Next step: You grow sick unto death of the story you’re on, especially if it’s a long one. In consequence, your writing slows down.
Yes, there’s a remedy. It’s this:
One reason you grow tired of your story is because fresh new ideas keep pressing in. Yet you feel you must reject them.
Well, don’t.
Accept them instead. Devise ways to incorporate them into your present copy.
Thus, maybe you find yourself intrigued by a slangy, loudmouthed, belligerent old woman, real or imagined.
All right. Find a place for her. Substitute her for some drab, dowdy female already in the cast.
Are you suddenly fascinated by the lore of diamonds? Then let a character be captivated too. His preoccupation with precious stones can serve as a tag and thus add extra interest.
The same principle holds for any other topic, from sports-car racing to ancient armor. Use it skillfully, and you’ll find it a first-class weapon against boredom.
(11) Take the bull by the horns.
“If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway,” suggests mystery writer William Campbell Gault. “You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.”
It’s good advice. Such is the power of inertia in us that we hesitate to plunge into work. Like timid swimmers, we stand shivering beside the pool, urging ourselves to dive yet dreading the water’s chill.
The remedy is the same both for swimmer and for writer: a quick-drawn breath, a shudder, and a leap.
Besides, once the initial shock wears off, you may find the water is warmer than you think!
(12) Stay with the cattle.
My friend Clifton Adams is a top western writer. To what does he attribute his success?
He answers: “Writing’s the only way I know to make a living. I didn’t have any choice but to go on.”
Actually, of course, Clif understates his case. You can always quit. But in some people determination, dedication, commitment—staying with the cattle, in the old range phrase—are character traits too deeply ingrained to be brushed aside easily.
These are traits every writer needs. When you bog down, your best response may be simply to persevere.
To that end, force yourself to write, however badly. Work awhile; then take a walk around the block, have a cup of coffee, and come back and work some more.
When the dam finally breaks, you’ll discover an interesting fact: The copy you wrote in agony isn’t one tenth as awkward as you thought it was.
The reason?
Talent is something that you’re born with. It doesn’t evaporate or drain away.
Skill is an element you build, out of work and study and experience. It can’t vanish in a puff of smoke.
That’s why it pays you to stay with the cattle.
(13) Finish every story.
Years ago I shared an office with another writer.
One day, something went wrong for him. Though more successful than most free-lances, he decided that his copy just wasn’t good enough.
From there on, he worked through story after story up to the final scene.
Then, despair would overwhelm him. Refusing to believe his work was anything but drivel, he tore up sometimes-brilliant yarns . . . pieces that would certainly have sold if he’d ever given them a chance.
Completion of any story, however bad, is in its way implicit proof that you’re better than most people who talk of writing. Not to finish, on the other hand, conditions you to failure in advance.
Howard Browne summed up the issue for me in a letter he wrote when I was in a blue funk of my own: “You go ahead and do me a story the way I’m telling you. Finish it—BUT DON’T READ IT WHILE YOU’RE WRITING IT AND DON’T READ IT BEFORE YOU SEND IT TO ME. I’ll read the thing and if it’s no good I’ll reject it. But it’s not your job to reject anything; who do you think you are—an editor?”
(14) Set up a private checklist.
You know more than you think you do, on an unconscious level.
So, when you stall, more often than not it means that something about the story itself is wrong.
Somehow, you sense this fact, even though you can’t nail down the trouble on a conscious basis.
At such a time, it helps to have a private checklist . . . a compendium of your own literary weaknesses.
Why?
Because we all tend to repeat our errors.
Thus, quite frequently, you may let your heroes grow passive, or fail to motivate key actions, or allow a goal to remain abstract.
Each time you spot such a weakness in one of your stories, note it on a file card, one card per weakness.
Soon, you’ll have a packet of such.
That packet can be your most helpful aid in spotting errors. When a story bogs down, turn to it.
More often than not, what really bothers you in your current work will stand revealed.
(15) Give yourself a break.
Too much time in his workroom can develop tunnel vision in a writer.
When that happens, words come harder.
What should you do about it?
One answer is to take a break. Abandon work for a day or two or three. Get out among people. Have fun. Go on a trip. Do some of the things you’ve planned and postponed too long.
The virtue of this treatment lies in the fact that it changes your perspective. Under reality’s impact, you become to a degree a different person.
Whereupon, when you go back to work, your problems may not loom so large.
(16) Avoid crutches.
When a man’s in trouble, he tends to clutch at straws, or even bottles.
In fact, especially bottles.
Why?
Because alcohol lowers inhibition. You forget self-doubt in a haze of bourbon fumes.
Catch is, alcohol also establishes a conditioning. Before you know it, you discover that you can’t work without a drink. Or two. Or three. Or four.
Soon you may find yourself in the situation of a friend of mine. Each day when he sat down to write, he set a fifth of whisky beside the typewriter.
Finally he reached a point where story and fifth ran out together. One fifth: one story.
A night came when the story took two fifths instead of one. His wife found him dead in his workroom in the morning.
Moral: Drink socially if you want to. But don’t drink while you work.
There are other crutches besides alcohol, from marijuana to LSD. All operate on the same principle, and each offers a throughway to disaster.
The smart writer sweats out his private hell without them.
So now the fiction factory is in operation.
But here, another question rises: How do you sell the finished product?
That’s a subject dear to every writer’s heart. For a succinct guide, turn to the next chapter.
CHAPTER 9
Selling Your Stories
A story is merchandise that goes hunting for a buyer.
This is going to be the shortest chapter on record.
To sell stories, do three things:
1. Study your markets.
2. Get manuscripts in the mail.
3. Keep them there.
And that’s all there is to it.
What about agents?
An agent is a business manager for writers.
If you have a business to manage—one that makes a solid, consistent profit—an agent can be invaluable to you. If you haven’t, why should he waste his time?
One agent, Paul R. Reynolds, has written a book called The Writer and His Markets. It covers the waterfront.
Read it.
CHAPTER 10
You and Fiction
A story is a larger life, created and shared with others by a writer.
So now you know how to write and sell a story: the tricks, the techniques, the devices, the rules-of-thumb.
True, you still have plen
ty to learn. The creation of commercial fiction involves all sorts of twists and subtleties. A writer can work at his craft for twenty years, yet continue to discover something new each day.
But such fringe fragments are largely a matter of individual touch, and best assimilated through experience. They’ll come with time and work.
More important, now, is a different question: Where do you go from here?
That depends on you, of course: your tastes, your talents, your ambitions; above all, the depth of your inner need to write and sell.
And that brings us to a crucial issue: Just what is the nature of the need to write, precisely? Why does one man go on and on; another not?
The answer, put briefly, is this: The writer is a man who seeks a larger world.
When he finds it, he passes it along to others.
Believe me, this can be a vital matter to you. Once you truly understand it and its implications, your most irksome problems will be resolved.
Shall we move to the attack?
The true function of any teacher is to prepare his students to face the future and strike out on their own.
To that end, and whether he plans it so or not, he ponders said students as much as they ponder him.
My own chosen pondering-place is the University of Oklahoma, and the Professional Writing program in which I teach. It provides me with student writers to observe, and the fact of their talent is demonstrated by the success that they’ve achieved: more than three hundred books published; literally thousands of magazine stories and articles sold. Men and women like Neal Barrett, Jr., science-fiction specialist; Jack M. Bickham, now with more than a dozen novels to his credit; Bob Bristow, major contributor in the men’s field; Martha Corson, top confessioneer; Al Dewlen, whose Twilight of Honor was a Book of the Month Club selection and MGM film; Lawrence V. Fisher, with Die a Little Every Day for Random House and Mystery Guild; Fred Grove, winner of Western Writers of America awards; Elizabeth Land Kaderli, author of assorted fact books; Harold Keith, whose Rifles for Watie claimed a Newbery Medal; Leonard Sanders—his latest novel is The Wooden Horseshoe, at Doubleday; the late Mary Agnes Thompson, one of whose short stories ended up as an Elvis Presley movie; Mary Lyle Weeks, another leading confession writer now moving into the hardback novel field, and Jeanne Williams, author of prize-winning books for young people, are among those with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working personally, at one time or another.
What do I find when I look back along the road that these writers and hundreds of others like them have followed, as they went through courses with me and various of my colleagues: Foster-Harris, Helen Reagan Smith (in the University’s Extension Division), and the late Walter S. Campbell?
Typically, the beginning student (and in specialized professional courses such as ours, “beginning student” often means a man or woman far past usual college age) is eager to write, but has deficiencies and knows it. He can’t make words or readers behave the way he wants them to. So, he comes to course or book to learn his craft.
The skills he needs are things that can be taught.
We teach them to him.
Very soon, however, Writer learns that tools and tricks alone just aren’t enough.
Why not?
Suppose an accident occurs at a busy intersection, in the presence of a dozen witnesses.
If the police are very lucky, they may locate one person upon whose account of the wreck they can depend. The others catch part of the action only, or become confused, or simply see things that didn’t happen.
Would-be writers, too, reflect a kind of private blindness. Give five of them the self-same training and raw materials, and it may be your good fortune to have one produce a story that’s worth the reading.
Thus, whether you deal with writer or with witness, the individual is the vital factor.
Why?
Because each person “sees” things differently.
Further, a different type of seeing is needed in each case.
The man the police want as an accident witness is one who sees facts: the World That Is; what actually took place, without distortion or interpretation.
This kind of seeing constitutes a talent. To observe accurately takes experience and training and a special kind of person.
What the writer needs, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite: the ability to see more than the facts: to look beyond them; to hypothesize about them; to draw conclusions from them.
Above all, he must use his facts as stimuli to feeling: emotionalize them; give them a unique private life.
This, too, is a talent.
Why does one would-be writer see more than do his fellows?
Because one has it in him to be a writer. The others only wish they did.
And—now we’re back to where we started—this is because the true writer seeks a larger world.
How so?
Because the World That Is can never be quite large enough to suit the writer. Hemmed in by reality, he feels restive, no matter how ideal his situation may appear to another eye. A rut gilded, to him, still remains a rut.
And just as each character in a story draws motive force from his need to make up for something that he lacks, so the writer is driven by his need to escape the limits of a too-small world, the World That Is. It’s in his blood to range farther than life can ever let him go. The impossible intrigues him. So do the unattainable, the forbidden, the disastrous. Like the man who reads his stories, he wants to know what it’s like to love, to hate, to thrill, to fear, to laugh, to cry, to soar, to grieve, to kill, to die, from inside the skins of a hundred different people.
Nor is it enough for him just to know. He must play God too; guide the hand of fate; somehow mold and control the forces that shape destiny.
These things can’t be. The writer realizes it.
But that only sharpens his desire and whets his craving; for his need to reach out strikes deeper than the wildest dreams of other men.
And the writer can reach out, through the agency of his own imagination.
He does so.
Then, because the things he finds in the larger world that he creates so fascinate him, he yearns to pass them on to others.
He does that too, through the medium of the written word.
Do I make this plain? The writer’s inner need is dual.
On the one hand, he’s driven by his desire to live life in a larger world.
On the other, he feels a compulsion to share that world . . . to display it for others to admire.
Both these drives must coexist inside you, nagging and harassing, if you’re to be a writer.
I stress this because it’s so seldom understood. Too often, the would-be writer thinks that what he wants is fame or money or independence. He equates a taste for reading or a knack with words for talent.
Now none of these beliefs are wholly false. But neither are they wholly true. They evade the issue, for convenience’ sake or lack of insight or unwillingness to accept the fact of difference, as the case may be.
Actually, what a writer seeks is a way of life, and that way constitutes its own reward. The criterion is never art for art’s sake . . . always, it is art for self’s sake. You write because you like to—need to, have to—write; there is no other valid reason.
Once let a writer recognize this; once let him understand his own dynamics, and uncertainty and self-doubt fade. You learn to face the fact that if your inner need is great enough, you’ll write. If other needs surpass it—if your drives to adventure or security or love or recognition or family duties strike deeper—then you can turn away with no regrets. You won’t have to kid yourself about fame or money or independence—those are bonuses for special skill and talent; fringe benefits. Convenient and desirable though they may be, on a basic level they’re only status symbols; society’s stamp of approval to mark your success in your chosen field.
More important by far is your own self-satisfaction. Build larger worlds of your private
choosing; find the right readers to admire them, and you’ll live content despite an income that would never rouse jealousy in a used-car salesman. Deny yourself your Worlds of If, your readers, and you can be miserable even with a Rolls-Royce and a Bel Air estate.
What is a story?
A story is so many things—
It’s experience translated into literary process.
It’s words strung onto paper.
It’s a succession of motivations and reactions.
It’s a chain of scenes and sequels.
It’s a double-barreled attack upon your readers.
It’s movement through the eternal now, from past to future.
It’s people given life on paper.
It’s the triumph of ego over fear of failure.
It’s merchandise that goes hunting for a buyer.
It’s new life, shared with readers by a writer.
A story is all these things and more. So much, much more . . .
For a story, in the last analysis, is you, transferred to print and paper. You: unique and individual. You, writer, who through your talent range a larger world than others, and thus give life new meaning to all who choose to read.
You: writer.
Attain that status, and you win fulfillment enough for any man!
APPENDIX A
Preparing Your Manuscript
Use sixteen- or twenty-pound white paper . . . black typewriter ribbon. Follow the general style of the sample pages that follow, with one-inch margins all around and plenty of space at the top of page one. Mail flat, first class, in a 9½×12½ or 10×13 kraft envelope. Enclose a stamped, self-addressed, 9×12 envelope for possible return. Address simply to the magazine’s editorial department, unless you have reason to call the script to the attention of some particular individual. No cover letter is necessary.
For market listings, consult:
The Writer, 8 Arlington St., Boston 16, Mass.
Writer’s Digest, Writer’s Yearbook, Writer’s Market, 22 East 12th St., Cincinnati, Ohio.
Techniques of the Selling Writer Page 33
