The art of fiction: a guide for writers and readers - By Ayn Rand & Tore Boeckmann Page 0,44

gave me valuable clues to the manifestations of certain basic premises. These figures were the concretes that helped me to hold it all in my mind. This was the preliminary gathering of material.

Then, one day, some acquaintances invited me to a lecture by a liberal at the New School for Social Research. I felt that it would be immoral to go; but they insisted that the lecturer was not leftist, that he was a brilliant speaker, and that they had already bought the tickets, so I went. And there was Toohey in the flesh, in personal appearance and manner. [The speaker was the British Labour Party politician Harold Laski.]

When he spoke, that man projected infinitely more than the specific content of his ideas. It is true that he was not particularly liberal—that is, he was the most vicious liberal I have ever heard in public, but not blatantly so. He was very subtle and gracious, he rambled on a great deal about nothing in particular—and then he made crucial, vicious points once in a while. My foolish acquaintances did not know what was going on, but I did, and I thought: “There is my character.”

I did not read anything about him; I did not care to know much. But what I gained from his appearance and way of speaking was the lightning-like sum of the kind of personality that certain premises would produce. Anytime I would ask myself, for instance, how Toohey would act toward his niece, or what his attitude would be toward young love, I had only to remember the image of that man on the speaker’s pulpit and I would know unerringly what his type would do.

I was using an abstraction, not a concrete. I was not copying a real-life model; from a political lecture, I had no way of knowing what the speaker’s attitude would be toward a niece or young love. He served merely to concretize and anchor certain abstractions in my mind.

Years later, I learned that the speaker’s career was in fact somewhat like Toohey’s: he was always the man behind the scenes, much more influential than anybody knew publicly, pulling the strings behind the governments of several countries. Finally he was proved to be a communist, which he did not announce himself as or blatantly sound like. This demonstrates my “writer’s instinct.” I observed the total impression of the man, I derived my own concretes, and in many instances they were similar to the facts—proving not that I was clairvoyant, but that I had grasped the right abstractions and translated them correctly.

This is the method I recommend (but if it seems too cumbersome, do not treat it as a duty). You do not literally copy a person; you use him as a concretization of something too complex to hold in your mind as a mere philosophical or literary description.

The result is that you have a sense of what your character would do or say without having to figure it all out in advance. You have caught the basic tone, the key, of a personality.

8

Style I: Depictions of Love

When I was writing Atlas Shrugged, I spent a long time planning the scene where Francisco comes to Dagny in the country. Many issues had to be integrated in this very complex scene, and I was exhausted after days of walking and thinking on the road in front of my house in California. One day I told [my husband] Frank that I was tired of planning the scene. He knew about its content, and, not too seriously, he told me: “Oh, that’s simple. All you have to say is: ‘He rushes up the hill, he seizes her in his arms, he kisses her—and she likes it.’ ”

Everything between that sentence and what you read in Atlas Shrugged comes under the department of style.

The swiftness of Francisco’s movements was carrying him toward the hill while he was raising his head to glance up. He saw her above, at the door of the cabin, and stopped. She could not distinguish the expression on his face. He stood still for a long moment, his face raised to her. Then he started up the hill.

She felt—almost as if she had expected it—that this was a scene from their childhood. He was coming toward her, not running, but moving upward with a kind of triumphant, confident eagerness. No, she thought, this was not their childhood—it was the future as she would have seen it then, in the days when she waited