CONVINCINGNESS
Among writers of some experience the rejection of a manuscript for
the quite common reason that it is "not convincing" is often
considered merely the editor's slipshod, evasive or ignorant excuse
given in place of some mysterious real reason or through lack of any
definite one. Sometimes it is, but, when honestly and intelligently
given, it is the best possible reason for rejection.
"Unconvincingness" means definitely and directly that a story fails
to impose its illusion--that it is merely words for the reader to
look at, not a world for him to live in. It is the death-knell to
the illusion.
An editor's failure to give the reasons why it is "not convincing"
may be due to his not having analyzed beyond the general effect, but
it may be simply because unconvincingness is not easy to reduce to
black and white and at best involves far more detail than his {95}
time permits him to handle. It is as various and elusive as human
nature itself, but the more common causes can be fairly well
indicated.
_Improbabilities and Impossibilities_.--Contradictions and
inconsistencies have already been considered in Chapter VI and are to
be included under this head. Improbability and impossibility are of
course relative terms; a wishing-ring, while an utter impossibility
in reality, is not even an improbability in a story of fairies; if
the reader accepts the major illusion of fairy-land there will be no
difficulty to his accepting the minor illusion of a wishing-ring.
But in a story of anything approaching real life absolute conformity
to the laws and facts of real life is relentlessly exacted, and in
stories dependent upon the acceptance of some fundamental premise,
like the reality of fairy-land or the possibility of being
transferred into the year 2022, there must be equally relentless
conformity to the condition of the premise.
I venture that not twenty per cent. of _accepted_ manuscripts are
entirely free from slips of this kind when submitted. Acceptance has
been in spite of them, each of them {96} lessened the chances of
acceptance, and sufficient increase in their number would have meant
rejection by any good magazine. There is, of course, the type of
story that depends upon sheer quantity and tenseness of action to
carry the reader along, despite all inconsistencies and
improbabilities--the "dime novel" type, but all the strain of a
bridge should not be upon a single girder.
_Improbabilities of Plot_.--Too infinite in variety for any attempt
at classification. The test in each case must reduce first to,
"Could it happen under the conditions?" And the writer--with help
from his friends if they can be induced to help in this more
practical fashion--must be the judge. Then he must narrow his
question to, "Is it so likely to happen that the reader will accept
it _without hesitation_?" Here is the real test and most writers
fail to meet it largely because they have not, under the present
system of teaching fiction, been trained to measure a story strictly
through the reader's eyes. Many a time every editor has been
"caught" by an author who wrote back gleefully or vindictively "but
it actually happened in real life!" Doubtless, but that doesn't mean
anything. {97} It may have happened a thousand times in real life,
but if readers can not believe it when they find it in a story it is
none the less an improbability in that story, a blow to
convincingness, a check to the reader, an injury to the illusion.
I have struggled so often, and so often vainly, to make writers
realize this distinction that I come to it now girded for the fray.
Can't they see that a fact can not be a fact to a reader if he
refuses to consider it a fact? Are they so hopelessly egotistic in
their outlook on life that, because an improbable or unusual thing
has occurred in their personal experience, it has thereby
demonstrated its possibility to every one else? Are they so
sickeningly conceited as to be sure that their presentation of the
fact is as convincing to others as was the fact itself to them? Are
they so imbecile as not to see that "proving" it to an editor _after_
the reading of the story does not in any way prove it to the next or
any reader _while_ he is reading it? That, if it were published,
they would never have the chance to prove it afterward in the case of
readers as they had had in the case of the editor? That readers,
ninety-nine times out {98} of a hundred, would not even bother to
challenge the author on the point but would merely class him as
"punk" and his story as "bunk" and go on to the next in the thousands
of stories they read?
Ah, no, it "really happened" somewhere! That ought to be enough for
anybody, even if he doesn't know it happened and is convinced that it
couldn't and knows mighty well that it is contrary to his own
experience!
A leprechawn or a magic carpet can be made entirely convincing as
part of the story's illusion by sufficient skill and in the proper
setting, while the wonderful drive you and a half-dozen other
witnesses saw John R. Smith make, on your club links a week ago
Wednesday can, if put into a story, seem nothing whatever but a crude
lie. Verily, truth is stranger than fiction--particularly good
fiction. Good fiction makes a business of being a little less
strange than truth sometimes is, so that it can be believed.
As a matter of fact, a "really happened" incident is likely to need
twice the amount of "framing up" that an imaginary but more usual one
would require.
The true addict to this stupid and stubborn {99} point of view scorns
the simple device, used by his betters, of presenting the unusual
_as_ an unusual thing. No, it must be accepted as normal; it
happened, you've got to believe it. It doesn't occur to him that it
was unusual to him, that he seized upon it as material for that very
reason, that it would be equally unusual to the characters in his
story and that, really to duplicate or simulate life, he must make
his characters register the same surprise and interest that he
himself felt as a result of its unusualness. You can make a reader
accept something as a remarkable occurrence which he would utterly
reject as a normal happening.
For example, take the common case of the very feminine heroine who
goes through the author's best hell of horror, desperation, bodily
strain and general nerve-shock and, when rescued at its very climax,
at once blandly regains almost entire poise and enunciates a very
charming love-passage or goes cheerfully and competently about her
other business. Most of us know that it is characteristic of the
female sex to rise to an emergency strain and collapse or violently
react the instant the demand is removed if not {100} before.
Consequently said heroine fails to convince. The author's logical
correction is to make this heroine conform to general experience,
but, if he simply can not or will not change this part of his plot,
why not give what convincingness he may by making her show at least
some effects of the strain, or making clear that reaction had not yet
come, or at least some such crude but comparatively desirable device
as "strangely enough"?
_Improbabilities of Character_.--Like human nature, too various for
specific classification. Most writers are capable of at least some
understanding of human nature and a weakness along these lines can be
partly corrected by a combination of earnest study and sincere care.
Failure to draw character convincingly is an absolute limit to
success except in the lowest grades of fiction and in such uncommon
types of story as are in no way dependent for interest upon fidelity
to human nature.
The wire-nerved heroine cited above is an example. Any expression,
thought, emotion or act assigned to a character to whom, as drawn, it
would not be natural helps destroy {101} the reality of that
character--the word "grievously" or "interrelation" in the mouth of
an ignorant, illiterate character; a thought of the Virgin Mary in
the mind of a Protestant during a crisis; a feeling of pity, not
specified as unusual, in a pitiless person; fumbling in an emergency
by a man drawn as cool, clear-headed and ready.
_Lack of Characterization_.--Unless a character is given at least a
semblance of individualization he will be unlike any human in real
life or else will be like some human viewed from a distant
mountain-top or air-ship, in either case unconvincing as a "close
up." Yet in the vast majority of submitted manuscripts characters
are proper names and nothing more. This will be taken up in the
chapter on "Characterization."
_Clanking Plots_.--"The framework shows through," "you can hear the
machinery go round," "artificial"--such plots are like the doggerel
whose author does violence to both content and expression in order to
get at the ends of lines words that approximate a rhyme. Lack of
plot is almost a synonym. Instead of building a plot that is the
natural result of character, conditions or conflicting {102} forces,
the author draws at will upon the universe at large for whatever
elements will lend what he considers strength and effectiveness.
Since the law of cause and effect holds in real life, such a plot is
unconvincing. In reading even published stories haven't you often
found something said or done that was obviously put into the story,
not for its intrinsic or relative value, but solely for the
plot-purpose of making other things connect and keep moving? And
what is the effect upon your belief in the story, upon your illusion?
_Hack Plots_.--I've forgotten who first said that there are only
seven--or is it nine or five?--plots in the world, but, whoever he
was, he's done a good deal of damage. With that hopeless dictum
looming before their eyes it is not to be wondered at that many
writers strive half-heartedly or not at all for originality of plot.
Add this to the majority's lack of invention, our ingrained habit of
copying and a tendency to take rather than make and you can see why
an editor can reject at a glance a large proportion of submitted
stories. Like any other reader, he has very thoroughly learned some
scores of {103} plots or plot variations and doesn't need to read
them any more. Usually the author who turns in a hack plot is the
author who has little to offer except plot. And quite often he
answers a rejection for hack plot by quoting "there are only five
plots in the world anyway." If that is so, five is enough to enable
better writers to write better stories.
The patent objection to hack plots is that they have outworn, with
all but the newest and most elemental readers, the power to hold in
illusion, therefore demanding an extra amount of excellence in other
factors. There is also the objection that this very repetition of a
formula identified with fiction, particularly poor fiction, gives
them at once the flavor of fiction instead of real life, and
successful illusion is thus made extremely difficult.
As a lonely little plea in behalf of wearied editors, couldn't you
arrange, when you wish to shoot or stab a character without removing
him entirely, to wound him somewhere else than in the shoulder? The
bullet that proved merely to have glanced off the skull is also
rather overworked. And must you turn for help to overheard
conversations?
{104}
_Coincidence_.--Coincidence is such a favorite device for attaining a
hack plot, a clanking plot and improbability in general that it calls
for a separate and emphatic warning. A reader's credence for
coincidences is strictly limited, especially if they are presented as
matters of course.
_Hack Style_.--Objectionable for the same reason as hack plot. The
inevitable connotation of hack words and phrases is of the "writing
game," of the printed page, of stories sold for money, not of real
life--too "magaziney" to be successful in holding illusions in which
magazines can have practically no place. Each hack phrase, moreover,
is a lost opportunity for a right phrase that would have added to
effectiveness. Also, readers are just plain tired of them.
_Frames or Brackets and First-Person Narratives_.--Guard against
letting the frame-story character who tells the real story talk so
long, fluently and perfectly that readers will note the impossibility
of his performing such a feat in real life. First-person narratives,
not in a frame, generally avoid this impossibility by having the
narrative written instead of spoken; otherwise they run the {105}
same danger. Most of all, don't let the narrator abandon his own
speech for that of the author himself. He generally does.
_Dialect, Slang, Foreign Words_.--All these, rightly used, tend
toward convincingness of color and character, but their effectiveness
is often measured by suggestion rather than quantity. Broad Scotch
dialect at full strength will give a very Scotch atmosphere, for
example, but many readers will refuse to enter that atmosphere or
will become lost in it if they do enter. Often idiom is a more
effective device than dialect.
_Ignorance of Material: Mistakes_.--There is, heaven knows, just
ground for the belief that writers are given to writing of things
with which they are not sufficiently familiar. Instead of using the
material they know best, as a class they are too prone to select the
material they'd like to know about but don't. Also to feign a
scholarliness they don't possess or to attempt a style they have not
mastered.
Lack or loss of faith in the author is as great a catastrophe as lack
or loss of belief in the story. Irritation against him is still more
fatal. If you have any doubt, an {106} editor's mail would dispel
it. Nothing brings so many or such bitter protests from readers as a
mistake in handling local color. Mark that well, you who "take a
chance" because you think you can--and often do--"get away with it."
Not only do you underestimate the irritation, sometimes amounting to
a virulence that remembers you and follows you with hostility through
your other stories, but your ignorance of setting, local color,
material blinds you to the infinite possibility for unconscious
mistakes that are instantly detected by those who know and make you
ridiculous in their eyes.
Your dialect, slang and foreign quotations gain you no color if you
make mistakes in them. Classical, historical and fictional
references, or "big words" in English, if incorrectly used, give you
no reputation for scholarliness. Having your villain run lightly
away with more dollars in gold or dust than he could lift from the
ground or using an "automatic revolver" does not impress readers with
your knowledge of what you write about. Giving Brazilians Spanish as
their native tongue produces very unlocal color. A negro strain in a
pure-blooded Creole shows no knowledge of types.
{107}
Add to these the mistakes considered in the chapter on
"Distractions," add all the other mistakes of which the uninformed
human brain is capable, and then take up your heavy burden of
becoming thoroughly familiar with the material you use in stories. A
month or two in a locality will not give to any save a Kipling
sufficient familiarity for safety. Most writers think it will. And,
whatever you do, don't fool with fire-arms or with anything
pertaining to ships until you have become a real authority! I speak
from bitter experience; editor, as well as writer, becomes the target
for almost venomous ire. And no detail is too tiny for detection and
wrath. The picture of a grizzly bear on a magazine cover brought a
vicious indictment because, while a grizzly has six toes, not five,
he does not show the sixth toe especially when in the position
depicted.
The convincingness of a story as a whole, then, is dependent upon
many detailed factors and there is some excuse for the editor who
does not give the analyzed reasons for his verdict of "unconvincing."
Such a weakness is due, on one hand, to {108} ignorance, deliberate
indifference or almost criminal carelessness or, on the other hand,
to failure to visualize clearly from the point of view of the reader.
The most practical remedy, for both classes of causes, is, aside from
the writer's own efforts, a fundamental change in teaching methods,
putting far more emphasis upon training writers to habitual and very
anxious consideration of the reader's actual reactions to every least
stimulus in a story.
{109}