Techniques of the Selling Writer (20 page)

What gives this sense of security to your reader?

The feeling that he controls his own destiny; that he’s not a pawn of blind fate or
a helpless victim of chance or a hostile universe.

It’s the same for all of us, in life as in fiction. Infinitely small, pitifully weak,
we face a world that’s both frightening and overwhelming. So, a dozen times a day—a
hundred; a thousand—we question our own adequacy: Can we really cut it in our pressure-laden
private situation? Do we actually stand a chance to win happiness?

Constantly, we need encouragement and reassurance. We yearn for some small demonstration
that it’s worth our while to go on fighting.

If happenstance alone is what decides the issue, we know we’re licked before we start.
Luck’s just not sure enough to tie to, and we’ve got experiences to prove it.

What we want, instead, is a setup where what
we
do has a bearing on outcome. We need to feel as if how a man behaves, his personal
performance, helps to decide the way he fares in this life. We like the idea of individual
worth and individual reward.

In practical terms, this means that a character’s fear shouldn’t be cleared away by
accident or coincidence. Happy circumstance shouldn’t solve his problems. Your reader
gains no ultimate story satisfaction from a resolution in which lightning strikes
the villain, or the convenient death of an Australian uncle ends the hero’s financial
crisis. He wants an outcome in which man
masters
fate. It’s one of his deepest emotional needs.

To create this sense of control, this feeling of security, you must relate your story
material to reality in such a manner as to help give life meaning to your readers,
by reaffirming their wishful thinking and emotion-based convictions.

To that end, in each story you write, you establish a cause-effect relationship between
your focal character’s behavior and his fate; his deeds and his rewards.

Here’s how:

Thus, the beginning of a story hypothesizes:

It’s helpful, at this point, to cast these two elements into the form of a
story question:
“Will Joe win Ellen despite the crippling of his arm?” “Will the Things from Space
wipe out the human race and Our Hero with it?” “Can Suzy prevent her too-loving mother
from spoiling the children?”

The
answer
to this question constitutes the resolution of your story, and grows out of your
hero’s demonstration of whether he deserves to win or lose.

How do you arrange for your hero to demonstrate this, in terms that make for reader
satisfaction?

You focus his fight with danger down to a moral issue. At the climax, he acts on this
issue; chooses which of two conflicting
roads to take . . . which of two antithetical courses of action to pursue.

In what sense is the climactic issue moral?

One road’s right; the other, wrong.

What constitutes “right”?

Unselfishness. Adherence to principle despite the temptation of self-interest.

And “wrong”?

Selfishness. Abandonment of conviction for the sake of personal advantage.

What’s the deciding factor in your character’s choice between these roads?

Emotion. His own subjective feelings. The kind of person he intrinsically is.

Isn’t selfishness often more logical than unselfishness? Mightn’t it be more sensible,
more intelligent, for him to follow the wrong road?

Of course. But our object here is to test your character’s character, not his intelligence;
his instinctive reactions, not his logic.

Does this mean your hero should be unintelligent?

On the contrary. Further, he should use to the full every ounce of brain-power he
possesses.

But moments come to all of us when thinking-through isn’t enough. If a thick-headed
clerk gives you too much change, you can accept it; or, you can call his attention
to the error and give the money back. Crumpling someone’s fender in a darkened parking
lot, you can leave a note; or, you can merely drive away. Welcomed too well far from
home by the wife of a good friend, you can take advantage of the opportunity; or,
you can bow out.

When such times come, we must act—spontaneously, instinctively, on the basis of the
things we believe, the way we feel, the kind of men we are. Principle and character
are the issues.

How does all this bear on your reader? How does it help him to achieve the sense of
security he seeks?

Because your reader lives through the story with the focal character, he shares the
testing of that character. Instinctively, he knows that he himself isn’t necessarily
strong enough or intelligent enough or lucky enough always to be able to defeat danger.
But no matter how weak or dull or ill-omened he may
be, he tells himself that he
can
act on principle . . . do the thing he knows emotionally to be right, even though
such a course seems destined to lead to sure disaster.

So?

So, you then resolve the story problem. If the character does right, you give him
victory. You let him defeat his private danger.

In brief, you reward your character for his display of virtue.

Whereupon, fear dissipates. Tension ebbs. The character relaxes, safe and satisfied
and happy . . . and, with him, your reader.

Even granting the validity of all this . . . isn’t it a childish pattern, ill-suited
to mature readers?

That depends on you: your skill as a writer. The pattern can be presented childishly,
of a certain. Thousands of times it’s been done crudely, on a comic-book level.

But it’s also the configuration in
Oedipus
and
Crime and Punishment;
in
Of Human Bondage
and the Holy Bible. Skill and subtlety are the only issues.

But doesn’t a writer falsify reality when he uses such a pattern? Isn’t it pure hypocrisy
to pretend that a cause-effect relationship exists between deed and reward, even in
the confines of a story?

The answer here falls into two parts:

Where Point 1 is concerned, most American readers believe in the pattern here outlined;
the cause-effect relationship set forth. It therefore is the most effective approach
to a mass audience.

On the other hand, it obviously will offer no satisfaction whatever to the writer
who wants to present a different philosophy of life.

All that means is that said writer should work out a pattern more in keeping with
his beliefs and write his stories to it. It’s
done every day: witness some of the material occasionally published as novels or in
magazines.

However, because any book has limitations as to length, I’ve chosen here to pass such
by, in order to focus more fully on the form dominant in commercial fiction: the approach
taken by most selling writers.

Point 2 warrants further immediate consideration. For most of us have an unfortunate
habit of ignoring the doughnut in favor of the hole; of becoming so enamored of the
exception as to overlook the rule.

A story shouldn’t do so.

Actually, in this life, exceptions notwithstanding, most of us get about what we deserve.

This isn’t any accident. All society is based on the principle of mutual aid. Precisely
because
he’s so helpless and alone, man limits his selfishness, his pursuit of and preoccupation
with self-interest, in order to enjoy the benefits to be gained from living at peace
with his fellows. “Free enterprise” is held in check by fraud laws. Speed limits and
stop signs restrict freedom of movement. Safety regulations control conditions of
work. Police protection reduces the need for arming of the individual.

Nor are our controls merely external. Honesty, truthfulness, kindness, integrity,
chastity, piety, courage, dignity, humility, sensitivity, honor—these are more than
just words. They’re inner standards, restrictions on self-interest and self-indulgence.
People live by them.

Often, there’s disagreement on just how far such limits—internal or external—should
extend. The rules vary from time to time and place to place and culture to culture;
and individual circumstances alter cases. But most men, most of the time, abide by
them.

When they don’t, the result is anarchy.

Because man acts on principle, sacrifices self-interest to the larger cause of his
own standards, ordinarily he benefits.

The main reason, of course, is that our fellow men continually sit in judgment on
us. Courage, moral or physical, attracts attention. The fact of known honesty opens
avenues before us. Opportunity knocks on the door of the man devoted to duty. Kindness
and hard work and loyalty are noted.

Contrariwise, the schemer, the sharp operator, the malcontent and the philanderer
soon are labeled and appropriately dealt with.

Rewards of the spirit loom even larger than rewards of the letter. Though public ignominy
may crucify the conscientious objector, he still can stand tall and proud if he’s
doing what he believes is right. Court-martialed, a Billy Mitchell remains a better
man than his accusers, and he knows it.

What about the exceptions—those individuals who refuse to play by the rules?

The day they grow so numerous as to dominate the picture, the rules change—witness
America’s repeal of Prohibition. Or, the society itself collapses, as in the case
of the Roman Empire.

Cheat in school, your ignorance later loses you a job. Cheat on the traffic laws,
a tank truck becomes your funeral pyre. Cheat in a crap game, a perceptive soul with
a switchblade perforates more than your ego.

Hypertension and insomnia and ulcers are constant occupational hazards for them. Often
they make psychotherapists wealthy. But even if they escape such, conscience still
travels with them in most cases, and their triumphs all taste of bitter ashes.

In essence, life and fiction alike assume that ruthless self-interest takes the short
view of any issue. The man without principle is in effect blood brother to the alcoholic
whose perspective on life has narrowed to the problem of how to get just one more
bottle, or the armed bandit so preoccupied with the seventy dollars in a cash register
that he never stops to figure out what his hourly wage will be if he pays for the
caper with a five-year prison sentence.

The implicit truth of all this is the bedrock upon which our society is erected. Fiction
merely epitomizes it . . . telescopes
and condenses the broad picture into capsule form so that it may more easily be digested
by the average reader. As Raymond Chandler once observed in commenting on the fantastic
aspects of the hard-boiled mystery, “Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor
to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was
inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you
were lost.”

A good story provides your reader with Pleasurable Tension plus Ultimate Satisfaction.
These are the fundamentals. This is what constitutes the double-barreled attack.

The carrying out of that attack, however, demands a bit more detail: detail about
the most effective tricks for developing the beginning of your story, and also its
middle and its end.

For a look at such, turn to the next chapter.

CHAPTER 6

Beginning, Middle, End

All stories are “about” the same thing: desire versus danger. Each concerns a focal
character’s attempt to attain or retain something in the face of trouble.

To translate this general principle into a specific piece of fiction, you need a grasp
of five broad subjects:

The first step in this direction is to get the basic outlines of your story clear
in your own mind. A certain amount of organization is essential. Lack of direction
and form can send you off into a trackless maze of false starts and blind alleys.