Techniques of the Selling Writer (16 page)

Written in scene-type detail, all this will bring your yarn to a grinding halt.

You face a problem of proportion. Summary is essential.

Summary is what you get when you abstract or abridge. It’s that part of a story in
which the writer
says
that things are happening, or that they have happened. It’s
telling
, not showing; or, at best, a combination of the two.

Summary telescopes reality. And this telescoping is sequel’s second function.

How does sequel control tempo?

It lets you allocate space and emphasis to get the effect you want.

A story is a series of peaks and valleys; big moments and small.

It’s
not
just a continuing climax.

To that end, you work for mood . . . select detail . . . capture the flavor of life.
Through elaboration or excision, you thrust the peaks high, cut the valleys deep . . .
hammer home the climactic moments without losing contact with the incidental.

Thus, where our boxer is concerned, we must give the big fight its full due as climax
and milk it of every ounce of impact.

At the same time, however, in brief space, we must somehow convey the sense of time
passing, and capture the grind and dreariness of the training routine.

In fact, we must
contrast
the peak of emotional intensity of the fight itself with the dragging hours that
go before. It’s essential to speed up here, slow down there . . . in brief, control
the tempo.

What unifies sequel and holds it together?

Topic.

What is topic?

The subject of a discourse or any section of it.

What’s the subject of sequel?

It’s your character’s reaction to his plight. It’s preoccupation with the problem
the preceding scene posed.

It says, in effect, “I’ve been defeated, humiliated, overwhelmed by a disaster. What
do I do now?”

With that preoccupation riding him, Character works out an answer. Then he pinpoints
it in a decision to attack a new goal.

Thus, sequel has a 1-2-3 structure:

How does this work?

To demonstrate, let’s build a sequel to follow the scene that starred our fighter.

The scene climaxed in a knockout—for Character, disaster.

Where does that leave our man? What’s his state of affairs and state of mind?

His manager will have a role in this: “Sorry, kid; you’ve had it. Don’t call me; I’ll
call you.”

His girl too, maybe: “Sure, I love you, honey. But marry a punch-drunk pug—what’s
there in that for anybody?”

State of affairs often is revealed in the reaction of others to your character’s disaster.

How about state of mind?

What would you expect? What’s happened is enough to rouse fears in anyone: Is he really
no good? Has he, indeed, had it?

Together, state of affairs and state of mind constitute the aftermath of disaster.

Out of it all, a question rises: What’s Character to do now? Should he accept defeat?
Find a new girl? Get a job hustling packing-cases in a warehouse?

Character broods about it numbly while the trainer strips off the gloves and cuts
away the bandages. He goes on brooding while he showers and dresses. What happens
doesn’t matter, save insofar as it lends reality to the moment. The disaster is all
that counts; the disaster, and your character’s preoccupation with it.

Later, he walks the streets. There’s a steak that somehow turns to ashes in his mouth,
and drinks that burn but don’t brighten.
That night he tosses, sleepless, on a lumpy mattress in a cheap hotel room.

This black despair—it may go on for days or weeks, or it may be over in a moment.

Or, perhaps, the thing he feels isn’t despair, but fury, or relief, or grim determination.
But whatever it is, it’s reaction:
your character’s reaction
to his very real, very personal disaster.

Then that too fades, pushed back at least a trifle by the need to face the future.

What should he do? That’s the question.

It’s also Character’s
dilemma:
a situation involving choice between equally unsatisfactory alternatives.

Deftly or clumsily, blithely or bitterly, our man works out an answer.
Decision
emerges: Hell try to set up a rematch in Minneapolis.

It’s a new goal. Our character’s efforts to attain it will give rise to further conflict;
another scene to catch and hold a reader.

Logically, plausibly, sequel has brought it into being.

Now let’s try the pattern again . . . this time on our other scene, the one that featured
John and George and Suzy.

Scene climax: disaster.

What’s John’s
reaction
to it?

Humiliation, of course. How would
you
like to be thrown out of the malt shop, right before the very eyes of the girl you’re
trying to impress?

So, John feels humiliation. Plus rage. Plus frustration. Plus half-a-dozen other mixed,
unnamable emotions that add up almost to apoplexy.

Sensible enough, right? Understandable? Acceptable?

But what can he do about it? George is big and brawny and in star-halfback condition.

Besides, in her panic, Suzy has already backed down on going to the prom.

Enter
dilemma
.

So, John goes off to lick his wounded ego and to brood: Should he appeal to Suzy’s
father? To Suzy herself? To Aunt Hephzibah?

Ridiculous thoughts, all of them. Even John can see it. Yet he’s got to do something—not
only because he wants Suzy himself,
but because he’s convinced that George is interested in her for purely mercenary reasons.

Notice what this does for your reader:

First-off, he gets a chance to suffer and worry with and about John.

Second, he considers the possibilities that he himself might come up with. Seeing
the weakness in each, he realizes that John can’t take those roads.

Third, he sees there’s a reason John can’t quit.

In other words, here in the sequel we’ve introduced additional elements to logic and
plausibility to hook your reader tighter to the story.

Perhaps we even add an
incident
or two, in which John asks friends for advice, to no avail.

(An incident is a sort of abortive scene, in which your character attempts to reach
a goal. But he meets with no resistance, no conflict. When a boy seeks to kiss a girl
who’s equally eager to kiss him, you have an incident.)

Or maybe there are
happenings
along the way, in which John meets acquaintances. But because he’s preoccupied with
his problem, he fails to respond to their greetings.

(A happening brings people together. But it’s non-dramatic, because no goal or conflict
is involved.)

Both these sub-units are legitimate enough. In fact, they’re desirable, insofar as
they add touches of realism to your work. But since they lack conflict, they don’t
hold enough real interest to sustain attention for long.

So here stands John, balanced precariously on the horns of his dilemma. By now the
whole situation seems so impossible to him that he begins to wonder if he was a fool
to give up Cecile for Suzy in the first place.

Cecile—!

Suppose he were to take Cecile to the prom instead of Suzy! While she bears him no
love, at this point, she still might be persuaded if he could put forth the right
incentive. Mercenary little minx that she is, she might even agree to make a play
for George; and if George responded, Suzy’s eyes would indeed be opened!

It’s a long shot, obviously . . . the kind of deal that very well might backfire.
But under the circumstances, it’s worth a try.

First step: Sell Cecile!

It is
decision
. . . a new goal for John to strive toward. And count on it, conflict will inevitably
follow.

At least, it will if we make proper use of our scene pattern!

Reaction . . . dilemma . . . decision. All the parts are there. It’s a sequel.

Sequel and scene: the search for a goal . . . then the struggle to attain it. These
are fiction’s two basic units.

To lay out a story, repeat the pattern to fill the desired length: scene . . . sequel
. . . scene . . . sequel . . . scene . . . sequel. . . .

Can you begin with sequel?

Yes, of course.—More about this, though, when we get to the problems of the beginning.

These are basic tools. They work. Practice using them every chance you get. Goals,
conflicts, disasters, reactions, dilemmas, decisions—you meet them a hundred times
a day, in fragmentary form, whenever you come in contact with other people.

So, take advantage of those fragments. Build forward and/or backward from them, elaborating
from chance remarks or observed details into complete scenes, complete sequels; even
combinations.

My late colleague Professor Walter S. Campbell used to say that he began to sell as
soon as he mastered scene format.

One of my former students echoes the sentiment. He’s just seen his thirteenth book
published.

So, is that all there is to fiction? Just learning to plan scenes and sequels?

Well, not quite. It also helps if you can
write
them!

Writing the scene

Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’ve already acquired most of the technical tricks
you need to write a scene. You picked them up in
Chapter 3
.

What are they?

A scene is a struggle, a unit of conflict, remember. So you put it together like the
fight in which our boxer was knocked out: The bell rings. Focal character and opponent
come out of their corners, each determined to attain his private goal. And from there
on, it’s just a matter of motivation and reaction: for every move, a countermove;
for every punch, a counterpunch . . . until one or the other goes down or the bell
again rings.

The big thing to bear in mind is that a scene is unified by time. There aren’t any
breaks or lapses in it, any more than there are in living.

Consequently, you write in a series of interlocked M-R units, as continuous as water
gushing from a faucet. Each motivating stimulus evokes an appropriate reaction from
the focal character. Each character reaction triggers—or at least is followed by—a
pertinent motivating stimulus. Unit hooks to unit in a fast-linking chain. State of
affairs intermeshes with state of mind. Goal is established. Your character’s efforts
to attain it plunge him into conflict. He fights through a seesaw pattern of furtherance
and hindrance, gain and loss, until—just when he thinks he’s won—disaster suddenly
overwhelms him.

If you do your job well, your reader lives through the battle with your story people.

And believe it or not, that’s all there is to it!—Though the specific points that
follow may also prove helpful, by steering you away from common pitfalls.

Herewith, three do’s:

Confusion infuriates your reader. To avoid it, keep him properly informed.

Especially is this necessary where changes in situation are concerned: “The sky to
the east was gray and the street lights had gone out before Greer left the apartment.”
“The Three Brothers was a squat adobe building, huddled in a wild crook of the hills
half a mile beyond the town.” “It was too dark to see the man who shook him awake.”
“The Murderer never knew quite when it was he made that final, awful, inevitable decision
to kill.”

The first half-page of a scene should make it clear that somebody has a goal.