Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Swain, Dwight V.

  An emotional need comes with these feelings: the need to communicate your excitement to others. So, where another man similarly excited might let his tension go in talk, or get drunk, or chop weeds in his garden, you write a story . . . put down words with which you seek to re-create the feelings that seethe inside you.

  That is, you hope the words re-create those feelings.

  And then?

  For some fortunate souls, that’s all there is to it. So talented are they . . . so sensitive, so perceptive, so completely attuned to themselves and to their audience . . . that they intuitively grasp everything they need to know of form and structure, style and process. They write, readers read, the world hails them as geniuses. . . . A happy state.

  However, don’t let the thought of such ability depress you. Though I’ve heard for years about these awesome figures, I’ve yet to meet a living, breathing writer who hadn’t worked–and worked hard—for everything he got.

  Most writers learn by doing. Practice, trial and error, train them. It’s as if our friend Fred were to go home tonight to his wife Gertrude with a joke to tell.

  Listening, she stares at him blankly. “What’s so funny about that?”

  Fred tries again. And maybe, this time, he gets the point across: Gertrude laughs.

  Tomorrow, a new joke comes along. So, Fred tries to remember what he did before, so that he can present this story to Gertrude in such a manner that she’ll laugh first time round, without benefit of follow-ups or explanations.

  If his plan succeeds, he tucks the procedure away in the back of his head. From here on out, for him, it will constitute a cornerstone of verbal humor. He’s found himself a rule to follow.

  It’s the same with writing. By trial and error, you learn that some things work and others don’t . . . then incorporate that knowledge into rules-of-thumb.

  Failure to develop such rules says merely that the man concerned is incapable of learning by experience. No matter howhard he tries, his time is wasted.

  Where’s Fred to find these tools . . . the specific bits and tricks he needs?

  Here Mabel Hope Hartley scores. As she says, the devices are all right there before his eyes, in every published story . . . more of them than any one man can ever hope to master. Even though Fred lives to be a hundred, he’ll still learn new twists each time he sits down to read or write.

  But in order to reach that stage, Fred—and you—first must master fundamentals, so that he knows what to look for.

  The trouble with rules

  No writer in his right mind writes by a set of rules.

  At least, not by somebody else’s rules.

  Why not?

  Because rules start from the wrong end: with restriction; with form; with mechanics; with exhortation about things you should and shouldn’t do.

  Where should you start, then?

  With feeling. Your own feeling.

  A story is like a car that runs on emotion. The author’s feeling is the gasoline in its engine. Take away its fuel, and even the shiniest, chrome-plated literary power plant is reduced to so much scrap iron.

  Feeling first takes form within you. If you haven’t got a feeling, you can’t write about it, let alone arouse it in somebody else.

  The self-taught writer holds a small advantage here, perhaps. Lacking formal training, he tends to be unaware of technique as a thing separate and apart. Intellectualization of art is alien to his thinking. First, last, and all the time he deals with what he feels: Dick’s love for Janice . . . the hatred Vincent turns on Tom . . . the mother’s anguish when Elsa runs away. Skill, to him, is simply a tool to help convey feeling. No feeling, no writing.

  A novice like Fred Friggenheimer, on the other hand, may assume that rule counts for more than story. So, he admires his plot because it so perfectly follows the formula laid down by the Mephisto Computer.

  In so doing, he ignores the gasoline of feeling. Then he wonders why the car won’t run.

  That’s why the first real rule of successful story-writing is . . . find a feeling.

  Or, if you prefer a different phrase: Get excited! Hunt till you uncover something or other to which you react. With feeling. The more intensely, the better.

  Maybe it’s a girl that turns you on . . . a gyroscope . . . a god . . . a gopher. A disaster . . . a moment of truth . . . a funny fragment. A color . . . an odor . . . a taste . . . a bar of music.

  For me, once, it was an electroencephalograph, a machine that measures brain waves. Because it fascinated me; because I felt so strongly about it, it ended up as a paperback novel.—You’ll agree, I think, that no one can get much farther out than that.

  After you find your feeling, rules come in handy . . . help you to figure out the best way to capture in words whatever it is that so excites you. But the feeling itself must always remain dominant. Though rules may shape your story, you yourself must shape the rules.

  Beware, too, of the other man’s rule. He sees the world through different eyes.

  Thus, George Abercroft is an action writer. “Start with a fight!” is his motto. And for him, it works.

  But Fred Friggenheimer’s witch-cult yarn, as he conceives it, puts heavy emphasis on atmosphere. The fight he tries to stick in like a clove in a ham at the beginning, following George’s rule, destroys the mood—and the story.

  Even with your own rules, indeed, you must be careful. Because somehow, subtly, they may not apply to this explicit situation.

  “There is really no such thing as the novel,” observes novelist Vincent McHugh. “The novel is always a novel—the specific problem, the particular case, the concrete instance.“

  And again: “The novel is not a form. It is a medium capable of accommodating a great variety of forms.“

  Feelings differ. So do the stories that spring from them.

  General rules imply that all are the same.

  Be very wary, therefore, of anything that says, “Reject this feeling.” Search instead for the kind of guidance that tells you, “Here’s a way to do the thing you already want to do . . . to use effectively the impossible situation, the outlandish incident, the offbeat character.”

  How do you tell whether a rule is good or not, in terms of a specific problem?

  Answer: Find out the reason the rule came into being. What idea or principle stands behind it?

  “The man who knows how will always find a place in life,” says the adage, “but the man who knows why will be the boss.”

  Arbitrary rules restrict and inhibit you.

  Knowing why sets you free.

  Take George’s rule about starting every story with a fight. It’s born of George’s markets—men’s magazines in which the emphasis is on fast, violent action, with blood on page one an absolute must.

  If Fred only realized that fact, he’d ignore George’s rule when he himself writes a mood-geared story.

  Projected, this principle means that a writer should have theories on every phase of writing—how to get ideas, how to plot, how to build conflict, how to bring characters to life, how to create the right feelings in a given reader.

  And, he should think through and take note of the why behind each and every how. Otherwise, how can he discover the procedures most effective for and best suited to him, in terms of his own temperament and tastes?

  Nor does it matter whether these theories are right or wrong in the view of objectivity or the critics. Their purpose is only to provide one particular writer with working tools and orientation. Universality is no issue. If an approach works for you, that’s all that counts. Writing a story, any story, is a very personal, very individual business. No one else can fight the battle for you. You must win or lose all by yourself, alone in the solitude of your psyche, working out of the depth and breadth of your own feeling.

  Which brings us to another interesting question: If feeling is indeed the issue, where do you find it?

  Or, more specifically, what kind of a person is the writer?

&nbs
p; Your right to be wrong

  You start with an urge to write, and that’s really all you need.

  That’s all, that is, so long as you don’t let other things get in the way.

  What other things?

  They go by so many names. But they all boil down to one issue: the fear of being wrong.

  To write successfully, you have to have the nerve to look at something in a new way and say, “This fascinates me. Look what I’ve done with it!”

  Looking at anything in a new way takes nerve.

  Why?

  Because other people may see it from a different angle.

  Whereupon, out of disagreement may spring disapproval. A husband may scoff, “Look who thinks she can write!”

  Or a boss may shoot you down: “Young man, I pay you to do a job, not ride a hobby!”

  Or a neighbor—“You’d think that woman would clean up her kids a little if she’s got so much time to spare.”

  Or an editor—“. . . nor does rejection necessarily imply any lack of merit.”

  Or a friend—“. . . so we’re all so proud of you—even if it is just a Sunday School paper.”

  Or a relative—“Honestly, Gladys, you can’t imagine what they said when they found out you write those awful confessions!”

  Or the pastor—“Just ask yourself, Sam: Do you want your children to know their father wrote a book like this?”

  Or the critics—“This work lacks even ordinary competence.”

  “A stylistic mishmash.” “The characters are caricatures at best.”

  “A shallow and empty story, without insight or compassion.”

  So many voices, all singing the same song: “What makes you think that you could ever write anything worth reading?”

  Voices like that sap your courage. They drain away your spirit. They make you want to run and hide, or lock a mask over your thoughts and feelings . . . and never, never, never write again.

  Don’t listen to them.

  “A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong,” mystery specialist Raymond Chandler once warned.

  “I cannot give you the formula for success,” says Herbert Bayard Swope, “but I can give you the formula for failure: Try to please everybody.”

  What qualities and/or conditions are most valuable to a writer?

  Spontaneity. Freedom. The opportunity for unstudied, impulsive roving through the backlands of his mind.

  Which are most detrimental?

  Inhibition. Self-censorship. Restraint.

  (Inhibition of feeling, that is—not inhibition of behavior. Becoming a writer doesn’t automatically license you as a libertine, or grant you a permit to appear roaring drunk at high noon in the public square.)

  In this world, all of us want to be right, on the one hand; to avoid being wrong, on the other. So, we search for certainty.

  To that end, too often we put on blinders . . . shut out those thoughts and feelings and interpretations which don’t conform to those we hear expressed by others, lest we find ourselves borne down by frowns of disapproval.

  Rules for writing constitute one such set of blinders . . . designed to help us never to be wrong.

  Is it so bad to want to win acceptance?

  Of course not. But hem a writer in with rules, and in spite of himself he unconsciously weighs each new thought against the standard of the rule, instead of bouncing it around in free association until other thought-fragments, magnetized, cling to it.

  To be a writer, a creative person, you must retain your ability to react uniquely. Your feelings must remain your own. The day you mute yourself, or moderate yourself, or repress your proneness to get excited or ecstatic or angry or emotionally involved . . . that day, you die as a writer.

  Why should this be so?

  The answer lies in . . .

  The snare of the objective

  There are two types of mind in this world . . . two approaches to the field of fiction.

  One type is that of the objectivist, the man who sees everything analytically. Three things warp his orientation:

  a. He depends on facts.

  b. He distrusts feelings.

  c. Therefore, he tries to write mechanically.

  This man may have an inclination to create. But he’s the product of an educational system that focuses on facts the way a Mohammedan zeros in on Mecca; and, in his case, the education took.

  Now there’s nothing wrong with facts as such. Educators of necessity seek a common ground on which to reach their students.

  But one of the characteristics of a fact is that it has a record of past performance. That’s what makes it a fact: Phenomenon X behaved and/or existed in thus-and-such a manner yesterday, last week, last month, last year. So, we have reason to anticipate that it will behave and/or exist the same way tomorrow.

  This means that to deal with facts, you must devote a great deal of attention to analysis of their track records. What did they do in previous encounters, and how did they do it? They’re like cases in law: Past history dominates. First, last, and always you check precedents.

  If this were as far as the matter went, there wouldn’t be any real headache. But the educators refused to let it go at that. Facts were easy to present. Knowledge of them was easy to test. In many areas they were of great practical use. Centering attention on them obviated the complications that went with dealing with each student as an individual.

  So, educators in the lead, an entire society plunged into wholesale fact-worship.

  When you glorify one thing, it’s generally at the expense of something else. In this case, the “something else” was feeling.

  Now a feeling is about as opposite to a fact as you can get. At best, you might describe it as a sort of internal driving force, like electricity in a motor. You can’t see it or hear it or smell it or taste it or touch it. It reveals itself to the outside world only in overt behavior, as a reaction. Even measuring its intensity, by any objective standard, remains a problem not at all satisfactorily resolved.

  As if that weren’t enough, feelings differ from moment to moment and person to person. They’re the ultimate variable—utterly unpredictable, oftentimes; poker with everything wild.

  Faced with this unpredictability of feelings, this refusal of an element to behave in neatly ordered fashion, the educators responded with varying degrees of uncertainty, suspicion, outrage.

  —Feelings all, of course, you understand; but acceptable, because they were housed in the right people.

  Being human as well as frustrated, the educators took the obvious course of action: They taught generations of children to depend on facts.

  —And, as a corollary, to hold all feelings suspect.

  Result: a population trained to feel guilty every time it discovers that emotion prompted an action.

  What happens when a man conditioned to such a mode of thinking decides he wants to create something?

  Naturally enough, he approaches it as a problem in fact-finding.

  That is, he looks to stories already written . . . studies them . . . attempts to dig out the common denominators that they share.

  From this survey, he deduces rules. Then, he tries to write stories of his own that fit these regulations.

  A story, thus, is for him an exercise in mechanics . . . a sort of juggling of bits and pieces; a putting together of a literary jigsaw puzzle. Seeing the product but not the process, viewing the end result rather than the dynamic, forward-moving forces that brought it into being, more often than not he ends up with something limp and inert. For though he may have skill, he’s at heart a thinker, a logician. It never occurs to him to feel about his story. If it did, he’d thrust the thought aside, because he has no faith in feeling. He’s afraid to trust it.

  Now this is a dangerous distortion of attitude in any circumstances, even though you still may be able to function satisfactorily enough in spite of it so long as your job is merely to saw boards or s
ew seams or mix premeasured chemicals.

  In a creator, however, such a pattern looms as utter and complete disaster.

  Why?

  Because the creator automatically is doomed to failure if he assumes that past and precedent can provide him with certainty and guarantee success.

  No such certainty does or can exist—not in writing, nor in life itself. No matter how carefully we plan and prepare for tomorrow, tonight may find us frozen as solid as those famed Siberian mammoths, refrigerated for centuries like giant sides of beef by a blast of frigid air so sudden and so devastating that they died with buttercups still in their mouths.

  Incidentally, science and the objectivists haven’t yet figured out just what happened that day.

  The only true certainty in life, so far as we know, is death—at least, what we call death.

  As a writer, to deal with this world, you must accept it and your own ever-so-finite limitations as they are. Facts are something you have to take for granted. But you don’t worship them, for your security, your certainty, is in yourself.

  In your feelings.

  Feeling, indeed, is what drives you forward. Wrapped up in your story, you face the future, not the past. The tale you tell excites you. You write out of the thrill of that excitement. Everywhere, you see new possibilities, new relationships. “What if—?” is your watchword. The rules, when you think of them, are incidental.

  Which all is merely another way of saying that the writer is subjective more than objective; that his inner world is more important to him than the external one. Intuitively, he knows that “plot” and “character” and “setting” and all other analytic elements of the craft, taken apart from story, are just that: analytic; which is to say, dead, in the same way that any part of a dissected laboratory specimen is dead.

  Because most readers read to feel, not analyze, they love the work of the subjectivist-turned-writer.

  For precisely the same reason, they ignore the fiction of the non-creator, the analyst.

  Does this mean that you write as Jack Kerouac is alleged to, with no heed for technique; no attempt at revision or correction?

  No, indeed. The picture of “pure” creator versus “pure” objectivist is an exaggeration. No such creatures exist. Always, the issue is a matter of degree and emphasis. The writer puts heavier stress on the emotional entity we call story because he feels, and isn’t afraid to trust his feelings. That is all.