Techniques of the Selling Writer (32 page)

In other words, cause leads directly to effect. Deed brings reward. As soon as you
know your hero’s goal, you also know how your story is going to end.

But knowing a destination and working out the route to reach it are two very different
things. Practical problems have to be
faced along the way . . . problems which you, the writer, must solve.

So, how do you move your focal character from decision to reward?

Again, three steps are involved:

Each of these three items is important. Slight any one of them and you’re in trouble.

Further, none of these issues are quite as simple as appears at first glance. To handle
them effectively, you need to understand them in terms both of dynamics and mechanics.

Take (
a
):

The reason your reader reads, we’ve said, is so that he can worry.

In the moment immediately after climax, that worry comes to its sharpest focus.

Why?

Because the focal character, acting, stands convinced that he’s lost; that the seemingly
inevitable doom the course of principle threatened is about to destroy him. It’s a
moment when, to him, all hope is gone.

Experiencing with the focal character, your reader shares this feeling. It brings
his fear to its highest pitch.

Therefore, you don’t dare hurry or slight that moment. Let your reader chill to—and
thus enjoy—it to the full! The blacker things look, the longer the moment hangs. In
consequence whereof, the higher your reader’s pitch of tension rises, and the greater
will be his sense of release and relief when the flip finally comes.

The story is a western. Or science fiction, or mystery, or adventure. Now, in the
climax scene, while minor characters stand by in aching silence, Villain gives Hero
an unpleasant choice: Let Hero betray the cause for which he fights, and Villain will
let him live. Let him refuse, and he’ll die. Messily.

Hero chooses: He’ll die. In the process, he’ll try to take Villain with him.

Not that he has a chance. The odds are far too long for that. But at least he’ll go
down fighting.

He starts forward. Villain tightens a finger on the trigger of his weapon.

It’s a moment that lasts an eternity. The chill breath of death seems to freeze the
scene.

Only then, as Hero makes his play, and Villain bares teeth in a sadistic grin, a voice
cries, “No!”

Whose voice it is, and why the cry is uttered, are unimportant here. The vital thing
is, something happens. Something unanticipated. Something that upsets the balance
of the situation.

So, here, someone cries, “No!”

In the brief moment that the Villain hangs distracted, Hero drives in hard. Villain’s
shot goes wild. And Hero is on his way to victory.

There, in its crudest and bloodiest form, stands the secret of story resolution: An
unanticipated development has reversed the focal character’s situation.

Not that triumph follows automatically or without effort, you understand. Hero still
may have to bleed and battle. But his sacrifice of self in climax opens the way to
a reversal.

“The art of life,” Justice Holmes once said, “consists in making correct decisions
on insufficient evidence.”

How better can you describe the focal character’s plight at a story’s climax? Seeing
only part of the picture, he still must make his choice—his sacrificial decision—and
act upon it.

Whereupon, you the writer reveal the rest of the picture: the things which have a
bearing that your character didn’t know. The variables, the unperceived factors. Like
what’s going on inside the villain, or how another character will react, or the fact
that somebody’s gun is loaded or empty, or that there’s water instead of poison in
the hypodermic needle.

Nor is this any falsification of reality, even remotely. Life is full of shocks and
twists and flips. Every man Jack of us has ever so often feared, but still plowed
straight ahead; and, plowing, found our fears were groundless. Not a day passes but
someone startles us with his reaction. A hundred times we face disaster, only to find
that the blackest cloud can indeed have a silver lining.

A good reversal demands three things:

If your reader doesn’t want—want desperately—to see the focal character saved, even
the best of twists is unlikely to impress him. You
must
make Reader care what happens to your hero.

You lose half the impact, at least, if your reader guesses in advance what’s going
to happen. The obvious just won’t do.

Believability is the payoff for proper preparation: planning and planting. An effect
without a legitimate cause spells disaster every time.

Given these three elements, however, reversal will prove effective in a story on any
level. Don’t allow the fact that we here use an action-type example to prejudice you.
No matter what kind of fiction you prefer to write, once a sacrifice is made, the
climactic situation changes: Father revises his estimate of Son’s potential. Girl
recognizes Suitor’s worth. Monster backs down before raw courage. Executive takes
new cognizance of Subordinate’s sense of duty. Wife sees that Husband really loves
her.

Desired yet unanticipated yet logical developments, one and all.

Such a development, in turn, is what starts release of reader tension. It begins the
answer to the story question: Will this focal character survive the hazard that threatens
attainment of his goal, or won’t he?

Specifically, the reversal demonstrates that the course of principle your hero chose
in crisis isn’t really going to crush him.

In so doing, it cuts fear sharply.

Result: a matching drop in tension . . . a drop that relieves and satisfies your reader.

How do you lay the groundwork for a reversal?

Herewith, five hints:

—And that means, know them precisely! Even go so far as to draw a map or plan of the
setting if it’s not completely clear to you. The general is your worst enemy. In terms
of pure mechanics, Hero may need a window that isn’t there, or an electric cord, or
a text on astrophysics.

List them, every one. Then, ask yourself what each is doing at this particular moment,
and how each will react to the fact of your character’s decision.

Tonight’s paper carried a story about a householder who saw a thief stealing the tires
from Householder’s pickup truck. So, Householder went out with a shotgun to stop the
theft. Thief promptly pulled a “small pistol,” ordered Householder back into dwelling,
and then drove off with tires
and
shotgun!

If the man I detest displays moral courage, I may conclude that he’s more worthy than
I thought him. Whereupon, I may act upon that belief to help him.

Further, an act of principle and courage can sometimes free your hero himself from
the bondage of his own fears. Once he’s taken the first step, inertia’s paralysis
breaks. Committed, he has nothing left to lose. So, like a berserker, a Moro run amok,
he rises above what he always imagined were his limitations.

In time of need, a change in circumstance—anything from weather to locale to the villain’s
attitude—will
always
solve your problem.

How do you reward a character?

You let him attain his goal, in letter or in spirit.

Beginning writers seldom pay enough attention to the nature of reward.

Because this is so, too often they also talk cynically about the “hypocrisy” of fiction
and the eternal need for a “happy” ending.

Actually, the
happy
ending is infinitely less important than the
satisfying
ending. Given reader fulfillment, you don’t necessarily have to close with a clinch,
the Marines landing, or the villain snarling, “Foiled again!”

Forget the phony, therefore. Distortion of reality will get you nowhere. What your
reader seeks is less nirvana than the feeling, “This is as it should be.”

How do you create this feeling?

The first step is to release tension.

Source 1 for tension, already discussed in detail, is danger. It culminates in the
climactic moment, with its threat of disaster for your hero.

To release tension stemming from this source, you eliminate the hazard. In so doing,
you dissipate character’s—and reader’s—fear that some specific something will or won’t
happen. Where-upon, tension ebbs.

Source 2 is desire.

Desire, you’ll recall, is the ground-swell from which all danger springs. It precedes
peril. For what trouble can you give a focal character who doesn’t care what happens
to him? Implicitly, desire to live must exist before there can be a fear of death.
How can you worry about what a woman does, if she means nothing to you? Does money
matter, when you’ve already taken a vow of poverty?

Whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, desire is in all of us, every moment.
Somewhere deep inside, we ache; we yearn; we hunger.

Out of such desire, in your focal character, springs goal . . . a goal so vital to
him, subjectively, that early in your story he commits himself to fight to achieve
it against all odds.

Specifically, he wants to attain or retain some particular something.

When you want anything badly enough, the wanting creates tension in you. A continuing
tension that gnaws and churns and burns.

Until your focal character gets the thing he wants, therefore, this desire-born tension
roils inside him—and, vicariously, inside your reader.

To release that tension, you give Character what he wants. You allow him to attain
his goal.

It’s at this point that a host of writers go astray.

Why?

Because they assume that the thing the focal character gets must match to the letter
the goal he seeks. If he wants a million dollars, a million dollars he must have.
Does the heroine yearn for a red dress? Then give it to her! And so on down the line,
all the way to the ruby from the idol’s eye, the banker’s house, violent vengeance
against a hated rival, and Cleopatra reclining on a tiger skin.

This isn’t reward or poetic justice. It’s nonsense.

The reason is that often there’s a vast difference between
stated
goal and
true
goal. Though they may be the same, frequently the gap between them is as wide as
that between sentimental and intrinsic value, where the kerchief or tintype or lock
of hair an old man treasures may be thrown out by his heirs as trash.

In the same way, physical goal is primarily a symbol.

As a symbol, it represents an emotional need. And it’s this need which the symbol
represents that reward must satisfy.

Such a need is like a hunger, an inner thirst. It makes its host a driven man.

Often, however, the man doesn’t even realize the need is there. He only feels an unrest,
a dissatisfaction.

Whereupon, consciously or unconsciously, he picks a goal to strive for, in the belief
that once he attains it he’ll be happy.

Frequently, he’s mistaken. What he really needs is to satisfy his inner hunger. Such
satisfaction is more vital by far than acquisition of fame or girl or gold.

Take the man above who claims he wants a million dollars.

Actually, his need—the thing the million dollars represents to him, on an unconscious
level—may be to feel an inner sense of his own worth and, with it, the self-confidence
to tell his arrogant boss to go to hell.

Give him that confidence, and he’s happy even though he still stays broke.

Likewise, the girl who longs for a red dress may not truly care about the dress at
all. It’s love she’s seeking, actually. But deep inside, she sees herself as far too
drab and unattractive ever to win the man she wants. So, the dress is only a means
to her emotional end. Let her once find love, and she’ll blissfully forego the garment.

The ruby from the idol’s eye, in turn, may be the verbalized target of someone who
seeks a sense of power; for who but a brave and dangerous person would ever dare to
try to steal it? The banker’s house, likely as not, stands as a status symbol, and
the man who wants it really seeks proof that he’s as good as anyone in town, despite
the fact that his father was the local drunk and his mother took in washing. A drive
to violent vengeance can grow from a need to impress a girl who disdains you as weak
and ineffectual. The fantasy of wooing Cleopatra on a tiger skin speaks of loneliness
and deep-seated yearning for affection. Quite possibly it’s less sexual craving than
it is hunger for tenderness and warmth, embodied in a living woman.