Techniques of the Selling Writer (28 page)

Or, if I have a prized reputation as tough and dangerous that will be forever shattered
if I let this cheap thug clean me?

The more I have at stake, the greater will be the pressure on me to fight.

The greater that pressure, the higher the tension, and the stronger the chances of
building to a powerful climax.

Nor is your focal character the only one you need to think of in
these terms. Give
each
person in your story something at stake—so much that he fights desperately. For any
man among us struggles harder if he knows his foe will kill him if he can.

Both hero and villain must continue to play dynamic roles throughout your story. Neither
should become static. Each must adjust as the story progresses. Whenever one makes
a move, it should evoke a countermove by the other, in a clear-cut, motivation-reaction
pattern. And whenever one side seems to be making progress, it should be a signal
for the other to put forth renewed effort.

Always arrange your scenes—or groups of scenes—in an ascending order of intensity.

Why?

Because the main line of your story’s development must continually increase your reader’s
tension. Try merely to hold it at the same level, and Friend Reader will feel as if
it’s falling off.

Whereupon, his interest in your story will sag.

It will help, here, if you think of your story as a series of peaks and valleys.

The valleys we’ll take up later, when we talk about balancing your story. At this
point, we’re dealing only with the peaks.

The peaks are your scene climaxes. In general, each should carry your reader to a
higher level of tension than the one before.

That is, each should increase your reader’s foreboding of potential disaster. It should
make him devastatingly aware that your focal character may not attain his goal.

In a long story—a novelette; a novel—scenes may be grouped into larger units. Then,
some scenes will be preparation, groundwork, build-up, foothills.

The true peaks, in such cases, will be the climaxes of the major story segments. They’ll
tower like mountains, each higher than the one which precedes it.

How do you manage this?

A good idea is to decide in advance which moments in your story are the big ones.
That is, which blows struck against your
hero are the most devastating? Which scene disasters shatter him the worst?

Then, separate those big moments, and plan an appropriate build-up for each one. The
bigger the moment, the bigger the build-up.

Here an eye for story values can prove a crucial thing. The flamboyant, the spectacular,
the cosmic mean less than nothing. Always, always, you
must
measure in terms of the effect the event has in relation to your focal character’s
feelings and the story question. A steak dinner may be more important than a death,
a quick-drawn breath more exciting than the sack of Rome.

In the same way, crowding two climaxes too close together will drain the punch from
both. And if the issue is too few climaxes versus too many, choose too few every time.
Build-up can give the few importance. Too many automatically come out as melodramatic
drivel. A girl may have one affair, or two, or even three, and still rate as a best-seller
heroine. Push her into a dozen, and she’s judged a tramp.

To box in our hero, restrict his freedom of choice where movement and/or course of
action are concerned.

Ordinarily, the first phase of a story gives the focal character a fair amount of
leeway. Like the queen in a chess game, he can move in almost any direction he desires.

Then, threatened, he commits himself to fight for what he wants.

That decision blocks off a number of avenues previously open to him. Unless he’s willing
to betray himself or others, he can no longer run, or ignore the situation. He must
center his attention on one area of activity until his problem is solved.

In the same way, each scene narrows his radius of action . . . cuts down on the choices
he can make. Trapped in a maze of dangers and decisions, contradictions and dilemmas,
he attempts one course after another, only to discover that each in its turn is a
dead end. The friend he relies on betrays him. The weapon he seeks is missing. The
time he needs runs out. The assumptions he makes are wrong.

All of which increases tension . . . builds the sense of rising action in your story.

Step by step, then, your central character is forced into a bottleneck, a funnel.
Less and less frequently are there a variety of directions in which he still can turn.

Finally, he reaches a point at which he’s restricted to a choice between two specific,
concrete, alternative courses of action.

But that’s a subject we’ll take up later. For when your hero reaches it, he’s also
reached the beginning of the end.

For now, the important thing to remember is that, in the middle stages of your story,
you must be sure that this narrowing takes place. Your job is to spot holes and plug
them; to foresee escape routes and block them; to cut off your hero from all apparent
hope.

If you don’t, your reader’s going to see those holes, and scream because your hero
doesn’t duck out through one.

And idiot heroes seldom please.

I’ve saved this point for last because, though obvious, it’s so often overlooked.

Which is tragic, since it very often can make the difference between a pedestrian
story, and one with verve and sparkle.

The “corpse” referred to above is the unanticipated.

More specifically, the disastrously unanticipated . . . and the unanticipatedly disastrous.

Injection of the unanticipated is a major function of disaster in your scene pattern.
So, keep your disasters disastrous! Throw in the least likely development, the startling
twist! Don’t be afraid to shock or hurt your hero. He—and your readers—will thrive
on such abuse. For nothing helps more to build exciting climaxes.

If this sounds like a plea for blood and thunder, please remember that you, as a writer,
are supposed to have sufficient taste and intelligence and judgment to adapt such
suggestions as this to your own chosen field.—Though how much difference there is
between the unanticipated as exemplified in the rawest pulps and that found in more
“literary” circles is open to question, in
view of some of the writings of such figures as William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams
and Calder Willingham.

And just in case you wonder precisely to what ultimates this matter of the unanticipated
can be carried, I give you, in conclusion, an editorial communiqué I once received
from my old friend Howard Browne, who now make fabulous sums of money in Hollywood,
but who at the time was riding herd on a chain of pulp magazines.

Herewith, Mr. Browne:

I’ve got an assignment for you, keed. I want 25,000 words a month—one story—that is
ACTION! The type of yarn, for instance, where a group of people are marooned in, say,
a hilltop castle, with a violent storm raging and all the bridges out and the electric
power gone and the roof threatening to cave in and corpses falling down the stairs
and hanging in the attic and boards creaking under somebody’s weight in the dark (“Can
that be the killer?”) and flashes of lightning illuminating the face of the murderer
only the sonofabitch is wearing a mask that makes him look even more horrible, and
finally the girl has been given into the safekeeping of the only person who is absolutely
not the killer—only he turns out to be the killer, but he has taken the girl where
no one can get to save her and you damn well know he is raping her while everybody
stands around helpless. Do these stories in the style Burroughs used to use; you know,
take one set of characters and carry them along for a chapter, putting them at the
end of the chapter in such a position that nothing can save them; then take another
set of characters, rescue them from their dilemma, carry them to a hell of a problem
at the end of the chapter, then switch back to the first set of characters, rescue
them
from their deadly peril, carry them along to the end of the chapter where, once again,
they
are seemingly doomed; then rescue the second set of characters . . . and so on. Don’t
give the reader a chance to breathe; keep him on the edge of his goddam chair all
the way through. To hell with clues and smart dialogue and characterization; don’t
worry about corn. GIVE ME PACE AND BANG BANG! Make me breathless, bud!

What more can anyone say? What more could anyone want to?

Hike up a mountain sometime. You’ll find, very shortly, that some slopes are steeper
than others; some trails more devious or difficult. Here, you’ll move slowly . . .
there, swiftly. And up ahead you’ll want to stop and rest and catch your breath.

A story is like that mountain. You don’t present it all in the same manner or at the
same pace. A pulse of tension runs through it—here, strong and vibrant; there, more
relaxed.

Thus, the main line of the action—the development from climax to climax—continually
rises. Your focal character stands in ever greater danger. So, the peak of each major
story segment, whether scene or group of scenes, is higher—more tense; more exciting—than
the one before.

But if you attempt to maintain this same high level of excitement
between
the peaks, your reader soon becomes exhausted. Overstimulated, continually under
experiential and emotional bombardment, he loses his sense of proportion and, quite
possibly, quits reading out of sheer fatigue.

So, you give him a chance to rest a bit along the way. Between peaks, you let him
relax.

You do this in the moments that follow each disaster.

That is, you slow the pace, reduce the tension, in those portions of your story that
are termed sequel: reaction to disaster, read-justment to changed situation, search
for new goal or approach, groundwork and build-up, preliminary feints and thrusts
and conflicts.

In other words, you balance your peaks, your climaxes, with valleys.

How?

The first step is to devise ways to build your big moments, your climaxes, to the
desired heights.

Here are five of the many tools that help you do this:

Too often, a writer is tempted to set forth his story in a loosely connected series
of simple, trivial scenes.

A simple scene may show your focal character try to persuade his girl’s mother to
tell him why Sophronia has ditched him. Failing to get satisfaction from her, he tackles
Sophie’s father . . . then her brother.

String the three scenes together, and odds are that you rack up more length than tension.

On the other hand, if your focal character starts on Mama . . . whereupon Papa charges
in and orders Mama to keep quiet and Character to leave the house . . . and Character
tries to pressure Papa into talking . . . only just then Brother enters and assaults
Character—well, you may find you’ve built to quite a peak.

All of which is not to say that the simple, uncomplicated scene doesn’t have a place.
But for climax purposes, you’ll get more mileage from units in which you arrange and
compress your material in a manner designed to achieve maximum effect.

A buzzing fly is an annoyance. A buzzing rattlesnake encourages you to do something
about him.

In general, the more dangerous a situation, the more important it looms in your character’s
eyes, and the more inclined he is to take action.

Action begets reaction and conflict, and the better are your chances, out of it, to
build a big scene.

The inconsequential, in contrast, lacks red blood and vitamins. It’s unlikely to provide
a basis for any major climax.

If the above-mentioned rattlesnake sounds off as you cross your yard at dusk, you’ll
probably put off hunting him till morning. If he’s in the same room with you, you
feel a degree of impulse to do something right now.

Which is why urgency helps, ever and always, when it’s time to build a climax.

Your reader takes it for granted that a story’s climax will center on an explosive
showdown between desire and danger.

Therefore, as your story progresses, the tension engendered by each new crisis grows.

Especially is this so if you keep building up the strength of the opposition and a
sense of potential ultimate disaster. It’s as if each step your character takes forward
brings him closer to impending
doom. He’s like a man trying to break down a door in order to save a loved one, knowing
even as he does so that a berserk gorilla is waiting for him on the other side.

Tension does things to people. Under its pressure, perceptions and reactions heighten.
You move faster. You respond quicker. Time stretches out. There’s a jerky, staccato,
exaggerated quality to everything you say and do.

These are elements you can capture in your copy. Your reader, reading, catches the
excitement of the moment by the very way you write, the words you use.

What kind of words?

Short words. Harsh words. Pointed words. Slashing words.

What kind of writing?

Terse writing. Action writing. Short sentences. Short paragraphs. The tunnel vision
that shuts out everything except the moment and the danger. The prolongation of crisis
that stretches time like a rubber band.

How do you learn to write such copy?

You hunt down the moments that thrill you in the other man’s story.