Techniques of the Selling Writer (2 page)

A story is a complex thing. Its materials demand skill in their manipulation.

Story components, in turn, don’t stand alone, nor yet hang in a vacuum. There’s no
such thing as plot, per se, or character, or setting.

Neither is story merely words or language . . . let alone style, or symbol, or imagery,
or structure.

The experts do us badly here. Too often, they give the impression that a single player
makes a ball team.

Take Fred’s friend George Abercroft (like Fred, he’s really non-existent), a specialist
in story structure. Organization is the important thing, he says. Learn pattern, and
it will solve your every problem.

But a superior architect may prove a poor carpenter; and you the writer must execute
your works as well as plan them.

The specialist in character, in turn, sneers at plot as if it were a dirty word . . .
conveniently forgetting that it’s impossible truly to delineate character sans situation.

Ignoring content, the stylist prays to Flaubert and performs
assorted sacred rites with language . . . as if the garment were more important than
the wearer.

So many specialists . . . so many out-of-focus answers.

And each authority is dangerous to the very degree that he’s correct, because that’s
also the degree to which he distorts the actual picture. Put four such specialists
to work as a group, designing a woman, and she might well turn out like the nightmare
of a surrealistic fetishist, all hair and
derrière
and breasts and high French heels.

So . . . no magic key. No universal formula. No mystic secret. No Supersonic Plot
Computer.

It’s enough to plunge a man to the depths of despair.

–Not to mention frustration.

Yet there’s another way to look at your dilemma, and that way just may point you to
salvation.

Consider: Do you really want to succeed just because you possess a magic secret?

For if there were some super-trick, some mysterious formula to puff away creative
problems, then it stands to reason that said trick must be as difficult to perform
as the Indian rope illusion, multiplied by Cagliostro and carried to the
n
th power, with Paracelsus, Apollonius of Tyana and Madame Helena Blavatsky thrown
in. Otherwise, 999 writers would already be using it and the world would be blessed
with a great deal more good fiction.

Denied such thaumaturgy, a beginner like our friend Fred Friggenheimer finds his task
made both easier and harder. Instead of one secret, he must master dozens, hundreds
. . . devices, procedures, bits of craftsmanship and rules of thumb and gimmicks.

And that brings us to a further hazard.

Must you learn the hard way?

Mabel Hope Hartley (that’s not her real name), queen of the love pulps thirty years
ago, is another of Fred’s acquaintances. Old and tired now, she turns out just enough
confessions to support herself.

Mabel tells Fred that a writer needs no help or guidance. Published stories, she claims,
should be his textbooks, for what
secrets can there be to writing when every detail is spread before you on the printed
page?

True enough, as far as it goes. But how many of us can correctly note and/or interpret
everything we see?—And let no man say me nay who hasn’t tried to figure out the recipe
for creole gumbo from what his taste buds tell him. A whiff of perfume is no sure
clue to the scent’s formulation. Just because you’ve walked on carpets doesn’t mean
you’re qualified to weave one. Art conceals art, in writing as elsewhere. The skill
of a skilled writer tricks you into thinking that there is no skill.

So it might be just as well to take the sneers of our imaginary Mabel Hope Hartley
with several grains of salt. Mabel’s merely confused about the issues, because she
did her own studying without benefit of text or teacher–reading, rereading, writing,
rewriting, struggling, failing; sweating, swearing, pacing the floor, experimenting,
straining; wrestling with her work night after night in agonies of despair or of frustration;
battering at the wall of authorial success till her square Dutch head was bloody.

Next question: Is Mabel’s procedure a good one?

It’s a moot question, really. Often you have no choice but to play by ear. The tune
exists only in your own head, so you doodle till you achieve the effect you want.

But in many areas this may prove a wasteful process. Earlier travelers have already
noted landmarks and drawn maps of sorts. “Do this,” they say, or “Don’t do that.”

Short cuts are ever welcome, in a business as complex as this one. So, most of us
seize upon such rules with gratitude . . . attempt conscientiously to apply them.

Certainly Fred Friggenheimer does.

And that’s where he runs into trouble.

Why?

Because often rules—arbitrary rules, at least—conflict with an infinitely more vital
element: feeling.

Emotion and the writer

All your life you’ve lived with feelings . . . inner awarenesses, pleasant or painful,
that rose in you when you bumped a knee or
bit a lemon, kissed a girl or soothed a hurt child. The Marine Band playing “The Halls
of Montezuma” brought one type of emotion . . . a guitar and “La Paloma” another.
Your father’s death, your sister’s marriage, snowflakes drifting down, the smell of
wood smoke, angry words, soft whispers, a scornful laugh, the comedian whose pants
fall down, puppies’ warm cuddlesomeness . . . to one and all of them, you react.

With feelings.

In some of us, these feelings are more intense than they are in others; and, they’re
aroused by different stimuli and situations. The slight that brings this woman to
fury is passed by unnoticed by her neighbor. Fred Friggenheimer is more aware of certain
nuances than is George Abercroft . . . more sensitive to subtleties of sensation and
of impulse: overtones, undertones, implications.
You
pity the sharecropper’s bony, sway-backed horse;
I
pity the cropper;
our friend
pities himself, that he should be forced to face the fact of such degradation.

In other words, each of us experiences and responds to life differently, in a manner
uniquely and individually his own.

Now all this is ever so important to a writer.

Why?

Because feeling is the place every story starts.

Where do you find feeling?

It springs from the human heart.

As a writer, your task is to bring this heart-bound feeling to the surface in your
reader: to make it well and swell and surge and churn.

Understand, feeling is in said reader from the beginning. You give him nothing he
doesn’t possess already.

But emotion, for most people, too often is like some sort of slumbering giant, lulled
to sleep by preoccupation with the dead facts of that outer world we call objective.
When we look at a painting, we see a price tag. A trip is logistics more than pleasure.
Romance dies in household routine.

Yet life without feeling is a sort of death.

Most of us know this. So, we long wistfully for speeded heartbeat, sharpened senses,
brighter colors.

This search for feeling is what turns your reader to fiction; the reason why he reads
your story. He seeks a reawakening:
heightened pulse; richer awareness. Facts are the least of his concern. For them,
he can always go to the
World Almanac
or
Encyclopedia Britannica.

Further, Reader wants this sharpening of feeling because he needs it, emotionally
speaking. Otherwise, why would he bother with your copy?

Now, let’s look at the other side of the coin:

Where do stories originate?

In you, the writer.

Why do you write them?

You too have feelings . . . feelings that excite you, the way the witch-cult excited
Fred Friggenheimer.

An emotional need comes with these feelings: the need to communicate your excitement
to others. So, where another man similarly excited might let his tension go in talk,
or get drunk, or chop weeds in his garden, you write a story . . . put down words
with which you seek to re-create the feelings that seethe inside you.

That is, you
hope
the words re-create those feelings.

And then?

For some fortunate souls, that’s all there is to it. So talented are they . . . so
sensitive, so perceptive, so completely attuned to themselves and to their audience
. . . that they intuitively grasp everything they need to know of form and structure,
style and process. They write, readers read, the world hails them as geniuses. . . .
A happy state.

However, don’t let the thought of such ability depress you. Though I’ve heard for
years about these awesome figures, I’ve yet to meet a living, breathing writer who
hadn’t worked–and worked hard—for everything he got.

Most writers learn by doing. Practice, trial and error, train them. It’s as if our
friend Fred were to go home tonight to his wife Gertrude with a joke to tell.

Listening, she stares at him blankly. “What’s so funny about that?”

Fred tries again. And maybe, this time, he gets the point across: Gertrude laughs.

Tomorrow, a new joke comes along. So, Fred tries to remember what he did before, so
that he can present this story to Ger
trude in such a manner that she’ll laugh first time round, without benefit of follow-ups
or explanations.

If his plan succeeds, he tucks the procedure away in the back of his head. From here
on out, for him, it will constitute a cornerstone of verbal humor. He’s found himself
a rule to follow.

It’s the same with writing. By trial and error, you learn that some things work and
others don’t . . . then incorporate that knowledge into rules-of-thumb.

Failure to develop such rules says merely that the man concerned is incapable of learning
by experience. No matter howhard he tries, his time is wasted.

Where’s Fred to find these tools . . . the specific bits and tricks he needs?

Here Mabel Hope Hartley scores. As she says, the devices are all right there before
his eyes, in every published story . . . more of them than any one man can ever hope
to master. Even though Fred lives to be a hundred, he’ll still learn new twists each
time he sits down to read or write.

But in order to reach that stage, Fred—and you—first must master fundamentals, so
that he knows what to look for.

The trouble with rules

No writer in his right mind writes by a set of rules.

At least, not by somebody else’s rules.

Why not?

Because rules start from the wrong end: with restriction; with form; with mechanics;
with exhortation about things you should and shouldn’t do.

Where
should
you start, then?

With feeling.
Your own
feeling.

A story is like a car that runs on emotion. The author’s feeling is the gasoline in
its engine. Take away its fuel, and even the shiniest, chrome-plated literary power
plant is reduced to so much scrap iron.

Feeling first takes form
within you
. If you haven’t got a feeling, you can’t write about it, let alone arouse it in somebody
else.

The self-taught writer holds a small advantage here, perhaps. Lacking formal training,
he tends to be unaware of technique
as a thing separate and apart. Intellectualization of art is alien to his thinking.
First, last, and all the time he deals with what he feels: Dick’s love for Janice
. . . the hatred Vincent turns on Tom . . . the mother’s anguish when Elsa runs away.
Skill, to him, is simply a tool to help convey feeling. No feeling, no writing.

A novice like Fred Friggenheimer, on the other hand, may assume that rule counts for
more than story. So, he admires his plot because it so perfectly follows the formula
laid down by the Mephisto Computer.

In so doing, he ignores the gasoline of feeling. Then he wonders why the car won’t
run.

That’s why the first
real
rule of successful story-writing is . . . find a feeling.

Or, if you prefer a different phrase: Get excited! Hunt till you uncover something
or other to which you react. With feeling. The more intensely, the better.

Maybe it’s a girl that turns you on . . . a gyroscope . . . a god . . . a gopher.
A disaster . . . a moment of truth . . . a funny fragment. A color . . . an odor . . .
a taste . . . a bar of music.

For me, once, it was an electroencephalograph, a machine that measures brain waves.
Because it fascinated me; because I felt so strongly about it, it ended up as a paperback
novel.—You’ll agree, I think, that no one can get much farther out than that.

After
you find your feeling, rules come in handy . . . help you to figure out the best
way to capture in words whatever it is that so excites you. But the feeling itself
must always remain dominant. Though rules may shape your story, you yourself must
shape the rules.

Beware, too, of the other man’s rule. He sees the world through different eyes.

Thus, George Abercroft is an action writer. “Start with a fight!” is his motto. And
for him, it works.

But Fred Friggenheimer’s witch-cult yarn, as he conceives it, puts heavy emphasis
on atmosphere. The fight he tries to stick in like a clove in a ham at the beginning,
following George’s rule, destroys the mood—and the story.

Even with your own rules, indeed, you must be careful. Be
cause somehow, subtly, they may not apply to this explicit situation.

“There is really no such thing as
the
novel,” observes novelist Vincent McHugh. “The novel is always
a
novel—the specific problem, the particular case, the concrete instance.“

And again: “The novel is not a form. It is a medium capable of accommodating a great
variety of forms.“

Feelings differ. So do the stories that spring from them.

General rules imply that all are the same.

Be very wary, therefore, of anything that says, “Reject this feeling.” Search instead
for the kind of guidance that tells you, “Here’s a way to do the thing you already
want to do . . . to use effectively the impossible situation, the outlandish incident,
the offbeat character.”