Techniques of the Selling Writer (23 page)

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

Again, readers wonder why.

If a man’s lawyer calls and asks him to drop by, your reader assumes that something’s
in the wind.

Same when a boy winks at a girl in a bar, under the very eyes of her burly escort.

Or if somebody hears the hoofbeats of a galloping horse, coming closer and closer
down the road.

Describe a doorknob in tremendous, painstaking detail, and a reader will figure there
must be a reason for giving it such unusual attention. He’ll read on to find out what
that reason is.

A grandmother’s gnarled hands, the shabbiness of a run-down house, a little girl peering
out from behind her bubble gum—portray them with special care and they’ll hook readers.

Needless to say, these aren’t the only ways to begin. Start with a still life. Describe
it skillfully enough and your reader, knowing that it can’t stay still forever, will
assume a change must be impending. Mirror routine activity, and he’ll conclude that
something will happen soon to break the routine. Show purposeful activity, and he’ll
be prepared for it to create or collide with opposition.

In the same way, you can begin on either motivating stimulus or character reaction;
on the search for a goal or on the struggle to attain it. You can start with the big
picture and move to the small, in the manner of the motion picture’s familiar long-shot,
medium-shot, close-up pattern. Or, you can reverse the process . . . begin with the
close-up, the significant detail, and then pull back to view the broader frame of
reference that is the detail’s setting.

As a matter of fact, you have a certain amount of leeway in your first paragraph and
on your first page.

Why?

Because your reader wants so badly to be entertained. Therefore, he
assumes
that sooner or later what he reads will relate to something satisfying and exciting—desire,
danger, a character fighting for fulfillment and future happiness.

The place where story openings go wrong is when a writer rides this reader assumption
too hard.

That is, Writer takes it for granted that Reader will suffer drabness and ineptitude
indefinitely. So, he plods through his first page or two or three, laying groundwork
and that’s all. He doesn’t work for interest. The vivid noun, the active verb, the
colorful phrase, the intriguing detail, the clever twist, the deft contrast—these
aren’t for him.

Above all, he doesn’t plan his presentation to make his reader curious as to what
those first few crucial lines are leading up to.

And that’s literary suicide.

It’s not enough, in an opening, just to set the stage or to introduce the characters
or to have something happening. What hooks your reader isn’t the present, but the
future. He wants to be reassured that something worth reading about is
going
to happen—and he wants that reassurance
now.

So, give him what he wants. Show him that your story deals with something special—something
outside the framework of routine and day-to-day anticipations.

Show him now. Right from the start. The next line, the next paragraph, the next page
may be too late!

To begin a story, you must create a story world.

You start with your reader’s mind a blank. Then, a step at a time, you lift him away
from reality and transport him into the imaginary land you have conceived.

To travel thus into the story world, your reader instinctively asks three questions:

Your job in beginning your story is to provide answers to these questions.—Though
not necessarily in any particular order.

How do you present this information to your reader most effectively?

You pinpoint the significant.

What’s significant?

That incident or detail is significant which epitomizes and/or symbolizes and/or captures
the essence of whatever aspect of the story world you’re attempting to communicate.
Describe a girl as a “dizzy blonde,” and you tag her far beyond mere appearance. Fairly
or unfairly, her hair symbolizes her as a particular type of woman. In calling attention
to it, you give it weight as a detail which holds significance, and your reader will
so use it in evaluating her.

In the same way, a “Charles Addams sort of house,” for many, conjures up a mood of
the macabre. It epitomizes feeling in the image of a gloomy, decaying, mansard-roofed
Victorian mansion.

Connotations of sensitivity and taste seldom are implied when you refer to a man as
“bull-necked.” A Modigliani print on the wall establishes one tone for a room; a needlepoint
sampler, another. If cockroaches are crawling over greasy, egg-smeared dishes in the
sink, a still different note is struck.

This process of symbolization by significant detail isn’t unique to fiction. You find
it every day in routine living also, whenever you use a picture that already hangs
in someone’s mind as a sign or reference point to help label an unfamiliar object.
A handy adaptation of the principle of association, it draws upon comparison, similarity,
contrast, analogy, and the like. It forms the basis for the stereotyping which, while
frequently unjust and/or unwarranted, is also ever so convenient.

What if no obviously symbolic detail is immediately at hand?

Create one.

That is, spotlight some phenomenon—anything at all. Then, let a character react to
it. The interpretation he places on it, the conclusions he draws from it, will at
once endow it with “significance,” where your reader is concerned.

Thus, bring a rain spot on the ceiling into focus as a significant detail, and it
may in all seriousness be viewed as symbolic of (
a
) recent bad weather, (
b
) a leaky roof, (
c
) a poverty-stricken family’s pride, (
d
) a proud family’s deterioration, (
e
) a chink in the villain’s armor, (
f
) the heroine’s vulnerability, (
g
) a stain on honor, (
h
) aristocracy’s feet of clay, (
i
) proof that trouble is a common denominator which touches rich and poor alike; and
so on, to and past infinity.

In other words, you blow up any fragment in any situation to a close-up so big it
fills the screen. Then, you have someone state or imply that it’s important to and
indicative of a particular frame of reference. Whereupon—count on it—your readers
will go along.

And if you think this is a ridiculous exaggeration, pause for a few minutes this evening
to glance over your favorite manual of Freudian dream interpretation.

Extend this same process of creating significance by association and conditioning
to a sort of running gag, an emotional doorbell, and it gives you a handy device for
establishing and reestablishing mood with minimum wordage.

Thus, let your hero note and feel as blithe, at one point, as the mockingbird’s song
he overhears. Your public then will be delighted when, later, you use a sour note
from the bird’s midnight serenade to reflect Hero’s conviction that life is doing
him
dirt. Does the heroine shut him out? The bird’s song now sounds sad. Does the villain
fall in the horse trough? The bird lets go with a cadenza similar to a razzberry.
And so on.

Carried far enough and used with sufficient skill, this reiteration of emotionalized
detail becomes what’s sometimes called a gimmick—one of the most useful devices for
resolving your story. But more of that later. Right now, let’s consider briefly how
best to help your reader answer the first of his three questions about the story world.

Your reader needs to know your story’s locale: It won’t do to have him think he’s
on the seacoast when he’s really in the slums. Does the action take place in a barroom,
a ballroom, a bedroom, a barn? Is it midday, midnight, dusk, or dawn? He
must
know!

You need to convey this information to him early—the sooner, the better. Otherwise,
he may make false assumptions that throw him for a loss later.

But no matter how important this information may be, you don’t dare indulge in long-winded
explanations or descriptions. Such take up too much space and bore your readers.

So, what do you do?

You use the significant detail, of course. Which is to say, you pluck a symbolic fragment
or two or three from the setting. By describing them in such terms as to provide an
implicit or explicit interpretation, you give your reader the impression you want
him to have. Are the grounds neat? Then say that the flower beds appear to have been
aligned with a micrometer and the grass mown both ways before a trimming with manicure
scissors. It will draw a sharper picture than several paragraphs of more generalized
detail. Sawdust on the floor of a bar says more about it than any cataloguing of the
bottles on the shelf. Squalor can occupy pages of description, or you may just observe
that the shanty’s walls had cracks so wide you could throw a cat through them.

There’s more to establishing locale than this, of course. But it’s a start, and the
fine points will wait a few pages, till we can take time out to discuss the technique
of exposition.

For now, let’s move on to Question Number 2:

As pointed out above, your beginning must establish time and place; a locale.

It also must set forth a situation—an existing state of affairs; the way things stand
as your story starts.

Situation breaks down into two components:

Let’s begin with . . .

One of the hardest things a writer has to learn is that “What’s going on?” means precisely
that—“What’s happening
right now?”—Not
, “What
has
gone on?” or “What’s the background and/or past history of the present action?”

How do you thus communicate present action?

You
show
what happens.

You show it
as
it happens, moment by moment, in strict chronological order.

The sense of this at once becomes apparent if you stop to realize that the present
is the only thing you
can
show. The past is already gone. Your only link to it is memory. The future waits
in the wings, not yet on stage. It may be set forth only as conjecture or imaginings.

Here’s a sentence:

“The ancient wagon had been wallowing heavily across the prairie all day now.”

O.K.?

No. “Had been” instantly tells us that we’re dealing with past action. And while the
past certainly has a place in many stories, that place isn’t in the beginning.

How better to handle it?

“Sagging under its load, the ancient wagon wallowed heavily across the prairie.”

Present action. A word picture of the here-and-now.

If there’s sound, let’s hear it:

“. . . rattling and creaking and groaning.”

Is odor a factor?

“The air, despite the dust, held also a paradoxical steaminess of wilting vegetation.”

Heat?

“Even the tough, low-growing buffalo grass seemed to shrink from the blazing rays
of the morning sun, high now and climbing higher.”

How about a change in the situation?

“Ahead, far in the distance, smoke rose—a slender, wispy plume.”

What happens when we put all these together?

Sagging under its load, the ancient wagon wallowed heavily across the prairie, rattling
and creaking and groaning. The air, despite the dust, held also a paradoxical steaminess
of wilting vegetation. Even the tough, low-growing buffalo grass seemed to shrink
from the blazing rays of the morning sun, high now and climbing higher.

Ahead, far in the distance, smoke rose—a slender, wispy plume.

And so it goes. With manipulation of language and selection of detail, you capture
a state of affairs on paper. No matter what fragment you need to introduce, you call
it to your reader’s attention as an immediate stimulus, a present action.

Won’t you ever deviate?

Of course you will, a thousand times. But when you do go into past or future at the
beginning of a story, it should be a matter of conscious and intentional technique,
designed to create a predetermined effect and to solve a specific, clearly thought
out problem. It should
not
represent mere clumsiness and lack of insight.

Most of the time, you’ll get best results if you make it a habit to stick with the
here-and-now approach.