Techniques of the Selling Writer (17 page)

To this end, let that somebody show purpose—preferably, urgent purpose. Make him
act
as if he had a goal . . . as if he were out to do something specific and important
right now: “He clung to the shadows, studying the place for the space of a cigarette.”
“She came in the night, long after he’d given her up.” “The lawyer called at nine-forty.
He said he represented Daniel O’Connor, and that in the interests of justice, culture,
and peace on earth, it was vital that he see me right away.”

Ideally, make your character’s goal clear-cut and explicit from the beginning: “Very
coolly, very carefully, he raised the rifle and drew a bead on the back of Sortino’s
neck: one dead dictator, coming up.” “Cox said, ’I want some facts, Heffner. All the
facts about what happened on Calisto.’ ” “One thing was certain: Charlene was going
to leave this house. Tonight. He’d see to that for sure.” But if you have trouble
pinning the goal down that tightly right at the start, the
impression
of purpose alone will carry the ball for a while.

Remember, too, that like everything else in fiction, a goal is better shown than told.
The things your character does, a demonstration, will come through stronger than mere
words.

Why make such a big thing of introducing goal so quickly?

The sooner you introduce the idea that somebody’s traveling toward a given destination,
the sooner your reader will become intrigued with wondering what will come of the
journey.

In other words, goal is primarily a springboard to plunge your character into conflict.
Once he’s caught up in such, the situation will change on him, likely as not. So the
more quickly you establish goal, the more quickly you can move on to the meat of action
and unanticipated development that your reader loves.

Thus, maybe your hero wants to punch the villain in the nose, or to obtain an answer
to one pointed question. But bug-eyed monsters are waiting for him in the cellar,
or the heroine has disappeared, or the houseboat on the Styx has sunk. By the time
the disaster is reached, in fact, no one even remembers the initial goal. Yet that
goal is still infinitely important, for without it the scene itself would have had
no excuse for coming into being.

Must the goal always be that of your focal character?

Not necessarily. Perhaps his role, in this particular instance, is less to achieve
than to resist. But try to avoid having him merely
acted upon
too much of the time. In most scenes, he should be the aggressor—active, dynamic,
driving forward.

So much for scene goals. Whether they come forth on the printed page as implicit or
explicit, all must be ever so sharp in your own thinking. Each should be epitomized
into some single act so pertinent and urgent that a character could believably aspire
to perform it—and so concrete and specific that you the writer could snap a picture
of that performance!

Some scenes have punch and some don’t.

The ones that do have been written so that the disaster comes suddenly and in unanticipated
form—a shock, focused needle-sharp in a curtain line: “’Congratulations, Mr. Goss,’
the alien said. ’With you, your race comes to an end.’ ” “But dead Wang’s fingers
still clung to a tuft of Clare Kennedy’s shimmering auburn hair.” “He shoved the white-hot
iron between Will Evans’ toes.”

Now I grant you that this sort of thing can easily be overdone. Also that there are
indeed a host of other factors that go to create punch. But when all the critical
smirks have faded, and all the intellectual laughter has died down, ordinary readers
will still
be reading—avidly, enthusiastically—stories that cap off their scenes with curtain
lines.

And now, three don’ts:

There are those who’ll tell you a scene can’t be developed satisfactorily in less
than four pages—a thousand words.

They just might be right, too.

Why?

Four pages, then?

No, let’s not make it anything arbitrary or resembling a rule. But on the other hand,
let’s not try to put across a climax in a paragraph either! A John Collier can get
away with it. The rest of us don’t dare to write too small.

Flashback is somebody remembering in the present what happened in the past. It brings
your story, your present action, to a dead halt for the duration.

Now there’s a place for this kind of thing, upon occasion. But that place is
not
within a scene.

Why not?

Most of us, when we’re in conflict, are far too involved with keeping our heads above
water to indulge in any great amount of reverie.

When you write a story, you try to sweep your reader along with you on a rising wave
of tension. Particularly is this true in those units of struggle we call scenes.

Go into flashback, and tension tends to drop to zero.

Why?

Because you’ve halted forward movement and present action, and your reader knows that
what’s already past just can’t be changed.

Then, when you return to the present, you have to start building excitement again
from scratch.

Are these grounds enough to warrant your keeping past history out of your scenes?

For my money, yes—especially since flashbacks fit more neatly into sequel anyhow.

Actually, you do summarize even in scene, of course. The fact that your heroine absent-mindedly
picks her nose in an embrace doesn’t necessarily demand mention, nor is its exclusion
missed.

On the other hand, there are certain slips that sneak into everyone’s copy, at one
time or another. They’re dangerous. They jar readers. They crack or shatter story
illusion.

No one can ever hope to make a complete list of such, of course. But here are a few
samples of the kind of thing to watch out for:

This is indirect discourse—a paraphrasing and summarizing of the actual words spoken.
Run from it! What you want is speech—the genuine article, down to the last slur and
contraction.

That’s what you tell me, anyhow. But I’d rather
see
what happened:

Definitely hurrying now, he loped down the corridor to the left.

Still no elevator. Not even a fire stairs . . .

. . . and so on. Step by step and blow by blow. After all, that’s how your character
lived it.

Then skip to where things start to happen.

Why not

The thing to bear in mind is that nothing ever really comes alive in summary. Life
is lived moment by moment, in Technicolor detail. To capture it on paper, you have
to break behavior down into precise and pertinent fragments of motivation and response.

And that’s enough instruction. If not too much. Once you understand the fundamentals,
the way to learn to write scenes is to write scenes.

While you’re practicing, though, you might like to consider a few thoughts on . . .

Writing the sequel

When you sit down to write a sequel, you’re faced with problems in three major areas:

Consider your focal character. Time: post-disaster. He’s lost his girl. His job’s
no more. The friend he trusted has betrayed him.

Now, he tries to decide what to do; how to readjust to his changed circumstances.

To that end, he must pace the floor and walk the streets and face the disdain of a
dozen different people.

How do you squeeze it all into a paragraph or a page?

Similarly, a week may pass between the time he’s struck down and the time he starts
toward a new goal. In that week, he may travel from Milwaukee to Madagascar; from
bruises to blooming health; from black gloom to wild elation.

How do you make the jump from time to time and place to place and state to state and
mood to mood?

Disaster tends to paralyze a man. Beaten down, he finds it hard to rally. Yet only
a few lines after the blow descends, story requirements demand that he charge into
the fray anew, undaunted.

How do you make it believable?

You already know the answer to all three of these questions. Where time unifies the
scene,
topic
unifies the sequel. In the process, it also gives you the essential tool you need
to handle compression, transition, and credibility properly.

How does topic do this?

To be preoccupied with a topic is actually to be preoccupied with a particular set
of feelings. If your girl runs out on you, in all likelihood you feel hurt and angry.
If your boss fires you, you feel angry and panicky. If your friend betrays you, you
feel grieved and confused.

Or, perhaps, your own feelings are different. That doesn’t matter.

What does is that until you decide what to do about the situation, your feelings can’t
help but be the thing uppermost in your mind.

Therefore, in writing sequel, you act on the assumption that feeling is the common
denominator that unites all other elements.

Then, you move from one such element to another across what might be termed an emotional
bridge . . . subordinating facts; emphasizing feeling.

Take
compression
, for example. You skip or summarize the emotionally non-significant or non-pertinent,
as pointed out in
The Problem of Proportion
in
Chapter 3
. If what’s needed is a picture of Lisa, and the process of portraiture isn’t itself
devastatingly important, we very well might end up with some such abridgment as “Now
the sketch took form. In a few deft lines, Lisa stood re-created there on paper.”

Since few details can be included, when you’re trying to keep wordage down, the selection
of those you use becomes a matter of major concern. Frequently, the bit that serves
you best is the
symbolic
fragment—the tear blinked back, the buffalo skull bleaching on the prairie, the bedbug
crawling along a pillow. A whole frame of mind may be summed up in a mockingbird’s
song; a way of life in the fact that the plumbing has been stolen out of a vacant
house.

The trick is to find the single feature that captures the essence of what you want
to say. You need the lone item which, brought into close-up, speaks volumes about
your character’s state of mind.

Link enough such details into an impressionistic montage and there’s virtually no
limit as to how much ground you can make a sentence cover:

Fog and smog and soot-streaked snow. Steaming summer nights in New Orleans; the parched
miles going across Wyoming. He knew them all, in the months that followed; knew them,
and ignored them, because there was no room in him for anything but hate.

Transition
offers much the same situation. You need to bridge time or space or mood or circumstance
or what have you.

To that end, you spotlight your focal character’s dominant feeling: Is it depression?
Rage? Passion? Fear?

Emphasize that feeling immediately
before
the lapse in time or space or action or whatever begins . . . and then again immediately
after
said lapse ends.

In other words, set up your material so that the chosen feeling is the element the
“before” and “after” situations have in common.

Let’s say, for instance, that the feeling is guilt. Our technical problem, in turn,
is that we need to jump from Friday night in New York City to Monday morning in Tulsa.

Sleep came quickly, easily, to his surprise.

Only then he wished it hadn’t, because it brought strange, dark, half-nightmares with
it . . . weird dreams in which Irene somehow always stood beside him, mute, dark eyes
accusing.