Techniques of the Selling Writer (42 page)

Closely related to philosophy, yet by no means precisely the same, each magazine has
a personality all its own.

This personality is compounded of reader interests, editorial taste, and ad-department
pressure.

Drop the advertising angle, and the same statement applies to book houses.

If you’re eager to hit some special market, it’s only good judgment to consider this
personality factor.
Rogue
and
Secrets
and
Redbook
buy vastly different stories. The novel that bears Little, Brown’s imprint isn’t
likely to be of a type to win a place at Gold Medal, or vice versa.

How do you familiarize yourself with a given market’s tastes and rules?

You read what that market publishes.

In quantity.

Particularly, you pay attention to:

Ordinarily, character age reflects audience and, even more important, the publisher’s
compulsive striving to build a readership.

The young adult is king in most magazines. Advertisers see him as a big buyer, not
yet set in his spending habits.

The publisher reads this fact as an equation: Young-adult readers equal advertising
equal profits.

Young-adult characters attract young-adult readers. Q.E.D.

Obversely, stories that feature older characters are notoriously hard to sell.

Though not to such a marked degree, the same pattern is found in the book field.

Why?

Because young adults tend to buy and read more books than do their elders.

There are exceptions aplenty to generalizations such as this, of course. And if you’re
good enough, you can throw any rule away.

But over-all, and whether you like the idea or not, it does pay to think young.

It should be obvious to anyone, it seems, but I still find plenty of would-be writers
who don’t realize that male-viewpoint stories sell more readily in men’s markets,
female-viewpoint in women’s.

Take the confession field. Sure,
True Story
or
Modern Romances
or
Secret Diary
buy yarns with male central characters. But they probably publish five times as many
in which women play the leading roles.

Does your chosen market prefer exotic backgrounds, or familiar? Glamorous, or everyday?

Again, consistent reading gives you the answer.

One point of caution, however: Historical settings find few takers these days, especially
in the magazines.

The western is always with us, and so is the mystery, the science-fiction yarn, the
doctor-nurse story, the romance.

Such category fiction offers a special hazard, though: Readers of a particular
genre
frequently are fans.

That means they’ve read widely in the field. They know the clichés, the worn-out plots,
the too-familiar patterns.

Consequently, unless you know the area equally well, you’ll waste endless hours writing
yarns doomed in advance to rejection because they feature the vengeance trail, the
range war, the locked room, the biter-bit, atomic doom, the interplanetary travelogue,
or the like.

Don’t let the fact that old hands get away with such fool you, either. The long-time
professional has other elements working
on his side. Whereas the beginner is expected to come up with something fresh.

On the financial front, profitable pickings from the categories tend to be slim in
the magazine field. Probably it’s because the TV series have so largely taken over.

Hardback book publishers, in turn, seem more and more to give prime emphasis to the
big literary and pseudo-literary novels, with their potential of fantastic profits
from best-sellerdom, book club and movie sales.

Result: A high proportion of category material now appears under the paperback houses’
imprints.

Finally, and unfortunately, when one category rides high, chances are that others
are scraping bottom. Specialize too narrowly, and you may be in for a long hard winter.

Scan the girlie books casually, and all appear to be much alike. Check more closely,
and you discover that this one likes sex with a light touch, that one prefers clinical
detail, and another works largely in terms of implication.

Crime equals violence, at some houses. In others, cleverness dominates. One builds
up character; another puts its emphasis on plot.

In the same way, Ace and Berkley set different standards for their westerns. Random
House buys one kind of mystery, Dutton another. The story heavy with technical detail
that
Analog
features would fall flat at
Amazing
.

Does all this sound like a plea for rigid slanting?

It isn’t.

To me, it seems that a writer should be intensely aware of the markets he hopes to
hit. He needs to read them, study them, learn to recognize their tastes and strengths
and weaknesses.

When he sits down to write a story, however, he ought to forget said markets, utterly
and completely. The story itself should become his entire preoccupation. Because if
that story is good enough, count on it, it surely will find a home somewhere.

That incredibly prolific fictioneer John D. MacDonald once summed up the matter, in
a letter to
Writer’s Digest
in response to a man who declared that a book written for one publishing house often
had small chance of acceptance elsewhere.

Wrote MacDonald: “I agree heartily. I would even say that a book written for one publishing
house has little chance of acceptance at that publishing house. A book written for
oneself—to meet one’s own standards, to gratify and satisfy and entertain the toughest
one-man audience a writer can ever have—such a book has a good chance of acceptance
anywhere.”

So, what about material?—That’s where we started, remember?

MacDonald’s statement still applies. You judge by personal standard.

And,
personal
is the key word. You can’t use someone else’s yardstick. You have to shape your own,
out of an intimate amalgam both of fiction principles and of market patterns.

Preparing to write a story

Preparation boils down to two issues:

What is an idea?

An idea is something that excites a writer.

Will the same idea excite two writers?

Not necessarily.

Then why is it important that the writer have an idea?

Because only insofar as he experiences excitement—a sense of mounting, goal-oriented
inner tension—will the writer be able to muster the enthusiasm and energy he needs
to seek for meaningful relationships in his material.

Creativity, in turn, may be defined as multiple response to single stimulus.

Most of us, when we look at a doorknob, see a doorknob. It’s a one-to-one relationship:
one doorknob, one response.

But some day you may fall prey to a sadistic old writing teacher who removes that
self-same doorknob from the door and commands that you list ten ways to kill somebody
with it.

Now, suddenly, the doorknob is no longer just a doorknob. You find yourself dealing
with it in terms of qualities and context, as well as appearance and/or function.

Whereupon, the laws of association take over.

Thus, the doorknob’s shaft is
similar
to a dagger . . . the knob to a billy . . . the material to an electrical conductor.

What
isn’t
a doorknob, by way of
contrast?
Well, traditionally, it isn’t supposed to function as the trigger to a booby trap,
or a clue to the existence of a secret room (“Look! If you just stick the shaft through
that knothole—”), or a secret container for poison or dope.

How about
contiguity
. . . meaning
next to
, as one house is next door to another? Apply it to doorknobs, and soon you find yourself
thinking about locks and windows, panels and pull-cords, handles and hinges.

Before you know it, ideas begin to flow: A doorknob is round, maybe. Metal, maybe.
Or glass. Or porcelain. Or hexagonal. Or octagonal. Why would anyone want a square
doorknob? Maybe the knob slips on the shaft, so someone can’t escape. Take the knobs
from a door, and it gives you a tiny window into the room, through which a bullet
or dart or rapier might pass . . . after which, the knob could be reinserted. How
about radioactive material inside the knob? Or a poisoned-needle mechanism—snake or
spider poison? You could run a piano-wire noose through the hole for the shaft. Maybe
gimmick the latch—substitute a spring-lock for it and, at the same time, put the regular
lock out of action, so that whoever’s in the room thinks the lock is locked and he’s
safe, when really anyone outside can open the door without a key. How about wiring
the knob for electricity? Or piping the shaft-hole for gas? “Glass” knob made of ice
melts when the room heat is turned on. Diamond might be concealed in glass knob. Metal
knob might be made of gold or platinum. What if knob were a symbol of something or
other, and possessing it made its possessor a target? Or, turning knob
trips hidden camera. Or load knob with germs. China knob turns out to be an insulator.
Knob given to villain. Or unique knob used as clue to betray hiding place of right
or wrong person. Knob filled with explosives. Shaft thrust into electric socket to
stop some vital device by blowing fuse. Knob dusted with fluorescent powder to reveal
who’s touched it . . .

The above, please note, tends to take the form of a wild, chaotic, and often barely
coherent jumble. It’s random. It’s disorganized. It’s without any pre-established
plan or pattern.

It is, in a phrase, a product of
focused free association
—that is, free association centered upon a particular subject and/or related group
of subjects.

Such focused free association is what gives you ideas.

Your prime tools, in this associative process, are a scratch-pad, a pencil, and a
willingness to set down a multitude of utterly and completely impossible notions,
until you find one that rings an emotional bell somewhere deep inside you. For if
anything is certain in this world, it’s that only out of a host of
bad
ideas will emerge the occasional
good
one. Censor your thinking, attempt in advance to limit yourself to a superior product,
and you can count on it that you’ll end up sterile, or paralyzed, or both, creatively
speaking.

Whenever you need an idea, then, make a list.—Not just lists of story situations,
either. Whether you’re looking for an incident, or a setting, or a character, or a
bit of characterizing business, or a title—make a list! Even if you feel you’ve already
worked out a proper angle, jot down half-a-dozen more, just for kicks.

And when the list is done—what then?

You put it aside; then come back later. Main strength and awkwardness mean little,
in this phase of a writer’s work. You have to sneak up on ideas. To that end, you
must learn to change your point of view . . . your approach . . . your routine . . .
even yourself