Techniques of the Selling Writer (3 page)

How do you tell whether a rule is good or not, in terms of a specific problem?

Answer: Find out the reason the rule came into being. What idea or principle stands
behind it?

“The man who knows
how
will always find a place in life,” says the adage, “but the man who knows
why
will be the boss.”

Arbitrary rules restrict and inhibit you.

Knowing why sets you free.

Take George’s rule about starting every story with a fight. It’s born of George’s
markets—men’s magazines in which the emphasis is on fast, violent action, with blood
on page one an absolute must.

If Fred only realized that fact, he’d ignore George’s rule when he himself writes
a mood-geared story.

Projected, this principle means that a writer should have theories on every phase
of writing—how to get ideas, how to plot, how to build conflict, how to bring characters
to life, how to create the right feelings in a given reader.

And, he should think through and take note of the
why
behind each and every how. Otherwise, how can he discover the procedures most effective
for and best suited to him, in terms of his own temperament and tastes?

Nor does it matter whether these theories are right or wrong in the view of objectivity
or the critics. Their purpose is only to provide one particular writer with working
tools and orientation.
Universality is no issue. If an approach works for you, that’s all that counts. Writing
a story, any story, is a very personal, very individual business. No one else can
fight the battle for you. You must win or lose all by yourself, alone in the solitude
of your psyche, working out of the depth and breadth of your own feeling.

Which brings us to another interesting question: If feeling is indeed the issue, where
do you find it?

Or, more specifically, what kind of a person is the writer?

Your right to be wrong

You start with an urge to write, and that’s really all you need.

That’s all, that is, so long as you don’t let other things get in the way.

What other things?

They go by so many names. But they all boil down to one issue: the fear of being wrong.

To write successfully, you have to have the nerve to look at something in a new way
and say, “This fascinates me. Look what I’ve done with it!”

Looking at anything in a new way takes nerve.

Why?

Because other people may see it from a different angle.

Whereupon, out of disagreement may spring disapproval. A husband may scoff, “Look
who thinks she can write!”

Or a boss may shoot you down: “Young man, I pay you to do a job, not ride a hobby!”

Or a neighbor—“You’d think that woman would clean up her kids a little if she’s got
so much time to spare.”

Or an editor—“. . . nor does rejection necessarily imply any lack of merit.”

Or a friend—“. . . so we’re all so proud of you—even if it
is
just a Sunday School paper.”

Or a relative—“Honestly, Gladys, you can’t imagine what they said when they found
out you write those awful confessions!”

Or the pastor—“Just ask yourself, Sam: Do you want your children to know their father
wrote a book like this?”

Or the critics—“This work lacks even ordinary competence.”

“A stylistic mishmash.” “The characters are caricatures at best.”

“A shallow and empty story, without insight or compassion.”

So many voices, all singing the same song: “What makes you think that
you
could ever write anything worth reading?”

Voices like that sap your courage. They drain away your spirit. They make you want
to run and hide, or lock a mask over your thoughts and feelings . . . and never, never,
never write again.

Don’t listen to them.

“A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid
to be wrong,” mystery specialist Raymond Chandler once warned.

“I cannot give you the formula for success,” says Herbert Bayard Swope, “but I can
give you the formula for failure: Try to please everybody.”

What qualities and/or conditions are most valuable to a writer?

Spontaneity. Freedom. The opportunity for unstudied, impulsive roving through the
backlands of his mind.

Which are most detrimental?

Inhibition. Self-censorship. Restraint.

(Inhibition of feeling, that is—
not
inhibition of behavior. Becoming a writer doesn’t automatically license you as a
libertine, or grant you a permit to appear roaring drunk at high noon in the public
square.)

In this world, all of us want to be right, on the one hand; to avoid being wrong,
on the other. So, we search for certainty.

To that end, too often we put on blinders . . . shut out those thoughts and feelings
and interpretations which don’t conform to those we hear expressed by others, lest
we find ourselves borne down by frowns of disapproval.

Rules for writing constitute one such set of blinders . . . designed to help us never
to be wrong.

Is it so bad to want to win acceptance?

Of course not. But hem a writer in with rules, and in spite of himself he unconsciously
weighs each new thought against the standard of the rule, instead of bouncing it around
in free association until other thought-fragments, magnetized, cling to it.

To be a writer, a creative person, you must retain your ability to react uniquely.
Your feelings must remain your own. The day you mute yourself, or moderate yourself,
or repress your proneness
to get excited or ecstatic or angry or emotionally involved . . . that day, you die
as a writer.

Why should this be so?

The answer lies in . . .

The snare of the objective

There are two types of mind in this world . . . two approaches to the field of fiction.

One type is that of the objectivist, the man who sees everything analytically. Three
things warp his orientation:

This man may have an inclination to create. But he’s the product of an educational
system that focuses on facts the way a Mohammedan zeros in on Mecca; and, in his case,
the education took.

Now there’s nothing wrong with facts as such. Educators of necessity seek a common
ground on which to reach their students.

But one of the characteristics of a fact is that it has a record of past performance.
That’s what makes it a fact: Phenomenon X behaved and/or existed in thus-and-such
a manner yesterday, last week, last month, last year. So, we have reason to anticipate
that it will behave and/or exist the same way tomorrow.

This means that to deal with facts, you must devote a great deal of attention to analysis
of their track records. What did they do in previous encounters, and how did they
do it? They’re like cases in law: Past history dominates. First, last, and always
you check precedents.

If this were as far as the matter went, there wouldn’t be any real headache. But the
educators refused to let it go at that. Facts were easy to present. Knowledge of them
was easy to test. In many areas they were of great practical use. Centering attention
on them obviated the complications that went with dealing with each student as an
individual.

So, educators in the lead, an entire society plunged into wholesale fact-worship.

When you glorify one thing, it’s generally at the expense of something else. In this
case, the “something else” was feeling.

Now a feeling is about as opposite to a fact as you can get. At best, you might describe
it as a sort of internal driving force, like electricity in a motor. You can’t see
it or hear it or smell it or taste it or touch it. It reveals itself to the outside
world only in overt behavior, as a reaction. Even measuring its intensity, by any
objective standard, remains a problem not at all satisfactorily resolved.

As if that weren’t enough, feelings differ from moment to moment and person to person.
They’re the ultimate variable—utterly unpredictable, oftentimes; poker with everything
wild.

Faced with this unpredictability of feelings, this refusal of an element to behave
in neatly ordered fashion, the educators responded with varying degrees of uncertainty,
suspicion, outrage.

—Feelings all, of course, you understand; but acceptable, because they were housed
in the right people.

Being human as well as frustrated, the educators took the obvious course of action:
They taught generations of children to depend on facts.

—And, as a corollary, to hold all feelings suspect.

Result: a population trained to feel guilty every time it discovers that emotion prompted
an action.

What happens when a man conditioned to such a mode of thinking decides he wants to
create something?

Naturally enough, he approaches it as a problem in fact-finding.

That is, he looks to stories already written . . . studies them . . . attempts to
dig out the common denominators that they share.

From this survey, he deduces rules. Then, he tries to write stories of his own that
fit these regulations.

A story, thus, is for him an exercise in mechanics . . . a sort of juggling of bits
and pieces; a putting together of a literary jigsaw puzzle. Seeing the product but
not the process, viewing the end result rather than the dynamic, forward-moving forces
that brought it into being, more often than not he ends up with
something limp and inert. For though he may have skill, he’s at heart a thinker, a
logician. It never occurs to him to
feel
about his story. If it did, he’d thrust the thought aside, because he has no faith
in feeling. He’s afraid to trust it.

Now this is a dangerous distortion of attitude in any circumstances, even though you
still may be able to function satisfactorily enough in spite of it so long as your
job is merely to saw boards or sew seams or mix premeasured chemicals.

In a creator, however, such a pattern looms as utter and complete disaster.

Why?

Because the creator automatically is doomed to failure if he assumes that past and
precedent can provide him with certainty and guarantee success.

No such certainty does or can exist—not in writing, nor in life itself. No matter
how carefully we plan and prepare for tomorrow, tonight may find us frozen as solid
as those famed Siberian mammoths, refrigerated for centuries like giant sides of beef
by a blast of frigid air so sudden and so devastating that they died with buttercups
still in their mouths.

Incidentally, science and the objectivists haven’t yet figured out just what happened
that day.

The only true certainty in life, so far as we know, is death—at least, what we call
death.

As a writer, to deal with this world, you must accept it and your own ever-so-finite
limitations as they are. Facts are something you have to take for granted. But you
don’t worship them, for your security, your certainty, is in yourself.

In your feelings.

Feeling, indeed, is what drives you forward. Wrapped up in your story, you face the
future, not the past. The tale you tell excites you. You write out of the thrill of
that excitement. Everywhere, you see new possibilities, new relationships. “What if—?”
is your watchword. The rules, when you think of them, are incidental.

Which all is merely another way of saying that the writer is subjective more than
objective; that his inner world is more important to him than the external one. Intuitively,
he knows that “plot” and “character” and “setting” and all other analytic ele
ments of the craft, taken apart from story, are just that: analytic; which is to say,
dead, in the same way that any part of a dissected laboratory specimen is dead.

Because most readers read to feel, not analyze, they love the work of the subjectivist-turned-writer.

For precisely the same reason, they ignore the fiction of the non-creator, the analyst.

Does this mean that you write as Jack Kerouac is alleged to, with no heed for technique;
no attempt at revision or correction?

No, indeed. The picture of “pure” creator versus “pure” objectivist is an exaggeration.
No such creatures exist. Always, the issue is a matter of degree and emphasis. The
writer puts heavier stress on the emotional entity we call
story
because he feels, and isn’t afraid to trust his feelings. That is all.

The successful writer also has intelligence as well as talent; far too much intelligence
to rely on spontaneity alone.

But he does
separate
logic from emotion; critical judgment from creation. So, though feeling is the wellspring
of his work, over and over again along the line he pauses . . . sits back . . . subjects
his plans and copy to reappraisal.

That reappraisal is based on the rule-of-thumb testing that is the shrewdest, most
practical application of the past experience we call principle. Each story teaches
him new tricks . . . brings him new tools, new techniques. Insight continually grows
in him, and so does understanding. So, he improves as he goes along . . . seldom falls
into the same trap twice.

That procedure; that separation of frames of mind; that alternating between creation
and critique . . . it’s the most effective way to learn, in any creative field. It
uses rules as a checklist, not a blueprint. Feeling dominates; not logic.

Thus, it encourages spontaneity and takes advantage of it in the initial excitement
of storytelling.

Then, later, it spots story flaws and pins down points of error.

Do I make myself clear? Communication of feeling—
your
feeling—demands skill as well as heart.

To win that skill, you have no choice but to begin right where you are—this very moment.

Ordinarily, that means you start a long way down the ladder.
You first have to be willing to be very, very bad, in this business, if you’re ever
to be good. Only if you stand ready to make mistakes today can you hope to move ahead
tomorrow.