused with sympathy. Sympathy is achieved when a reader feels sorry for the character's plight. But a reader might feel sorry for a loathsome wretch who is about to be hung without identifying with him. Identification occurs when the reader is not only in sympathy with the character's plight, but also supports his or her goals and aspirations and has a strong desire that the character achieve them.
• In Jaws, the reader supports Brody's goal to destroy the shark.
• In Carrie, the reader supports Carrie's longings to go to the prom against her tyrannical mother's wishes.
• In Pride and Prejudice, the reader supports Elizabeth's desire to fall in love and get married.
• In The Trial, the reader supports K.'s determination to free himself from the clutches of the law.
• In Crime and Punishment, the reader supports Raskolnikov's need to escape from poverty.
• In The Red Badge of Courage, the reader supports Henry's desire to prove to himself he is no coward.
• In Gone with the Wind, the reader supports Scarlett's craving to get her plantation back after it is destroyed by Yankees.
Fine, you say, but what if you're writing about a loathsome wretch? How do you get the reader to identify then? Easy.
Say you have a character who's in prison. He's treated horribly, beaten by the guards, beaten by the other prisoners, abandoned by his family. Even though he may be guilty as Cain, the reader will feel sorry for him, so you've won the reader's sympathy. But will the reader identify with him?
Say his goal is to bust out of prison. The reader will not necessarily identify with his goal because he's, say, a vicious killer. A reader who wants him to stay in prison will identify with the prosecutors, judges, juries, and guards, who want him kept right where he is. It is possible, though, for the reader to identify with the prisoner's goal if he has a desire to reform and make amends for what he's done. Give your character a goal that is noble, and the reader will take his side, no matter how much of a degenerate slime he has proven himself to be in the past.
Mario Puzo had a problem when he wrote The Godfather. His protagonist, Don Corleone, made a living by loan-sharking, running protection rackets, and corrupting labor unions. Hardly someone you'd want to invite over for an evening of pinochle. To stay in business, Don Corleone bribed politicians, bought newsmen, bullied Italian shopkeepers into selling only Genco Pura olive oil, and made offers impossible to refuse. Let's face it, Don Corleone was a degenerate slime of the first rank. Not a character a reader would be likely to sympathize and identify with. Yet Puzo wanted readers to sympathize and identify with Don Corleone and he was able to get them to do it. Millions of people who read the book and millions more who saw the film did sympathize and identify with Don Corleone. How did Mario Puzo work this miracle? He did it with a stroke of genius, creating the magic of sympathy for a character who had suffered an injustice and linking Don Corleone with a noble goal.
Mario Puzo did not begin his story with Don Corleone fitting out some poor slob with a pair of cement shoes, which would have caused the reader to despise him. Instead, he begins with a hardworking undertaker, Amerigo Bonasera, standing in an American courtroom as he "waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her." But the judge lets the boys get off with a suspended sentence. As Puzo's narrator tells us:
All his years in America, Amerigo Bonasera had trusted in law and order. And he had prospered thereby. Now, though his brain smoked with hatred, though wild visions of buying a gun and killing the two young men jangled the very bones of his skull, Bonasera turned to his still uncomprehending wife and explained to her, "They have made fools of us." He paused and then made his decision, no longer fearing the cost. "For justice we must go on our knees to Don Corleone."
Obviously, the reader is in sympathy with Mr. Bonasera, who wants only justice for his daughter. And since Mr. Bonasera must go to Don Corleone to get justice, our sympathy is transferred to Don Corleone, the man who brings justice. Puzo forges a positive emotional bond between the reader and Don Corleone through sympathy, by creating a situation where the reader identifies with Don Corleone's goal of obtaining justice for poor Mr. Bonasera and his unfortunate daughter. Next, Puzo reinforces the reader's identification with Don Corleone when he has "the Turk" approach him to deal dope and the Don — as a matter of high principle — refuses; the reader identifies with Don Corleone even more. By giving the Don a code of personal honor, Puzo helps the reader to dismiss his or her revulsion for crime bosses. Instead of loathing Don Corleone, the reader is fully in sympathy with him, identifying with him and championing his cause.
EMPATHY
Despite feeling sorry for a character who is experiencing, say, loneliness, the reader may not feel the loneliness itself. But through empathy with the character, the reader will feel what the character is feeling. Empathy is a much more powerful emotion than sympathy.
Sometimes when a wife goes into labor a husband will also suffer labor pains. This is an example of empathy. The husband is not just in sympathy; he empathizes to the point of suffering actual, physical pain.
Say you go to a funeral. You don't know the deceased, Herman Weatherby; he was a brother of your friend Agnes. Your friend is grieving, but you're not. You didn't even know Herman. You feel sorry for Agnes because she's so sad.
The funeral service has not started yet. You and Agnes go for a walk in the churchyard. She starts to tell you what her brother Herman was like. He was studying to be a physical therapist so that he could devote his life to helping crippled kids walk. He had a wonderful sense of humor, he did a great Richard Nixon imitation at parties, and once in college he threw a pie in the face of a professor who gave him a D. Sounds like Herman was a fun guy.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II"
by .
Copyright © 1994 James N. Frey.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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