Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Often, too, it takes as long to plan a story as it does to write it. A week of such preparation, for a short story, may prove none too much.

  All this is an individual matter, though. Some writers are facile, others clumsy. This one works fast, that one slow.

  So, find your own pace. Start with minimal demands; then work up.

  But do produce. For a writer is, by definition, one who writes.

  (4) Have a place to work.

  There are books on the shelf next to your desk. Fascinating books, that you love to read. Outside your window, you can see white sails skimming down the lake, or watch the lights come on along the Sunset Strip, or marvel at snow sparkling on an Ozark hillside.

  Is this your picture of a writer’s workroom?

  It’s also a prelude to disaster.

  Why?

  Because, believe me, you’ll read the books . . . gaze out the window.

  What you really need is a windowless, bookless, distractionless gray room.

  It will help if this room isn’t even in your home. An office is a legitimate income-tax deduction. It frees you from family pressures and interruptions.

  Keep its location a secret, and friends won’t be tempted to drop by either.

  Equipment? Desk, chair, typewriter, blank paper, carbon, pencils. Maybe a lounge chair, if you like to sit at ease while you scribble notes or edit copy. And lamps, since good lighting is essential to a writer.

  Probably you should have a dictionary and thesaurus too . . . if you’ll discipline yourself not to read them as an escape from writing.—Yes, a writer can read even a dictionary for entertainment. I’ve seen it done.

  Most important of all, when you enter your workroom (or work area, if it’s just a corner of the bedroom), it should be for purposes of production only. Again, habit is the issue. If you sit down at your desk only to write, you establish a conditioning that will help you.

  (5) Eliminate distractions.

  Some writers work nights, instead of days.

  Why?

  Because night offers fewer distractions. The noise and bustle of day are gone. Darkness closes in, like a protective mantle.

  Result: more copy.

  Schedule is a matter of personal preference, however. Some people work better in the morning, or the afternoon. The only way to find out your own best time is to experiment.

  Whatever your choice, distraction still remains an irritating problem. It consists of anything that draws your attention from your work.

  Thus, an uncomfortable chair constitutes a distraction. So does a too-low desk, or a flickering light, or a too-warm or too-cold room, or a typewriter with keys that stick, or squeaking floor boards in the hall outside your door.

  Whenever you become aware of such annoyances, do something about them if at all possible.

  Often, the solution is no more involved than purchase of a new ribbon for your old mill, or moving your desk into a corner so that you face blank wall instead of open window, or installation of a small electric fan to muffle encroaching echoes of sound.

  On the other hand, there are things in this life you can’t control.

  When such arise, remember your grandmother’s line about “What can’t be cured must be endured,” and condition yourself to ignore the situation. A newspaper city room resembles a madhouse, on occasion, but reporters still turn out their copy. Whole books have been written on subway trains, in ships’ forecastles, or while bouncing a baby on one hip. If you want to write badly enough, you’ll get the job done somehow.

  (6) Don’t push too hard.

  Once upon a time there was a writer. Because he was a competent craftsman, he prided himself on his ability to deliver precisely what an editor asked, no matter how short the notice or great the pressure.

  Magazines liked that attitude. Soon Our Boy was the man they called when, in crisis, they needed a 20,000-word cover piece by Monday morning.

  Since such rush jobs often carried double or even triple rates, Writer felt very pleased with himself, not to mention prosperous.

  That is, he felt thus until, one day, it dawned on him that maybe the pride was misplaced and the profit not quite so great, if you stopped to consider that he ended each story so knocked out that he couldn’t work at all for two or three weeks after.

  The lesson here is that, although you can outdo yourself on a short-time basis, you pay for it later.

  In the same way, if you push yourself too hard, day in and day out, you become tired and bored.

  Especially bored.

  Boredom is born of conflict: You’re doing one thing, but you wish—even if unconsciously—that you were doing something else.

  How does this apply to writers?

  Writing is hard work . . . work that makes strenuous demands on your unconscious.

  Said Unconscious goes along. But it wants reward for effort.

  If no reward comes . . . if you press too hard, if you drive too long, if you insist on labor without respite . . . Unconscious balks.

  Try to force the issue then, and you may end up in real trouble.

  And we wouldn’t want that to happen to you, would we?

  (7) Stay alive.

  Life is a writer’s raw material.

  Successful writers immerse themselves in it.

  To that end, you read. You travel. You shop. You loaf on street corners. You go to ball games. You visit friends. You attend parties. You work in church or civic club or Boy Scout troop.

  In other words, you contact people. All kinds of people, without regard to age or sex or social stratum; the wider the range, the better.

  No aspect of your work is more important. Ignore it, and you must face the unhappy plight met too often by the older person who decides he wants to write.

  Frequently, this older person stopped reading fiction twenty years ago. Result: His ideas on style are hopelessly outmoded.

  Worse, his friends, his attitudes, his allusions and his idiom all are drawn from his own age group. His world is one of age, not youth.

  Yet to 71 per cent of our citizenry, World War I is something you read about in history books. Sixty-four per cent don’t remember Prohibition. Even the Korean War is dead past to 22 per cent.

  This creates a problem for the older person: How does he make contact with young readers?

  Most often, he doesn’t. The gap between him and them is too wide to bridge.

  In fact, ordinarily you don’t make contact with anyone, as a writer. You keep it. Every day.

  And you do it by staying alive.

  (8) Get enough exercise.

  Writing is an appallingly sedentary occupation.

  In addition, it builds nervous tension.

  Put those two facts together, and you have a basis for all kinds of trouble, from obesity to the screaming mimis.

  What do you do about it?

  You exercise.

  That doesn’t mean pushups, necessarily, or handball. But it does mean getting out into the open . . . walking along the beach in early, pearl-gray morning . . . taking an afternoon off to sun and swim . . . venting your hostilities on the weeds, if you’re a gardener . . . bicycling, fishing, hunting, golfing, riding, boating.

  This is time well spent. Allow for it in your schedule. Your work will benefit, not suffer. You’ll eat better, sleep better, relax easier. The plot problem that tied knots in your stomach before you dived into the pool will somehow have resolved itself by the time you sit down at the typewriter again. Raw-nerved touchiness and acid temper fade away as you chop wood or mow the lawn.

  In fact, you might even come up with an idea for a new story!

  b. How to revise; and when.

  A first-draft story ordinarily is a lumpy, awkward thing.

  To shape it up, you must rework it.

  Mystery writer Margery Allingham states the issue this way: “I write everything four times: once to get my meaning down, once to put in everything I left out, once to take out everything that seems unnece
ssary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it.”

  Reworking a story involves two processes. One, here termed revision, deals with structural change. The second, to be taken up later, centers on language, and is called polishing.

  Successful revision requires that you perform three operations, separately or simultaneously:

  (1) See that the story goes in a straight line.

  That is, make sure it centers on the story question.

  You can check this with a little private quiz game:

  (a) Does the story question define the issue?

  “Can Loretta Kloman, lone Negro teacher in a white high school, prove her competence, when the racist coach urges her pupils to walk out on her?” is a good story question. It brings objective into head-on collision with opposition.

  Leave desire (Loretta’s determination to prove her competence) or danger (the fear that her pupils will walk out on her) vague and unformulated, and your whole story may grow weak and fuzzy.

  (b) Can the story question be answered “yes” or “no”?

  Let Loretta seek to “prove that Negroes are as good as whites,” and you have a question that can’t be resolved in fiction.

  Why not?

  Because you’ve shifted the issue from a test of individual worth to a debate on anthropological or sociological theory.

  Similarly, if your story question deals primarily with process (“How can Loretta prove . . .” etc.), you switch emphasis from feeling to intellect, emotion to puzzle.

  You’re better off to stick with a pattern that focuses down to a definite “yes” or “no.”

  (c) Is the story question established early?

  Loretta’s objective, and Coach Wilding’s opposition, and Loretta’s decision to fight, should come on stage as soon as possible . . . preferably in the very first scene.

  If they don’t, the opening will drag.

  (d) Does each and every incident you include have some clear-cut bearing on the story question?

  Discursiveness is a peril for all of us. Incorporate a love scene between Loretta and her boy friend, with no reference to the school situation in speech or thought or feeling on either side, and you waste words better devoted to some aspect of the story question.

  (e) Is development close-knit and logical from scene to scene?

  If it isn’t, it means that the disaster in the preceding scene hasn’t been devastating enough to preoccupy Loretta with the need to find a new goal.

  Thus, the theft of Loretta’s lunch-box might rate as an irritation, but it won’t force her to revise her thinking about her situation. Whereas Bucko Wilding’s belligerent demand that other teachers leave her table, when she sits down in the school cafeteria, and the other teachers’ compliance, will increase her fears . . . perhaps even tempt her to quit her job on the spot.

  (f) Is the question answered at the climax?

  Your story needn’t solve all of Loretta’s problems. But if you end with her still in doubt as to her competence, her ability to meet and control her class, there’s no release of tension, and your reader has a right to irritation.

  (g) Does your hero’s climactic act decide the issue?

  We’ve reached the story’s climax. The kids in Loretta’s class are on their feet to leave. She’s floundering, in deep trouble.

  Now, enter the principal. In a ringing speech on duty, tolerance, brotherhood and Americanism, he appeals to the class to stay with Loretta. Whereupon, the kids sit down again.

  O.K.?

  No, no, no!

  Why not?

  Because God, in the shape of the principal, saves the day. Loretta herself does nothing . . . performs no climactic act to prove that she’s worthy of reward.

  And that, dear friends, is a cardinal sin indeed in fiction!

  (h) Does the resolution tie up all loose ends?

  The answer to any story question leaves an aftermath of minor issues. If you don’t at least hint as to their outcome, your resolution won’t completely satisfy your reader.

  In our hypothetical story, for example, there’s bound to be curiosity as to what happens to Bucko Wilding. So, don’t leave it hanging.

  And that’s enough attention to the tricks of checking story line. Now, let’s move on to the second aspect of revision:

  (2) See that the story builds from beginning to end.

  Here, the issue is proportion. A ten-page beginning to a twenty-page story is like opening a kids’ cap-gun war with the blast of an actual hand grenade.

  In the same way, a story whose big scene comes in the middle isn’t likely to get you much; and neither is one that features two tremendous climaxes in succession at the end.

  You must space your crises and keep your peaks of tension rising!

  (3) See that your reader cares what happens to your hero.

  The key to identification is desire, and it works two ways.

  Thus, no one cares what happens to the character who wants nothing.

  And if nothing stands between him and his goal—that is, if he faces no danger, no opposition—again, he’s a dead duck so far as your reader is concerned.

  Therefore, check force and counterforce in every scene. Build up the struggle. Emphasize what’s at stake . . . its subjective importance to your hero.

  In addition, remember that your reader looks for some element of personality in your hero that he himself would like to possess. It’s your job to provide it.

  So much for our three points.

  Are they the only items you need to check when you revise?

  By no means; for every story offers different problems.

  However, our list does cover the key issues. And you can always fall back on Chapter 6: Beginning, Middle, End, and Chapter 7: The People in Your Story, if you grow confused.

  Finally, there’s one special hazard in revision: the tendency to substitute it for new stories.

  Thus, too often, when a story is rejected, Writer decides that it must be revised.

  Maybe he’s right. Maybe it really needs reworking.

  But if this happens more than occasionally, he should begin to suspect his motives.

  Why?

  Because writing, as before mentioned, can be devilishly hard work. For some people especially, playing with an already-completed product comes easier.

  The solution?

  Once a story is mailed, forget it. No matter how bad you decide it is, in afterthought, let it go out at least five times before you change it.

  That is, unless an editor suggests that you rework it.

  In which case, boy, get busy!

  c. Polishing the product.

  A story communicates emotion.

  To that end, it uses language.

  Whereupon, a question arises: Does the language used really say what you want it to say? Does it convey the precise nuances of meaning you seek to pass on to your reader?

  Unless it does—and it seldom will, in first-draft copy—you need to give it further polish.

  Specifically, you need to check and correct it, line by line, for:

  (1) Clarity.

  To be clear is to be distinct; plain; easily and correctly understood.

  All of which is more simply defined in the abstract than it is put to use when you deal with the specific and concrete.

  Thus, does your reader really know what “talus” is . . . how a harpsichord sounds . . . the function of a Zoomar lens? Because you visualize a girl as of a certain type, or picture a door in a particular place in your mind’s eye, do you neglect to establish them as vividly for the audience with description? Are you sure each sentence is so written that the “he” refers beyond question to hero or villain, as the case may be?

  If not . . . you need to clarify your meaning.

  (2) Clutter.

  In simplicity lies strength. Qualify anything too fussily, and you lose the forest in the trees. Explanation and interjection can bog a story down.

 
All those intriguing adjectives and adverbs! They lure us. We purr to the sonority of the convoluted sentence . . . rolling on, rolling on. Alliteration beckons, and so does metonymy, and a hundred other devices pressed into the service of self-conscious stylism. Why limit yourself to a simple statement, when fifty words will befuddle your reader so much more neatly and completely?

  The remedy for clutter is simple: Get down to work with that blue pencil! Say what you have to say, briefly and to the point. Draw the picture cleanly and vividly, but don’t embellish it with unnecessary words and phrases. Forego the purple prose. Your job is to tell a story!

  (3) Consistency.

  Does Rita have black hair on page three, brown on page seven? Is the sky overcast one moment . . . your character squinting against the sun the next? Have you planted the gun in the desk drawer on page twelve, so that its presence won’t startle your reader when Babette snatches it at the climax?

  These all are problems of consistency. Failure to check them out may spoil a story for your reader.

  (4) Sequence.

  “He turned, hearing the knock at the door.”

  Actually, of course, the knock came first.

  Motivating stimulus always precedes character reaction, in proper copy. When it doesn’t, you’re faced with confusion of sequential order.

  Correct it, or the passage will strike an awkward, jerky note.

  (5) Flow.

  “Standing there by the grave, he nodded gravely.”

  The repetition sticks out like a sore thumb.

  “Standing there beside her in the cemetery, he nodded gravely.”

  Now we’ve come up with an inadvertent pun, and that’s even worse than repetition.

  “Standing there beside her in the polyandrium, he nodded soberly.”

  O.K., so the writer owns an unabridged dictionary. But does the reader?

  All these examples represent disruptions of flow.