Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Do you see how this system works? All you have to do is string together a series of such episodes, each ending with your focal character in hotter water than before. Result: a continuing rise in tension, until eventually you reach the climactic peak you seek.

  Herewith, a few useful tools to help you in your efforts thus to create complications, intensify tension, and build to a climax:

  (1) Build with scenes.

  A character in a scene is a character in conflict, and conflict breeds tension.

  (2) Don’t confuse delay with complication.

  A boy waits for a girl. She doesn’t show up. Finally, phoning, he learns that she thought he was going to drop by her home to get her. Though disgruntled, he drives on over for her, and they start on their date nearly two hours late.

  A detective seeks to locate a missing witness. The man has moved. After considerable legwork, the detective at last finds him.

  Fishing, a fat, middle-aged farm wife snags her hook . . . falls in the creek as she attempts to free it. By the time she gets herself and her tackle ashore, she’s in somewhat less than a gay mood. It takes her the better part of an hour to dry her clothes and drop her baited hook back in the water.

  Now such incidents are common and useful in fiction. But don’t call them complications.

  Why not?

  Because they merely delay the action. They don’t make the character’s situation worse. Consequently, they don’t increase your reader’s tension.

  A rule-of-thumb of complication might very well be, “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

  In other words, if your character doesn’t get burned, you don’t have a complication.

  Can such bits be developed into complications?

  Of course. If Boy, waiting for Girl, were picked up as a robbery suspect, or fell in with a gold-digging floozy, or lost a chance for a promotion because he and Girl didn’t make it to the boss’s party, the situation would be dynamic instead of static.

  That is, the delay would have plunged him into trouble . . . created new problems for him to cope with . . . shaped and influenced his future.

  And that’s complication.

  Same way if a dangerous criminal had been freed because the detective couldn’t find the witness in time for the trial.

  Result: The detective is placed on suspension. A complication.

  Or suppose a gossipy neighbor had spread a rumor that the farm wife was having an affair, because he glimpsed her naked on the creek bank while she was drying her clothes. Isn’t her plight then made more difficult?

  Which isn’t to say that delay, as delay, can’t be most useful. But delay in and of itself is a subordinate element, not at all on a level with or fit to substitute for complication.

  (3) Tie your characters to your story.

  It’s hard to build tension if your reader is continually wondering why the central character doesn’t ride out of the story to greener pastures. After all, how much sense does it make for the marshal to stand and be shot at, or the heroine to accept her jealous lover’s violence and abuse, or the teacher to go on teaching despite poor pay, pupil disdain, and community ingratitude?

  For this reason, you need to train yourself, at every juncture, to chant one ritualistic question: “Why doesn’t he quit?”

  No answer is acceptable that doesn’t offer a mighty solid reason for your guy’s continued presence.

  Reasons for a character’s not quitting fall into two categories: physical situation, and emotional involvement. A high proportion of story people have both.

  Physical situation may range from the financial (your hero will lose his shirt unless he fights out the story issue) to the geographic (Joe’s got to come in out of the desert and face the baddies who hold the spring or he’ll die of thirst).

  Emotional involvement covers everything from a mother’s refusal to abandon her child to a soldier’s stubborn pride in his dedication to duty.

  How do you acquire such situations and involvements for your story?

  You devise them.

  Which is to say, you use the brains and imagination God gave you to think them up.

  (4) Balance your forces.

  Put a high-school football team on the field against the Green Bay Packers, and it’s no contest.

  Same for a little old lady in a wheelchair, confronted with a two-hundred-pound homicidal maniac.

  Or a convent girl delivered into the hands of a professional pimp.

  To build to a climax, you need well-matched opponents. Neither side should have such markedly superior strength as to make the outcome a foregone conclusion.

  This is not to say that you can’t do wonders with David and Goliath. When you’re tempted to try it, however, remember one thing: David had a sling. That was his ace in the hole, the derringer up his sleeve.

  Assailed by overwhelming odds, your character, too, needs an equalizer—some trick, some angle, some trait of character that gives him at least a remote fighting chance.

  Maybe the high-school team has a science-fiction-type kid quarterback who can control passes by mental radio. Maybe the little old lady is a retired psychology professor who considers the maniac a challenge. Maybe the convent girl holds such sublime and innocent faith in the goodness of all men that she shakes even the pimp.

  And so it goes. Both forces in your story, hero and villain alike, must have the strength or cleverness or perseverance or what have you that’s needed to make their struggle a fight in fact as well as name. They must be foemen worthy of each other’s steel.

  (5) Have enough at stake.

  If I have $1.12 total in my pocket and a holdup man sticks a gun in my ribs, it won’t be too surprising if I don’t put up a fight.

  But will I surrender as easily if the sum is $9000 and it represents my aged parents’ life savings?

  Or, if I’m messenger for a hoodlum and know he’ll fit me with a concrete overcoat if I lose the money?

  Or, if I have a prized reputation as tough and dangerous that will be forever shattered if I let this cheap thug clean me?

  The more I have at stake, the greater will be the pressure on me to fight.

  The greater that pressure, the higher the tension, and the stronger the chances of building to a powerful climax.

  Nor is your focal character the only one you need to think of in these terms. Give each person in your story something at stake—so much that he fights desperately. For any man among us struggles harder if he knows his foe will kill him if he can.

  (6) Force continuing adjustments.

  Both hero and villain must continue to play dynamic roles throughout your story. Neither should become static. Each must adjust as the story progresses. Whenever one makes a move, it should evoke a countermove by the other, in a clear-cut, motivation-reaction pattern. And whenever one side seems to be making progress, it should be a signal for the other to put forth renewed effort.

  (7) Keep the action rising.

  Always arrange your scenes—or groups of scenes—in an ascending order of intensity.

  Why?

  Because the main line of your story’s development must continually increase your reader’s tension. Try merely to hold it at the same level, and Friend Reader will feel as if it’s falling off.

  Whereupon, his interest in your story will sag.

  It will help, here, if you think of your story as a series of peaks and valleys.

  The valleys we’ll take up later, when we talk about balancing your story. At this point, we’re dealing only with the peaks.

  The peaks are your scene climaxes. In general, each should carry your reader to a higher level of tension than the one before.

  That is, each should increase your reader’s foreboding of potential disaster. It should make him devastatingly aware that your focal character may not attain his goal.

  In a long story—a novelette; a novel—scenes may be grouped into larger units. Then, some scenes will be preparation, groundwork, build-up, f
oothills.

  The true peaks, in such cases, will be the climaxes of the major story segments. They’ll tower like mountains, each higher than the one which precedes it.

  How do you manage this?

  A good idea is to decide in advance which moments in your story are the big ones. That is, which blows struck against your hero are the most devastating? Which scene disasters shatter him the worst?

  Then, separate those big moments, and plan an appropriate build-up for each one. The bigger the moment, the bigger the build-up.

  Here an eye for story values can prove a crucial thing. The flamboyant, the spectacular, the cosmic mean less than nothing. Always, always, you must measure in terms of the effect the event has in relation to your focal character’s feelings and the story question. A steak dinner may be more important than a death, a quick-drawn breath more exciting than the sack of Rome.

  In the same way, crowding two climaxes too close together will drain the punch from both. And if the issue is too few climaxes versus too many, choose too few every time. Build-up can give the few importance. Too many automatically come out as melodramatic drivel. A girl may have one affair, or two, or even three, and still rate as a best-seller heroine. Push her into a dozen, and she’s judged a tramp.

  (8) Box in your hero.

  To box in our hero, restrict his freedom of choice where movement and/or course of action are concerned.

  Ordinarily, the first phase of a story gives the focal character a fair amount of leeway. Like the queen in a chess game, he can move in almost any direction he desires.

  Then, threatened, he commits himself to fight for what he wants.

  That decision blocks off a number of avenues previously open to him. Unless he’s willing to betray himself or others, he can no longer run, or ignore the situation. He must center his attention on one area of activity until his problem is solved.

  In the same way, each scene narrows his radius of action . . . cuts down on the choices he can make. Trapped in a maze of dangers and decisions, contradictions and dilemmas, he attempts one course after another, only to discover that each in its turn is a dead end. The friend he relies on betrays him. The weapon he seeks is missing. The time he needs runs out. The assumptions he makes are wrong.

  All of which increases tension . . . builds the sense of rising action in your story.

  Step by step, then, your central character is forced into a bottleneck, a funnel. Less and less frequently are there a variety of directions in which he still can turn.

  Finally, he reaches a point at which he’s restricted to a choice between two specific, concrete, alternative courses of action.

  But that’s a subject we’ll take up later. For when your hero reaches it, he’s also reached the beginning of the end.

  For now, the important thing to remember is that, in the middle stages of your story, you must be sure that this narrowing takes place. Your job is to spot holes and plug them; to foresee escape routes and block them; to cut off your hero from all apparent hope.

  If you don’t, your reader’s going to see those holes, and scream because your hero doesn’t duck out through one.

  And idiot heroes seldom please.

  (9) Drop a corpse through the roof.

  I’ve saved this point for last because, though obvious, it’s so often overlooked.

  Which is tragic, since it very often can make the difference between a pedestrian story, and one with verve and sparkle.

  The “corpse” referred to above is the unanticipated.

  More specifically, the disastrously unanticipated . . . and the unanticipatedly disastrous.

  Injection of the unanticipated is a major function of disaster in your scene pattern. So, keep your disasters disastrous! Throw in the least likely development, the startling twist! Don’t be afraid to shock or hurt your hero. He—and your readers—will thrive on such abuse. For nothing helps more to build exciting climaxes.

  If this sounds like a plea for blood and thunder, please remember that you, as a writer, are supposed to have sufficient taste and intelligence and judgment to adapt such suggestions as this to your own chosen field.—Though how much difference there is between the unanticipated as exemplified in the rawest pulps and that found in more “literary” circles is open to question, in view of some of the writings of such figures as William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Calder Willingham.

  And just in case you wonder precisely to what ultimates this matter of the unanticipated can be carried, I give you, in conclusion, an editorial communiqué I once received from my old friend Howard Browne, who now make fabulous sums of money in Hollywood, but who at the time was riding herd on a chain of pulp magazines.

  Herewith, Mr. Browne:

  I’ve got an assignment for you, keed. I want 25,000 words a month—one story—that is ACTION! The type of yarn, for instance, where a group of people are marooned in, say, a hilltop castle, with a violent storm raging and all the bridges out and the electric power gone and the roof threatening to cave in and corpses falling down the stairs and hanging in the attic and boards creaking under somebody’s weight in the dark (“Can that be the killer?”) and flashes of lightning illuminating the face of the murderer only the sonofabitch is wearing a mask that makes him look even more horrible, and finally the girl has been given into the safekeeping of the only person who is absolutely not the killer—only he turns out to be the killer, but he has taken the girl where no one can get to save her and you damn well know he is raping her while everybody stands around helpless. Do these stories in the style Burroughs used to use; you know, take one set of characters and carry them along for a chapter, putting them at the end of the chapter in such a position that nothing can save them; then take another set of characters, rescue them from their dilemma, carry them to a hell of a problem at the end of the chapter, then switch back to the first set of characters, rescue them from their deadly peril, carry them along to the end of the chapter where, once again, they are seemingly doomed; then rescue the second set of characters . . . and so on. Don’t give the reader a chance to breathe; keep him on the edge of his goddam chair all the way through. To hell with clues and smart dialogue and characterization; don’t worry about corn. GIVE ME PACE AND BANG BANG! Make me breathless, bud!

  What more can anyone say? What more could anyone want to?

  d. Do strive for balance.

  Hike up a mountain sometime. You’ll find, very shortly, that some slopes are steeper than others; some trails more devious or difficult. Here, you’ll move slowly . . . there, swiftly. And up ahead you’ll want to stop and rest and catch your breath.

  A story is like that mountain. You don’t present it all in the same manner or at the same pace. A pulse of tension runs through it—here, strong and vibrant; there, more relaxed.

  Thus, the main line of the action—the development from climax to climax—continually rises. Your focal character stands in ever greater danger. So, the peak of each major story segment, whether scene or group of scenes, is higher—more tense; more exciting—than the one before.

  But if you attempt to maintain this same high level of excitement between the peaks, your reader soon becomes exhausted. Overstimulated, continually under experiential and emotional bombardment, he loses his sense of proportion and, quite possibly, quits reading out of sheer fatigue.

  So, you give him a chance to rest a bit along the way. Between peaks, you let him relax.

  You do this in the moments that follow each disaster.

  That is, you slow the pace, reduce the tension, in those portions of your story that are termed sequel: reaction to disaster, read-justment to changed situation, search for new goal or approach, groundwork and build-up, preliminary feints and thrusts and conflicts.

  In other words, you balance your peaks, your climaxes, with valleys.

  How?

  The first step is to devise ways to build your big moments, your climaxes, to the desired heights.

  Here are five of the man
y tools that help you do this:

  (1) Group as much significant action as possible into each scene.

  Too often, a writer is tempted to set forth his story in a loosely connected series of simple, trivial scenes.

  A simple scene may show your focal character try to persuade his girl’s mother to tell him why Sophronia has ditched him. Failing to get satisfaction from her, he tackles Sophie’s father . . . then her brother.

  String the three scenes together, and odds are that you rack up more length than tension.

  On the other hand, if your focal character starts on Mama . . . whereupon Papa charges in and orders Mama to keep quiet and Character to leave the house . . . and Character tries to pressure Papa into talking . . . only just then Brother enters and assaults Character—well, you may find you’ve built to quite a peak.

  All of which is not to say that the simple, uncomplicated scene doesn’t have a place. But for climax purposes, you’ll get more mileage from units in which you arrange and compress your material in a manner designed to achieve maximum effect.

  (2) Make the situation demand action.

  A buzzing fly is an annoyance. A buzzing rattlesnake encourages you to do something about him.

  In general, the more dangerous a situation, the more important it looms in your character’s eyes, and the more inclined he is to take action.

  Action begets reaction and conflict, and the better are your chances, out of it, to build a big scene.

  The inconsequential, in contrast, lacks red blood and vitamins. It’s unlikely to provide a basis for any major climax.

  (3) Increase time pressure.

  If the above-mentioned rattlesnake sounds off as you cross your yard at dusk, you’ll probably put off hunting him till morning. If he’s in the same room with you, you feel a degree of impulse to do something right now.

  Which is why urgency helps, ever and always, when it’s time to build a climax.

  (4) Foreshadow your story’s climax.