Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Swain, Dwight V.

  The successful writer also has intelligence as well as talent; far too much intelligence to rely on spontaneity alone.

  But he does separate logic from emotion; critical judgment from creation. So, though feeling is the wellspring of his work, over and over again along the line he pauses . . . sits back . . . subjects his plans and copy to reappraisal.

  That reappraisal is based on the rule-of-thumb testing that is the shrewdest, most practical application of the past experience we call principle. Each story teaches him new tricks . . . brings him new tools, new techniques. Insight continually grows in him, and so does understanding. So, he improves as he goes along . . . seldom falls into the same trap twice.

  That procedure; that separation of frames of mind; that alternating between creation and critique . . . it’s the most effective way to learn, in any creative field. It uses rules as a checklist, not a blueprint. Feeling dominates; not logic.

  Thus, it encourages spontaneity and takes advantage of it in the initial excitement of storytelling.

  Then, later, it spots story flaws and pins down points of error.

  Do I make myself clear? Communication of feeling—your feeling—demands skill as well as heart.

  To win that skill, you have no choice but to begin right where you are—this very moment.

  Ordinarily, that means you start a long way down the ladder. You first have to be willing to be very, very bad, in this business, if you’re ever to be good. Only if you stand ready to make mistakes today can you hope to move ahead tomorrow.

  Writing as a creative act

  As Pasteur once observed, chance favors the trained mind.

  Feeling tells you what you want to say. Technique gives you tools with which to say it.

  Facility lies in knowing at once what to do next, and so doing it more quickly than somebody else.

  To know what to do next, you must master process . . . an ordered, step-by-step presentation of your materials that pushes emotional buttons in your reader, so that he feels the way you want him to feel. It’s a way of going about things; an answer to your “how-to” questions.

  For example?

  “How do you make description vivid?” “How do you build conflict?” “How do you tie incidents together?” “How do you decide where to start your story?” “How do you make a character interesting?” “How do you insure that a story is satisfying to your readers?”

  Or, if you’d rather: “By what steps do you make description vivid?” “By what steps do you build conflict?”

  Often, these questions overlap, for process operates on all levels. Some processes are simple, some complex; some basic, some specialized. The steps you take to make a character easily recognizable may be quite definite and explicit. “How do you create a hero with whom your reader can identify?” is likely to prove a good deal more involved. That is, it requires more steps, and must take into account more variables. It may even demand a combining or interweaving of several rudimentary processes.

  Must a writer know all these processes?

  That depends on the writer, and his level of aspiration—the kind and quality of writer that he wants to be. Many successful writers get by with only a few skills, well handled. Others have more tricks up their sleeves than they can use. The general rule is to do the best you can with what you’ve got at the given moment.

  Fortunately, too, in writing, most of us do many things effectively by instinct. Years of reading have given us a feeling for what’s right and what isn’t, and old habits turn out to be correct. So the amount you have to learn really is rather limited.

  In fact, if you try to learn too much, or strain too hard, it probably means that you’re fascinated with technique for its own sake, rather than as a tool to help you tell a story. You may be endeavoring to write mechanically, without sufficient excitement over your ideas.

  Which processes are most important?

  The ones you need most, at this specific moment.

  Which stories are best to study?

  The ones which intrigue you.

  Aren’t some better than others?

  Of course. But any story, taken as a whole, is a hodgepodge of good and bad. To study some so-called classic as a model, unless you first cross your fingers and then take each sentence with a teaspoonful of salt, is to lay yourself wide open to all sorts of confusion. For in Sentence A, you find, Classic Author performs admirably. In Sentence B, he botches things.

  Why?

  Because he has blind spots, even as you and I.

  A particular flaw may reflect a private weakness. Or it may mean that this individual writer is sloppy or ill-trained. Or that the phone rang at the wrong moment, or that his wife called him down to dinner.

  Thus, an entire story may make most entertaining reading, even when reprinted as a textbook model. But it covers too much ground to be truly useful. “Standard” procedures (an exaggeration and a misnomer if ever there was one!) are modified by the demands of the story situation, the writing situation, and the tastes and competence of the writer himself.

  —And that’s even ignoring the fact that a story rated as a model by a given writer or editor or teacher or critic may not be anything resembling the right model for you.

  You can’t take it for granted that any fragment of any story is ideally handled until you’ve analyzed it from all angles. Techniques, by and large, are explicit and specific. You learn them from examples that isolate the point under examination . . . eliminate as many variables as possible.

  To what degree are the processes outlined here subject to modification?

  As before noted, you don’t write fiction by the numbers. Each person goes about it in a different way. Some plan and some don’t. Some plod and some don’t. Some think and—not necessarily regrettably—some don’t.

  Thus, there’s no one right answer to any writing question. You do different things in different ways at different times. Not only are we safe in saying that you seldom would write a line the same way on two successive days; we also can state flatly that both lines written could very well be “right.”

  Or wrong.

  The problem, you see, is much like that in ball-playing. No matter how good a batter you are, you can’t guarantee in advance that you’ll hit a given pitch . . . because the material fights back and no two curves break just alike.

  Mood also enters. You change, and your way of handling your material changes with you. In the long run, you learn rules only to deviate from them.

  How do you master all the varied techniques?

  By writing stories. Which is to say, by being willing to be wrong.

  Then, having been wrong, you check back through your stuff for process errors . . . places where you skipped over steps, or went off the path, or started with the road map upside down.

  Do that enough times, on enough stories, and eventually you’ll learn.

  Won’t exercises give the same result less painfully?

  Regrettably, no; at least, not in my experience. The man who cottons to exercises generally isn’t cut out to be a fiction writer. He’s certainty-oriented; reaching out for a sure thing.

  Most potentially successful writers have little patience with such. They’re too eager to get on with their own stories; too intoxicated with their own euphoria; too excited over their ideas.

  Exercises excite no one. Palpably artificial, only tenuously related to the difficulties that beset you, they turn writing into drudgery for anyone.

  So buckle down and forge yourself a kit of techniques out of the iron of your own copy. Each story will give you more experience to translate into literary process. Each trick mastered will free you just a little more from your feelings of inadequacy and frustration.

  Finally, your excitement soars, unshackled, and to your own amazement you discover that somehow, in spite of everything, you’ve turned out to be a writer.

  What’s the first step?

  There’s the world of words to master; an importan
t world, too, with laws and protocol all its own.

  No doubt you’ll want to violate those laws, in many cases. But half the fun of sinning lies in knowing that it’s sinful.

  To that end, let’s move on to Chapter 2, and there take a look at language and its regulations.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Words You Write

  A story is words strung onto paper.

  “God forbid that I should set up for a teacher!” cried Italy’s master playwright of the eighteenth century, old Carlo Goldoni.

  Even more so, saints preserve us from that writer with the effrontery to proclaim himself a grammarian.

  Most writers paragraph for effect, punctuate on impulse, and let split infinitives and comma splices fall where they may. Omnivorous reading substitutes for systematic study. Syntactic nomenclature is a thing they learn only if, somehow trapped into teaching others the craft, they find themselves in need of terms to describe the errors of their students.

  None of which in any wise prevents their writing adequate or better than adequate copy.

  In other words, this is a business in which the star performers play by ear, and who cares? So long as a man’s writing is itself clear and accurate and specific, no holds are barred. And anyone who needs instruction in the traffic laws of the English language has wandered into the wrong field.

  Yet words are vital to a writer, no matter how askance he looks at grammar. Some work for him; some against him. And some just clutter up the landscape.

  If you’re just starting, you need to know which words do what, and why.

  Specifically, it’s desirable that you learn three things:

  1. How to choose the right words.

  2. How to make copy vivid.

  3. How to keep meaning clear.

  Taking first things first, let’s begin with . . .

  How to find the right words

  What are your essential jobs, in actually writing copy?

  They are:

  a. Selection.

  b. Arrangement.

  c. Description.

  What’s the issue in selection?

  As a writer, you provide peepholes through which your reader may look into the lives of other people. So, you must decide:

  Who is to be viewed?

  Do we deal with doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief? What specific individuals?

  When do we observe these characters?

  At what moment, what period, what time of their lives? Or, as the old gag phrases it, do infants have more fun in infancy than adults do in adultery?

  Where do we catch these people?

  Are they afield? On the street? At the office? In church? Homebound? In the living room? The bedroom? The bathroom?

  What are they doing?

  Are they working? Playing? Loving? Hating? Worshipping? Sinning? Learning? Forgetting?

  —And, closely related, what does your reader notice as your people go about these multitudinous activities? Does he see sunrise, or mudhole? Beauty, or blemish? Is he caught by the smell of frying bacon, or the rasp of saw teeth biting into a pine board, or the smoothness of velvet beneath his fingers, or the taste of a sucked anise drop? A bellow of rage, or an eyelash flicker?

  Why does he notice?

  What makes this detail important to him and to your story?

  How does your reader see all this?

  Is he looking at it objectively? Subjectively? Through the eyes of you, the writer? Through those of your hero? Those of your villain?—Or is this the viewpoint of the familiar innocent bystander, lining up for his turn at getting hurt?

  These are more or less weighty decisions, every one. For, ever and always, you the writer must select.

  Simultaneously, you arrange events for your reader, in what you fondly hope will prove effective order.

  Do you move from cause to effect?

  Or backward, from effect to cause?

  Do you present your story in strict chronological order, as the events involved transpire?

  Or, do you resort to some sort of frame or flashback, some device of recollection?

  Order does make a difference. Show a gun, then a coffin, then tears, and you put your focus on heartbreak. If coffin comes first, then tears, then gun, the issue may be vengeance.

  So, you arrange.

  Then, you bring your material to life.

  With description.

  To live through a story . . . experience it as vividly as if it were his own . . . your reader must capture it with his own senses.

  How do you put perfume on the page? The tiger’s roar? The whisky’s bite? The warm spring air? The earth? The blood?

  With words: description.

  But simply written, of course? With short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, and so on?

  Well, maybe. Simplicity is a virtue, within reason. But Proust sometimes wrote in sentences literally hundreds of words long. Ionesco makes all language a paradox. A current paperback novel—an original, not a reprint—includes such words as ubiquitous, relegated, nebulous, modulated, and ebullient. Einsteinian concepts and beyond are standard fare in the science-fiction pulps.

  So?

  Few of us read voluntarily about the primer-level doings of Dick and Jane. Simplicity is a virtue in writing, true; but never the primary virtue.

  What is?

  Vividness.

  How about brevity?

  It’s important too. Within reason.

  Within reason?

  Who, just learning this business, knows where or when or how to be brief? In the wrong place, brevity can destroy you.

  So?

  As in the case of simplicity, brevity is never the heart of the issue. Vividness is.

  Making copy come alive

  How do you write vividly?

  You present your story in terms of things that can be verified by sensory perception. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch—these are the common denominators of human experience; these are the evidence that men believe.

  Describe them precisely, put them forth in terms of action and of movement, and you’re in business.

  Your two key tools are nouns and verbs.

  Nouns are words that name something: dog, boat, pencil, man, telephone, grass, chair.

  Verbs are words that tell what happens: gulp, whirl, jump, choke, smash, slump, snore.

  The nouns you want are pictorial nouns: nouns that flash pictures, images, into your reader’s mind.

  The more specific, concrete, and definite the noun . . . the more vivid the picture.

  The noun rhinoceros flashes a sharper, more meaningful picture to your reader than does the noun animal.

  But animal is sharper and more meaningful than creature.

  In the same way, consider bungalow versus house versus building . . . starlet versus girl versus female . . . Colt versus revolver versus firearm . . . steak versus meat versus food.

  The more specific you get, the more vivid you get. Kim Novak draws an even sharper picture than starlet; tenderloin or chateaubriand than steak.

  —Assuming, that is, that your reader knows precisely what chateaubriand means. If he doesn’t, all your efforts have only confused the issue further . . . which just might offer a lesson to those among us who would rather write hirsute than hairy, collation than chow.

  How do you determine a given reader’s degree of understanding?

  Despite endless gobbledygook about psychological testing, market analysis, and the like, for most of us, ordinarily, the answer may very well be summed up in two principles: (1) You guess; and (2) you hope.

  Beyond that, who really knows? Sure, you try to familiarize yourself with the patterns and attitudes and limitations of your readers, but that still doesn’t mean that you can’t miss a mile. I’ve gotten away with Thorstein Veblen references in a pulp detective story, and I’ve been shot down for using the word clue in an adult education film; so you’ll pardon me, I trust, if I remain just a wee bit dubious of definitive answers where t
his point is concerned.

  But as Mark Twain once observed, the difference between the right word and the almost right word is as the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. So do strive for that right word!

  Broadly speaking, the thing you need to avoid is the general as contrasted with the particular (reptile creates a less vivid image than does rattler); the vague as contrasted with the definite (them guys is less meaningful than those three hoods who hang out at Sammy’s poolroom); and the abstract as contrasted with the concrete (to say that something is red tells me less than to state that it’s exactly the color of the local fire truck).

  Obviously, all this is a matter of degree and, in many instances, categories overlap. If we want to generalize about such generalizations, however, we’re probably safe in saying that abstraction, especially, offers hazards, for it expresses quality apart from object.

  Thus, love is a noun denoting a quality. But for most of us, said quality exists meaningfully only when its object is considered. Love means one thing when you speak of how a patriot feels about his country . . . another, if the issue is a young mother’s reaction to her baby . . . another, if your subject is a nun who kneels in prayer before the image of the Virgin Mary . . . another, if you listen to a shy high-school boy try to tell his girl friend how he feels about her . . . another, when discussed by the lantern-jawed prostitute sitting next to you at a bar.

  So, talk about the individual instance every time! Which is to say . . . work with nouns that are specific and definite and concrete.

  One further observation: The singular of a noun is almost always stronger than the plural. Cattle (plural, please note) may create an image of sorts as they mill restlessly. But for vivid impression, nail your picture down to some individual animal, at least in part—the bellow of a mossy-horned old steer, the pawing of a bull, a wall-eyed cow’s panicked lunge.

  The reason for this, of course, lies in the fact that every group is made up of individuals, and we really falsify the picture when we state that “the crowd roared,” or “the mob surged forward,” or even “the two women chattered on and on.” And while such summary may constitute a valid and useful verbal shorthand, it doesn’t give a truly accurate portrait.