Your reader takes it for granted that a story’s climax will center on an explosive showdown between desire and danger.
Therefore, as your story progresses, the tension engendered by each new crisis grows.
Especially is this so if you keep building up the strength of the opposition and a sense of potential ultimate disaster. It’s as if each step your character takes forward brings him closer to impending doom. He’s like a man trying to break down a door in order to save a loved one, knowing even as he does so that a berserk gorilla is waiting for him on the other side.
(5) Pace your presentation, mechanically, to increase your reader’s sense of tension.
Tension does things to people. Under its pressure, perceptions and reactions heighten. You move faster. You respond quicker. Time stretches out. There’s a jerky, staccato, exaggerated quality to everything you say and do.
These are elements you can capture in your copy. Your reader, reading, catches the excitement of the moment by the very way you write, the words you use.
What kind of words?
Short words. Harsh words. Pointed words. Slashing words.
What kind of writing?
Terse writing. Action writing. Short sentences. Short paragraphs. The tunnel vision that shuts out everything except the moment and the danger. The prolongation of crisis that stretches time like a rubber band.
How do you learn to write such copy?
You hunt down the moments that thrill you in the other man’s story.
Then, you copy them, word for word and line for line . . . study them in typescript . . . experiment with word substitutions and with sentence changes until you uncover the way he turns his tricks.
After which, with his tools buried deep in your unconscious, you’re ready to go on again and write more effective climaxes of your own.
So much for peaks.
Now, in the period immediately following each climax, each disaster, you reduce tension.
These five techniques will prove useful to this end:
(1) Pace your presentation to reduce tension.
How? By reversing everything said in (5), above.
That is, lengthen sentences a little, perhaps. Paragraphs, too. Consider euphony when you choose words. Work more for flow; less for the staccato and the punch.
Again, the other man’s copy is your best guidebook. And the reason I recommend no models to you is because your taste is your own, and private . . . a subjective thing; so what seems good and/or well done to me might very well prove completely wrong where you’re concerned.
One warning, though: Please don’t go to extremes. Because I talk about short words and short sentences to create a sense of tension doesn’t mean that anyone, ever, should forget the need to balance short with long. And to confuse polysyllabics and convoluted sentence structure with tension reduction is even worse.
Again, it helps to have horse sense if you want to be a writer!
(2) Make decision the issue.
The situation that demands action, it was pointed out above, is a useful tool in building tension and climax.
To relax tension, in turn, focus less on such immediate striving . . . more on search.
Thus, when I lose my girl or my job or my status, I have to draw back and regroup . . . rally my inner resources and try to figure out what to do now; which way to go. Do I hunt another girl or job or point of prestige, or do I slash my wrists or join the army?
In other words, I must make some decisions.
How I go about making them will depend on my own personality and background; my emotional patterns. Maybe I walk the streets. Maybe I get drunk. Maybe I try to find a priest to tell my troubles to.
Be that as it may. In all cases, passage of time will be involved: time to react, time to think, time to work things out. Eventually, I’ll choose a new goal to strive for, a new course of action to pursue. But in the interim between the moment when Dame Fortune knocks me down and the one when I finally get back up to fight again, seconds and minutes and hours and days—or maybe even weeks or months—will tick by.
In your copy, you use that time lapse to reduce tension . . . give your reader a chance to rest from his excitement. And it’s probably your most useful tool in this regard, since you can telescope it or expand it to fit your needs.
(3) Decrease urgency, time pressure.
How?
Let the disaster put your character in a situation in which he can take no action until tomorrow or next week or what have you. Maybe the man he needs to contact is out of town, or the lodge is snowbound, or there’s nothing to be done at the legislature till the bill comes out of committee.
(4) Develop non-tension factors.
A story is the record of how somebody deals with danger.
But no matter how threatening the situation, between moments of crisis life goes on. You eat. You sleep. You shop, change a tire, make polite conversation, take in a movie.
Ignore such routine, trivial though it may seem, and your story takes on a somehow shadowy, unsubstantial air. Include it, inserted between climaxes, and you increase the feeling that you’re dealing with actual people, real events.
In the process, you also give your reader a chance to catch his breath.
In the same way, side issues come up in the lives of all of us. There’s a boy you like, and so you take time out from your own concerns to help him find a job. A stuffed shirt irritates you; you pause a moment to deflate him. You’ve promised to spend a weekend with friends in Dallas. Even though it holds no satisfaction for you, you feel obliged to keep the date.
Similarly, your reader knows the people in your story only to the degree that you develop them on paper. Yet their reactions are important. He needs to understand them as people and not puppets. That calls for exploration of attitudes, philosophies. Is this man’s morality that of the Honest Brakeman, so called because he never stole a boxcar? Does this woman’s outspoken belief in equality, in practice, make Christians just a bit more equal than Jews, or vice versa? Is sympathy an emotion a character feels for alcoholics, but not for the girls in the home for unwed mothers?
The moments that you take to give such dimension to your people also help you to slow pace a fraction, as needed.
A setting can be as flat as a canvas backdrop. Or you can add details that make it come to life.
And the best place to insert them is in the lull that follows disaster . . . in the pause between climaxes, where emphasis is more strongly on decision than on the striving and urgency and danger out of which you build your story peaks.
(5) Change viewpoint.
When you change viewpoint, tension drops.
Why?
Because instantly, your reader is faced with a totally new and different situation. He must adjust not only to a change in time and place and circumstance; he must also get inside somebody else’s skin.
That somebody sees the story issues through private eyes. His background and attitudes and problems aren’t the same as those of the character your reader was living and experiencing with before. Hero, heroine, villain, bystander—each has his separate outlook.
That new outlook, those unique attitudes, must be made clear to your reader each time you change viewpoint.
Which takes time, and space. Friend Reader can’t just do a flip and automatically be somebody new. He has to readjust; learn his new role.
Result: tension reduction . . . an opportunity to pause and rest awhile.
From valley you build to peak . . . then drop back down again and start anew. And thus do you create a sense of balance and of pacing in your story.
e. Do snip off the threads.
The middle of your story is a time of building.
It’s also a time of tapering off.
If a story is of any length, a number of issues are likely to develop as adjuncts to the story question.
Thus, the central character seeks to clear himself of a murder charge. One of the factors that helps to increase pressure
on him is the reaction of family and of friends. Not to mention associates and enemies and casual acquaintances.
Specific friends. Specific members of his family. Specific associates and enemies and acquaintances.
Take his girl’s father. Upset by certain past history of the hero, he swears that such a man never will be allowed to marry his daughter.
An opportunist associate, in turn, snags Hero’s job.
And a tough cop, angered over an embarrassing incident, stands determined to force Hero to leave town, no matter how the case comes out.
Now all these angles are necessary, if the story is to build to a proper peak. But if they ride clear through past the climax to the moment of resolution, they’ll be difficult to wind up in any reasonable wordage. Consequently, the end of the story will dribble off unsatisfyingly in a series of anticlimaxes.
To avoid this, the wise writer cuts things down to size before the climax, by snipping off subordinate threads as middle begins to merge with end.
Thus, Hero perhaps discovers that Girl’s father was, in his day, a bit of a dog himself. The old man feels guilty about it. That’s why he’s so rabid over any hint that Hero has been less than perfect.
When Hero faces him with these facts, Father sees the error of his ways and flips over to Hero’s side. It’s a thread snipped off, and it’s out of the way before the climax.
Similarly, Hero may decide he doesn’t want the job, or he may come up with a better offer, or receive recompense from his contrite employer. The cop, in his anger, may attempt to frame Hero, be caught at it, and himself be forced to leave town.
In each case, elimination of minor issues simplifies and shortens resolution. Even more important, it clears the stage for the climax, so that the reader can devote his full and undivided attention to the big “Will-he-or-won’t-he?” issue posed by the story question.
f. Don’t rehash.
You know how it sounds when a phonograph needle gets stuck, and the same strain of music repeats endlessly.
Middle-area copy too often follows the same route. The story stops moving forward . . . bogs down on reiteration of one theme.
When you write a story, in effect you present a sequence like the alphabet: A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L, and so on.
It should not read, A-B-C-D-D-D-E-F. One D—or F, or H, or X—is enough. You need to establish the necessary information and move on. To have your character go through the same routine undeviatingly, again and again, is sure to bring boredom. Same for reiterated threats, all essentially the same, mouthed by the villain.
What’s the cure for repetitiousness?
Change. The unanticipated. New elements and twists continually injected. A story that doesn’t stand still—one with soundly structured sequels and scenes, searchings and strivings.
Given such, everything else will work out.
Let’s end this section on the same note we struck at the beginning: The middle consists of a series of scenes and sequels linked together.
If you frame each solidly; if you incorporate all component elements; if you force yourself to keep each individual fragment fresh, then your story will move and build and hold your reader, in fit preparation for what’s to follow: that climactic moment of decision that marks, in good fiction, the beginning of the end.
How do you bring a story to an end?
(1) You set up a situation in which your focal character has a choice between two specific, concrete, alternative courses of action.
(2) You force Character to choose between these two courses.
(3) You make him translate this choice into an irrevocable climactic act.
(4) You reward or punish Character for this act, in accordance with poetic justice.
(5) You tie up any loose ends.
(6) You focus fulfillment into a punch line.
Why follow such a pattern?
It provides your reader with story satisfaction, through release of tension.
How does it trigger such release?
Two basic issues are involved:
1. What does your character deserve?
2. What does he get?
These two factors, in turn, correlate with the two subdivisions of your story’s end: climax, and resolution.
Climax gives final, conclusive proof of what your focal character deserves.
Resolution sets forth what he gets.
Thus, tension builds on the conflict between desire and danger that you establish at the beginning of your story. Experiencing with the focal character, your reader yearns to see said character attain his goal. But so powerful is the opposition that he fears, simultaneously, that his man won’t make it.
Now, enter the deciding factor: What does the focal character deserve?
How to build a climax
It’s in his ability to perceive principle and separate it from self-interest that man is distinguished from the animal.
This isn’t to be considered validation of any specific principle, you understand. Principles may be right or they may be wrong; and certainly they change as man moves through time, space, and circumstance. But in judging behavior by ethical standard rather than mere expediency, we establish an absolute by which to test character and to orient ourselves meaningfully to life. Only in terms of principle can we demonstrate the triumph of free will over determinism . . . of cause-effect pattern over blind fate . . . of spirit over external reality. It’s principle and principle alone that gives meaning to the whole concept of control of circumstance.
Principle also provides the basis of climax. In adherence to or abandonment of principle, your focal character proves ultimately and beyond all doubt what he deserves.
Climax itself merely dramatizes this adherence or abandonment. In the process, it demonstrates the relationship between cause and effect in parable form, so clearly that no one can miss it. If the character acts on conscience, despite the pressure of self-interest, he attains his goal. If he doesn’t, his efforts fail. It’s as simple as that.
All of which serves to reaffirm your reader’s philosophy of life, with its built-in assumption that self-sacrifice for the sake of a larger issue is worthy of reward. His fears and tensions are released. He relaxes into that happy state that comes with fulfillment and satisfaction.
As a corollary to the above, a narrative that concerns action unrelated to principle can never be more than chronicle; can never rise to the status of story. Sans principle, behavior can’t be evaluated and consequently ceases to be fit subject for fiction.
“A storyteller is passionately interested in human beings and their endless conflicts with their fates,” observes screenwriter Dudley Nichols, “and he is filled with desire to make some intelligible arrangement out of the chaos of life, just as the chairmaker desires to make some useful and beautiful arrangement out of wood.” And Professor Franklin Fearing adds, “It is this intelligible arrangement that the reader seeks, whatever his level of sophistication and regardless of whether he is able to be articulate about it.”
Fiction thus is basically a tool to give life meaning. It does this, as we’ve seen, by establishing a cause-effect relationship between the focal character’s behavior and his fate; his deeds and his rewards. So a story without pattern is a contradiction of terms.
The trouble with the “slice of life” approach is that it most often is formless and so lacks the power of resolution. As a sociological document, a case study that draws attention to a problem, it may prove excellent. But it’s not a story. When the end of a film about a retardate sees the mentally deficient focal character walk off down the street into a future no different from his past, it resolves nothing. Consequently, it leaves the viewer in a state of frustration; unreleased tension. And as dramatist Howard Lindsay has remarked, “The play that ends in mere frustration for the people in whom the audience is emotionally interested will not satisfy them, for frustration is one of the most unhappy experiences in our lives.”
Now, back to climax, and to the f
irst three steps listed preliminary to the beginning of this section:
(1) You set up a situation in which your focal character has a choice between two specific, concrete, alternative courses of action.
In good fiction, a climactic moment of decision marks the beginning of the end.
So, how do you set up such a moment?
A story, remember, is the record of how somebody deals with danger.
It begins when desire bumps into opposition, and your focal character commits himself to fight for what he wants.
This gives you a story question: Will Joe attain his goal? Will he overcome the forces that oppose him, or won’t he?
Result: Conflict. Suspense. Tension.
The middle of your story develops, builds up, and intensifies these elements. Conflict grows sharper. Suspense mounts. Tension rises higher.
There’s a limit to tension, however. Sooner or later, at the end of the story, it must be released.
The moment of decision provides the trigger mechanism to discharge it.
Up to this point, your focal character’s courage and intelligence and strength have carried him.
But you and I know that there are moments when courage isn’t enough, and neither is intelligence, or strength.
When such moments come, there’s only one recourse left for us.
Feeling.
That is, we act on emotion; impulse. We don’t think. We respond spontaneously, on a visceral, well-nigh instinctive level, without regard for rules or logic or for hazard. We throw ourselves between the child and the speeding car. We step from the ranks to back a friend. We speak out for truth when silence would serve self-interest better.
Or, if such are our emotional patterns, we break and run in panic. We harden our hearts to pity or tenderness or ardor. We snatch the cash and say to hell with conscience.
Feeling reflects something deeper and more profound than strength, or intelligence, or even courage. It comes from the heart and guts, not the head. It speaks for the man or woman you really are; the secret self; the naked I.
Techniques of the Selling Writer Page 20