Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Your copy should read smoothly, and without attracting undue attention to your use of language. To that end, you try to select the right word, the right sound, the right connotation, the right combination for rhythm and pacing and balance. When too many long sentences fall together, you break them up. Are too many short? You check to make sure they don’t sound choppy.

  —Unless choppiness is the effect you seek, that is.

  How do you train yourself to spot the literary awkwardness that breaks up flow?

  You follow the same technique by which you avoid using barracks idiom at Aunt Matilda’s tea: You cultivate awareness of language and its nuances.

  (6) Impact.

  Timing, word placement, makes a world of difference, whether in a joke or in a story.

  Thus, “Sympathy is what one girl offers another in exchange for details” makes a good gag-line, because the punch, the unanticipated twist, is at the very end.

  Would it be as amusing if you said, “When one girl offers another sympathy, the details of what happened are demanded in return”?

  The technique of building impact is a fine art indeed. One wrong or extra word inserted, or one key word misplaced or left out, and what should be a bomb can sound like the backfire of a car a block away.

  Perhaps the best way to learn timing is to practice telling jokes.

  Don’t just repeat; experiment with your phrasings endlessly. It may make your friends groan for a while, but every laugh you coax will increase your skill at adding impact to your copy.

  (7) Idiosyncrasy.

  To some teen-agers, everything is “swell” or “square” or “tough” or “cool” or “greasy.”

  Being people, writers too sometimes fall into bad habits.

  —Dashes can become such a habit. So can elipses . . . not to mention unnecessary Capitals (or parenthetical insertions) or exclamation points!

  How about you? Has “febrile” become your favorite adjective? Are “thickly” or “numbly” or “fiercely” adverbs too often used? Is the villain forever heavy-footed? Do the heroine’s breasts rise and fall too fast on every other page?

  It’s something to think about.

  A writer can devote a lifetime to mastering the tricks and techniques of polishing his copy.

  He should.

  He can spend days on end honing and burnishing a single paragraph or page.

  And that’s another matter.

  How so?

  Again, Somerset Maugham sums up the issue. “One fusses about style,” he comments in A Writer’s Notebook. “One tries to write better. One takes pains to be simple, clear and succinct. One aims at rhythm and balance. One reads a sentence aloud to see if it sounds well. One sweats one’s guts out. The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently. It proves that if you can tell stories, create character, devise incidents, and if you have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. All the same it’s better to write well than ill.”

  d. The not-so-gentle art of cutting.

  The letter says, “. . . so, we’d be most interested in having another look at this story, if you can get it down to three thousand words.”

  What do you do now?

  You cut.

  What do you cut?

  You cut facts.

  More specifically, you do not cut emotion.

  This is the heart of the issue, believe me. As such, it’s also the reason why a great many revisions are rejected.

  When a beginner cuts, it’s his tendency to lop out feeling, every time.

  That is, he hangs onto his trees or his wharves or his buildings. He clings to the routine incident in the railroad station, the bit with the bootlegger, the explanation of precisely how a carillon is played.

  What he throws away is character reaction.

  But a story isn’t facts. Rather, the truly vital element is how a specific somebody feels about the data; reacts to them.

  These feelings are what move the story forward. Eliminate them, and the story stands still and dies.

  To cut, yet hang onto these so-essential feelings, the trick often is to consolidate and regroup the facts. Maybe Character can react to a mountain scene as a whole, a panorama, instead of to trees and rocks and brooks and purple shadows separately. Dock Street’s wharves and fog and smells and murky alleys are less important than the chill of fear your hero feels as he strides along the broken sidewalk. You can leave out all sorts of description of glass and stainless steel, if you confide that the building is one of those that make the old man long nostalgically for 1890.

  In the same way, if the railway-station scene represents little save passage of time and movement through space, it’s possible that you can drop it altogether. Same for bootlegger and carillonneur, unless the parts they play are truly vital in the shaping of somebody’s feelings.

  So much for the general principle. Now, here are two specific rules:

  (1) For limited cuts, trim words and phrases.

  Blue-pencil an adjective here, an adverb there, an explanatory clause or rambling sentence or discursive paragraph on down the line, and two or three hundred words can be stripped from almost any manuscript. It’s often well-nigh painless. And it’s almost certain to sharpen up and so benefit your story.

  (2) For major cuts, drop scenes or characters.

  Carry a word-trim too far and your story thins, from loss of detail and imagery.

  Elimination of a minor scene, on the other hand, may save you two or three pages, without affecting the color of the story as a whole.

  In the same way, dropping a character takes out lines and paragraphs with a minimum of pain.

  In either case, however, there will be a disruption of story balance. To remedy it often demands that you reappraise and rewrite most carefully.

  e. The psychology of production.

  “In the good hours when words are flowing well,” remarks Herman Wouk, famed author of The Caine Mutiny, “it seems there is hardly a pleasanter way to spend one’s time on earth.”

  How true. Production gives a writer his greatest satisfaction.

  Only then Wouk adds, “Never mind the bad hours. There is no life without them.”

  Well, as a philosophical attitude, that’s fine. But what a working writer needs when he’s stalled is help; practical help.

  Specifically, what’s he to do when, for some mysterious reason, he can’t get out the copy?

  This is by no means an uncommon situation. Every professional has experienced it, at one period or another. Sometimes it lasts for weeks, or even months. Depression—both financial and emotional—comes with it, and panic . . . maybe even the end of a career.

  Actually, the whole problem stems from one simple fact: Writers, too, are people.

  Being people, the fear of failure lives in all of us, on one level or another.

  Anything that frustrates us or makes us feel inadequate may bring that fear surging to the surface.

  When that happens, self-doubt takes over. Consciously or otherwise, projecting your fears into your copy, you begin to wonder whether said copy really can be any good, when you yourself are such a failure.

  A bad review can trigger such a mood. Likewise, a rejection. Introduction to a more successful writer may make you wonder if he hasn’t some mysterious something that you lack. A sneer, a barbed joke, an inept compliment which Ego interprets as a slight—each holds the potential of undermining confidence.

  Nor need the trigger be associated with your work. Inability to get proper service from a waiter can plunge you into a black mood. A child’s question—“Why can’t we have a new car, Daddy?”—or a wife’s sigh over an expensive gown in a shop window have been known to start writers on a downward spiral. Divorce is notorious for its shattering effect.

  Thus, you need not face actual disapproval or rejection. It’s enough that you interpret what happens
in derogatory terms, even on an unconscious level.

  Whereupon, because you’re already critical of self and unsure in your talent, you involuntarily question the worth of the work you do.

  Consider, for example, the not-untypical case of a man with an overeager agent.

  Writer has for years made a decent enough living from paperback science-fiction novels. Agent, aware of Writer’s talent and dazzled by visions of greater profit, urges him to move over into the hardback field.

  “This stuff you do is nothing,” Agent presses. “A big book with literary quality—that’s what you need to tackle.”

  Writer laughs it off. “I’m doing all right,” he says. “Science fiction’s fun. It’s what I’m geared to.”

  But the laughter has a hollow ring: “This stuff you do is nothing.” That’s what the man said.

  The words fall against a backdrop of irksome memory: snide remarks from an aging poetess . . . the disdain evinced by the young English professor who genuflects at the altar of the Kenyon Review . . . a tendency of friends to treat Writer as an amusing kook because his specialty is science fiction.

  And now, his agent joins the pack.

  On the surface, Writer shrugs it off. But a knot begins to tighten in his belly.

  Finally, one day, he sits down at the typewriter—and no words come.

  Why?

  Because, without even being aware of it, Writer suddenly has become critical of his own work.

  You can’t be both creative and critical at the same time. They’re opposing forces. Catch a writer between them, and they tear him apart.

  And that gives us our first rule:

  (1) Separate creative impulse from critical judgment.

  How do you do this?

  The first and most essential step is to recognize the human tendency to attempt to mix the two.

  Then, walk wide around it.

  To that end, adopt a working rule of “Create now . . . correct later.” Promise yourself the privilege of being as critical as you like, as soon as the first draft of a scene or story is completed.

  Until the draft is done, however, stick with impulse. Let yourself go in a heat of passion. Forget the rules. For as Balzac said, “If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtius flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one . . . he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.”

  (2) Face up to your fears.

  Writers as a group are notoriously hard to live with. They snarl, brood, take affront, pick fights . . . leap from heights of elation to depths of despond.

  The reason is that they tend to project their fears . . . seek confirmation for their self-doubt in others.

  Says Christopher Fry, playwright and poet, “An artist’s sensitiveness to criticism is, at least in part, an effort to keep unimpaired the zest, or confidence, or arrogance, which he needs to make creation possible; or an instinct to climb through his problems in his own way as he should, and must.”

  So, you tend to be hypersensitive. What do you do about it?

  First, recognize that most slights are matters of interpretation, not intent. Not every casual comment bears a barb. The sneer lies more often in your own mind than the speaker’s.

  Second, remember that to achieve, you first must stick your neck out; and that the jealousy of others, less able or less courageous or less insightful, is part of the price you pay for rising from the mass. When local literati jab, most often it’s because they themselves can’t write or sell. The fact that you deal in thoughts and feelings instead of shoes makes you different from your neighbors, and hence a trifle frightening to them.

  Third, bear in mind that we all tend to expect our fellows to be perfect, long after we discover that we ourselves are not. Professional writers and professors have been known to cut beginners down, in order to inflate their own egos, or to vent frustrations, or from plain, simple fear of competition.

  Will facing these facts eliminate your fears?

  No, of course not. But given time and effort, they’ll help you to live with yourself more comfortably.

  (3) Build your self-esteem.

  As someone has said, you don’t have moods; moods have you.

  Resort to will-power isn’t always the best way to combat them. Sometimes, you get better results when you sneak in the back door.

  If you’re depressed, try to recall some action that in the past has lifted such depression—a simple thing, like being forced to put on a mask of cordiality and speak to people on the street, or joking with old friends over coffee.

  Call it auto-suggestion if you want to. But the fact remains that if you take this route . . . if you act as if you were a competent, confident, successful person . . . then frequently, you’ll become just that.

  (4) Don’t demand too much.

  Frustration tends to block a writer’s flow of copy.

  Nothing frustrates more than too high a level of aspiration. You get nowhere when you try to force yourself to write today the way you may write ten years from now, if you’re sufficiently talented and lucky and if you write and study every day for the next ten years.

  Accept yourself as you are today, on the other hand, and work from where you are with what you’ve got, and you may develop beyond your fondest expectations. Skill is a thing you acquire a little at a time. It doesn’t come in a flash of magic.

  (5) Keep your own counsel.

  Writing is a lonely business.

  In consequence, there’s always a temptation to discuss your latest story with your friends.

  Don’t.

  Why not?

  For two reasons:

  To begin with, talking about a story—telling it, in effect—amounts to working through it for the first time.

  Result: Your emotional need to write it is reduced. You’re put in the position of the man who strives, in reminiscence, to recapture the thrill of a first kiss. No matter how hard you try, the sparkle’s gone.

  Secondly, you can’t help but be affected by your listener’s reaction. His slightest frown or misinterpretation may cast a pall over the whole idea, to the point where it becomes almost impossible to write.

  Double that in spades if the “listener” is an editor to whom you’ve sent an outline or synopsis.

  You’re better off to write, not talk.

  (6) Follow your feelings.

  Writing isn’t a logical process, thank heavens.

  And consistency is the hobgoblin of petty minds.

  Therefore, don’t let what “ought” to be constrict you. Impulse may prove a better guide.

  This is especially true when you’re in trouble with a story and production breaks down.

  At such moments, if something about your opus doesn’t “feel” right—ditch the something!

  Similarly, if it does, don’t hesitate to drive ahead, regardless of any apparent violation of the rules.

  Why?

  Because myopia can ever so easily blind a writer. Wrapped in his task, he loses all perspective.

  Feeling operates on a different level. It sorts out the variables . . . rejects the false . . . catches glimpses of the larger pattern. While it can be wrong, its verdict rates strong consideration.

  (7) Fall back on free association.

  To free associate, you merely spill out words on paper: any words at all, without regard to point or purpose.

  Such a process cuts you loose from critical judgment. Creative impulse takes command. Disinhibition helps restore your sense of balance.

  Soon, fragments—ideas, words, phrases, sentences—begin to strike your fancy. Your stricken ego revives.

  So, try free association when you’re stuck: one hour per day for a week; no other writing permitted.

  By the eighth day, you’l
l be back to production of story copy.

  (8) Draw confidence from knowledge.

  Certain things you know: things like the relation of motivation to reaction . . . the pattern to which you build a scene . . . story structure . . . character dynamics . . . a host of techniques and devices.

  These things aren’t original with you. Generations of other writers worked them out before you.

  That means you can depend on them . . . write to them by the numbers, if need be, secure in the knowledge that they’ll help pull you out of your production breakdown.

  Thus, if you write down a motivating stimulus, however crudely, you know that your next step is to find the proper character reaction.

  A scene, in turn, starts with a character’s selection of and decision to attempt to reach a given goal. Conflict develops from this effort, and finally builds to a disaster.

  A story comes into being when desire collides with danger. Its climax centers on how your focal character behaves when faced with a choice between principle and self-interest.

  With the road so clearly marked, how can you go astray?

  (9) Soak yourself in your subject.

  In the scene ahead, Hero needs an unobvious way to disable Villain’s car. How should he go about it?

  That’s something you haven’t yet worked out. So you sit staring at your typewriter, frustrated and unhappy because the yarn’s bogged down.

  What you should do is go in search of facts. Dig up a mechanic. Ask him how he’d cripple a ’62 Ford, in a matching situation.

  Too often, too many of us boggle at research. We try to “think through” something that really calls for information.

  Then, we excuse it with talk of “writer’s block.”

  (10) Incorporate present interests.

  I’ve mentioned boredom before, and the way it can bring you to a grinding halt when you have to do one thing despite your yearning to do another.

  Closely linked to this pattern is the fact that, in writing, your interests often change as you go along.