1

Universal Man: The Art of Enduring Writing

In this book my aim is to give the writer an understanding of human behavior and to show how he can apply it in his work. Every type of creative writing depends upon the credibility of a character. This is why a writer must know when a character is one-, two- or three-dimensional.

Men are essentially the same. The difference is only in degrees. All this sounds simple enough, but the problem is how to capture this chameleon-like creature in repose long enough to draw his true image. What the writer wants to know is how a real human being—a three-dimensional character—acts in life. The answer is simplicity itself: like you or me.

“Yes,” one may argue, “but I really don’t know how I act. One day this way, another day the opposite. Does it make sense?” Of course it does. Every human being is as contradictory as you and I. We constantly vacillate. Sometimes you and I are very much alike, and sometimes we are worlds apart.

There was a great furor, which to this day has not abated, when Freud discovered the id and the superego—the subconscious mind of man. Yet, as literary scholars know, the writers of the past were the real discoverers of the workings of the mind.

No doubt they closely watched people around them acting in real life. They must have been appalled by their contrariness! The more they watched, the more disturbed they must have become.

They must have found contradiction in everything man did. To this very day we cannot find any living human being who we can claim is angelic through and through or rotten to the core.

This knowledge was surely one of the greatest discoveries in the age foreshadowing Freud, Jung, Adler and the rest.

Yes, man is complex. The truth is—man has the capacity to be heroic, superhuman, ready to sacrifice his life for an ideal and with the same ease, cut his best friend’s throat.

In short: he’s good and evil at the same time. It depends on what inner or outside contradiction activates him to expose himself.

This sounds too general to be of great help for a writer interested in character building. I must be more concrete, more personal. I will take one man, a character, vivisect him to see the nakedness, the complexity, the contradiction in his mind. Since I know myself better than anyone alive, I will give you the summation of my character.

(After you finish reading the following, please remember what Jesus said: “Let him without sin cast the first stone. ”)

I am greedy, selfish, and jealous and I try desperately to be loved by all. I am thinking day and night of how to make myself so important that it will force people to think only good about me. I am sorry, but it’s true that I always want to be in the right.

I came to the conclusion that whatever I say, I say for only two reasons:

1. To create sympathy for myself.

2. To show how important I am.

This is what I found inside myself. At first, it was frightening. “I cannot be this!” I cried. I looked again and saw the same. It is true. I am all that and more.

All great character portraits were and will be written with the detachment of a dedicated scientist—determined to tell the truth and nothing but the truth whoever will be hurt in the process.

Only a corpse can exist without contradiction. The corpse is busy disintegrating, while a living man is preoccupied with the struggle to keep soul and body together. This is, in itself, a Herculean job to accomplish.

The universal man is really the average man. The difference between him and his superior brother, the genius, is only in degrees. We are, after all, brothers under the skin. If you truly know one—you know all.