Techniques of the Selling Writer (21 page)

To avoid such confusion, there are worse tricks than to lay out your material in a
starting line-up.

How to line up story elements

Five key elements go into every solid commercial story. The line-up arranges them
in dynamic form, so that you can check their strength or weakness.

These are the five elements:

Without a focal character, you have no story. He brings it into being when, affected
by and reacting to external events, he fights back against the danger that threatens
him.

No focal character exists in a vacuum. He operates against a backdrop of trouble that
forces him to act. That backdrop, that external state of affairs, is your story situation.

A focal character who has nothing he wants to attain or retain can’t be endangered,
and so has no place in any story. Whether he succeeds or fails is immaterial. He
still must strive.

Dig a ditch, and you find that even the earth resists you. But obstacles personified
in an opponent—who not only resists but fights back—make for more exciting reading.

Every story needs to build to a climax. So, you threaten your focal character with
Something Unutterably Awful which he must face close to the end, just before you let
him off the hook.

—And
do
try to make each item as specific and concrete as possible!

Next, these five elements are cast into two sentences.

—No more than two, either. Here we want black versus white, forces in conflict. The
starker and sharper, the better. Extra words only blur the issue. Every writer needs
the self-discipline of forcing himself to slash away verbiage and get down to essentials.
Slickness and subtlety can come later.

So, we need two sentences, and two only.

Sentence 1 is a statement. It establishes character, situation, and objective.

Sentence 2 is a question. It nails down opponent and disaster.

How you put together this
olla-podrida
is unimportant. The big thing is to force yourself to do so! Any effective story
must
incorporate the materials of conflict if it’s to prove effective. If you don’t go
through this ritual, or one similar, over and over again you’ll kid yourself into
thinking you have a story where none actually exists.

So, now, let’s try out the pattern.

On a science-fiction story, for example:

The issue in a story always is “Will this focal character defeat his opponent, overcome
his private danger, and win happiness?” Your reader gets maximum tension release from
the resolution if Sentence 2, the story question, is so framed that it can be answered
with a clear-cut “yes” or “no.”

A broader or less rigid approach (“How can Sam win Esmerelda back from Jacob?” “Why
did old Mansford fire the swamp?”) takes emphasis off the basic conflict and moves
it over to a puzzle element. Such a curiosity angle is valuable as a component of
your story—a twist, a complication, a sub-plot. But avoid it as a dominant, over-all
story question. Though intellectually intriguing, perhaps, in most instances it proves
less suspenseful to a mass audience than does the simpler, more obvious, “Will he
win or won’t he?” pattern.

This is because your reader reads first and foremost for
emotional
stimulation. He has no great desire to think. A story that hinges on analysis or
logic—no matter how elementary—holds little appeal for him. He prefers to keep the
cerebral factor subordinate. As a sub-plot or the like, it’s there, pleasantly present
if he happens to feel in the mood for it. But it’s not so important
that he can’t skim over it without damaging the story’s total impact if he wants,
tonight, to read just for what he describes as “relaxation.”

Use of the starting line-up approach in no wise limits your range. Here, for example,
it’s applied to a confession yarn:

Or, here’s the kind of story that might be developed on almost any level, from the
lower-bracket men’s magazines to a literary novel:

And there you have the starting lineup . . . as useful a tool as you’ll ever find.

One warning: This sort of device is an aid only. A semi-mechanical procedure, its
purpose is to help keep you reminded of the dynamic elements in your story. And that’s
all.

Like any mechanical or semi-mechanical approach, it’s anything but foolproof. In no
sense will it substitute for thinking. Unless you adapt it to your own temperament—your
own ideas and tastes and readers—it very well may do you far more harm than good.

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:

Let’s take these one at a time:

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.