Techniques of the Selling Writer (47 page)

Would it be as amusing if you said, “When one girl offers another sympathy, the details
of what happened are demanded in return”?

The technique of building impact is a fine art indeed. One wrong or extra word inserted,
or one key word misplaced or left out, and what should be a bomb can sound like the
backfire of a car a block away.

Perhaps the best way to learn timing is to practice telling jokes.

Don’t just repeat; experiment with your phrasings endlessly. It may make your friends
groan for a while, but every laugh you coax will increase your skill at adding impact
to your copy.

To some teen-agers, everything is “swell” or “square” or “tough” or “cool” or “greasy.”

Being people, writers too sometimes fall into bad habits.

—Dashes can become such a habit. So can elipses . . . not to mention unnecessary Capitals
(or parenthetical insertions) or exclamation points!

How about you? Has “febrile” become your favorite adjective? Are “thickly” or “numbly”
or “fiercely” adverbs too often used? Is the villain forever heavy-footed? Do the
heroine’s breasts rise and fall too fast on every other page?

It’s something to think about.

A writer can devote a lifetime to mastering the tricks and techniques of polishing
his copy.

He should.

He can spend days on end honing and burnishing a single paragraph or page.

And that’s another matter.

How so?

Again, Somerset Maugham sums up the issue. “One fusses about style,” he comments in
A Writer’s Notebook
. “One tries to
write better. One takes pains to be simple, clear and succinct. One aims at rhythm
and balance. One reads a sentence aloud to see if it sounds well. One sweats one’s
guts out. The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known,
Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently.
It proves that if you can tell stories, create character, devise incidents, and if
you have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. All the same
it’s better to write well than ill.”

The letter says, “. . . so, we’d be most interested in having another look at this
story, if you can get it down to three thousand words.”

What do you do now?

You cut.

What do you cut?

You cut facts.

More specifically, you do
not
cut emotion.

This is the heart of the issue, believe me. As such, it’s also the reason why a great
many revisions are rejected.

When a beginner cuts, it’s his tendency to lop out feeling, every time.

That is, he hangs onto his trees or his wharves or his buildings. He clings to the
routine incident in the railroad station, the bit with the bootlegger, the explanation
of precisely how a carillon is played.

What he throws away is character reaction.

But a story isn’t facts. Rather, the truly vital element is how a specific somebody
feels about the data; reacts to them.

These feelings are what move the story forward. Eliminate them, and the story stands
still and dies.

To cut, yet hang onto these so-essential feelings, the trick often is to consolidate
and regroup the facts. Maybe Character can react to a mountain scene as a whole, a
panorama, instead of to trees and rocks and brooks and purple shadows separately.
Dock Street’s wharves and fog and smells and murky alleys are less important than
the chill of fear your hero feels as he strides along the broken sidewalk. You can
leave out all sorts of description
of glass and stainless steel, if you confide that the building is one of those that
make the old man long nostalgically for 1890.

In the same way, if the railway-station scene represents little save passage of time
and movement through space, it’s possible that you can drop it altogether. Same for
bootlegger and carillonneur, unless the parts they play are truly vital in the shaping
of somebody’s feelings.

So much for the general principle. Now, here are two specific rules:

Blue-pencil an adjective here, an adverb there, an explanatory clause or rambling
sentence or discursive paragraph on down the line, and two or three hundred words
can be stripped from almost any manuscript. It’s often well-nigh painless. And it’s
almost certain to sharpen up and so benefit your story.

Carry a word-trim too far and your story thins, from loss of detail and imagery.

Elimination of a minor scene, on the other hand, may save you two or three pages,
without affecting the color of the story as a whole.

In the same way, dropping a character takes out lines and paragraphs with a minimum
of pain.

In either case, however, there
will
be a disruption of story balance. To remedy it often demands that you reappraise
and rewrite most carefully.

“In the good hours when words are flowing well,” remarks Herman Wouk, famed author
of
The Caine Mutiny
, “it seems there is hardly a pleasanter way to spend one’s time on earth.”

How true. Production gives a writer his greatest satisfaction.

Only then Wouk adds, “Never mind the bad hours. There is no life without them.”

Well, as a philosophical attitude, that’s fine. But what a working writer needs when
he’s stalled is help;
practical
help.

Specifically, what’s he to do when, for some mysterious reason, he can’t get out the
copy?

This is by no means an uncommon situation. Every professional has experienced it,
at one period or another. Sometimes it lasts for weeks, or even months. Depression—both
financial and emotional—comes with it, and panic . . . maybe even the end of a career.

Actually, the whole problem stems from one simple fact: Writers, too, are people.

Being people, the fear of failure lives in all of us, on one level or another.

Anything that frustrates us or makes us feel inadequate may bring that fear surging
to the surface.

When that happens, self-doubt takes over. Consciously or otherwise, projecting your
fears into your copy, you begin to wonder whether said copy really can be any good,
when you yourself are such a failure.

A bad review can trigger such a mood. Likewise, a rejection. Introduction to a more
successful writer may make you wonder if he hasn’t some mysterious something that
you lack. A sneer, a barbed joke, an inept compliment which Ego interprets as a slight—each
holds the potential of undermining confidence.

Nor need the trigger be associated with your work. Inability to get proper service
from a waiter can plunge you into a black mood. A child’s question—“Why can’t
we
have a new car, Daddy?”—or a wife’s sigh over an expensive gown in a shop window
have been known to start writers on a downward spiral. Divorce is notorious for its
shattering effect.

Thus, you need not face
actual
disapproval or rejection. It’s enough that you interpret what happens in derogatory
terms, even on an unconscious level.

Whereupon, because you’re already critical of self and unsure in your talent, you
involuntarily question the worth of the work you do.

Consider, for example, the not-untypical case of a man with an overeager agent.

Writer has for years made a decent enough living from paperback science-fiction novels.
Agent, aware of Writer’s talent and
dazzled by visions of greater profit, urges him to move over into the hardback field.

“This stuff you do is nothing,” Agent presses. “A big book with literary quality—that’s
what you need to tackle.”

Writer laughs it off. “I’m doing all right,” he says. “Science fiction’s fun. It’s
what I’m geared to.”

But the laughter has a hollow ring: “This stuff you do is nothing.” That’s what the
man said.

The words fall against a backdrop of irksome memory: snide remarks from an aging poetess
. . . the disdain evinced by the young English professor who genuflects at the altar
of the
Kenyon Review
. . . a tendency of friends to treat Writer as an amusing kook because his specialty
is science fiction.

And now, his agent joins the pack.

On the surface, Writer shrugs it off. But a knot begins to tighten in his belly.

Finally, one day, he sits down at the typewriter—and no words come.

Why?

Because, without even being aware of it, Writer suddenly has become critical of his
own work.

You can’t be both creative and critical at the same time. They’re opposing forces.
Catch a writer between them, and they tear him apart.

And that gives us our first rule:

How do you do this?

The first and most essential step is to recognize the human tendency to attempt to
mix the two.

Then, walk wide around it.

To that end, adopt a working rule of “Create now . . . correct later.” Promise yourself
the privilege of being as critical as you like, as soon as the first draft of a scene
or story is completed.

Until the draft is done, however, stick with impulse. Let yourself go in a heat of
passion. Forget the rules. For as Balzac said, “If the artist does not fling himself,
without reflecting, into his work, as Curtius flung himself into the yawning gulf,
as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in
this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have
fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one . . .
he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.”

Writers as a group are notoriously hard to live with. They snarl, brood, take affront,
pick fights . . . leap from heights of elation to depths of despond.

The reason is that they tend to project their fears . . . seek confirmation for their
self-doubt in others.

Says Christopher Fry, playwright and poet, “An artist’s sensitiveness to criticism
is, at least in part, an effort to keep unimpaired the zest, or confidence, or arrogance,
which he needs to make creation possible; or an instinct to climb through his problems
in his own way as he should, and must.”

So, you tend to be hypersensitive. What do you do about it?

First, recognize that most slights are matters of interpretation, not intent. Not
every casual comment bears a barb. The sneer lies more often in your own mind than
the speaker’s.

Second, remember that to achieve, you first must stick your neck out; and that the
jealousy of others, less able or less courageous or less insightful, is part of the
price you pay for rising from the mass. When local literati jab, most often it’s because
they themselves can’t write or sell. The fact that you deal in thoughts and feelings
instead of shoes makes you different from your neighbors, and hence a trifle frightening
to them.

Third, bear in mind that we all tend to expect our fellows to be perfect, long after
we discover that we ourselves are not. Professional writers and professors have been
known to cut beginners down, in order to inflate their own egos, or to vent frustrations,
or from plain, simple fear of competition.

Will facing these facts eliminate your fears?

No, of course not. But given time and effort, they’ll help you to live with yourself
more comfortably.

As someone has said, you don’t have moods; moods have you.

Resort to will-power isn’t always the best way to combat them.
Sometimes, you get better results when you sneak in the back door.

If you’re depressed, try to recall some action that in the past has lifted such depression—a
simple thing, like being forced to put on a mask of cordiality and speak to people
on the street, or joking with old friends over coffee.

Call it auto-suggestion if you want to. But the fact remains that if you take this
route . . . if you act
as if
you were a competent, confident, successful person . . . then frequently, you’ll
become just that.

Frustration tends to block a writer’s flow of copy.

Nothing frustrates more than too high a level of aspiration. You get nowhere when
you try to force yourself to write today the way you
may
write ten years from now, if you’re sufficiently talented and lucky and if you write
and study every day for the next ten years.

Accept yourself as you are today, on the other hand, and work from where you are with
what you’ve got, and you may develop beyond your fondest expectations. Skill is a
thing you acquire a little at a time. It doesn’t come in a flash of magic.