Techniques of the Selling Writer (46 page)

This is time well spent. Allow for it in your schedule. Your work will benefit, not
suffer. You’ll eat better, sleep better, relax easier. The plot problem that tied
knots in your stomach before you dived into the pool will somehow have resolved itself
by the time you sit down at the typewriter again. Raw-nerved touchiness and acid temper
fade away as you chop wood or mow the lawn.

In fact, you might even come up with an idea for a new story!

A first-draft story ordinarily is a lumpy, awkward thing.

To shape it up, you must rework it.

Mystery writer Margery Allingham states the issue this way: “I
write everything four times: once to get my meaning down, once to put in everything
I left out, once to take out everything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the
whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it.”

Reworking a story involves two processes. One, here termed
revision
, deals with structural change. The second, to be taken up later, centers on language,
and is called
polishing.

Successful revision requires that you perform three operations, separately or simultaneously:

That is, make sure it centers on the story question.

You can check this with a little private quiz game:

“Can Loretta Kloman, lone Negro teacher in a white high school, prove her competence,
when the racist coach urges her pupils to walk out on her?” is a good story question.
It brings objective into head-on collision with opposition.

Leave desire (Loretta’s determination to prove her competence) or danger (the fear
that her pupils will walk out on her) vague and unformulated, and your whole story
may grow weak and fuzzy.

Let Loretta seek to “prove that Negroes are as good as whites,” and you have a question
that can’t be resolved in fiction.

Why not?

Because you’ve shifted the issue from a test of individual worth to a debate on anthropological
or sociological theory.

Similarly, if your story question deals primarily with process (
“How
can Loretta prove . . .” etc.), you switch emphasis from feeling to intellect, emotion
to puzzle.

You’re better off to stick with a pattern that focuses down to a definite “yes” or
“no.”

Loretta’s objective, and Coach Wilding’s opposition, and Loretta’s decision to fight,
should come on stage as soon as possible . . . preferably in the very first scene.

If they don’t, the opening will drag.

Discursiveness is a peril for all of us. Incorporate a love scene between Loretta
and her boy friend, with no reference to the school situation in speech or thought
or feeling on either side, and you waste words better devoted to some aspect of the
story question.

If it isn’t, it means that the disaster in the preceding scene hasn’t been devastating
enough to preoccupy Loretta with the need to find a new goal.

Thus, the theft of Loretta’s lunch-box might rate as an irritation, but it won’t force
her to revise her thinking about her situation. Whereas Bucko Wilding’s belligerent
demand that other teachers leave her table, when she sits down in the school cafeteria,
and the other teachers’ compliance, will increase her fears . . . perhaps even tempt
her to quit her job on the spot.

Your story needn’t solve all of Loretta’s problems. But if you end with her still
in doubt as to her competence, her ability to meet and control her class, there’s
no release of tension, and your reader has a right to irritation.

We’ve reached the story’s climax. The kids in Loretta’s class are on their feet to
leave. She’s floundering, in deep trouble.

Now, enter the principal. In a ringing speech on duty, tolerance, brotherhood and
Americanism, he appeals to the class to stay with Loretta. Whereupon, the kids sit
down again.

O.K.?

No, no, no!

Why not?

Because God, in the shape of the principal, saves the day. Loretta herself does nothing
. . . performs no climactic act to prove that she’s worthy of reward.

And that, dear friends, is a cardinal sin indeed in fiction!

The answer to any story question leaves an aftermath of minor issues. If you don’t
at least hint as to their outcome, your resolution won’t completely satisfy your reader.

In our hypothetical story, for example, there’s bound to be curiosity as to what happens
to Bucko Wilding. So, don’t leave it hanging.

And that’s enough attention to the tricks of checking story line. Now, let’s move
on to the second aspect of revision:

Here, the issue is proportion. A ten-page beginning to a twenty-page story is like
opening a kids’ cap-gun war with the blast of an actual hand grenade.

In the same way, a story whose big scene comes in the middle isn’t likely to get you
much; and neither is one that features two tremendous climaxes in succession at the
end.

You
must
space your crises and keep your peaks of tension rising!

The key to identification is desire, and it works two ways.

Thus, no one cares what happens to the character who wants nothing.

And if nothing stands between him and his goal—that is, if he faces no danger, no
opposition—again, he’s a dead duck so far as your reader is concerned.

Therefore, check force and counterforce in every scene. Build up the struggle. Emphasize
what’s at stake . . . its subjective importance to your hero.

In addition, remember that your reader looks for some element of personality in your
hero that he himself would like to possess. It’s your job to provide it.

So much for our three points.

Are they the only items you need to check when you revise?

By no means; for every story offers different problems.

However, our list does cover the key issues. And you can always fall back on
Chapter 6
:
Beginning, Middle, End
, and
Chapter 7
:
The People in Your Story
, if you grow confused.

Finally, there’s one special hazard in revision: the tendency to substitute it for
new stories.

Thus, too often, when a story is rejected, Writer decides that it must be revised.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe it really needs reworking.

But if this happens more than occasionally, he should begin to suspect his motives.

Why?

Because writing, as before mentioned, can be devilishly hard work. For some people
especially, playing with an already-completed product comes easier.

The solution?

Once a story is mailed, forget it. No matter how bad you decide it is, in afterthought,
let it go out at least five times before you change it.

That is, unless an editor suggests that you rework it.

In which case, boy, get busy!

A story communicates emotion.

To that end, it uses language.

Whereupon, a question arises: Does the language used really say what you want it to
say? Does it convey the precise nuances of meaning you seek to pass on to your reader?

Unless it does—and it seldom will, in first-draft copy—you need to give it further
polish.

Specifically, you need to check and correct it, line by line, for:

To be clear is to be distinct; plain; easily and correctly understood.

All of which is more simply defined in the abstract than it is put to use when you
deal with the specific and concrete.

Thus, does your reader really know what “talus” is . . . how a harpsichord sounds
. . . the function of a Zoomar lens? Because you visualize a girl as of a certain
type, or picture a door in a particular place in your mind’s eye, do you neglect to
establish them as vividly for the audience with description? Are you sure each sentence
is so written that the “he” refers beyond question to hero or villain, as the case
may be?

If not . . . you need to clarify your meaning.

In simplicity lies strength. Qualify anything too fussily, and you lose the forest
in the trees. Explanation and interjection can bog a story down.

All those intriguing adjectives and adverbs! They lure us. We purr to the sonority
of the convoluted sentence . . . rolling on, rolling on. Alliteration beckons, and
so does metonymy, and a hundred other devices pressed into the service of self-conscious
stylism. Why limit yourself to a simple statement, when fifty words will befuddle
your reader so much more neatly and completely?

The remedy for clutter is simple: Get down to work with that blue pencil! Say what
you have to say, briefly and to the point. Draw the picture cleanly and vividly, but
don’t embellish it with unnecessary words and phrases. Forego the purple prose. Your
job is to tell a story!

Does Rita have black hair on page three, brown on page seven? Is the sky overcast
one moment . . . your character squinting against the sun the next? Have you planted
the gun in the desk drawer on page twelve, so that its presence won’t startle your
reader when Babette snatches it at the climax?

These all are problems of consistency. Failure to check them out may spoil a story
for your reader.

“He turned, hearing the knock at the door.”

Actually, of course, the knock came first.

Motivating stimulus
always
precedes character reaction, in proper copy. When it doesn’t, you’re faced with confusion
of sequential order.

Correct it, or the passage will strike an awkward, jerky note.

“Standing there by the grave, he nodded gravely.”

The repetition sticks out like a sore thumb.

“Standing there beside her in the cemetery, he nodded gravely.”

Now we’ve come up with an inadvertent pun, and that’s even worse than repetition.

“Standing there beside her in the polyandrium, he nodded soberly.”

O.K., so the writer owns an unabridged dictionary. But does the reader?

All these examples represent disruptions of flow.

Your copy should read smoothly, and without attracting undue attention to your use
of language. To that end, you try to select the right word, the right sound, the right
connotation, the right combination for rhythm and pacing and balance. When too many
long sentences fall together, you break them up. Are too many short? You check to
make sure they don’t sound choppy.

—Unless choppiness is the effect you seek, that is.

How do you train yourself to spot the literary awkwardness that breaks up flow?

You follow the same technique by which you avoid using barracks idiom at Aunt Matilda’s
tea: You cultivate awareness of language and its nuances.

Timing, word placement, makes a world of difference, whether in a joke or in a story.

Thus, “Sympathy is what one girl offers another in exchange for details” makes a good
gag-line, because the punch, the unanticipated twist, is at the very end.