Stein on Writing (23 page)

Barry savored each spoonful of melon as if it were ambrosia he would never be allowed to taste again. (taste)

Garret could swear someone had come in behind him, yet hesitated to turn around for fear he would be right. (sixth sense)

If you look at those examples again, you’ll note that each of the characterizations is an action. Somebody is doing something. There’s no need to stop a story to characterize or to use the senses.

Love Scene

T
he main concern of this chapter is the most common kind of love scene in literature, between a man and a woman. But there are other kinds of love that provide writers and readers with appealing stories: love between an adult and a child; same-sex love affairs; love between a human and an animal; love between children, and love in odd combinations.

To begin with the last, we already know that a major source for writers of fiction involves bringing together people from different social or ethnic backgrounds who meet and fall in love. D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and L. P. Hartley’s
The Go-Between
are outstanding examples. In theater, the vitality of Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
is attributable in large measure to the clash of backgrounds. Sometimes the differences are bizarre—for instance the love of a monstrously deformed person for a normal-appearing human (or vice versa). It is useful to study the classics such as
Beauty and the Beast
and
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
with an eye toward understanding how emotions are generated in the reader. The interplay in the audience’s emotions may arise from the conflict of repugnance slowly overcome by affection. Young people are much more interested in and accepting of the grotesque in such fantasies. If you enter this difficult but rewarding territory, be mindful that your story to be acceptable must be sufficiently different from the well-known classics.

Love stories of great poignancy can be fashioned out of the love between an adult and a child because once upon a time everyone was a child. A child can be desperate for love. Adults are sometimes too busy with the mechanics of living (job, homemaking, the behavior of other adults) to respond to a child’s need. The denial of a child’s craving for affection touches many readers. Love between a parent and child, or
unrequited love between a parent and a child (in either direction), or the belated recognition of parental love or love of a parent, or a child or parent who rejects affection—all are possibilities. However, any sexual conduct involving a child raises the issue of child molestation, a difficult subject for fiction and one involving psychopathology rather than love.

Affection between people and their pets or other animals is frequently the subject of children’s books, and has long been important in such adult books as the Tarzan stories and Jack London’s
The Call of the Wild.
It takes skill to make an animal believable as a character, and the best method is to give it a particularity just as you would a human character, a distinctive characteristic and preferably one that relates to the story—for instance a cat that jumps up into the lap of everyone but the person who loves it.

A mistake made easily in stories that involve animals is to neglect particularizing the human character. Also, it is important that the animal have a clear want of its own and not be merely the passive recipient of human wants.

The writer who wants to write about the relationship of a human to an animal has to cross two tripwires. There seems to be a greater limit on imaginative story possibilities than in the relationships between humans. So much has been done with human/animal material that innovation becomes difficult.

Also, the trap of sentimentality is present and ready to snap. It may amuse you to know that George Stevens, a long-time editor of J. B. Lippincott, once a venerable American publishing firm, actually wrote a book that contained the three most common ingredients in the bestsellers of his time. He called his book
Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.

Same-sex love affairs have been the subject of fiction for a long time, though some books, like Radclyffe Hall’s
The Well of Loneliness
were often banned, and E. M. Forster’s
Maurice
was not published until after the author died. During recent decades, homosexual love stories and homoerotic fiction have come out of the closet. A special market has developed for these stories, and homosexual attraction has made an occasional appearance in mainstream fiction.

Infantile and child sexuality raises profound discomfort and disbelief in many readers, requiring great skill in the writing. However, a child showing immature affection for another child (sometimes called “puppy love”) is widely acceptable. This is not a frequent subject of fiction and is difficult to do well.

Which leads us to the principal topic of this chapter, romantic and sexual love between adults. I have some bad news.

Editors will tell you that love scenes are often among the worst-written scenes not only in rejected work but in published work. Such scenes are often mechanical, overly physiological, hackneyed, or sentimental. However, editors know that trying to discuss the flaws in love scenes with their authors is like walking across a mine field. One never knows when a flaw in the writing of a love scene derives from a buried discomfort in the author’s life.

In recent decades we have had both a sexual revolution and a counterrevolution. Along about 1960, a prominent publishing attorney named Harriet Pilpel asked me if I was willing to go to jail for Henry Miller. I was then heading an upscale book club whose judges were interested in distributing a forthcoming Henry Miller title that dealt with sexual matters explicitly, and Ms. Pilpel, well known as a civil libertarian, seemed quite certain there was then a real risk of allegedly criminal conduct in distributing works by Henry Miller that are today found in bookshops throughout the world.

A few years later the floodgates opened not only to books that treated sexual conduct openly and with some degree of seriousness, but also to transient novels that mocked adult lovemaking as much as misnamed “adult” movies did.

Adults are in general knowledgeable about the physical apparatus and actions involved in lovemaking, and concentration on these can quickly become repetitive and boring. Some people, and consequently some writers, have never learned that mechanical description of sexual activity does not usually arouse readers who are no longer adolescents. Moreover, female readers, who account for the purchase of most hardcover fiction, often lose patience with male writers who continue to fabricate love scenes solely from a male point of view. Men who write love scenes as if they are dealing with the mechanical parts of an engine should know that such scenes have zero erotic effect and do not accomplish their primary mission of evoking a loving experience between people.

Readers remain interested in passion, if not in the mechanical details. Moreover, any novel accrues an advantage by including a love story. It is one of the easiest relationships to plot, a fact that is most obvious in the field of musical comedy. A handsome young man appears at one side of the stage. A beautiful young woman appears on the other side. The audience immediately wants them to get together.
It is the author’s job to keep them apart as long as possible.

The gestation of love can be the central dramatic event in the lives of characters. The loss of love is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a human being. Both possibilities can generate enormous emotion in life and, if skillfully handled, in fiction.

The gain of love and the loss of love are powerful combustibles. It is doubly powerful to have both gain and loss of love in the same story. Suspense, tension, and conflict inhere in love stories. An endless cornucopia of relationships is available to the writer.

Of course, disadvantages offset this. The prevalence of love in so much fiction requires the writer to exercise his imagination in order to come up with scenes that will seem fresh. Love stories also carry the danger of sentimentality.

The writer invokes sentimentality when he elicits superficial emotions that are exaggerated, excessive, or affected, obviously designed to elicit the reader’s sympathy. Sentimentality in fiction usually comes across as patently insincere, mawkish, or maudlin, and should be avoided. A writer’s sensibility should be directed toward evoking a depth of feeling in the reader, not to fabricating superficial excesses of emotion on the page.

The main flaw in most love scenes is similar to that of the main flaws in all other scenes: the reader’s emotions have been insufficiently considered by the writer. The primary erogenous zone is in the head, and that’s where the reader experiences writing.

The reader wants to identify with a character. Love scenes can be especially effective when the reader is identifying with
both
characters—that is, with the hoped-for success of the relationship—experiencing more than each of the characters individually. This can be accomplished if the writer considers the love scene from the point of view of each of the characters even when writing from the disciplined point of view of one of them. The reader needs to understand the relationship between the lovers better than either of the lovers do.

The two most essential ingredients in love scenes are tension and tenderness. A crisis in the relationship or postponing lovemaking, keeping the lovers apart as long as credibility permits, generates tension. It’s a mistake to let the reader know early the likely outcome of the scene.

No love scene should be the repetition of a familiar ritual. To sustain the reader’s interest in the outcome, the attraction should seem new even in a longstanding relationship.

Interruptions in a love scene can be useful. Not the grocery boy ringing the doorbell, but the lovers themselves noticing a picture, listening to some special music, talking about memories that arouse—all the while postponing the consummation to increase the tension of the scene. Literary foreplay does not necessarily involve physical contact. If the possibility of contact is in the air, nuances in actions and dialogue can affect the reader’s emotions. A woman brushing her hair can have a powerful aphrodisiac effect. Less produces more in the reader. In the following example a couple stand in front of the door of his house. The reader senses that once inside the house, they are going to make love. The writer’s first temptation might be to let them in the house, to get on with it. But delay builds anticipation. It can be accomplished by minutiae:

I was waiting for him to say something. Instead he reached into his pocket and removed a key ring with three keys on it. Holding the first key, he said, “The garage.” Then he held the second key, dangling the others, and said, “The back door.”

He must have seen me smile.

He took the third key between his thumb and forefinger and said, “The front door.” Then he handed the key ring with all three keys to me and said, “Welcome.”

Among the many advantages of a love scene is that it provides excellent opportunities for characterizing both partners and for creating sympathy or antipathy toward one of the characters.

Love stories exist about each of the seven ages of man. Three of those ages are most useful to the writer.

The youngest lovers may be inexperienced, tentative, nervous, worried about pregnancy, disease, getting caught. Any or all of these can become a writer’s Petri dish for brewing conflict and drama. External obstacles loom in abundance. The young lovers may be separated by distance because of school, work, and family. They may have to overcome class differences, family incompatibilities, peer pressure, or rivalry from another young person, or from an older, more experienced individual. Keep in mind that you don’t want to tell the reader what they are feeling, but to evoke feelings in the reader as a result of what the young lovers say to each other and what they do. It helps to make each of them vulnerable in a different way.

With adult lovers in the child-bearing age group, one of the most powerful forces of nature is at work, the drive toward procreation, often unknown to or unacknowledged by lovers. The human race is perpetuated
by drives that are endocrinal in origin. Romantic love, as it is experienced by most (but not all) people, is a cultural invention. While these are things that the average reader doesn’t want to hear about, it is important that the writer know them.
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Love scenes deal with the consequences of these physiological drives and cultural customs. Writers need to be knowledgeable about the nuances of human relationships and the origins of feelings; hence, it helps for writers to know and understand as much as possible about the psychology and physiology underlying love—what the pulls are, whether or not the participants are aware of them.

An obstacle commonly faced by adult lovers is the threat of a competing person and the consequent loss of security in a relationship. An adult wandering from a relationship can get involved with persons of questionable character and can blunder into acts of violence. The consequences of infidelity have inspired hundreds of plots. Some obstacles encountered by adult lovers are internal, such as guilt over conduct disapproved of by the person or by society. Also casting a shadow over both old and new relationships is the fear of passing age boundaries, of getting older.

In plotting a love story, a writer must remind himself that plot grows out of character. What happens in a love scene should come out of the writer’s understanding of his characters and their motivation, and the clash between such characteristics or motivation in different characters. Some basic questions to ask yourself about your prospective love story:

Does each of your lovers have one thing that distinguishes his or her physical appearance from that of other people? Is there something distinctive in the way your lovers dress?

Keep in mind that the most boring kind of relationship is one in which there are never any problems. He loved her and she loved him, they never quarreled, is the ultimate turnoff. In devising a love story, search for the root conflicts based on character and upbringing, but also ferret out surface conflict by asking yourself if you have depicted your adult lovers at a moment of crisis. If not, can you add a crisis that will increase the tension of the relationship? Does the woman want something reasonable that is refused by the man, perhaps for reasons that he keeps secret and that arouse her suspicions? Does the man want something that is refused by the woman because she is afraid of the result? Whatever your plan, remember that if there is no friction between the lovers, there is no interest on the part of the reader. And if there is massive friction, will the reader be convinced that they are nevertheless in love? If they are not, you don’t have a love story.