You need to know only four things in order to write a solid story:
If you’re just starting, you need to know which words do what, and why.
Specifically, it’s desirable that you learn three things:
You present your story in terms of things that can be verified by sensory perception. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch—these are the common denominators of human experience; these are the evidence that men believe.
Describe them precisely, put them forth in terms of action and of movement, and you’re in business.
The more specific, concrete, and definite the noun . . . the more vivid the picture.
Feeling is a thing you build through manipulation of motivation and reaction.
a thing isn’t just significant. It’s significant to somebody.
Next question: Which somebody?
So, again, how does the individual make his value judgments?
He responds to facts with feelings.
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.
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.
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 while your reader judges, however, his feelings merge with those of the focal character.
That is, he lives through the story with him.
The story world
You need to remember three key points about the world in which your story takes place:
Each of these items is of quite crucial importance. To build a story world is to play God in a sort of private Genesis. You can understand the issues best if you consider them as they relate to the world of reality—the world in which you and your readers move from day to day.
Here is where you relate all that has gone before to your reference point, your focal character.
You do this by presenting your material subjectively, as your focal character receives it.
And so you build your story world—a moody, subjective bailiwick, brought to life so vividly with sensory images that each and every reader automatically finds himself transported there, no matter how limited his experience.
But don’t relax, even then. Your job is just beginning. For the story world, far from being static, is an ever-changing place.
Story equals change …
A story records change. It sets forth the details of how your focal character moves from one state of affairs and state of mind to another.
The answer lies in your reader’s attention span. Boredom attacks in seconds when no new stimulus—for which read, “change”—impinges on him. If you want proof, see how long—or, rather, how briefly—you can force yourself to concentrate fully on a given object or fixed point. There’s no story in a static situation. A still life will never hold your reader. Word photography isn’t enough.
Therefore, we must have change in both the external world, your focal character’s state of affairs, and his internal world, his state of mind. Neither can stand without the other. Only as they interact, meshing like finely tooled gears, will your story roll forward.
Precisely how does this interplay, this dual movement, take place?
That’s a question that calls for more detailed analysis of the patterns of causation that rule the story world.
… equals cause and effect
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
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.
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!
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:
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.
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.
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:
(1) Feeling.
(2) Action.
(3) Speech.
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.
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.
(1) You choose the effect you want this particular stimulus to create, in terms of motivating your focal character to desired reaction and, at the same time, guiding your reader to feel with him.
(2) You pick some external phenomenon—thing, person, event—that you think will create this effect.
(3) You frame this stimulus so as to pinpoint the precise detail that highlights the point you seek to make.
(4) You exclude whatever is extraneous or confusing.
(5) You heighten the effect, by describing the stimulus in terms that reflect your focal character’s attitude.
What are Motivations?Theory time. I’ll make it short and sweet. Motivations are things that happen to the protagonist and make him act. External stimuli in most cases. Smell. Like the stench of a burning tavern. Sight. Finding a dead body on the floor. Touch. Being punched in the face. Sound. Someone screaming for help. Taste. Sensing poison in the wine. Thoughts Remembering you forgot dad’s birthday yesterday. Any of the above should suffice to spur our hero into action. What are Reactions?Here things get a little tricky because while there’s usually only a single motivation, it leads to multiple reactions. And for the prose to read well, the reactions need to happen in the most natural order: 1. Involuntary thoughts and emotions. Internal monologue or feelings. 2. Involuntary physical responses A chill down the spine, eyes going wide, legs trembling, and such. 3. Conscious action Looking around, straightening up, putting hands in your pocket to wipe off sweat. 4. Speech and dialogue come last. ------- All prose—whether it’s the elaborate poetry of William Faulkner or the straightforward sentences of Cormac McCarthy—will always be instinctive on some level. Our word choices and sometimes the direction the sentences themselves end up taking can surprise even us sometimes. But if the structure that underlies our sentences and paragraphs is going to effectively convey our thoughts to our readers it will always adhere to the logical pattern of cause and effect. Motivation Reaction Units, S. Hetman; Motivation-Reaction Units: Cracking the Code of Good Writing
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(1) The pertinent stimulus must show some change in the external world—your focal character’s state of affairs.
(2) This external change must be such as logically to evoke some change in his internal world also—his state of mind.
(3) This internal change must reasonably lead him to behave in the manner you want him to in order to move the story forward.
To be motive, a stimulus must spur your focal character to action. Instead of letting him rest on his laurels, it jerks him up and boots him in the pants.
To that end:
(1) The motive stimulus is one which demands response.
(2) The response demanded is of such a nature as to keep your focal character active.
Too many variables are involved to warrant making these points more explicit. In general, however, what you need is the stimulus that demands adjustment on the focal character’s part. Fluffy white clouds aren’t enough; a thunderhead that makes him race for cover may be. Beads of moisture forming on a cold glass don’t call for action; the glass slopping red wine onto a snowy tablecloth does.
A character reaction is anything your focal character feels, thinks, does, or says in consequence of a motivating stimulus that impinges on him.
To this end, it must be:
All our observations on the vital importance of careful selection and description of motivating stimuli apply equally to character reaction.
A characteristic reaction is one that’s in keeping with your character’s known character. The Milquetoast doesn’t suddenly slug a gorilla. The strong silent type doesn’t burst forth with flowery speeches. Is your character phlegmatic? Volatile? Sullen? Tender? Weak? Passionate? Irritable? You pays your money and you takes your choice. But whatever he is, it will have a bearing on each of his reactions.
Reasonable means that your focal character’s reaction should make sense in terms of the motivating stimulus he’s received
Proportion
Because your reader needs a clear and simple standard by which to judge the degree to which an event is important or inconsequential.
Wordage, length, gives him a yardstick with which to make this measurement. If you describe a thing in tremendous detail, he figures there must be something important about it. If you dismiss it with an aside, he takes it for granted that it holds no profound significance.
A portion of that why is subjective . . . a matter of your character’s character. But another segment is more or less objective: external factors which influence your character’s degree of tension and hence the amount of detail in which you present the incident.
Five aspects of this objective segment are:
Thus, you may or may not feel threatened when a guest points out to you that you’ve erred in serving chablis at room temperature rather than chilled. But a sentence of life imprisonment, for most of us, makes readjustment an absolute necessity.
By way of recapitulation, then …
Writing the M-R unit
How do you go about writing a motivation-reaction unit?
The thing that bothers your reader, though he’s seldom aware of it, is the absence of anticipated sentences of motivating stimulus. Your construction makes him feel as if they should be present. But they aren’t there.
Does this mean that every choppy passage demands insertion of motivations or reactions?
Not necessarily. Often, the answer is merely to juggle words or sentence structure until you achieve a surface unity; an impression of continuity that draws apparently divergent elements into a single motivation or reaction.