Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Swain, Dwight V.

  You’ll find them in the next chapter.

  CHAPTER 8

  Preparation, Planning, Production

  A story is the triumph of ego over fear of failure.

  The best observation anyone can make on preparation, planning, and production is that everyone has a God-given right to go to hell in his own way—and don’t let anyone kid you out of yours.

  The greatest talent in writing is nerve: You bet your ego that your unconscious has something in it beside dinner.

  Ignorance must be defeated in the process, and inertia also. The true recipe for writing success is that laid down by dramatist Jerome Lawrence: “You’ve gotta get up very early some morning five years ago.”

  So, now, the alarm clock is ringing. What do you do about it?

  1. You learn what it means to be a writer.

  2. You learn how to recognize good story material.

  3. You learn how to prepare to write a story.

  4. You learn your own best way to plan it.

  5. You learn how to get out copy.

  Each of these aspects of creative work involves a variety of problems. Taken a step at a time, however, none of them is too difficult to master.

  Shall we dive in?

  On being a writer

  To become a writer, you first must be capable of emotional involvement.

  That is, you must feel, and feel intensely. Though you work with language, the words you use are only symbols . . . means to the end of communication of emotion.

  You can’t communicate that which you yourself lack. No feeling, no story.

  To feel, in practical terms, means to react . . . to desire to behave in a particular way. Given the right stimulus, things happen inside you. Awareness vibrates—assorted gradations of like, dislike, surprise.

  If no such response takes place, or if it comes through on too low a level, give up. You’ll never make it as a writer.

  On the other hand, don’t cross yourself off the list of candidates for authorship too quickly. Everyone feels, to some degree. Further, the very fact that you want to write is a good omen. To desire, to yearn, itself demonstrates a capacity for involvement. Restraint, indifference, apathy—in major measure, they’re all learned responses; habit patterns. With sufficient perseverance, and at least in part, you can break them down.

  Which brings us back to where we started: Writing springs from feeling.

  What comes next?

  To succeed as a writer:

  a. You must be enthusiastic.

  Why is enthusiasm so important?

  Because writing is murderously hard, lonely, frustrating work, upon occasion. Unless a project excites you to begin with, odds are you’ll stand ready to slash your wrists before it’s done.—Maybe you will anyhow, as a matter of fact. But at least, with enthusiasm, you improve the percentages a little.

  How do you acquire enthusiasm?

  Enthusiasm is an emotional response, a feeling. Outside stimuli spark it.

  These stimuli come from your story’s topic, its subject matter—love in Manhattan or Okmulgee, murder in a hospital, war in Vietnam, smuggling in the Big Bend country, ambition and jealousy in business.

  To build enthusiasm, you search for aspects of your topic that excite you . . . immerse yourself in factual raw material till you find some unique something about which you can be fervent. Inspiration springs from saturation. No one can write for long out of his own unsustained unconscious. Emotion is an element which that unconscious can supply, virtually without limit; but it must have stimulating facts—about people, about events, about setting, about objects or what have you—upon which to feed.

  b. You must be sincere.

  Sophistry is a subtle poison. The story that falsifies your emotional standards, your convictions, does you infinitely more harm than any editor’s check can compensate.

  Why?

  Because a story is in essence a parable. Though you set it on Mars and cast it with bug-eyed monsters, the message it conveys is deepest truth.

  That truth is you. On an unconscious level, it reflects your innermost feelings.

  The story which by implication proves that promiscuity is good clean fun, or honor a fraud, or duty and honesty outmoded, when you really believe the opposite, makes you one with the prostitute who simulates ecstasy for money. Hypocrisy moves you over into the ranks of the constitutional psychopath, the con man.

  Result: emotional conflict. Conscience joins battle with creativity.

  Then, one day, you freeze up so tightly that you can’t write at all, and another career goes down the drain.

  c. You must be self-disciplined.

  No one really gives a damn if you don’t make it as a writer.

  No one, that is to say, except you yourself.

  Further, no one’s going to pay you for the stories you don’t write.

  This means you have to be your own taskmaster. If you’re not up to the job, you can always sack groceries for a living, in a store where someone else tells you what to do and when to do it.

  To succeed as a writer means getting up in the morning, even when you’d rather sleep.

  It means working when you’d much prefer to take in a movie or go swimming.—Really working, too; not just staring, trancelike, out the window.

  It’s your decision.

  d. You must be yourself.

  “I was surprised,” Somerset Maugham remarks in A Writer’s Notebook, “when a friend of mine told me he was going over a story he had just finished to put more subtlety into it; I didn’t think it my business to suggest that you couldn’t be subtle by taking thought. Subtlety is a quality of the mind, and if you have it you show it because you can’t help it. It’s like originality: no one can be original by trying. The original artist is only being himself; he puts things in what seems to him a perfectly normal and obvious way: because it’s fresh and new to you you say he’s original. He doesn’t know what you mean. How stupid are those second-rate painters, for instance, who can’t but put paint on their canvas in a dull and commonplace way and think to impress the world with their originality by placing meaningless and incongruous objects against an academic background.”

  It’s hard to accept yourself for what you are, sometimes. No one likes to admit to inadequacy or limitation.

  But a mask is difficult to hold in place, on paper. It keeps slipping out of line. The truth pops forth, in spite of all your efforts.

  You’re better off to face the facts at the beginning. Ben Hecht was no Virginia Woolf, nor was Woolf a Eugene Ionesco. Herman Wouk, Erle Stanley Gardner, and A. J. Cronin each found his place.

  They did it by being themselves, not fakes or copyists.

  Strength is in each of us, as well as limitation. Call your shots the way you see them, and you give the world a chance to rate you and your talents realistically.

  Whereupon, your reader may like the way you write in spite of all your lacks, just because that way is individual and different.

  Material, good and bad

  Some years ago, a scholar at a leading university made it his hobby to translate French fables of an earlier day.

  But hobbies have a way of getting out of hand. Soon Scholar yearned for a public for his efforts.

  An acquaintance remarked that a certain magazine occasionally carried translations from the French.

  Our man had never seen this publication. But he promptly sent its editor a batch of his best work.

  Enter happenstance. The magazine was one of the most ribald journals ever to sully the nation’s newsstands. The editor, with perverse humor, accepted the fables and ran one each month, sandwiched in between naughty nudes and bawdy ballads. Each carried the good professor’s name and full academic pedigree, and mirth and embarrassment were the order of the day on his campus when word got round.

  The lesson here is that material is neither good nor bad, per se. You must rate it in terms of the reaction it evokes from a given market, a specific reader.

&
nbsp; Thus, this entire book has been designed to give you a standard by which you may judge story.

  As you read current books and magazines, however, you’ll soon see that not all fiction fits this pattern.

  The reason is simple: There are two ways to acquire a reputation as a good marksman.

  The first is to draw a target on some appropriate surface, then shoot at it and hit the bull’s-eye.

  The second is to fire at the surface to begin with, and afterwards draw target around the spot where the bullet hit.

  In the same way, it has become the habit of the literary world to apply the term “story” to any pleasant or intriguing fragment of writing which involves fictional characters and/or situations. Sketches, vignettes, anecdotes, word photography, and all sorts of other curiosa are so described.

  In consequence, we have good stories and bad, weak stories and strong, stories appealing to one reader and those appealing to another. So whatever you write, you quite possibly will find someone, somewhere—even a distinguished critic, perhaps—who’ll proclaim it a story.

  Further, there are complex non-literary matters which an editor must take into account: readership, available space, “house image,” business-office pressures, and the like.

  It follows that recognition of good story material involves much more than evaluation of how a given piece of fiction will shape up. For while such evaluation is ever so important, it becomes truly helpful only as it’s related to market, with due consideration given to the editor’s problems.

  To this end, ask yourself three questions:

  a. Is this material too diffuse and/or complex?

  Here, the issue is length. Some stories may be told in few words. Some take many.

  Each market, in turn, has its own standards. There are magazines that won’t touch a yarn that runs over 1500 words. A hardback publisher is unlikely to boggle at a 100,000-word novel.

  This being the case, it’s only common sense to correlate material and market.

  Factors to be considered include:

  (1) Scope.

  It’s hard to deal with a whole war in a short story. The social movement of a family, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, is bound to demand wordage.

  (2) Strength.

  A girl worries about whether or not a particular boy will ask her for a prom date.

  Will such an idea carry a short-short? Sure thing.

  A short story? Probably.

  A novelette? Weak.

  A novel? Ridiculous.

  (3) Complexity.

  Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything interweaves the romances of five New York career girls. Such an involved tale demands novel length.

  Does your story make it essential that you use three different viewpoints? Each time you switch, you’ll have to re-establish emotional tension . . . and such re-establishment eats up pages.

  The more characters you use, and the more fully they’re developed, the longer your story will run.

  Same for settings.

  (4) Passage of time.

  A man dies at the age of eighty. To tell the story of his life adequately in all likelihood will take a novel.

  How he in one day met and won the girl he married may make a 3000-word short story.

  In general, the longer your story’s time span, and the more events you deal with, and the more scenes you develop, the longer that story will have to be.

  b. Does this material fit the philosophy of your reader?

  Why does a story please one man and displease another, even though its subject may be a favorite of both?

  The core reason is that the man displeased disagrees with certain of the author’s basic assumptions . . . his personal philosophy, the way he views the world. Whereas, the man pleased agrees.

  Often, neither reader nor author is even aware that such assumptions exist. They’re things taken for granted, not even the subject of conscious thought.

  Thus, this book jumps to all sorts of wild conclusions.

  For example, I start from the idea that you write in large measure to please a reader.

  Some people don’t agree.

  —And on that issue, I can’t resist quoting a statement by John Fischer that recently appeared in Harper’s:

  Among serious fiction writers, one large group now seem (in the words of a veteran publisher) to be “more concerned with self-expression than with entertaining the public.” [British novelist Geoffrey] Wagner defines them as the poetic novelists. With them, and with most of the critics who make “serious” literary reputations, storytelling has become disreputable. Their main concern is with sensibility, with the inner drama of the psyche, not with the large events of the outside world. Often they are accomplished craftsmen. Their style is luminously burnished . . . they write on two levels, or even three . . . their work contains more symbols than a Chinese band . . . it may plumb the depths of the human soul . . . it may be (in Felicia Lamport’s phrase) as deeply felt as a Borsalino hat. But all too often it just isn’t much fun to read.

  If such exercises in occupational therapy don’t sell very well, the author has small grounds for complaint. He has written them, after all, primarily to massage his own ego and to harvest critico-academic bay leaves. Since he isn’t interested in a mass audience, why should it be interested in him?

  Back to our point:

  I also assume that readers like form. I think they prefer a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

  Most do. But not all.

  Again, I take it for granted that said readers believe man possesses at least a degree of free will, that they like active characters better than passive, and that they think a cause-effect relationship exists between what you do and what you get.

  Some voices would dissent.

  This list could go on thus for pages. But the point, I trust, is already clear: Each market, consciously or unconsciously, represents a particular philosophy of life.

  The stories it buys reaffirm that philosophy.

  Further, the issue reaches far beyond mere literary technique. McCall’s believes in premarital chastity. Playboy approves of sexual freedom. Grove Press takes the avant-garde view. Double-day aims more toward popular appeal.

  All of which is something to consider when you evaluate story material.

  Does this mean you should tailor your own beliefs to fit a given market?

  Well, hardly. It makes more sense to hunt markets that see the world the same way you do.

  c. Does this material fit your market’s needs?

  Shall we talk common sense for just a little while?

  Closely related to philosophy, yet by no means precisely the same, each magazine has a personality all its own.

  This personality is compounded of reader interests, editorial taste, and ad-department pressure.

  Drop the advertising angle, and the same statement applies to book houses.

  If you’re eager to hit some special market, it’s only good judgment to consider this personality factor. Rogue and Secrets and Redbook buy vastly different stories. The novel that bears Little, Brown’s imprint isn’t likely to be of a type to win a place at Gold Medal, or vice versa.

  How do you familiarize yourself with a given market’s tastes and rules?

  You read what that market publishes.

  In quantity.

  Particularly, you pay attention to:

  (1) Age of characters.

  Ordinarily, character age reflects audience and, even more important, the publisher’s compulsive striving to build a readership.

  The young adult is king in most magazines. Advertisers see him as a big buyer, not yet set in his spending habits.

  The publisher reads this fact as an equation: Young-adult readers equal advertising equal profits.

  Young-adult characters attract young-adult readers. Q.E.D.

  Obversely, stories that feature older characters are notoriously hard to sell.

  Though not to such a ma
rked degree, the same pattern is found in the book field.

  Why?

  Because young adults tend to buy and read more books than do their elders.

  There are exceptions aplenty to generalizations such as this, of course. And if you’re good enough, you can throw any rule away.

  But over-all, and whether you like the idea or not, it does pay to think young.

  (2) Sex of characters.

  It should be obvious to anyone, it seems, but I still find plenty of would-be writers who don’t realize that male-viewpoint stories sell more readily in men’s markets, female-viewpoint in women’s.

  Take the confession field. Sure, True Story or Modern Romances or Secret Diary buy yarns with male central characters. But they probably publish five times as many in which women play the leading roles.

  (3) Settings.

  Does your chosen market prefer exotic backgrounds, or familiar? Glamorous, or everyday?

  Again, consistent reading gives you the answer.

  One point of caution, however: Historical settings find few takers these days, especially in the magazines.

  (4) Categories.

  The western is always with us, and so is the mystery, the science-fiction yarn, the doctor-nurse story, the romance.

  Such category fiction offers a special hazard, though: Readers of a particular genre frequently are fans.

  That means they’ve read widely in the field. They know the clichés, the worn-out plots, the too-familiar patterns.

  Consequently, unless you know the area equally well, you’ll waste endless hours writing yarns doomed in advance to rejection because they feature the vengeance trail, the range war, the locked room, the biter-bit, atomic doom, the interplanetary travelogue, or the like.

  Don’t let the fact that old hands get away with such fool you, either. The long-time professional has other elements working on his side. Whereas the beginner is expected to come up with something fresh.

  On the financial front, profitable pickings from the categories tend to be slim in the magazine field. Probably it’s because the TV series have so largely taken over.