Techniques of the Selling Writer (18 page)

The sense of guilt those images engendered still nagged at him when he deplaned in
Tulsa Monday morning. . . .

Because feeling is the dominant factor in your story, it’s also the most favored bridge.
But you can, upon occasion, use well-nigh anything as a device—weather, for instance:

Credibility?
It’s the element you need most when you set about translating disaster into goal.

To achieve it:

Though he be dropped down on Arcturus, a hero needs to eat sometimes, and sleep, and
perhaps even bathe.

All about him, too, life drifts along. People chat and haggle, love and laze, laugh,
grumble, gamble.

For the sake of credibility, your reader needs to find these elements of the familiar
in your story. High adventure is fine, but too much of it all at once smacks of the
comic book, and it’s nice occasionally to have relief from tension.

Such lulls are developed best in sequel: the transition between dramatic scenes.

You want your hero, defeated, to go after a job out of town. But if he leaves the
moment the villain triumphs, your reader will sneer. So, you follow up the initial
disaster by having Our Boy’s boss fire him. His landlady tells him she’s got to have
his room for someone else. The P.T.A. protests that he’s a bad influence on the young.

Now, if your character takes off the way you want him to—though vowing to return,
of course—Reader will class it as understandable behavior.

Why?

Because you gave him proper motivation in the sequel.

This is the reaction side of the motivation coin set up in (2), above. In large measure,
it means simply that you give your character a chance to think things through. Because
he’s between scenes, he isn’t under immediate attack; isn’t locked in conflict. So,
what with more time and solitude, it’s plausible that he should here think as well
as act. We might even drop into flashback with him . . . appraise those experiences
in his past which influence his attitudes where the present and future are concerned.

Again, in sequel as in scene, you learn to write by writing. Get busy!

Integrating scene and sequel

Up to this point, we’ve treated scene and sequel almost as if they were separate entities.
Actually, of course, they must complement each other . . . link together smoothly
into that unified, cohesive whole that’s known as story.

Are there any problems involved in thus melding the two together? What points should
you bear in mind as you combine them?

Herewith, a few observations on the subject which it might pay you to consider:

As a general rule, big scenes equal big interest.

Long sequels, in turn, tend to indicate strong plausibility.

So, in writing, you must decide which element is most important to you at each given
point. Thud-and-blunder melodrama may jump from death threat to fist-fight to rape
to ambush, virtually without sequel. It’s all conflict; no transition.

Some of the more precious literary pieces, on the other hand, offer endless discussion
of the protagonist’s psychic turmoil as he tries to decide whether he should order
ice cream tonight, or sherbet. The only hint of strife is a warming of his cheeks
as he observes the waiter’s raised eyebrow.

All of which gives us a few practical hints:

Proportioning thus becomes a matter of individual taste. While extremes that amount
to “all scene” or “all sequel” exist, most of us prefer to take the middle ground
and strike some sort of balance.

Any story, diagrammed, resembles a mountain range—a succession of peaks and valleys.
You spotlight the peaks, the big dramatic moments, by presenting them as scenes.

An opening scene that features the fall of the Roman Empire may rock your reader back
on his heels. But what do you do for an encore? Too large a dose of vitamins at any
given point always carries with it the hazard that everything which follows will seem
anticlimactic.

Consequently, it’s good sense to arrange your scenes, your peaks, in order of ascending
importance and/or intensity.

Partly, this means that you can expand or contract sequel so that scenes fall farther
apart or closer together.

Partly, it means that a sequel frequently includes material which could just as well
or better be developed as a scene. For example, here’s an incident in which your hero
stops to get gas. To build it into a scene, all you need to do is inject conflict:
Maybe your guy irritates the attendant, who in turn releases his hostility by somehow
“accidentally” immobilizing (disaster!) the car.

Partly, finally, it means that small scenes may be reduced to sequel. Instead of making
Character have to pressure Doctor Jones in order to get in to see Marie at the hospital,
you let the nurse on the ward admit him as a matter of routine.

Each story offers different problems. A mechanical approach won’t solve them. You
must
stand ready to adapt your methods to your materials.

Thus, officially, a sequel involves reaction, dilemma, and decision.

Yet if a man is drowning, do you need to state explicitly that he decides to try to
keep his head above the surface? Or is it enough that he fights his way up from the
depths . . . breaks water . . . flails, gasps, struggles?

It’s that way, often, in sequel. If your character does something in a manner that
indicates he’s picked a goal, we assume it represents a decision, accept it, and let
the rules go by the board.

In the same way, at first glance scene often seems to flow directly into sequel. Yet
experience soon will teach you that often you build impact if you allow a time-break,
great or small, after the scene-disaster’s curtain line . . . as if your focal character
were numbed by shock, perhaps.

Here, for instance, a hero gets the wrong answer:

If you can write scene and sequel, you can write stories.

But you’ll write them easier and better if you also understand the strategy of fiction:
a most intriguing subject, in its way, and the topic of the chapter just ahead.

CHAPTER 5

Fiction Strategy

You want to write successful stories.

To that end, it will be a help if you first understand two things:

How do you define story?

You don’t.

Why not?

Because it’s impossible to arrive at any useful, meaningful, all-inclusive definition.
Each person who reads and/or writes is different. Each defines story to fit his own
tastes, his own prejudices. Tennyson’s
Lady of the Lake
and Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Capricorn
both have been termed stories. Same for assorted sketches, vignettes, anecdotes,
word photography, chronicles, plays, folk tales, and what have you. The piece which
Reader A likes and labels good is, to Reader B, distasteful and bad. “Strong” and
“weak” mean different things to different people. So do “trite” and “fresh,” “profound”
and “shallow,” “obscure” and “rich with hidden meanings.”

Definition tries to reduce a host of objects or events or experiences to their lowest
common denominator. It sucks out
their life for the sake of a post-mortem on dead flesh and bare bones. Individual
differences go by the board.

Such an approach is of little value to a writer. To bring a story into being, you
need to think of it not as a
thing
, but as something you
do
to a specific reader—a motivation; a stimulus you thrust at him.

Your goal, in turn, is to elicit a particular reaction from this reader. You want
to make him feel a certain way . . . suck him into a whirlpool of emotion.

To do this . . . to make your reader feel the way you want him to feel . . . is your
story’s whole and total
function.

Now this can prove a tricky business. It demands skill. There are techniques to be
learned, just as in figure skating or baking angel-food cake or playing the piano.

The aggregate of all these tricks and tools, these devices you use to help your story
fulfill its function properly, may be said to constitute
process.

Learn to work in terms of function and of process, and you’re on the shortest, straightest
road to success as a fiction writer.

The function of a story is to create a particular reaction in a given reader. Therefore,
this might be a good point at which to consider audience briefly.

You use one kind of saw to cut wood, another to shape metal, a third to slice marble.

The same principle applies to readers. Don’t try to be all things to all men. Universality
of appeal is a myth.
Superman
and Marcel Proust seldom strike sparks in the same audience. So, accept difference,
in literary preferences as in women’s hairdos. Quit wasting your time pretending that
it doesn’t exist, or that there’s some esoteric way around it.

Does this mean that you should consciously slant your story to a certain reader?

Yes. But not to
any
reader. The one you want is the one who shares your tastes and interests. For you,
too, are individual. You can’t change yourself at will to suit a given public. You
must accept yourself the way you are. Then, seek out an audience that sees the world
the same way you do.

Can you be sure such an audience exists?

You can. Individual you are indeed; and different. But not
that
different, for you’re human also.

And then?

Master story dynamics.