Techniques of the Selling Writer (30 page)

How do you bring a story to an end?

Why follow such a pattern?

It provides your reader with story satisfaction, through release of tension.

How does it trigger such release?

Two basic issues are involved:

These two factors, in turn, correlate with the two subdivisions of your story’s end:
climax, and resolution.

Climax
gives final, conclusive proof of what your focal character
deserves
.

Resolution
sets forth what he
gets
.

Thus, tension builds on the conflict between desire and danger that you establish
at the beginning of your story. Experiencing with the focal character, your reader
yearns to see said character attain his goal. But so powerful is the opposition that
he fears, simultaneously, that his man won’t make it.

Now, enter the deciding factor: What does the focal character deserve?

How to build a climax

It’s in his ability to perceive principle and separate it from self-interest that
man is distinguished from the animal.

This isn’t to be considered validation of any specific principle, you understand.
Principles may be right or they may be wrong; and certainly they change as man moves
through time, space, and circumstance. But in judging behavior by ethical standard
rather than mere expediency, we establish an absolute by which to test character and
to orient ourselves meaningfully to life. Only in terms of principle can we demonstrate
the triumph of free will over determinism . . . of cause-effect pattern over blind
fate . . . of spirit over external reality. It’s principle and principle alone that
gives meaning to the whole concept of control of circumstance.

Principle also provides the basis of climax. In adherence to or abandonment of principle,
your focal character proves ultimately and beyond all doubt what he deserves.

Climax itself merely dramatizes this adherence or abandonment. In the process, it
demonstrates the relationship between cause and effect in parable form, so clearly
that no one can miss it. If the character acts on conscience, despite the pressure
of self-interest, he attains his goal. If he doesn’t, his efforts fail. It’s as simple
as that.

All of which serves to reaffirm your reader’s philosophy of life, with its built-in
assumption that self-sacrifice for the sake of a larger issue is worthy of reward.
His fears and tensions are released. He relaxes into that happy state that comes with
fulfillment and satisfaction.

As a corollary to the above, a narrative that concerns action unrelated to principle
can never be more than chronicle; can never rise to the status of story. Sans principle,
behavior can’t be evaluated and consequently ceases to be fit subject for fiction.

“A storyteller is passionately interested in human beings and their endless conflicts
with their fates,” observes screenwriter Dudley Nichols, “and he is filled with desire
to make some intelligible arrangement out of the chaos of life, just as the chairmaker
desires to make some useful and beautiful arrangement out of wood.” And Professor
Franklin Fearing adds, “It is this intelligible arrangement that the reader seeks,
whatever his level of sophistication and regardless of whether he is able to be articulate
about it.”

Fiction thus is basically a tool to give life meaning. It does this, as we’ve seen,
by establishing a cause-effect relationship between the focal character’s behavior
and his fate; his deeds and his rewards. So a story without pattern is a contradiction
of terms.

The trouble with the “slice of life” approach is that it most often is formless and
so lacks the power of resolution. As a sociological document, a case study that draws
attention to a problem, it may prove excellent. But it’s not a story. When the end
of a film about a retardate sees the mentally deficient focal character walk off down
the street into a future no different from his past, it resolves nothing. Consequently,
it leaves the viewer in a state of frustration; unreleased tension. And as dramatist
Howard Lindsay has remarked, “The play that ends in mere frustration for the people
in whom the audience is emotionally interested
will not satisfy them, for frustration is one of the most unhappy experiences in
our lives.”

Now, back to climax, and to the first three steps listed preliminary to the beginning
of this section:

In good fiction, a climactic moment of decision marks the beginning of the end.

So, how do you set up such a moment?

A story, remember, is the record of how somebody deals with danger.

It begins when desire bumps into opposition, and your focal character commits himself
to fight for what he wants.

This gives you a story question: Will Joe attain his goal? Will he overcome the forces
that oppose him, or won’t he?

Result: Conflict. Suspense. Tension.

The middle of your story develops, builds up, and intensifies these elements. Conflict
grows sharper. Suspense mounts. Tension rises higher.

There’s a limit to tension, however. Sooner or later, at the end of the story, it
must be released.

The moment of decision provides the trigger mechanism to discharge it.

Up to this point, your focal character’s courage and intelligence and strength have
carried him.

But you and I know that there are moments when courage isn’t enough, and neither is
intelligence, or strength.

When such moments come, there’s only one recourse left for us.

Feeling.

That is, we act on emotion; impulse. We don’t think. We respond spontaneously, on
a visceral, well-nigh instinctive level, without regard for rules or logic or for
hazard. We throw ourselves between the child and the speeding car. We step from the
ranks to back a friend. We speak out for truth when silence would serve self-interest
better.

Or, if such are our emotional patterns, we break and run in
panic. We harden our hearts to pity or tenderness or ardor. We snatch the cash and
say to hell with conscience.

Feeling reflects something deeper and more profound than strength, or intelligence,
or even courage. It comes from the heart and guts, not the head. It speaks for the
man or woman you really are; the secret self; the naked I.

It’s this secret self that climax tests.

Why?

Because you can fool the world, and sometimes you can even fool yourself. But you
can’t fool your own feelings. They tell the truth about you, every time, without regard
for rationalizations or excuses.

That’s why climax is so vital. Only as we see a man in crisis, when under stress he
acts on feeling, can we gain the final, conclusive proof we need to determine whether
or not he deserves to attain the goal he seeks.

Your reader likes that. If he himself were to be judged, he hopes it would be on such
a basis. He knows that externals can deceive. He recognizes his deficiencies in strength
and intelligence and status. Over and over again, reality has forced him to acknowledge
flaw and weakness.

But his feelings, his impulses—those are different! He lives in a world of good intentions.
He sees himself as, at heart, a man of principle and honor. That’s his inner reality.

In an ultimate test, he feels that he would prove it.

So you test your focal character by the same standard.

To that end, you strip away all pretense from him. You make him reveal himself as
he really is.

How?

You offer him an easy way to reach his goal.

Thus, Ichabod has sweated blood for sixteen pages now, in his pursuit of fair Griselda.
It’s time to bring the business to an end.

So, you build a climax scene. In it Ichabod discovers that his rival, Roderick, was
driver of the hit-run car that crippled Griselda’s brother.

Roderick promptly agrees to let Our Hero have the lady—providing that Ichabod will
remain diplomatically silent about Roderick’s guilt.

It’s a fair enough deal, isn’t it? What Griselda doesn’t know
won’t hurt her, and wealthy Roderick will even go so far as to endow Brother for
life.

Besides, Brother was only a drunken bum to start with. Ichabod detested the very sight
of him.

As an alternative, if Ichabod refuses to play ball, Roderick will accuse him of the
crime, plus blackmail. True, Griselda may not be convinced. But enough doubt will
be raised in her mind that things will never be the same between her and Ichabod again.

So, Ichabod now has an easy way to reach his goal: All he needs to do is keep quiet.

He also has a disastrous alternative: to speak, and lose Griselda. In fact, with all
Roderick’s wealth and power arrayed against him, he might very well end up convicted
of hit-run himself.

Two specific, concrete, alternative courses of action. They constitute a fork in the
road for Ichabod . . . a test situation to bring final, conclusive evidence as to
whether or not he’s worthy of reward.

If he accepts Roderick’s offer, he gets Griselda and, in her, fulfillment of all his
dreams.

If he refuses, the payoff is black oblivion. On all counts.

Not much of a choice, is it? Intelligence, logic, and self-interest stand shoulder
to shoulder on the side of buying Roderick’s scheme.

Against it—well, what is there? Square-type puritan prejudices against conspiring
to help a criminal evade the penalty for his crime? Silly scruples over marrying a
girl under false pretenses? Qualms of conscience involving words like
right
and
honesty
and
love
and
justice?

Abstractions all. They count for nothing.

That is, unless principle means more to you than victory.

And that’s the way you set up the situation for a climax scene . . . an easy path
to goal on the one hand, a disastrous alternative on the other, and your focal character
standing at the fork in the road.

What are the most common weaknesses, in climax?

In other words, the perceptive reader (and an amazingly high proportion of readers
are
perceptive) instantly spots loopholes in a climax situation: “Why doesn’t Suzy just
tell
John that her dad’s gone broke?” “Isn’t Brent bright enough to realize that his aunt
was senile when she made him promise to stay on in that old house?” “What keeps Link
from calling the police?”

Result: a spoiled climax.

Remedy: a writer who thinks his story through, then plugs all loopholes and boxes
in his focal character
before
the climax.

All her life my mother’s hated whisky worse than snakes. Now she lies dying, and I’m
too broke to give her proper care. To make matters worse, my fiancée returns my ring.
A man who can’t look after his dying mother has no business taking a wife, she says.

Enter the town bootlegger. He offers to loan me the cash I need, on my tacit agreement
to let him set up a secret still in the swamp on Mother’s farm.

Should I take the money? It’s an easy way out.

But there’s also a matter of principle involved; a moral issue. For in sanctioning
the still I’ll be betraying everything that Mother believes in.

Of such materials are solid climax situations built.

Suppose, however, that it’s an old friend, and not the bootlegger, who offers me the
money. What then?

Even to ask the question is to see the climax fade away.

Why?

Because the function of climax is to test character, and without principle at stake
there can be no test. The friend’s money has no strings attached. I can accept it
with no qualm of conscience.

Result: no conflict.

And no climax.

Shall we spell out the message? When we talk about an “easy way,” it’s easy from a
material
standpoint only. On a
moral
level, it must nail your focal character to the cross. Though “practical” considerations
back it 100 per cent, it should bear an emotional price too high for your character
to pay.

The way to make a focal character sweat in climax is to build his alternative to sheer
catastrophe.