Techniques of the Selling Writer (4 page)

Writing as a creative act

As Pasteur once observed, chance favors the trained mind.

Feeling tells you what you want to say. Technique gives you tools with which to say
it.

Facility lies in knowing at once what to do next, and so doing it more quickly than
somebody else.

To know what to do next, you must master process . . . an ordered, step-by-step presentation
of your materials that pushes emotional buttons in your reader, so that he feels the
way you want him to feel. It’s a way of going about things; an answer to your “how-to”
questions.

For example?

“How do you make description vivid?” “How do you build conflict?” “How do you tie
incidents together?” “How do you decide where to start your story?” “How do you make
a character interesting?” “How do you insure that a story is satisfying to your readers?”

Or, if you’d rather: “
By what steps
do you make description vivid?” “
By what steps
do you build conflict?”

Often, these questions overlap, for process operates on all levels. Some processes
are simple, some complex; some basic, some specialized. The steps you take to make
a character easily recognizable may be quite definite and explicit. “How do you create
a hero with whom your reader can identify?” is likely to prove a good deal more involved.
That is, it requires more steps, and must take into account more variables. It may
even demand a combining or interweaving of several rudimentary processes.

Must a writer know all these processes?

That depends on the writer, and his level of aspiration—the kind and quality of writer
that he wants to be. Many successful writers get by with only a few skills, well handled.
Others have more tricks up their sleeves than they can use. The general rule is to
do the best you can with what you’ve got at the given moment.

Fortunately, too, in writing, most of us do many things effectively by instinct. Years
of reading have given us a feeling for what’s right and what isn’t, and old habits
turn out to be correct. So the amount you have to learn really is rather limited.

In fact, if you try to learn too much, or strain too hard, it probably means that
you’re fascinated with technique for its own sake, rather than as a tool to help you
tell a story. You may be endeavoring to write mechanically, without sufficient excitement
over your ideas.

Which processes are most important?

The ones
you
need most, at this specific moment.

Which stories are best to study?

The ones which intrigue
you
.

Aren’t some better than others?

Of course. But any story, taken as a whole, is a hodgepodge of good and bad. To study
some so-called classic as a model, unless you first cross your fingers and then take
each sentence with a teaspoonful of salt, is to lay yourself wide open to all sorts
of confusion. For in Sentence A, you find, Classic Author performs admirably. In Sentence
B, he botches things.

Why?

Because he has blind spots, even as you and I.

A particular flaw may reflect a private weakness. Or it may mean that this individual
writer is sloppy or ill-trained. Or that the phone rang at the wrong moment, or that
his wife called him down to dinner.

Thus, an entire story may make most entertaining reading, even when reprinted as a
textbook model. But it covers too much ground to be truly useful. “Standard” procedures
(an exaggeration and a misnomer if ever there was one!) are modified by the demands
of the story situation, the writing situation, and the tastes and competence of the
writer himself.

—And that’s even ignoring the fact that a story rated as a model by a given writer
or editor or teacher or critic may not be anything resembling the right model for
you
.

You can’t take it for granted that any fragment of any story is ideally handled until
you’ve analyzed it from all angles. Techniques, by and large, are explicit and specific.
You learn them
from examples that isolate the point under examination . . . eliminate as many variables
as possible.

To what degree are the processes outlined here subject to modification?

As before noted, you don’t write fiction by the numbers. Each person goes about it
in a different way. Some plan and some don’t. Some plod and some don’t. Some think
and—not necessarily regrettably—some don’t.

Thus, there’s no one right answer to any writing question. You do different things
in different ways at different times. Not only are we safe in saying that you seldom
would write a line the same way on two successive days; we also can state flatly that
both lines written could very well be “right.”

Or
wrong.

The problem, you see, is much like that in ball-playing. No matter how good a batter
you are, you can’t guarantee in advance that you’ll hit a given pitch . . . because
the material fights back and no two curves break just alike.

Mood also enters. You change, and your way of handling your material changes with
you. In the long run, you learn rules only to deviate from them.

How do you master all the varied techniques?

By writing stories. Which is to say, by being willing to be wrong.

Then, having been wrong, you check back through your stuff for process errors . . .
places where you skipped over steps, or went off the path, or started with the road
map upside down.

Do that enough times, on enough stories, and eventually you’ll learn.

Won’t exercises give the same result less painfully?

Regrettably, no; at least, not in my experience. The man who cottons to exercises
generally isn’t cut out to be a fiction writer. He’s certainty-oriented; reaching
out for a sure thing.

Most potentially successful writers have little patience with such. They’re too eager
to get on with their own stories; too intoxicated with their own euphoria; too excited
over their ideas.

Exercises excite no one. Palpably artificial, only tenuously related to the difficulties
that beset you, they turn writing into drudgery for anyone.

So buckle down and forge yourself a kit of techniques out of the iron of your own
copy. Each story will give you more experience to translate into literary process.
Each trick mastered will free you just a little more from your feelings of inadequacy
and frustration.

Finally, your excitement soars, unshackled, and to your own amazement you discover
that somehow, in spite of everything, you’ve turned out to be a writer.

What’s the first step?

There’s the world of words to master; an important world, too, with laws and protocol
all its own.

No doubt you’ll want to violate those laws, in many cases. But half the fun of sinning
lies in knowing that it’s sinful.

To that end, let’s move on to
Chapter 2
, and there take a look at language and its regulations.

CHAPTER 2

The Words You Write

“God forbid that I should set up for a teacher!” cried Italy’s master playwright of
the eighteenth century, old Carlo Goldoni.

Even more so, saints preserve us from that writer with the effrontery to proclaim
himself a grammarian.

Most writers paragraph for effect, punctuate on impulse, and let split infinitives
and comma splices fall where they may. Omnivorous reading substitutes for systematic
study. Syntactic nomenclature is a thing they learn only if, somehow trapped into
teaching others the craft, they find themselves in need of terms to describe the errors
of their students.

None of which in any wise prevents their writing adequate or better than adequate
copy.

In other words, this is a business in which the star performers play by ear, and who
cares? So long as a man’s writing is itself clear and accurate and specific, no holds
are barred. And anyone who needs instruction in the traffic laws of the English language
has wandered into the wrong field.

Yet words are vital to a writer, no matter how askance he looks at grammar. Some work
for him; some against him. And some just clutter up the landscape.

If you’re just starting, you need to know which words do what, and why.

Specifically, it’s desirable that you learn three things:

Taking first things first, let’s begin with . . .

How to find the right words

What are your essential jobs, in actually writing copy?

They are:

What’s the issue in
selection?

As a writer, you provide peepholes through which your reader may look into the lives
of other people. So, you must decide:

Who
is to be viewed?

Do we deal with doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief? What specific individuals?

When
do we observe these characters?

At what moment, what period, what time of their lives? Or, as the old gag phrases
it, do infants have more fun in infancy than adults do in adultery?

Where
do we catch these people?

Are they afield? On the street? At the office? In church? Homebound? In the living
room? The bedroom? The bathroom?

What
are they doing?

Are they working? Playing? Loving? Hating? Worshipping? Sinning? Learning? Forgetting?

—And, closely related,
what
does your reader notice as your people go about these multitudinous activities? Does
he see sunrise, or mudhole? Beauty, or blemish? Is he caught by the smell of frying
bacon, or the rasp of saw teeth biting into a pine board, or the smoothness of velvet
beneath his fingers, or the taste of a sucked anise drop? A bellow of rage, or an
eyelash flicker?

Why
does he notice?

What makes this detail important to him and to your story?

How
does your reader see all this?

Is he looking at it objectively? Subjectively? Through the eyes of you, the writer?
Through those of your hero? Those of your villain?—Or is this the viewpoint of the
familiar innocent bystander, lining up for his turn at getting hurt?

These are more or less weighty decisions, every one. For, ever and always, you the
writer must
select
.

Simultaneously, you
arrange
events for your reader, in what you fondly hope will prove effective order.

Do you move from cause to effect?

Or backward, from effect to cause?

Do you present your story in strict chronological order, as the events involved transpire?

Or, do you resort to some sort of frame or flashback, some device of recollection?

Order does make a difference. Show a gun, then a coffin, then tears, and you put your
focus on heartbreak. If coffin comes first, then tears, then gun, the issue may be
vengeance.

So, you
arrange
.

Then, you bring your material to life.

With
description
.

To live through a story . . . experience it as vividly as if it were his own . . .
your reader must capture it with his own senses.

How do you put perfume on the page? The tiger’s roar? The whisky’s bite? The warm
spring air? The earth? The blood?

With words: description.

But simply written, of course? With short words, short sentences, short paragraphs,
and so on?

Well, maybe. Simplicity is a virtue, within reason. But Proust sometimes wrote in
sentences literally hundreds of words long. Ionesco makes all language a paradox.
A current paperback novel—an original, not a reprint—includes such words as
ubiquitous, relegated, nebulous, modulated
, and
ebullient
. Einsteinian concepts and beyond are standard fare in the science-fiction pulps.

So?

Few of us read voluntarily about the primer-level doings of Dick and Jane. Simplicity
is a virtue in writing, true; but never the primary virtue.

What is?

Vividness.

How about brevity?

It’s important too. Within reason.

Within reason?

Who, just learning this business, knows where or when or how to be brief? In the wrong
place, brevity can destroy you.

So?

As in the case of simplicity, brevity is never the heart of the issue. Vividness is.

Making copy come alive

How do you write vividly?

You present your story in terms of things that can be verified by sensory perception.
Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch—these are the common denominators of human experience;
these are the evidence that men believe.

Describe them precisely, put them forth in terms of action and of movement, and you’re
in business.

Your two key tools are nouns and verbs.

Nouns are words that name something:
dog, boat, pencil, man, telephone, grass, chair
.

Verbs are words that tell what happens:
gulp, whirl, jump, choke, smash, slump, snore
.

The nouns you want are
pictorial
nouns: nouns that flash pictures, images, into your reader’s mind.

The more
specific, concrete
, and
definite
the noun . . . the more vivid the picture.

The noun
rhinoceros
flashes a sharper, more meaningful picture to your reader than does the noun
animal
.

But
animal
is sharper and more meaningful than
creature
.

In the same way, consider
bungalow
versus
house
versus
building . . . starlet
versus
girl
versus
female
. . .
Colt
versus
revolver
versus
firearm
. . .
steak
versus
meat
versus
food
.