CREATING THE ILLUSION
By creating the illusion I mean making the reader forget the world he
really lives in and carrying him into the world of the story, either
identifying himself with one of the characters or looking on and
listening entirely absorbed in what he sees and hears. The illusion
is wholly successful, fully effective, only if the reader is made to
live altogether in the story world. He must forget that he is a
reader, that he holds a book or magazine in his hands, that the story
is merely a story instead of actual happening. He must forget that
there is such a thing as an author; he must forget the method and
manner of telling in the telling itself. He must _live_ the story.
_The Illusion and Its Hold_.--Naturally perfection of illusion is not
generally attained, and naturally what holds some readers in {31}
thrall may not hold others. The more sophisticated the reader, the
more difficult, other things being equal, to make him lose himself
utterly in the story. Probably, too, the more fiction one has read,
the less readily is one swept away into the story's spell. The same
obstructions hold in any art, or in eating or any other pleasure.
The penalty of sophistication in anything is further removal from the
direct, elemental appeal. The penalty of satiety and overuse is a
dulling of response. But these facts do not alter the matter of what
the appeal is.
But do not the sophisticated get more out of fiction--out of the
"highbrow" fiction they tend toward--than do the unsophisticated out
of the same fiction? Get more what? More of the finer shadings
undoubtedly, but less of the elemental appeal. And is it really
fiction they are reading or something else mixed with fiction, and is
it from fiction or other things they draw pleasure or edification?
Their attitude is at least partly that of a critic rather than a
recipient; their interest in "What is happening" is at least partly
distracted to "how it is written." From fiction itself, from fiction
as fiction, the unsophisticated, {32} granting them understanding of
the words they read, in most cases get a greater intensity of appeal
than do the others. Understand, I am speaking not of general
sophistication but of sophistication in fiction.
_Fiction a Vehicle_.--As you run over in your mind various writers of
acknowledged rank you may feel that, in face of that rank, illusion
is an unsound basis of test and comparison. The stumbling-block is
that much of what we call fiction is not pure fiction but a hybrid, a
cross, a half-breed or even a quadroon--fiction plus an essay,
treatise, study, sermon, analysis, philosophy, satire, propaganda, a
performance in technique, an exhibition of style, what you will. It
is often the other element or elements, or the combination of
elements, that appeals and that gives rank and value. There is no
reason why writings should not be read and written for the sake of
these other elements or of the combinations, but such writings are
not pure fiction.
In such cases fiction is used not for itself alone but as a vehicle
for something else. The wagon and its load may be more pleasing and
valuable than the wagon alone, but {33} only the wagon is fiction and
therefore it is with the wagon alone that we are now concerned. No
matter how good the load may be, you can not carry it unless you can
build and drive a good wagon. Probably the majority of writers will
profit most by giving their whole attention to the wagon, partly
because they haven't a sufficiently valuable load to put in it and
partly because they need their undivided effort to make the wagon fit
to carry anything. Certainly it is sound for ninety-odd per cent. of
fiction writers to master their vehicle before they attempt hauling
messages and information in it.
This book deals with straight fiction only. Straight fiction may of
course include analysis, philosophy, technique, information and all
the other things for which it is so often made the vehicle, but if it
is to remain straight fiction, these must be really integral and
necessary parts of it--analysis of or by the characters themselves,
the information inherent in the material, the technique necessary for
presentation, the philosophy of a character, locality or nation.
Having sufficiently mastered straight fiction, a writer is infinitely
more likely to be successful in registering on {34} his readers
whatever it is he may wish to convey through fiction as a vehicle.
His message may be so interesting or important that people will seize
upon it eagerly, no matter how crude or weak the fiction-vehicle may
be, but it would reach them all the more strongly if the vehicle were
a competent carrier.
_Illusion the Essence of Fiction_.--The very essence of straight
fiction is the creation and maintenance of an illusion. That this
truth has been so largely lost sight of is due largely to the
frequent mixture of fiction with other things, so that the mixture,
instead of fiction itself, has tended to become the model and
standard. If American writers are to make more rapid progress toward
real success, they would do well to segregate fiction and study it
for itself alone.
_Illusion Easily Shattered_.--Successful illusion depends on an
infinite variety of things, is as sensitive to breakage as is a
bubble and, once broken, though it can be again created, its strength
is irremediably impaired. A writer of any merit can impose his
illusion, yet often he does so apparently through instinct only,
without evidence of carefully {35} considered knowledge and intent.
Certainly it is maddeningly common to see him again and again destroy
his illusion, if only temporarily, with some "little" flaw that would
almost unconsciously be avoided if he had clear conception of the
fundamental importance of perfect and uninterrupted illusion.
The importance of maintenance of illusion can not be too much
stressed. As a reader can you keep yourself within the spell of a
story you are reading if you are subject to constant physical
interruptions--conversation directed at you, people coming in and
going out, loud and sudden noises? No more can a reader keep himself
within the spell of a story if he is subject to constant
interruptions from within the story itself. How can a story maintain
its spell over you if you are again and again reminded by its text
that it is, after all, only a story, somebody's words typed on the
pages of a magazine you bought at the corner stand?
_Costliness of Breaking the Illusion_.--Each such interruption or
reminder does its share in wrecking the illusion, each compels the
story to begin over again in the business of making you forget your
world in its world, each leaves the remainder of the illusion the
{36} weaker. Even a single one in a story works very appreciable
damage to the illusion as a whole, lessens the net result of the
story's impact upon readers. Instead of the story's registering one
hundred per cent. of its value, it is, as a result of a single break
in its illusion, likely to register, not ninety-eight or ninety-five
per cent., but eighty-five or seventy or sixty per cent. There can,
of course, be no exact measure of the loss in the story's
effectiveness, of the amount of failure in the third step of the art
process, but very surely this loss is almost universally
underestimated or altogether ignored.
Whatever the value of your story as fiction, you can not afford to
have its one hundred per cent. reduced even five per cent. in its
register upon your reader, and the instant you remind him that he is
still merely himself in his same old world--or, even worse, make him
momentarily a critic instead of a reader--you seriously damage the
illusion and lessen your story's effect. The break may occupy only a
fraction of a second's time, the reader, after a few paragraphs may
forget all about the break, may even be wholly unconscious at the
time of its effect upon him, but {37} the harm has been done
nevertheless. It can be no comfort to the writer that the reader
doesn't know why the story failed to register its full strength; the
important point is that it did fail.
Some breaks in the illusion accomplish even more harm than letting
the reader escape from the story's spell, since it is always so
easily possible to lose a reader's sympathies or, worse, let him fall
into a critical attitude, or, worst of all, cause him irritation or
arouse his hostility. If, in reaching the reader, a story loses part
of its value by merely letting him get from under its spell, the loss
is still greater if it loses his sympathies, for even when he is
again brought under its spell he can not possibly be so wholly given
over to it as he was before. If you have made of him a critic--well,
how much sympathy has a critic? If you have irritated him, naturally
your chances of pleasing him are sadly diminished, since you must
overcome a heavy handicap before you can even begin to do so. And if
you have made him your enemy, you may as well bid farewell to any
chance of your story's success. No matter how good the first two
steps {38} of that story's art process--Material, Writer--if the
third step--Reader--can not be taken, then nothing has been completed
except an unrealized potentiality.
_Need of Emphasizing the Illusion_.--And yet, when it comes to the
actual writing of fiction these practical, common-sense, vital facts
are unrecognized or forgotten to an almost unbelievable degree. Day
after day the magazine offices are rejecting manuscripts that would
have been accepted but for the failure of illusion. Generally the
editor calls it "unconvincingness." Year after year class-room and
text-book go on teaching plot, style, characterization that go for
naught if they are unable to register upon the reader. Year after
year writers, oppressed with rules and abstractions, laboriously
build pieces of machinery and expect readers to take these obvious,
clanking collections of bolts, girders, wheels and cogs for something
that is alive. Why not? They've been taught to consider only the
making of a perfect machine according to formula. They find the
magazines heavily laden with machines and are the more convinced that
machinery is the ultimate attainment. Little teaching do they get
that {39} helps them put the breath of life into their stories or
gives them the habit of seeing also from the reader's point of view!
They "try it on their friends"--God save the mark!--their friends
respond or pretend to and the problem of the reader, if it arose at
all, is satisfactorily settled for all time.
But mustn't they be taught plot, etc.? Of course. But plot, etc.,
are merely tools. A man may be passing skilful in the handling of
chisel and mallet yet fail dismally as a sculptor. Plot, etc., are
necessary, but they must be taught, not as abstractions, but as
reasoned and reasonable outgrowths of something more vital than they.
_Individuality Crushed by Rules_.--Some writers escape from the net
or are too big to be caught in it. These are in a painful minority.
The tragedy is in the host of those who had sufficient talent and
individuality for a moderate success but never attain it because
their talent is diverted to formulas and their individuality crushed
by academics.
Those who escape do so generally through either disgust or despair.
They sweep the rules away or turn their backs upon them and--go ahead
on their own. One advantage {40} gained thereby is instant,
inevitable, automatic, for they have made an all-important step
forward--being no longer ridden and haunted by formulas and rules,
the writer at last has _a chance to live the illusion of his own
story_ and therefore a far better chance of making the reader live it.
The following is part of a letter from a writer who appears in _The
Saturday Evening Post, McClure's_ and other magazines of that grade.
Years ago he used to send me well-made but colorless and formal
stories. During some of the years between he had done no writing.
Then he sent me one of the new kind. Amazed at the remarkable
improvement in his work, I asked him what had happened. In his reply
the omitted name is that of a magazine:
In those days I was rigidly following the rules of what I call the
---- school of the American short story.
---- stories and the stories of the school which it dominated, were
all like Fords. They were of limited horsepower, neat, trim and
shiny, taking up very little road space, structurally correct and all
following the blueprint without the slightest deviation. There
weren't any big powerful Cadillacs zipping along, or any dirty,
greasy trucks hauling huge burdens and disturbing and upsetting {41}
the normal run of things. It was an endless highway just jammed with
Fords.
The ---- story, from a standpoint of construction, was astonishingly
well done. It had a beginning, a middle and an end, but few
intestines anywhere along the route. The workmanship was wonderful.
It was astonishing how many people there were who could write such
beautiful English. There was one punch, one climax, which was very
carefully led up to, and that was all.
Well, I tried to follow the rules as apparently laid down. I
agonized over each word and sentence to get 'em just exactly _right_.
I have sat at my typewriter for an hour to get just the few syllables
that their standards seemed to demand.
The Hades of it was that the reader was being cheated all the time.
He got a lot of very fine writing, but not much story. It was like
sitting down to a dinner where the appointments were perfect, the
water clear and ice-cold, the napery thick, the glassware thin,
flowers on the table, an orchestra, perfect service, and not enough
food for a canary-bird. In other words, a race of bird-shot stylists
was being propagated who could write beautifully about an ant-hill
but hadn't the equipment to do anything for a mountain.
I trailed along because I didn't know any better and because I hadn't
been waked up and shaken down. I had lived, but I had not
assimilated and correlated my experiences.
Now his present method, and if your nose is inclined to turn up at
his idea of style, before you let it, make very sure that he {42}
hasn't taken the one sure road to the only kind of style worth any
one's having. And note carefully what he says about the outside of
the motor-car:
I try to give the reader a lot for his money. I don't try to do any
fine writing. Only one of a million of us can be a polished stylist.
I'm not that one, but I think I can evolve a story and tell it. So
there is no more agonizing about the style. I try not to make the
outside of the motor-car which bears my people all gold and shiny and
flower-decked so that the countryside will look at the car, and not
at those it contains. I just try to make it a good, suitable,
unobtrusive vehicle which will start and get to the journey's end
without any tire trouble or backfires. I try to imagine real
people--very often they are friends and acquaintances whose mental
reactions I have noted under circumstances similar to those described
in the yarn. And I try to visualize every important scene before I
set it down. That is, I shut my eyes and see the people as though I
were looking at a scene from a play.
And it's just a joy, under those conditions, to write. To go to my
machine with the keenest anticipation. It is the finest sort of an
adventure to translate a good story and send it on its way. I write
much more easily and I think less artificially than in those days of
deadly correctness--and dullness.
There are thousands of other cases--proved, not yet proved or never
to be proved--of writers whose individuality has been {43} crushed
out or whose success has been prevented or delayed by the present
academic and unhuman methods of teaching the writing of fiction, by
forgetting the illusion and the reader for the sake of the _means_ of
securing them. Here is an example so extreme that it must in
fairness to other teachers of fiction be labeled as the last word in
formula. It is, nevertheless, only the usual method fully and
relentlessly developed. It is taken word for word from the teacher's
printed statement of his "mathematical rule" for plot:
If the thread A, or viewpoint character, figures with the thread B in
an opening incident of numerical order "n" there must follow rapidly
after the opening of the story an incident n-plus-1 involving threads
A and C, an incident n-plus-2 involving threads A and D, an incident
n-plus-3 involving threads A and E, and so on, up to perhaps at least
n-plus-4 or n-plus-5; and furthermore, n must produce n-plus-1,
n-plus-2 must be the result of n-plus-1, n-plus-3 must be the result
of n-plus-2, and so on.
That formula is, I dare say, sound and, if sound, undoubtedly useful.
The teacher sells his own stories regularly to magazines and, as he
is an apparently successful teacher, {44} probably numerous pupils of
his are doing the same. (It is stated that his output for the last
five years was about one million words, with sales of about
ninety-six per cent.) Yet I think you will agree that his formula
leaves something to be desired.
If I have talked overlong of Reader and Illusion in their general
aspect it is because I have found that, while some writers grasp the
idea at once, a minority seem incapable of seeing any possibility of
difference between what a writer intends the reader to get and what
the reader really does get, incapable of believing that they have not
expressed in full and with perfect exactness all that they saw and
know and felt when writing, and incapable of conceiving any reader
who would not be spell-bound by their stories and in full sympathy
with every shading and inflection whether real, imagined or flatly
reversed in expression.
The interrupters and destroyers of illusion are almost infinite in
variety and number. The means of avoiding them, indeed, constitute a
complete set of working rules for the writing of fiction--better
still, a basis from which a writer can draw his own rules to {45}
meet all occasions as they arise. They may be very roughly divided
into classes, the small, cruder interruptions that are comparatively
detached and temporary and the more fundamental, organic and
permanent ones. Most of the latter being treated, though from a
different point of view, by the usual textbook, the smaller ones are
in greater need of consideration and will be taken up first.
It is understood, however, that definite classification is not
attempted and that the division into sub-groups is for convenience
only. An item in one group may belong equally in several others and
will often be treated under more than one.
{46}