Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies

by Sol Stein

It is, however, a writer’s specialty to deal with taboos, to speak the unspoken, to reveal, to uncover, to show in the interaction of people the difference between what we profess and how we act.

Cultural differences arise from inherited characteristics, upbringing, and individual temperament. The best literary fiction often confronts these differences.

Wonderful stories can be crafted about people’s inherited characteristics, upbringing, and individual temperament.

Emotion-inciting material is the most desirable kind. If social and cultural differences between characters excite emotion, the tension of any story will surely increase.

Generational differences also produce changes. For instance, while a conspicuous tattoo still suggests “lower class” to the reader, and the larger the tattoo the lower the class, in recent years some young people of all classes have had themselves tattooed with small objects such as a heart, a rose, or a butterfly.

Written 28 years ago(1995).

If you get stuck, there’s another device some writers use. Think of the worst thing that could possibly happen to you right now. Don’t censor. A layman instinctively covers up. A writer disciplines himself to uncover.

For us writers, a high learning time came from the less formal exercises that did not require weeks of rehearsal by actors. In these exercises, writers were transformed into actors for the benefit of their colleagues. I was one of two writers picked by the director for an early exercise. The other writer was Rona Jaffe, the author of several bestselling novels. The director who worked with us that day was Elia Kazan, director of five Pulitzer Prize-winning plays and winner of two Academy Awards. For the writers in the audience—and for the “victims,” Rona Jaffe and me—it was an experience that gave us one of the most valuable techniques a writer can have. We were to improvise a scene for which there was no script. I was to play the part of the headmaster of the Dalton School, a private establishment in New York for the privileged young. Rona Jaffe was to be the mother of a boy who had been expelled by the headmaster. That’s what the audience knew. Then Kazan took me aside, out of everyone’s earshot, and told me that the mother of the expelled boy was coming to my office, undoubtedly to try to get the boy reinstated. This incorrigible boy had disrupted every class he was in, did not respond to the warnings of his teachers, and under no condition was I to take him back. After this briefing, which took half a minute, I returned to the makeshift stage and Kazan then took Rona Jaffe aside. What do you think he told her? None of the writers—myself included—knew what Kazan told Ro...

• In Jean-Paul Sartre’s brilliant play No Exit, which every writer should read, all four characters are in a closed environment, giving the play its dramatic intensity and its theme: Hell is other people.