Fiction Writing Demystified Page 2

  That’s the job. That’s all of it.

  It is the advertisers who are paying the bills.

  And how does the TV writer do that? By keeping the audience entertained. Fascinated. Curious. Amused. Moved.

  The TV writer is not obligated to elevate the public’s cultural level, to educate, inspire, enlighten, or to produce art. But neither are we prohibited from doing so (with the obvious exception of shows that are so abysmally dumb in conception as to make such aspirations impossible — there have always been too many of those, but I prefer to celebrate the remarkable few that are brilliant — and yet manage to survive in this mass medium). If the writer aims for any or all of these last, that’s great, but it is not a requirement.

  The only requirement is that the audience must continue to watch. Hence, if the television writer fails to grab, and then hang onto viewers, if the audience switches channels before the commercial — if the writer loses the audience, that writer is not doing his or her job.

  Is not the same thing true of the poet, playwright, novelist, biographer — or clergy? Several years ago I delivered a seminar at a Baptist writers’ conference. About 20% of the several hundred attending the talk were ministers. They were there to learn how to hold their congregants’ attention.

  The TV Writer’s Bogeyman

  Another take on it: an imperative that television taught me, is that as I write each word, each line of dialogue, I keep a certain image in mind — that of a representative, metaphorical VIEWER. Mine happens to be a guy in his tee-shirt, feet up on the coffee table, sitting there after another long, tiring day at a job he despises, a beer in one hand and the remote in his other. And that’s the important part — the remote — because his thumb is constantly hovering over the channel-selector button. He is ready to vote, moment-tomoment, on how well I am doing my job. If I bore this guy, for even an instant, I’ve lost him. Ergo, I have failed.

  Oh — and there’s another side to this guy — as I envision him — that sets him apart from, say, the moviegoer in a theater. The moviegoer has paid to see the film and, beyond his cash investment, is at least somewhat captive; he’s sitting in a dark room, which contributes to his feeling of isolation and therefore to his concentration on the movie, which is bombarding his senses with Surround-Sound, special effects and a giant screen. The person reading your novel or short story is, you hope, likewise engrossed. My TV viewer, on the other hand, is seated in a lighted room, looking at a small screen while the kids are screaming, the dishwasher is clattering, the phone is ringing and the dog is farting. And if that weren’t bad enough, every few minutes he’s further distracted from my show by — commercials.

  Think about it.

  That’s the challenge.

  How different is it from the necessity, in writing a novel, that you grip your reader? Or the movie that rivets the audience’s attention, advertising copy that sells, or essays, newspaper stories, travel articles, or even memoirs that compel us to read on? Or weaving a story that sways a jury? How different is it from the historian’s obligation to hold the attention of the reader who bought his or her book? Or the playwright’s to the audience that paid for tickets to the show — to keep the people in — or better yet, on — the edge of their seats — instead of walking out?

  The novelist whose reader stops turning the pages is not doing his or her job.

  The advertising copywriter whose words don’t rivet the customer — and sell the product — isn’t doing her job.

  The minister whose flock dozes off or begins fidgeting, glancing around the room, isn’t getting his message across. A successful pastor whom I know approaches his sermons with the following philosophy: “I try to comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable.”

  We want our audiences to be absorbed, hooked. We want them to stay with us, turn the pages, remain in the theater. So we must remember — always — even in the smallest, seemingly least important scene — that we cannot bore them. If we do, they’ll stop reading or watching or paying attention to whatever it is we’re trying to say. And even the most dedicated — the ones who despite the boredom hang on till the end, will find the process torturous. And will therefore be reluctant to try anything else that we’ve authored.

  That is the standard by which you must judge the words you write. And you’ve got to be willing to revise them or dump them if they don’t measure up — no matter how deeply you might admire them.

  The Hitchcock Motto

  Perhaps the most meaningful words for a writer that I have ever encountered came from a filmmaker. Alfred Hitchcock, the master writer/director of suspense movies said:

  “Drama is real life — with the dull parts left out.”

  I think about that a lot. And so should you. It applies to all of us, to all kinds of fiction writing. You, the writer, the teller of your story, have to locate, to recognize — and then present — the heat. The drama.

  And by “drama,” I mean comedy as well as tragedy, and all of the shadings in between — including surprises — all of which have, at their core, a common and arguably the single most important thread for writer and audience — CONFLICT.

  But more to the point, and I’ll expand upon this later, show the conflict. Play it. Don’t talk about it, or have your characters discuss it. Dramatize it. Focus on it. Set up scenes or situations that use it, that illustrate it. Conceive your stories and your characters and your individual scenes and moments in terms of conflict. In terms of disagreement. Argument.

  Conflict is a word you will find repeated many times in this book — for very good reasons.

  Because conflict is the story.

  Moreover, the above — along with so much else in this book — is not limited to fiction writing. The Hitchcock Motto is particularly relevant for those who are telling a “true” story — be it history, biography or a memoir. That a story is factual gives it, admittedly, a measure of cachet, but only a degree. Its success depends on how well it is told.

  A true story consisting of a succession of this-happened-andthen-that-happened-accounts of how your hero and/or heroine met this-or-that famous person, or was present when some noteworthy event took place — that doesn’t cut it. Where was the heat in their tale? Where was the theater? What were their emotions? Where was the excitement?

  Because, nonfiction or fiction, you must still entertain your audience. Put another way, readers/viewers want to see, to experience vicariously, the obstacles your protagonists overcome in getting from A-to-B-to-C. Not just that they get there. I believe that historians or biographers who have a dramatist’s sensibilities, a gift for going beyond the academic, write the best, most satisfying, riveting nonfiction. People with the fiction writer’s talent for finding the real, human meanings, the stuff that takes us past the dryness of dates and times and places, enabling us to identify with the players.

  The Computer in Your Head

  As most of us know, among the wonderful features of writing on a computer are such functions as the spell-checker, grammar checker, the thesaurus, and the search-and-global-change capabilities. They have made the act of writing a very different process than it was in the days of Dostoevsky, of Shakespeare, or even those of Fitzgerald. In fact, when I read something as complicated as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and think about his having written it in longhand, I am not merely awed — the thought gives me a headache.

  Part of what I hope you’ll acquire from this book is a set of computer-like mental functions to augment those that come with your word-processing software. A mental checklist (though there’s nothing that says you can’t write this stuff down) of criteria that you’ll punch up in your head, which will help you to see into your manuscript and alert you — in the same way your computer reminds you of misspellings or questionable grammar — to some of the no-no’s of fiction writing. A set of standards — of tests to which you subject your literary output.

  It’s called Self-editing.

  Certainly, in the best of all wo
rlds, you’ll hire an editor, or your publisher will assign one. Or you’ll be lucky, as I have been, and writers more knowledgeable than yourself will hold your hand — for a while, anyway.

  But...

  Do not expect anyone else to tell you exactly what’s wrong with your work. Don’t count on it. Why? Because at the very best, even their informed comments will be to some extent subjective.

  And at the other end of that equation — to quote the immortal words of the great screenwriter/novelist, William Goldman — “Nobody knows anything.”

  In between there may be gradations — a teacher or mentor, an agent or editor who knows more than you do, who may make constructive suggestions.

  But ultimately, you must be the judge of what you write. And you must believe in it, and in yourself, because I guarantee, there will be (in case you haven’t already discovered this) a lot of people who — either intentionally or well-meaning — will say and do things that will discourage you.

  What I’m talking about is that if you hope to become an effective writer, you must develop your own highly tuned self-editor — forgive the bluntness — your own shit-detector.

  It is my hope that a lot of what you’ll find in this book will become part of you as a writer, part of your standards, of your craft. And your art. The word-processor in your head.

  Write to The Money

  Still another dictum that travels well from TV writing to other forms, “Write to The Money” is not a plea on behalf of commercial hackdom. What it is is a reminder that we must remember whom and/or what our story is about. One of the tenets in series television is that the star of the show should be present in at least every other scene. Why? Because presumably your star is the reason the audience tunes in to watch the show. In other forms of fiction writing it means that your protagonist, the star of your piece, is the one the reader wants to follow. It means that, while you may wish to insert other threads in your story, you must guard against losing your major character’s arc.

  You have got to keep your lead character alive — and moving the action.

  First, it’s about fixing in your mind just whom the star of your show is, your lead character (or characters). That is the one your story should focus upon, the one your audience cares about, wants to know about. But more significantly, that character should be driving your story. Making it happen.

  Essentially, the star of your show (or play or novel or short story) — your protagonist — should be the engine of his (or her) own salvation (or destruction, if that’s what your story is about).

  The same should be true of any character you want your audience to root for.

  One of the most frequent errors committed by inexperienced writers is that of allowing the heroine or hero’s problems to be solved by someone else. Or worse than that, by happenstance, as in having a key clue fall, with no effort, into the detective hero’s lap, instead of — say — using his or her wits to find it, or, arguably better, to trick the killer into confessing.

  Likewise, victims do not usually make interesting, compelling protagonists. Frank McCourt, in his brilliant autobiographical Angela’s Ashes, may have been a victim at the outset, may have even felt like one, but he rose above it, extricated himself from his situation, driving his own story.

  Okay — so, as stated above, what we’re talking about here is getting ourselves into a no-nonsense mode about what we do. A place we feel comfortable about.

  We entertain people, right?

  Not rocket science.

  BEGINNINGS — THE STORY IDEA

  Asking Yourself “Where’s The Heat?”

  There is a single word that embodies the place where the writer’s head should be at all times.

  The place from which you start — and finish.

  It is a word you’ve already seen — and will see again — repeated in this book — one you should repeat like a mantra, till it’s engraved in your brain: Conflict.

  Conflict. Conflict. Conflict. Conflict.

  Throughout this book you’ll find words like “edge,” “heat,” “difficulty,” “problem,” etc., all of them variations on “conflict.”

  Without conflict there is no story.

  Without conflict within a scene, you have a non-scene.

  Drama, or comedy, is about characters in conflict with each other, with their situations or their environment.

  In children’s literature, the latter two are almost a given. And for those of you who write science-fiction, the list of conflict-sources includes androids, mutants, renegade computers, hostile planets, force-fields and other challenges not-yet-invented.

  All of these conflicts are — or should be — roadblocks that interfere with your characters’ efforts to get from A to B, preventing them from attaining their goals.

  The point — the validity — the necessity — of adopting this mindset about conflict, of keeping it automatically at the front of your mind, from the conception of your story, all the way to the end, will become more apparent as you read this book.

  A Word or Two About Originality

  During my career in TV, where one has to generate a lot of stories, the question I’ve been asked most frequently by far is — where do you get your ideas?

  Well, I steal them. And it’s a technique I highly recommend.

  But with a few caveats. Steal the good stuff. Don’t steal junk. Steal from the classics, from Hamlet to Casablanca. From Romeo and Juliet to The Maltese Falcon to The Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein.

  In case the foregoing tempts you to stop reading any further, I ask that you hang in there for the next few sentences, because you are about to learn one of the most valuable lessons a fiction writer can know. Which is:

  Anybody who believes they’re going come up with a fresh, original plot, a story that’s never been told before, leads a far-too-rich fantasy life.

  There are no new stories.

  There are no new plots.

  They were all used up before Shakespeare ever started. They were all used up in the Bible and, almost certainly, long before that, by folks dressed in hairy-mammoth skins, sitting around bonfires, beating the earth with clubs as they embroidered their accounts of hunting expeditions or battles with rival tribespersons.

  In fact, William Shakespeare maintained that there were only nine basic plots (or six or eleven, depending upon which account one chooses to believe). In the 1800’s a Frenchman, Georges Polti, defined thirty-six of them, some of which, it can be argued, are simply modifications of others.

  No one, as far as I know, claims there are more.

  As writers, what we do with stories is recycle them. Knowingly or unknowingly.

  Knowingly is better.

  Basically, they’re all of them sort of folk tales to which we apply our own particular spin.

  That’s what makes them special. That’s how we make them ours.

  Each of us views the world through our own personal, one-ofa-kind filters. That’s the essence of art, of what any artist does.

  A brief note about how I have, over the years, borrowed or stolen outright from Dashiell Hammett’s classic, seminal modern detective story, The Maltese Falcon, may serve to illustrate my point:

  I was a kid when I first read the novel, and therefore didn’t really understand it’s significant place in American literature. It took me several readings — of it and the competition — to absorb the many ways that it differed from virtually all the mystery and detective fiction that had gone before — dramatically breaking the patterns set by Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and Agatha Christie (Miss Marple & Hercule Poirot, among others). It also became apparent that most of the mystery fiction written since has been largely imitative of The Maltese Falcon, with very very little even close to equaling it. Of course there has been, and continues to be, some terrific writing done in the genre, but for me, while Raymond Chandler’s wonderful, literate Philip Marlowe novels came nearest, Falcon has never been surpassed.

  One of th
e ways Hammett’s paradigm novel was so singular was that while it contained a murder mystery — Who killed Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer? — it was, surprisingly for its time, a detective story that was not about clues. Another difference was that the tale took the reader on such a fascinating, entertaining journey through rascal-and-double-cross country that one almost forgot the murder mystery part of it. In the end, Hammett delivered satisfying closure in the matter of Archer’s killer, but in truth we almost didn’t care, the rest of it being so thoroughly gripping, introducing us to such a variety of wonderful, skewed characters — especially his enigmatic hero, private eye Sam Spade, and the lying, seductive Brigid O’Shaughnessy, who was to become the model female antagonist of novels and films noir for decades. The superb, classic movie version of The Maltese Falcon (Scr. & Dir. John Huston) is, by the way, almost scene-for-scene and word-for-word, Hammett’s book.

  When I began writing for the Murder, She Wrote TV series (Cr. William Link & Richard Levinson and Peter Fischer), before it went on the air, Peter Fischer explained to me that he envisioned the show in the mold of traditional Agatha Christie puzzle mysteries (most of which predated Hammett). I pointed out to Peter that as a boy I had read a few Christies, plus a couple of locked-room mysteries by others, and they had bored the hell out of me. I added that I wouldn’t write that sort of thing for him. Peter asked what I would write. I said I’d write The Maltese Falcon. Peter’s reply was “That’ll be fine.”

  For the next twelve years, that’s mostly what I wrote and/or generated and oversaw. And except for a few connoisseurs, I doubt that many viewers were aware that Falcon was my prototype.