Techniques of the Selling Writer (41 page)

Each of these aspects of creative work involves a variety of problems. Taken a step
at a time, however, none of them is too difficult to master.

Shall we dive in?

On being a writer

To become a writer, you first must be capable of emotional involvement.

That is, you must feel, and feel intensely. Though you work with language, the words
you use are only symbols . . . means to the end of communication of emotion.

You can’t communicate that which you yourself lack. No feeling, no story.

To feel, in practical terms, means to react . . . to desire to behave in a particular
way. Given the right stimulus, things happen inside you. Awareness vibrates—assorted
gradations of like, dislike, surprise.

If no such response takes place, or if it comes through on too low a level, give up.
You’ll never make it as a writer.

On the other hand, don’t cross yourself off the list of candidates for authorship
too quickly.
Everyone
feels, to some degree. Further, the very fact that you
want
to write is a good omen. To desire, to yearn, itself demonstrates a capacity for
involvement. Restraint, indifference, apathy—in major measure, they’re all learned
responses; habit patterns. With sufficient perseverance, and at least in part, you
can break them down.

Which brings us back to where we started: Writing springs from feeling.

What comes next?

To succeed as a writer:

Why is enthusiasm so important?

Because writing is murderously hard, lonely, frustrating work, upon occasion. Unless
a project excites you to begin with, odds are you’ll stand ready to slash your wrists
before it’s done.—Maybe you will anyhow, as a matter of fact. But at least, with enthusiasm,
you improve the percentages a little.

How do you acquire enthusiasm?

Enthusiasm is an emotional response, a feeling. Outside stimuli spark it.

These stimuli come from your story’s topic, its subject matter—
love in Manhattan or Okmulgee, murder in a hospital, war in Vietnam, smuggling in
the Big Bend country, ambition and jealousy in business.

To build enthusiasm, you search for aspects of your topic that excite you . . . immerse
yourself in factual raw material till you find some unique something about which you
can be fervent. Inspiration springs from saturation. No one can write for long out
of his own unsustained unconscious. Emotion is an element which that unconscious can
supply, virtually without limit; but it must have stimulating facts—about people,
about events, about setting, about objects or what have you—upon which to feed.

Sophistry is a subtle poison. The story that falsifies your emotional standards, your
convictions, does you infinitely more harm than any editor’s check can compensate.

Why?

Because a story is in essence a parable. Though you set it on Mars and cast it with
bug-eyed monsters, the message it conveys is deepest truth.

That truth is you. On an unconscious level, it reflects your innermost feelings.

The story which by implication proves that promiscuity is good clean fun, or honor
a fraud, or duty and honesty outmoded, when you really believe the opposite, makes
you one with the prostitute who simulates ecstasy for money. Hypocrisy moves you over
into the ranks of the constitutional psychopath, the con man.

Result: emotional conflict. Conscience joins battle with creativity.

Then, one day, you freeze up so tightly that you can’t write at all, and another career
goes down the drain.

No one really gives a damn if you don’t make it as a writer.

No one, that is to say, except you yourself.

Further, no one’s going to pay you for the stories you don’t write.

This means you have to be your own taskmaster. If you’re not
up to the job, you can always sack groceries for a living, in a store where someone
else tells you what to do and when to do it.

To succeed as a writer means getting up in the morning, even when you’d rather sleep.

It means working when you’d much prefer to take in a movie or go swimming.—
Really
working, too; not just staring, trancelike, out the window.

It’s your decision.

“I was surprised,” Somerset Maugham remarks in
A Writer’s Notebook
, “when a friend of mine told me he was going over a story he had just finished to
put more subtlety into it; I didn’t think it my business to suggest that you couldn’t
be subtle by taking thought. Subtlety is a quality of the mind, and if you have it
you show it because you can’t help it. It’s like originality: no one can be original
by trying. The original artist is only being himself; he puts things in what seems
to him a perfectly normal and obvious way: because it’s fresh and new to you you say
he’s original. He doesn’t know what you mean. How stupid are those second-rate painters,
for instance, who can’t but put paint on their canvas in a dull and commonplace way
and think to impress the world with their originality by placing meaningless and incongruous
objects against an academic background.”

It’s hard to accept yourself for what you are, sometimes. No one likes to admit to
inadequacy or limitation.

But a mask is difficult to hold in place, on paper. It keeps slipping out of line.
The truth pops forth, in spite of all your efforts.

You’re better off to face the facts at the beginning. Ben Hecht was no Virginia Woolf,
nor was Woolf a Eugene Ionesco. Herman Wouk, Erle Stanley Gardner, and A. J. Cronin
each found his place.

They did it by being themselves, not fakes or copyists.

Strength is in each of us, as well as limitation. Call your shots the way you see
them, and you give the world a chance to rate you and your talents realistically.

Whereupon, your reader may like the way you write in spite of all your lacks, just
because that way is individual and different.

Material, good and bad

Some years ago, a scholar at a leading university made it his hobby to translate French
fables of an earlier day.

But hobbies have a way of getting out of hand. Soon Scholar yearned for a public for
his efforts.

An acquaintance remarked that a certain magazine occasionally carried translations
from the French.

Our man had never seen this publication. But he promptly sent its editor a batch of
his best work.

Enter happenstance. The magazine was one of the most ribald journals ever to sully
the nation’s newsstands. The editor, with perverse humor, accepted the fables and
ran one each month, sandwiched in between naughty nudes and bawdy ballads. Each carried
the good professor’s name and full academic pedigree, and mirth and embarrassment
were the order of the day on his campus when word got round.

The lesson here is that material is neither good nor bad, per se. You must rate it
in terms of the reaction it evokes from a given market, a specific reader.

Thus, this entire book has been designed to give you a standard by which you may judge
story.

As you read current books and magazines, however, you’ll soon see that not all fiction
fits this pattern.

The reason is simple: There are two ways to acquire a reputation as a good marksman.

The first is to draw a target on some appropriate surface, then shoot at it and hit
the bull’s-eye.

The second is to fire at the surface to begin with, and afterwards draw target around
the spot where the bullet hit.

In the same way, it has become the habit of the literary world to apply the term “story”
to any pleasant or intriguing fragment of writing which involves fictional characters
and/or situations. Sketches, vignettes, anecdotes, word photography, and all sorts
of other
curiosa
are so described.

In consequence, we have good stories and bad, weak stories and strong, stories appealing
to one reader and those appealing to another. So whatever you write, you quite possibly
will find someone, somewhere—even a distinguished critic, perhaps—who’ll proclaim
it a story.

Further, there are complex non-literary matters which an editor must take into account:
readership, available space, “house image,” business-office pressures, and the like.

It follows that recognition of good story material involves much more than evaluation
of how a given piece of fiction will shape up. For while such evaluation is ever so
important, it becomes truly helpful only as it’s related to market, with due consideration
given to the editor’s problems.

To this end, ask yourself three questions:

Here, the issue is length. Some stories may be told in few words. Some take many.

Each market, in turn, has its own standards. There are magazines that won’t touch
a yarn that runs over 1500 words. A hardback publisher is unlikely to boggle at a
100,000-word novel.

This being the case, it’s only common sense to correlate material and market.

Factors to be considered include:

It’s hard to deal with a whole war in a short story. The social movement of a family,
shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, is bound to demand wordage.

A girl worries about whether or not a particular boy will ask her for a prom date.

Will such an idea carry a short-short? Sure thing.

A short story? Probably.

A novelette? Weak.

A novel? Ridiculous.

Rona Jaffe’s
The Best of Everything
interweaves the romances of five New York career girls. Such an involved tale demands
novel length.

Does your story make it essential that you use three different viewpoints? Each time
you switch, you’ll have to re-establish emotional tension . . . and such re-establishment
eats up pages.

The more characters you use, and the more fully they’re developed, the longer your
story will run.

Same for settings.

A man dies at the age of eighty. To tell the story of his life adequately in all likelihood
will take a novel.

How he in one day met and won the girl he married may make a 3000-word short story.

In general, the longer your story’s time span, and the more events you deal with,
and the more scenes you develop, the longer that story will have to be.

Why does a story please one man and displease another, even though its subject may
be a favorite of both?

The core reason is that the man displeased disagrees with certain of the author’s
basic assumptions . . . his personal philosophy, the way he views the world. Whereas,
the man pleased agrees.

Often, neither reader nor author is even aware that such assumptions exist. They’re
things taken for granted, not even the subject of conscious thought.

Thus, this book jumps to all sorts of wild conclusions.

For example, I start from the idea that you write in large measure to please a reader.

Some people don’t agree.

—And on that issue, I can’t resist quoting a statement by John Fischer that recently
appeared in
Harper’s:

Among serious fiction writers, one large group now seem (in the words of a veteran
publisher) to be “more concerned with self-expression than with entertaining the public.”
[British novelist Geoffrey] Wagner defines them as the poetic novelists. With them,
and with most of the critics who make “serious” literary reputations, storytelling
has become disreputable. Their main concern is with sensibility, with the inner drama
of the psyche, not with the large events of the outside world. Often they are accomplished
craftsmen. Their style is luminously burnished . . . they write on two levels, or
even three . . . their work contains more symbols than a Chinese band . . . it may
plumb the depths of the human soul . . . it may be (in Felicia Lamport’s phrase) as
deeply felt as a Borsalino hat. But all too often it just isn’t much fun to read.

If such exercises in occupational therapy don’t sell very well, the author has small
grounds for complaint. He has written them, after all, primarily to massage his own
ego and to harvest critico-academic bay leaves. Since he isn’t interested in a mass
audience, why should it be interested in him?

Back to our point:

I also assume that readers like form. I think they prefer a story that has a beginning,
a middle, and an end.

Most do. But not all.

Again, I take it for granted that said readers believe man possesses at least a degree
of free will, that they like active characters better than passive, and that they
think a cause-effect relationship exists between what you do and what you get.

Some voices would dissent.

This list could go on thus for pages. But the point, I trust, is already clear: Each
market, consciously or unconsciously, represents a particular philosophy of life.

The stories it buys reaffirm that philosophy.

Further, the issue reaches far beyond mere literary technique.
McCall’s
believes in premarital chastity.
Playboy
approves of sexual freedom. Grove Press takes the avant-garde view. Double-day aims
more toward popular appeal.

All of which is something to consider when you evaluate story material.

Does this mean you should tailor your own beliefs to fit a given market?

Well, hardly. It makes more sense to hunt markets that see the world the same way
you do.

Shall we talk common sense for just a little while?