Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Proportioning thus becomes a matter of individual taste. While extremes that amount to “all scene” or “all sequel” exist, most of us prefer to take the middle ground and strike some sort of balance.

  b. Scenes dominate story development.

  Any story, diagrammed, resembles a mountain range—a succession of peaks and valleys. You spotlight the peaks, the big dramatic moments, by presenting them as scenes.

  (1) How big you build a scene depends to a considerable degree on its placement in the story.

  An opening scene that features the fall of the Roman Empire may rock your reader back on his heels. But what do you do for an encore? Too large a dose of vitamins at any given point always carries with it the hazard that everything which follows will seem anticlimactic.

  Consequently, it’s good sense to arrange your scenes, your peaks, in order of ascending importance and/or intensity.

  (2) You can control scene placement, to some degree, by manipulating sequel.

  Partly, this means that you can expand or contract sequel so that scenes fall farther apart or closer together.

  Partly, it means that a sequel frequently includes material which could just as well or better be developed as a scene. For example, here’s an incident in which your hero stops to get gas. To build it into a scene, all you need to do is inject conflict: Maybe your guy irritates the attendant, who in turn releases his hostility by somehow “accidentally” immobilizing (disaster!) the car.

  Partly, finally, it means that small scenes may be reduced to sequel. Instead of making Character have to pressure Doctor Jones in order to get in to see Marie at the hospital, you let the nurse on the ward admit him as a matter of routine.

  c. Flexibility is all-important.

  Each story offers different problems. A mechanical approach won’t solve them. You must stand ready to adapt your methods to your materials.

  Thus, officially, a sequel involves reaction, dilemma, and decision.

  Yet if a man is drowning, do you need to state explicitly that he decides to try to keep his head above the surface? Or is it enough that he fights his way up from the depths . . . breaks water . . . flails, gasps, struggles?

  It’s that way, often, in sequel. If your character does something in a manner that indicates he’s picked a goal, we assume it represents a decision, accept it, and let the rules go by the board.

  In the same way, at first glance scene often seems to flow directly into sequel. Yet experience soon will teach you that often you build impact if you allow a time-break, great or small, after the scene-disaster’s curtain line . . . as if your focal character were numbed by shock, perhaps.

  Here, for instance, a hero gets the wrong answer:

  “I’ve tried to tell you, Ed,” she said. “I’m not going with you.”

  It was one of those moments—the kind that last and last and last. Then, when he finally found his voice, he discovered that he didn’t have anything to say.

  Pivoting, he strode down the walk, back to his car.

  If you can write scene and sequel, you can write stories.

  But you’ll write them easier and better if you also understand the strategy of fiction: a most intriguing subject, in its way, and the topic of the chapter just ahead.

  CHAPTER 5

  Fiction Strategy

  A story is a double-barreled attack upon your readers.

  You want to write successful stories.

  To that end, it will be a help if you first understand two things:

  1. Why your reader reads.

  2. The source of story satisfaction.

  How do you define story?

  You don’t.

  Why not?

  Because it’s impossible to arrive at any useful, meaningful, all-inclusive definition. Each person who reads and/or writes is different. Each defines story to fit his own tastes, his own prejudices. Tennyson’s Lady of the Lake and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn both have been termed stories. Same for assorted sketches, vignettes, anecdotes, word photography, chronicles, plays, folk tales, and what have you. The piece which Reader A likes and labels good is, to Reader B, distasteful and bad. “Strong” and “weak” mean different things to different people. So do “trite” and “fresh,” “profound” and “shallow,” “obscure” and “rich with hidden meanings.”

  Definition tries to reduce a host of objects or events or experiences to their lowest common denominator. It sucks out their life for the sake of a post-mortem on dead flesh and bare bones. Individual differences go by the board.

  Such an approach is of little value to a writer. To bring a story into being, you need to think of it not as a thing, but as something you do to a specific reader—a motivation; a stimulus you thrust at him.

  Your goal, in turn, is to elicit a particular reaction from this reader. You want to make him feel a certain way . . . suck him into a whirlpool of emotion.

  To do this . . . to make your reader feel the way you want him to feel . . . is your story’s whole and total function.

  Now this can prove a tricky business. It demands skill. There are techniques to be learned, just as in figure skating or baking angel-food cake or playing the piano.

  The aggregate of all these tricks and tools, these devices you use to help your story fulfill its function properly, may be said to constitute process.

  Learn to work in terms of function and of process, and you’re on the shortest, straightest road to success as a fiction writer.

  The function of a story is to create a particular reaction in a given reader. Therefore, this might be a good point at which to consider audience briefly.

  You use one kind of saw to cut wood, another to shape metal, a third to slice marble.

  The same principle applies to readers. Don’t try to be all things to all men. Universality of appeal is a myth. Superman and Marcel Proust seldom strike sparks in the same audience. So, accept difference, in literary preferences as in women’s hairdos. Quit wasting your time pretending that it doesn’t exist, or that there’s some esoteric way around it.

  Does this mean that you should consciously slant your story to a certain reader?

  Yes. But not to any reader. The one you want is the one who shares your tastes and interests. For you, too, are individual. You can’t change yourself at will to suit a given public. You must accept yourself the way you are. Then, seek out an audience that sees the world the same way you do.

  Can you be sure such an audience exists?

  You can. Individual you are indeed; and different. But not that different, for you’re human also.

  And then?

  Master story dynamics.

  How do you go about that?

  You start with one simple statement: A story is the record of how somebody deals with danger.

  Isn’t that definition?

  Of course. But it’s more rule-of-thumb and statement of what happens than it is an all-inclusive formulation. I’ll admit in advance that it won’t satisfy every critic, every reader.

  It applies more often than not, though, on a practical level. And it’s flexible. Once you get hold of how to use it, you’ll find you can adapt it to almost any taste, or type of story.

  Even more important, it’s the best possible place to start if you want to learn. . . .

  Why your reader reads

  Your reader reads fiction because it creates a pleasurable state of tension in him, line by line and page by page.

  But don’t analysts say that the thing that makes a story good is structure?

  They’re only half right. For as the late Raymond Chandler once observed, “The ideal mystery [is] one you would read if the end was missing.”

  Why would anyone read such a mystery?

  Because it holds your attention as it unfolds. The climax is important, true; but not to the exclusion of that which goes before. Though the over-all pattern of a story may be ever so sound, the reader won’t ever know it if he tosses the book or magazine aside in
the middle of first page or first chapter.

  This is the reason why a writer’s approach to his story must be double-barreled. His reader must be captured and held by what’s offered him at this moment: not the whole; not the ultimate pattern, but the present experience. Immediate and continuing involvement is what counts. Reader attention must be seized right now.

  What seizes attention?

  Tension. All attention is based on it.

  Tension, to reiterate a few points made in Chapter 3, is a physiological phenomenon: “tension . . . Act of stretching, or tensing; state or degree of being strained to stiffness. Hence: a Mental strain; intensity of striving. b Nervous anxiety, with attendant muscular tenseness.” (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Fifth Edition.)

  When your muscles contract, you have tension.

  Some tension is voluntary. More is involuntary.

  The thing that creates involuntary tension, most often, is fear.

  That is, you experience an unpleasant emotional reaction at the prospect that something will or won’t happen: Your wife will say unkind things if you lose your job. Your friends will laugh at you if you freeze up in the middle of your high-school speech. You’ll feel intensely alone and unhappy if your mother dies. Objectively, the issue may be ever so slight. No mad murderer threatening you with an ax is needed. It’s your feeling alone that counts. For when you feel fear, it makes your muscles tighten up, and plunges you into a state of tension, mild or extreme or in between.

  What creates fear?

  Danger.

  What is danger?

  Change. When any given situation is altered, the result is a different situation. This new state of affairs may demand adjustment on your part. Such adjustment may be beyond your capacity, and thus may endanger your survival or happiness. Anything endangering survival or happiness creates fear.

  Two factors are involved in this process:

  a. Perception.

  b. Experience.

  Perception means merely that you must be aware a change is taking place.

  Experience warns you that this particular change may expose you to injury, loss, pain, or other evil.

  Must both exist, in order for you to experience fear and its concomitant, tension?

  Yes. It’s like the stories the newspapers carry every once in a while about a child caught blithely playing with a cobra, or the like. The child perceives the snake, but he lacks the experience to know that it is dangerous. Hence, the child feels no fear, no tension.

  Or, experience tells you that guns are dangerous. But if you don’t perceive that one is pointed at your head, your degree of tension remains unaltered.

  But suppose both perception and experience exist?

  Consider a party. You’re introduced to several new people.

  This is change. New elements have been brought into your sphere of awareness. But if the situation doesn’t go any further, your tension increase will be relatively limited.

  Suppose, however, that one of the strangers is a tall, dark, handsome man.

  Now, enter experience: Your wife is a woman particularly susceptible to such men.

  At once, your tension level rises. For whether you acknowledge it or not, fear has entered your life. Specifically, you’re afraid that she’ll involve herself in an affair with this particular man.

  Or again: One of the strangers is a man you intensely desire to impress, in order to win a much-needed promotion. Result: a marked rise in your inner tension. It’s based on your fear that somehow you’ll fail to create as favorable an image as you wish to.

  Or again: One of the girls makes a flip, somewhat slighting remark about your taste in ties. Embarrassment—fear that your taste is indeed inadequate—sends tension soaring in you, out of all proportion to the motivation you’ve received.

  How does all this apply to story?

  “We go to the theatre to worry,” remarks the late Kenneth Macgowan in his A Primer of Playwriting. “Whether we see a tragedy, a serious drama, or a comedy, we enjoy it fully only if we are made to worry about the outcome of individual scenes and of the play as a whole.”

  That’s why a story must deal with danger. No danger, no worry.

  Why should we want to worry?

  Because tension is vital to the survival of any species. It represents awareness, alertness, preparedness for action. It’s readiness for fight or flight; the automatic reaction of each and every organism in the face of peril. Prod a tiger; he attacks. Prod a rabbit; he runs. Both leap from springboards of instinctive tension.

  Take away that ability to react to threat with tension, and a hostile world overwhelms the victim.

  Because tension has this survival value, mankind as a species has learned to enjoy it, in controlled amounts. So, to varying degrees, and in accordance with our individual tastes and metabolisms, we involve ourselves in situations which create tension in us. We play handball. We hunt big game. We get in fights. We seduce our neighbors’ wives.

  And, we read. Especially fiction.

  Why fiction?

  Experienced directly, tension-inducing situations can prove dangerous. Physically dangerous . . . dangerous on the level of reality. A handball game may rupture an aging heart. The hunted animal may turn hunter. A killing blow may end the fight. The neighbor may resort to firearms or a messy lawsuit.

  So?

  So, for most of us, tension achieved secondhand proves less hazardous and therefore more satisfactory than actual experience. That’s why we go to football games and prize fights . . . listen by radio to astronauts’ reports . . . gossip and follow disasters on TV newscasts and peruse the true-crime magazines and the confessions. We’re ever avid in our search for other people’s troubles. Sharing their peril gives us a kick.

  Fiction, in turn, creates an especially vivid vicarious tension for us. It brings a character face to face with danger, so that he feels, or should feel, fear.

  And then?

  Fear is contagious. When you live through a properly written story with a character, his experiences and tensions become yours.

  Your job as a writer is to control and manipulate this tension. To that end, and using your central character as a vehicle, you create it, intensify it, focus it needle-sharp, and then release it.

  Through the character, your reader empathizes matching emotions, matching tensions.

  A plot is merely your plan of action for thus manipulating tension. And the simplest formula is still that set down by old H. Bedford-Jones, king of the pulps, more than thirty years ago: “Get your hero in danger—and keep him in danger!”

  In essence, the habitual reader is a tension addict. Tension is what he hopes to buy when he tosses down his quarter or half-dollar at the corner newsstand.

  This is the reason that he spends his time and money on your story. This is why he reads.

  The source of story satisfaction

  What, specifically, is the source of story satisfaction?

  A most intriguing question—even though you have to approach it just a bit obliquely in order to get a properly comprehensive answer.

  Let’s go:

  A story is the record of how somebody deals with danger.

  But in a story, danger isn’t just danger in the abstract. It’s a definite and immediate menace to a particular person.

  Specifically, it’s a threat to your focal character.

  It’s this fact which gives your story its form.

  Exhibit A: Your focal character, blithely going about his business.

  Enter danger.

  Reacting, your focal character fights this peril until, eventually, he wins or loses.

  The duration of the danger defines the limits of your story. Roughly speaking, we can say that the story begins when the situation plunges Character into jeopardy. It ends when he emerges from the shadow of said hazard.

  Plot-wise, the beginning of your story creates tension.

  The middle builds up and intensifies it.

  Th
e end, in turn, breaks down into two segments: climax, and resolution.

  In climax, the tension you’ve created is focused sharply.

  And, finally, resolution sees the tension released, in character and in reader.

  Which brings us back to our original question: What, specifically, is the source of story satisfaction?

  Answer: Release of tension.

  All through the beginning and middle and climax of your story, the excitement of danger keeps your reader tense and eager, line by line and page by page.

  But excitement doesn’t constitute satisfaction. Maintain tension too long, or carry it too far, and it becomes as unpleasant as extended tickling. You begin to ache for it to end. You want to let go, give up . . . relax and rest awhile.

  To trigger such release is the whole and total function of your story’s resolution. It pays off your reader . . . rewards him with a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment for the strain of undergoing tension.

  In other words, the way your story turns out is your reader’s key source of satisfaction. A story is a fight. Danger is the focal character’s opponent. So, Friend Reader wants to know what happens to your imperiled hero . . . who wins the battle, and how. Leave him hanging in suspense about it, and you throw him into the state of frustration of an avid ball fan dragged bodily from the park in the ninth inning, with the score tied, the bases loaded, and the world series hanging in the balance.

  If the end of a story is “right,” your reader’s tension is released. He sinks back satisfied, relaxed, fulfilled.

  If it isn’t, he’s left raw-nerved and jittery; on edge. At best, he feels let down and disappointed.

  To make a story end “right,” ask yourself one simple question: How does your hero defeat his danger?

  The answer is always the same: He demonstrates that he deserves to win.

  So much for the broad outlines. Now, let’s look at the factors involved in a bit more detail.

  Release of tension, it was noted above, is what gives your reader satisfaction.