Techniques of the Selling Writer (25 page)

Author-objective it will stay, too, until you move into the heart or brain of some
particular person.—Or, you can write the entire story on an objective level, if that
appeals to your taste.

Thus it goes. One way or another, viewpoint is established. Your reader, in his turn,
makes appropriate assumptions as to where he stands . . . considers the events that
transpire in properly objective or subjective fashion.

In the process he also becomes aware, to a greater or lesser degree, of each character’s
traits and attitudes and state of mind. But that’s a subject that calls for greater
detail later.

Meanwhile, it’s enough that your reader’s found a skin to be in!

Where am I? What’s up? Whose skin am I in?
Those are the questions your reader asks when he begins a story.

In answering him, bear in mind two do’s and two don’ts:

The habit of planting and pointing is one of the easiest yet most effective ways to
strengthen your story.

A wrong assumption infuriates your reader. Help him to guess right by careful planting.

This is just another way of saying, “Don’t tell it; show it!” Wherever possible, translate
information into people doing things.

Try to crowd in too much too fast, and you’re on a sure short cut to disaster.

The thing to leave out of the beginning of your story is past history.

Why?

Because your reader’s interest centers on the future, not the past. He wants to know
what
will happen
as desire struggles against danger; not what
did happen
that led to the present conflict. Fans pay a lot more for prize-fight tickets than
they do for reminiscence.

The reason for this is as ridiculously simple as it is often overlooked:
Nothing can change the past
. It’s over; done. So, what suspense can it possibly hold?

Your story’s beginning thus should stick to present action . . . what’s happening
right now.

What’s happening, in turn, should center on desire colliding head-on with danger . . .
the conflict of irresistible force with immovable object, as it were.

How about the background of this conflict? Must it forever be forgotten?

On the contrary. Background can add insight to present problems . . . provide motivation
for future action. Quite possibly it’s of major importance to your story. You need
merely to be careful as to where and how you bring it in.

Ways to present it? Try these:

Flashback is someone remembering in the present what happened in the past.

There’s one key point to remember where flashback is concerned: Don’t open with it!

In the early stages of a story, you see, interest often is a fragile and tenuous thing.
Though your reader is in search of entertainment, he’s by no means sure that he’ll
find precisely what he wants in your particular story.

Bore him with flashback, past history, even briefly, and likely as not he’ll turn
to someone else’s yarn.

Once his interest is aroused, however, it’s entirely possible that he’ll ache to acquire
the self-same data he’d have spurned a page or two or three before.

So, do try to open on a striking, self-explanatory scene. Hold the flashback for later,
after the end of the beginning (a subject with which we’ll deal shortly), when the
story question is established and Reader firmly hooked. If a girl’s going to slap
a boy’s face, and he in his turn then will knock her down, let me
see
the bit first,
before
you explain the background of their quarrel. Believe me, the delay will make me an
infinitely better listener!

Such discussion is flashback verbalized. Don’t put it at the beginning either.

Also, and no matter where in your story you present it, don’t let it drag out and
become a bore.

To avoid such, use these three tricks:

This amounts to flashback in the author’s words.

Two solutions:

Is there anything else you shouldn’t put into your opening?

Yes: too much.

For example, too many characters, too detailed a setting, too involved a setting situation—the
list could go on forever.

Clutter and confusion are mortal enemies of good fiction. The thing to strive for
is the clean, sharp, simple line.

To that end, you need to devote some attention to . . .

What is exposition?

Exposition is whatever your reader needs to know about what happened in the past,
in order better to appreciate what’s going to happen in the future.

Your worst foe here is a literary plague called author convenience.

Author convenience is what makes a writer have a character say, “Father, is your sister
Lucille, whose husband Gregory died last August and left her penniless, coming to
visit us?”

Is this a normal question for anyone to ask his father?

Of course it isn’t. But a less-than-inspired writer could think of no more intelligent
way to get the facts of past action before his reader.

This is the same writer who insists on telling us how the heroine’s twin sister was
born with a horn-shaped birthmark because a bull chased their mother across the pasture
while she was
enceinte.

He also has the villain’s accomplice explain the villain’s proposed plot against the
hero to the villain. Nor is it any problem for Hero to acquire this same data, since
the villain’s mistress is happy to volunteer it to him.

Further discussion reveals that the killer is a dangerous man
with a knife. And Author, in ever-so-convenient asides, remarks that a minor character
is a diabetic, and that the hero is still very much emotionally involved with the
villain’s sister.

Need I say more? This obviously is
not
the right way to present background information!

To write successful exposition, motivate your reader to
want
to know the past.

That means: Make the past important to him.

Which is to say, make the facts to be presented important to your story—and to the
people in your story.

Then, set said facts forth in a manner that allows your characters to appear as normal,
intelligent human beings, and not cretins.

Techniques which may help you to achieve this worthy end include the following:

Is all the data as to what caused that horn-shaped birthmark really necessary?

Instead of shoving a half-page of past history at me in a lump, like soggy, dripping
laundry, maybe you could plant the pasture in one spot, as part of the setting; the
bull in another, as a continuing menace; sister’s birthmark in a third, with a sex-tinted
situation to carry it, and so on.

You motivate reader attention when you set someone in search of
needed
information. But your reader recognizes that the villain already knows the details
of his own plot, so any scene that involves his accomplice telling him about it automatically
rings as phony as a lead nickel.

If I want you to Tell All and you don’t want to, conflict and story interest are in
the making.

On the other hand, if the villain’s mistress starts to volunteer information, Hero
and Reader likely will head for the nearest exit . . . much the way you do when Auntie
decides the time has come to share all the details of her latest operation with you.

Tell me a given man is dangerous with a knife, and I may or not believe you. Let me
see him carve somebody up, and my hair stands on end with no resort at all to conscious
logic.

I may even grow willing to listen to a few lurid details about the guy’s past history!

You establish a character’s diabetes—a vital plot issue, perhaps—more vividly if you
let him give himself a shot of insulin in another character’s presence. Whereupon,
Character Number 2 is appropriately motivated to ask if your diabetic is on heroin,
and an explanation of the facts becomes in order.

If the hero is emotionally involved with anyone, your reader rates the
inside
dope. Let him experience the pain or passion or yearning in viewpoint . . . not hear
about it through the writer, secondhand.

There’s a thing in this world called reticence. It prevents some women from discussing
the clinical details of their sex lives; some men from talking about their dreams
or failures; some children and adolescents from opening up to adults; some older people
from dwelling too much verbally on death.

All of us feel a certain reticence, at one time or another, to some degree or another,
on some subject or another.

Consider reticence, next time, when in the name of exposition you’re tempted to endow
a character with an unduly loose lip.

Intelligence also must be considered. Just because you need a particular fragment
of data doesn’t mean that you can legitimately
wring inane observations from an otherwise sharp character and have your readers
accept it.

In fact, intelligence is an element you might very well apply to the whole cotton-pickin’
business of techniques of exposition.

Desire plus danger give you a beginning for any story.