Published in 1965, Dwight V. Swain’s “Techniques of the Selling Writer,” some feel, is a bit outdated. Written before the ubiquitous word processor, Google, and AI gives the book some age; however, after reading the book once and studying through it a second time, I think the book has good information. It is still in print, which speaks about the book’s endurance. The book has information for a freshman writer, like myself, or a senior writer. I’ll be studying through the book again and presenting some of my observations.
Dwight Swain (1915-1992) began his writing career in the 1930s. From publishing short stories, his writing evolved to include mysteries, westerns, and action-adventure stories. He was also a screenwriter.
Swain taught in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Oklahoma, where he oversaw the development of student writers. Students in the program submitted writing assignments. From these submissions, Swain drew many illustrations used to support his points in his nonfiction books about writing, such as Techniques of the Selling Writer, the focus of this discussion.
Chapter 4
Writing the Scene.
The major thing to keep in mind, Swain argues, is that a scene is unified by time without breaks or lapses. It is a series of M-R units—motivation-reaction units—following one another as water flowing from spigots, making the reader want to live through the battle with the story people. There are some dos:
1. Establish a time.
2. Establish the goal.
3. Establish a curtain line.
1. Establish a time, place, circumstance and viewpoint at the very start of each and every scene. Swain argues that it is important to establish time, place, circumstance, and viewpoint at the very start of each and every scene because confusion infuriates readers. “They were standing beside the desecrated statue in the town square.” “Mortimer slammed open the office door and stormed in.” “Judy was asleep in her room when the postman rang.”
Establishing time and location are especially important when changes in situation are concerned. “The car tires squealed to a stop and Sharp and Square ran into the burning house.” “Leaving her cubicle, she sauntered into the break room.”
2. Swain says do demonstrate quickly that some character has a scene goal. It’s important to make the scene goal clear quickly, preferably, he says, within the first half-page. Someone, preferably the focal character, has a goal. Therefore, that person should show, preferably urgently, the purpose. He should act as if he had a goal—the impression of purpose along will carry the ball for a while. The goal should be clear-cut and explicit from the beginning. And the goal, like everything else in fiction, is better shown than told.
Why, the author asks, make such a big thing of introducing a goal so quickly? First, interest rides with purpose. The reader will be hooked by the idea that somebody’s traveling toward a given destination. Second, goal often represents only the start of a scene. It’s a springboard to plunge the focal character into conflict. The goal doesn’t have to always be that of the focal character. The focal character may be in a situation where he tries to avoid or resist a conflict; in most cases, however, Swain argues the focal character should be the aggressor—active, dynamic, driving forward.
3. The author says that scenes that have a punch line, scenes that keep a reader’s attention, are stories that cap off their scenes with curtain lines. Drama can be overdone, but readers still enjoy a good curtain line.
Three Don’ts
After discussing the importance of scenes, Swain turns to what he calls “three don’ts in scene writing.” First, don’t write too small, or use too few words. He subscribes to a general rule that it takes about a thousand words to develop a satisfactory scene—about four pages because scenes constitute the most important parts of a story, and it takes time to impress a reader with the importance of the action. It also takes time or space to build to any kind of emotional peak. And short, brief, fragmentary scenes usually don’t offer enough space to develop color, characterization, conflict, complication, or unanticipated development. The author says the four-page goal is not a rule, but trying to put forth a good climax in anything shorter will be difficult, even for an experienced writer.
Second don’t: don’t go into flashback. Swain says that using flashback brings the story to a dead halt for the duration. While there’s a place and time for flashback, that place, he says, is not within a scene because it’s essentially unrealistic. When a focal character is involved in conflict, he’s too involved with staying afloat to indulge in reverie. Flashbacks also strain the reader’s patience badly. The story should sweep the reader along on a rising tide of tension. Going into flashback halts forward momentum and the present action. When the story returns to the present, then, the writer has to start building excitement again from scratch.
Third, don’t accidentally summarize. Accidental summarizations jar the reader and crack or shatter the story illusion. While nowhere near a complete list, Swain presents a few examples of accidental summarizations that can sneak into a story—“He told her that—”; “He hunted for the elevator without success”; “Time passed”; “They had a couple drinks.”
In summaries, he says, nothing ever really comes alive. Life is lived moment by moment, and to capture it on paper, a writer has to break behavior down into precise and pertinent fragments of motivation and response.
Writing the Sequel.
Swain says that in writing the sequel, one faces three problems:
a. Compression
b. Transition
c. Credibility
The sequel is not the scene. It is more like a bridge—a metaphor the author uses—between scenes. As a bridge is not mile after mile of highway, so a sequel must compress the action of one scene and lay out the path for the next.
Swain says that where time unifies the scene, topic unifies the sequel. The preoccupation with topic, he says, is really to be preoccupied with a particular set of feelings; therefore, in writing a sequel, the writer should act on the assumption that feeling is the common denominator that unifies all other elements.
In a sequel, the writer summarizes all non-significant or non-pertinent information, bringing the wordage down and selecting those feelings that are of major concern. Frequently, a bit of symbolism serves to do this—the tear blinked back, the dead body, the woman picking her nose, the overlong sermon.
The trick is to find the single feature that captures the essence of the feeling one wants to convey. Focus on the lone item which speaks about the character’s state of mind. Carefully linking those feelings into an impressionistic montage, Swain says, and there’s no limit as to how much ground one can make a sentence cover in order to bridge to the next scene.
Transition offers much the same challenge as compression, for one must bridge time or space or mood or circumstance. To that end, the writer must spotlight the focal character’s dominant feeling—uncertainty, determination, depression, passion, fear, or…
Because feeling is the most dominant factor in the story, it’s also the most favored bridge; however, occasionally one can use well-nigh any device as a transition.
Credibility is the element one needs most when setting about translating disaster into a goal.
First, the focal character needs to be set against a backdrop of realistic detail. High adventure is fine, but too much of it morphs into comic episodes. The focal character needs to rest, to eat, to have time to think, to discuss his ideas, maybe even take a bath. Such lulls in the action are best pursued in sequels, the transition between dramatic scenes.
Second, the sequel should help push the focal character in the right direction. If he jumps from one crisis to the next crisis, the action loses its punch. The behavior in the interval between scenes, the sequel, must be understandable to the reader. A road that comes to an abrupt end with another segment on the other side of the chasm and no bridge between leaves one wondering where to go next, if anywhere. The road ends. It joins on the other side of the chasm, but how to get there?
Third, the sequel should let the reader see the focal character’s chain of thought. The sequel, then, gives the focal character a chance to think things through. In the sequel, between crises, the focal character is not under attack, not locked in conflict, so he has time to think—think about the past and about the future. This is where a brief flashback might be useful.
Integrating scene and sequel.
While these two facets can be separated for analysis, they must complement each other, linking together smoothly into a unified conclusive whole worthy of the sobriquet “story.” There are some things to be observed in linking scene, sequel, scene, sequel together.
First, the story’s pacing can be controlled by the way one proportions scene to sequel. As a rule, Swain says, big scenes equal big interest, so long sequels, in turn, tend to indicate strong plausibility. Therefore, the writer must decide which element is most important at any given point. What Swain calls “thud-and-thunder” stories jump from one crisis to the next without transition. In some memorable stories, however, glimpses into the focal character’s thought process elevate the story from melodrama to memorable pieces.
Based on this relation between scene and sequel, if the story drags or becomes boring, strengthen it by building up conflict. On the other hand, if it becomes improbable, or melodramatic, lengthen the sequel. Follow the focal character step by step as he moves logically from one scene to the next.
Second, one must remember that scenes dominate story development. Diagrammed, a story would resemble a mountain range—a series of peaks and valleys. The writer spotlights the peaks without forgetting that one gets from one peak to the next by traversing the valley.
The size of a scene, the mountain peak, depends a considerable amount on its placement in the story. If one begins a story with a great climactic, cataclysmic scene, one’s left wondering where to go next. So it’s a good practice to arrange scenes, the mountain peaks, in order of ascending importance or intensity.
The control and placement of scenes can be managed to some degree by manipulating sequels; that is, sequels can be expanded or contracted so that scenes fall apart, or close together. In using this strategy, a sequel may well include material which could just as well be developed into a scene. Or, on the other hand, small scenes could be reduced to sequels.
Third, flexibility is important. A mechanical approach to writing overlooks the fact that each story offers different problems. So a writer must adapt his methods to his materials. Formally stated, a sequel involves reaction, dilemma, and decision. If a character does something in a manner that indicates he’s picked a goal, assume he’s made a decision, accept it, and let the rules go by the board. Maybe skip the sequel or reduce it to a few words. The character’s actions indicate his decision. On the other hand, in a big scene, disaster, or crisis, it may be well to allow a time-break, great or small, to allow the focal character to adjust to the new state of affairs.
Finally, in this discussion Swain says that if one can write scenes and sequels, one can write a story. Knowing and understanding the process will make the writing easier and better.
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