Techniques of the Selling Writer (44 page)

To work with such an expert is simple. You need primarily a willingness to be thought
a fool.

How do you achieve this happy end?

You take nothing for granted. You describe precisely what you propose to show in your
film, step by step, so that error lurches out into the open. You ask every stupid
question you can dredge up from the sub-depths of your brain, no matter how withering
your expert’s glances; no matter how biting his replies.

If you follow this principle, the expert goes his way convinced that you’re a blithering
idiot. You, in your turn, carry off the neatly-catalogued contents of the expert’s
head. A fair exchange.

There are worse tricks than to apply this same fact-film technique to fiction research.

To that end, dig out all the data you can from printed matter.
Do this first!
Any competent interview presupposes that the interviewer knows enough about the subject
to ask at least a modicum of intelligent questions.

Then, background filled in, hunt around till you find someone—historian, homicide
detective, marriage counselor, army colonel, zoologist—who has a strong track record
in the area you’re researching.

Make contact with this expert. Tell him your problem. Ask his aid. More often than
not, he’ll be flattered and happy to give it to you.

It also will help if you remember that an expert doesn’t always look like one. Maybe,
at first glance, your man appears to be only a sleazy beatnik type, unshaven and overdue
for a haircut, playing guitar in a cockroach-infested coffeehouse. But if the data
you seek concerns beatniks or coffeehouses or modern minstrels, he very well may prove
an ideal source.

Further, an interviewee needn’t know he’s being interviewed. He may talk more freely
if he thinks you’re just an amiable screwball who likes to chase fire engines or noodle
for catfish or gab about mining.

Charm radiated by the interviewer is no handicap. Neither is willingness to spring
for an occasional drink or cup of coffee.

Quite often, your best leads come from people who themselves lack the facts you need,
but are in a position to suggest someone who does have them. Chambers of Commerce,
trade associations, local newspaper offices, public-relations men, county agents,
motel managers—all are worth investigation.

You can even interview by mail, with luck, specific questions, brief checklists, and
stamped, self-addressed return envelopes. However, it’s my own feeling that such should
be pretty much a last resort, for most people are reluctant to take pen in hand and
their answers tend to be brief to the point of uselessness.

Field research is based on a simple premise: An ivory tower is a poor place to learn
the facts about anything.

In many cases, the best way to find out the things you need to know is to go forth
and poke around at first hand.

Thus, books and talk will tell you a lot about oil wells. But you add extra color
and authentic detail if you walk a drilling floor yourself.

Similarly, what’s wrong with working as a waiter for a week or two or three? Why shouldn’t
you ride a few nights in a police prowl car, if you can arrange it? Nurses’ aides
learn things. So do typists and dime-store clerks and door-to-door salesmen.

If such is too rich for your blood, that still shouldn’t stop you from attending trials
and loafing in bus stations and scraping acquaintances with jewelers and gunsmiths
and carhops and rodeo riders, if these maneuvers suit your ends.

Get in the habit of handling the props you plan to use in a story. It sparks ideas
and prevents idiotic errors. You discover that the barrels of two Mauser automatics
can be switched in seconds . . . that a modern vinyl phonograph record can’t easily
be snapped in half . . . that most watches today don’t carry Arabic numerals.

Finally, remember that every story comes alive in terms of sensory perception—the
things some character sees or hears or smells or tastes or touches.

To describe such phenomena vividly, you need to experience them yourself, wherever
possible.

Providing this sensory background is the function of field research.

The best-laid plans

By all means, plan your story.

But don’t plan too completely, or the story may die before it’s born.

Why?

Because a basic fallacy lies at the heart of all attempts to blue-print
creative activity: Planning, you’re one person. But by the time you sit down to write,
you’ve become another.

You probably can see this most clearly if you’re one of those methodical souls who
goes in for journals, sketches of stories you hope some day to write, file cards listing
plot ideas, and the like.

These efforts are laudable. But by now, if you’ve carried on such projects for any
length of time, you’ve discovered that only on rare occasions do the notes develop
into finished copy.

The reason is precisely as stated above: You yourself change, in the interim between
the time when inspiration first becomes apparent and the later date when you attempt
to reclaim the concept from your file.

In consequence, yesterday’s idea strikes no spark today. Fervor has dulled to disenchantment.

Multiply this response by ten, and you get some small picture of what happens when
you outline a story in too great detail.

For when you plan rigidly, in effect you nail down the road a story must take. You
commit yourself to a mood and state of mind that no longer exist when you and your
typewriter finally get together.

In so doing, you deny yourself the pleasure and privilege of following the impulse
and inspiration of the moment.

Result: Writing flips from fun to drudgery. The idea lies dead as a skinned and gutted
rabbit in a freezer, its only pulse that which you pump into it with sweat and dogged
perseverance.

That’s not what I’d call successful planning.

Let’s try again, then, on a different tack. This time, we’ll let things hang a little
looser.

What elements do you really need in a story outline?

You should have:

In other words, you require a starting line-up, such as was described in
Chapter 6
.

And that’s all you need. For the line-up is a tool . . . its function, to pinpoint
essential dynamic factors that drive a story forward, from page one to
The End
. Minor characters, tags, settings, incidents, bits of business—by comparison, these
are trivial and unimportant. You can pick them up as you go along, if need be.

Next question: How do you acquire the elements it takes to build a line-up?

As with everything else in writing, each man must sooner or later develop his own
tricks, his private system.

Right now, however, your problem is to find a starting point. So, try this one:

This period is to be spent in hitting the keys as fast as possible, describing the
story you want to write.—Not actually writing it, you understand; not even organizing
it, or attempting to go in a straight line; just doodling about anything that comes
to mind related to your idea, from mood to characters, from moral to plot to incidents.

That is, take a pencil and go over your free-association typescript. Elaborate on
your first thoughts. Cross out bits that have lost their charm. Change. Combine. Develop.
Shape up. Flesh out.

Again, switch and change and delete and elaborate as you go.

A few days spent with this routine will give you an amazing mass of formless yet promising
material. You’ll begin to see strong points, and weak; bad judgment, and flashes that
excite you.

Included will be assorted fragments that hint of a potential starting line-up.

Don’t force the process, though. Let “Hang loose!” be your motto.

Eventually, all this rambling will begin to bore you. Take advantage
of it to draw up a list of incidents that strike you as essential to your story.

Some of these bits will loom larger and more important in your mind than others.

These may prove to be your story’s crises: the big moments. Jot them down, each on
a separate sheet.

Again, don’t yet try to turn them into actual fiction. Just describe each in a paragraph
or two or three of copy.

Shuffle these scene sheets as you go along. Put them into some kind of order. When
holes appear, rough in additional scenes to fill them. Or, if scenes as first conceptualized
don’t seem to fit, reshape or consolidate or delete them.

Apply the same technique to characters. As each takes form, give him a separate sheet
of his own. Then, use said sheet to doodle and hypothesize about him.

By now, count on it, restlessness will be upon you. You’re ready to go; eager to start
producing actual copy.

Fine. That’s as it should be. But don’t start writing. Not quite yet.

For this is the moment when you put an end to free association and loose thinking.—And
I
do
mean, in terms of your starting line-up.

What you must have is a statement and a question, two sentences, nailed down tight
precisely as described in
Chapter 6
:

Situation:
 Pursued by his boss’s amoral wife, Linda,

Character:
 Steve Grannis

Objective:
 decides to seek a transfer, so that his home and career won’t be destroyed.
 But can he escape, when

Opponent:
 Linda

Disaster:
 swears that she’ll have him fired and ruined if he tries to leave?

Situation:
 Reporting for her very first day’s work, fresh out of college and the lone Negro
teacher in a white high school,

Character:
 Loretta Kloman

Objective:
 stands determined to prove her competence.
 But can she succeed, when

Opponent:
 Bucko Wilding, the Mississippi-born coach,

Disaster:
 urges her pupils to walk out on her?

Situation:
 Expelled from a Central American republic at the request of his Latin sweetheart’s
politically powerful father,

Character:
 Tom Reynolds

Objective:
 hitchhikes back to persuade the girl to run away with him.
 But will he survive, let alone win her, when it turns out that

Opponent:
 Miguel Ortiz, the man who picks him up,

Disaster:
 is en route to assassinate
El Presidente?

There are the elements. Thus succinctly do you formulate your story framework.