Techniques of the Selling Writer

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Nor is it the only such way to go about things. Lester Dent’s old Master Fiction Plot has served a similar function for many and many a writer. Others prefer the “Three O” system—Objective, Obstacle, Outcome. “Who wants to do what, and why can’t he?” is a pattern-pregnant question that’s started hundreds of Hollywood scripts down the road.

  Whatever approach you take, you yourself remain the most vital factor. The fresh idea, the unique twist, the sudden insight into character, the enthusiasm that captures and excites your reader’s imagination—these are yours and yours alone.

  The concept of beginning, middle, and end spring from life itself: You’re born, you live, you die.

  At six, you enter school. For twelve long years you wrestle with friends and enemies and teachers and subjects. Then, you’re graduated.

  You take a job. You work it hard. You move on again to something better or worse.

  You go to the races. There’s a start and a run and a finish. A football game or a bullfight see conflict open and seesaw and close.

  The sun rises. The daylight hours pass by. The sun sets.

  These things you know. As corollaries, you know also that for the individual human being, whatever happens (1) has duration, and (2) is in a continuing state of flux, a process of development and change. Time forms a framework that puts limits on both your tragedies and your triumphs. Each situation coalesces, shapes and is shaped, dissipates.

  So, though Advanced Thinkers proclaim the cosmos to be self-renewing and unending, you pay them little heed. You’ve too many immediate pressures to deal with, day by day.

  Further, we like it that way. Both adventure and security go with delimitation. Show me the long view of my fate—or that of the human race, or Earth, for that matter—and likely I’ll hang myself in the nearest corner. The immediate is better. There’s hope and excitement in the prospect of a new town, a new job, a new girl. Release comes with completion, closure, the end of a day or a problem. The visitor who breaks in on the climax of your favorite TV show strikes sparks of irritation in you. The legend of the Wandering Jew is a frightening thing.

  Within time’s framework, for each of us, feeling reigns supreme. It doesn’t matter how much you talk about objectivity or perspective. As a feeling unit, you still have to sweat out your mortal span minute by minute and hour by hour and day by day—every moment, with none skipped; and each one brings its own reaction. Does automation claim your job? Economists’ reassurances have a hollow ring to this noon’s empty belly. When your girl marries someone else, you feel the hurt right now, and what difference does it make to you that next year you’ll find someone else less fickle? The man in grief is closer kin to the child whose balloon has burst than he is to theologian or philosopher.

  Fiction may not too awkwardly be defined as life on paper. It, too, flies the flag of feeling and takes the short-term point of view. It, too, ranges through a world in which the moment is what counts, and life and the events that make up life have a beginning and a middle and an end.

  “I want a story to have form,” W. Somerset Maugham has said, “and I don’t see how you can give it that unless you can bring it to a conclusion that leaves no legitimate room for questioning. But even if you could bring yourself to leave the reader up in the air, you don’t want to leave yourself up in the air with him.”

  How do you bring yourself and your reader back to the ground? Well, let’s start from . . .

  How to get a story under way

  The function of your story’s beginning is to let your reader know there’s going to be a fight . . . and that it’s the kind of fight that will interest him.

  To that end, beginning spotlights three things: desire, danger, decision. Someone wants to attain or retain something. Something else threatens his chances of so doing. He decides to fight the threat.

  The thing Character wants, the danger that threatens fulfillment of this desire, and the decision he makes, determine what specific readers will enjoy the story. One likes sex and violence, another tenderness and love, another the competitive striving for success, another intellectual stimulation. Relatively few college professors are Tarzan fans—and even fewer sharecroppers succumb to Finnegans Wake. The trick, for the writer, is merely to pinpoint audience taste . . . then to refrain from attempting to inflict his copy on the wrong people.

  The problems of beginning break down into six categories:

  a. Where to open.

  b. How to open.

  c. What to put in.

  d. What to leave out.

  e. How to introduce needed information.

  f. When to close.

  Let’s take these one at a time:

  a. Where to open.

  You can start a story in any way and at any point and, regrettably, I’ve read the manuscripts that prove it. But that doesn’t mean that some beginnings aren’t better (read: “more effective”) than others.

  Thus, you can open on a landscape or a fist fight, a still life or weather talk, or a close-up of a character or an object. Or on any of a thousand other angles.

  Confession editors sometimes say, “Start on the day that’s different.” A Hollywood axiom recommends, “Start with an arrival.” Pulp writers used to advocate starting with a fight. A general rule, across the board, has been that you should start with trouble.

  So, where should you start?

  Which immediately brings up another question: What do you need, to start a story?

  You need change.

  “Start on the day that’s different”? Something made it that way—a change from someone’s accustomed routine; what had been.

  “Start with an arrival”? An arrival is injection of a new element into a situation; therefore, a change.

  “Start with a fight”? Some deviation from the status quo caused that fight to explode at this particular time and place.

  “Start with trouble”? Trouble is only a name for what happens when new developments can’t be fitted into an existing pattern.

  So, change is the thing you need to start a story.

  Next question: How do you build the beginning of a story around change?

  You need four things:

  (1) An existing situation.

  (2) A change in that situation.

  (3) An affected character.

  (4) Consequences.

  These four items are listed here only as ingredients of the beginning, you understand; necessary elements; components. No order of presentation is implied.

  Now, what’s there to say about each one?

  By the existing situation, we mean the state of affairs in which your focal character functions.

  In a suburban home on a quiet weekday morning, that state of affairs may be placid. On a battlefield, it may be violent. At a high-level business conference, every word may crackle with tension. Along a shady creek-bank, the mood may be one of peace and relaxation.

  But whatever the situation, your focal character accepts it. It follows an anticipated routine.

  Enter change.

  Change is some new element or relationship injected into the existing state of affairs. Something happens that makes the original situation different. Perhaps the temperature drops, or the sun comes up, or a stranger enters, or a girl says yes.

  In the quiet household, change may be a leaky pipe or a visiting neighbor or a backfiring truck that wakes the baby. On the battlefield, it may be a machine gun that jams, or a sniper’s bullet that kills the squad leader, or an enemy rush that cuts off a unit.

  —Not that changes necessarily appear to be disastrous. Good news—new information received on anything from health to weather—may upset a situation every bit as much as bad.

  So: Change impinges on an existing situation.

  And someone is affected by it.

  This affected character is one whose state of mind is somehow altered by the modification in state of affairs.

  This, of course, presupposes that the character has a st
ate of mind to alter. That is, he can’t be a blank when you introduce him. His behavior must reveal already-existing attitudes, principles, prejudices, direction.

  So, faced with a change in his state of affairs, this character reacts in characteristic fashion.

  Nor does it matter whether his actions are warranted, objectively, by the facts of what has happened. How he interprets those facts—how he feels about them, subjectively—is what counts. For if you rob a grocery store tonight, and tomorrow morning a squad car pulls up in front of your rooming house, you very well may jump to and act on the conclusion that you’re about to be arrested—even though, in actuality, the officers have stopped merely to investigate a smoking trash pile.

  In the same way, loss of one friend may spell loneliness to a man, even though he moves through a crowd of others. Many a woman sees tragedy and old age in the first slight creping of her skin. Named West Coast manager, an executive quits because he thinks he rated a home-office job.

  Situation, change, character. Three essential ingredients down; one more to go.

  Consequences.

  That one can spell the difference between success and failure when you start a story.

  Situation: A bright, brisk winter day.

  Change: Wind—icy, biting, out of the north.

  Character: A pedestrian.

  Sweeping down, wind stings pedestrian. He shivers . . . turns up his collar . . . hugs his coat tighter about him . . . hurries on home.

  And that’s all.

  Same way, a girl runs a red light. A cop stops her. The girl smiles. The cop tears up the ticket. The girl drives off.

  No aftermath. By tomorrow the incident is forgotten.

  An old woman lives for her son’s rare visits. He comes. She berates him for his neglect. He ignores her and goes away again.

  The state of affairs is back where it began.

  To start a story, a change must prove the trigger for continuing consequences.

  That is, it must set off a chain reaction. Responding to change, your character must do something that brings unanticipated results. He must light a fire he can’t put out.

  Thus, regardless of your story’s original situation, or the initial change, sooner or later—and preferably sooner—the affected character must find himself in an intolerable state of affairs.

  What’s intolerable?

  Anything is intolerable which endangers a person’s chances of attaining or retaining something subjectively important to him.

  Or, to put it even more simply, it’s anything he finds too upsetting to ignore.

  If you like to walk, and arthritis begins to stiffen up your feet, it’s a painful annoyance.

  If your livelihood depends on walking—that’s intolerable. Win or lose, you’ll fight against it any way you can.

  A wife contemptuous of you is an affront to your pride.

  One who backs her contempt with demands for a divorce and property settlement that will leave you penniless is intolerable.

  The lazy, insolent, disobedient child may be frustrating and infuriating. The one who sets fires every chance he gets forces you to do something about him.

  Existing situation plus change plus affected character plus consequences equal desire plus danger.

  Desire plus danger plus decision opens any story.

  Decision is a factor we’ll take up later. For now, just remember that the stronger your character’s desire and the stronger the danger that threatens it, the stronger your opening.

  If the intolerable element can be personified—given life in an active opponent—that’s even better.

  So much for the ingredients you mix into your story’s beginning.

  And that brings us back to the place we started: Where do you open?

  Each story constitutes a new and unique problem. No one ever knows for sure just which spot is the best from which to start. Given identical material, no two writers would begin at precisely the same point.

  But in general—?

  There’s an old rule-of-thumb that you should open just before the trouble starts . . . or just as the trouble starts . . . or just after the trouble’s started.

  Let’s modify that a bit . . . substituting change for trouble.

  Change is what creates your story. So, start as close to change as possible.

  More specifically, start just before the change impinges . . . just as it takes place . . . or just after.

  Thus, if a tornado is what precipitates your story, you might open with generalized concern about the weather this particular morning . . . or with the tornado sweeping down . . . or with your focal character bleakly surveying the shattered wreckage of his farmstead.

  If a beautiful blonde is to be slain, we could begin with her alive and in characteristic action . . . or reeling back with a shriek before the killer’s onslaught . . . or lying in alley or park or boudoir, stiff and stark and dead.

  —And just in case I make “change” and “trouble” seem too close to synonymous in the examples above, note that the pattern works just as well on two miners striking it rich: Opening 1 shows them on the verge of giving up . . . Opening 2 lets sand swirl from one’s pan to reveal a dozen nuggets . . . Opening 3 finds the miners by their fire that night, gloating over their triumph.

  Which of these approaches is best for your particular story?

  That’s your decision, and no one else can make it for you. However, certain points are worth consideration:

  (1) Open too far ahead of your initial change, and you may bore your reader.

  This doesn’t mean that you can’t zero in first on existing situation. But today’s readers tend to be impatient. You either hook them fast or not at all. Film people say that in Europe you can start a picture with half-a-dozen cloud shots, just to set the right mood. But in the United States, your audience begins to shift in its collective seat on shot 2, and shot 3 had better have a bomber hurtling through the overcast unless you want to play to an empty house.

  Similarly, in fiction, a beginning that opens with a half-page description of the old family manor will probably kill you dead, dead, dead.

  (2) Open on the change itself, and your reader may feel he’s hanging suspended in a vacuum.

  To evaluate any phenomenon, you need perspective. A change that comes out of nowhere, unrelated to any background or existing situation, may lose most of its impact. The blow struck by a thug in a barroom brawl has different implications—and touches a different reader interest level—than the punch thrown by a preacher.

  (3) Open after the change has taken place, and you may find yourself forced to sandwich in a lumpy mass of explanation later.

  “I dropped to one knee and fired twice,” wrote Carroll John Daly, beginning one of his Race Williams stories in Black Mask many years ago. Although this is the very first line, obviously the change in state of affairs that precipitates the yarn has already taken place, offstage, and Williams is reacting to it.

  This kind of fast take-off is fine, if you’re as deft at it as Daly was. But many a new writer, tackling it, has difficulty incorporating a smooth explanation of precisely how the whole business started.

  So there you are. Every opening has its problems, and you yourself must choose between them.

  And if you choose wrong?

  Well, so what? You won’t be the first or the last man to learn the hard way, from his own mistakes!

  b. How to open.

  In terms of actual presentation, a good first paragraph is one that persuades your reader to read the second.

  To this end, you should write Paragraph 1 in such a manner that it piques your reader’s curiosity.

  To rouse curiosity in anyone, raise a question in his mind. Specifically, make him wonder, “Hey, what’s this leading up to?”

  How do you do this?

  You present your material in terms which indicate that you are leading up to something.

  This demands that you state and/or imply:

 
(1) Uniqueness.

  (2) The unanticipated.

  (3) Deviation from routine.

  (4) A change about to take place.

  (5) Inordinate attention to the commonplace.

  Classification of approaches in this manner is as an aid to clarity only. In practice, the degree of overlap between categories is great, and there’s no point to trying to keep them separate.

  (1) Uniqueness.

  To be unique is to be without a like or equal.

  To call attention to uniqueness is to make your reader wonder what you’re leading up to.

  The job can be done obviously: “She was the only artificial woman in the world.”

  Or, subtly: “He couldn’t sleep that night.” (That is the keyword. It implies that most nights he can sleep . . . but something different about this one prevents him from so doing.)

  Or, on a variety of levels in between: “It was a different sort of a town.” “The contrast between the two girls was what he noticed.” “’It’s this week or never,’ Susan said.”

  (2) The unanticipated.

  If the beautiful blonde turns out to have multifaceted insectile eyes, or the book on Grandma’s parlor table is illustrated with luridly pornographic pictures, or the hero starts out the story by proclaiming himself a damned fool—it’s unanticipated. Intrigued, readers read on, to find out what’s behind it all.

  (3) Deviation from routine.

  Instead of getting off the elevator at her usual floor this morning, Eunice rides two stops higher, then walks back down.

  Mr. Hersey approaches the front door of his home . . . gets out his key . . . pauses . . . walks back down the steps . . . goes around the house to the back door and enters there.

  Mrs. Grimes, professional sourpuss, sails gaily down the corridor, radiating sweetness and light upon everyone she meets.

  Again, readers wonder why.

  (4) A change about to take place.