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

In fiction, when information obtrudes the experience of the story pauses. Raw information comes across as an interruption, the author filling in. The fiction writer must avoid anything that distracts from the experience even momentarily.

We practice our craft to service the reader, not our psyches. The material we deal with may come from our observation and insight. As writers we don’t expel the result as raw material, we transmute it to provide what the reader most wants, an experience different from and richer than what he daily abides in life. As E. L. Doctorow once put it, “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

when the writer finishes his work, he can vanish from the earth and his book will continue to affect the reader’s mind and emotions. The writer becomes dispensable. The work must do the job.

Can a novelist or story writer work on the reader’s emotions consciously while writing a first draft? Not easily, except through long practice and prowess. But the less experienced writer can plan the reader’s adventure before he writes each scene, and in revising that scene after a respite away from it, with the steel gaze of an editor he can see how the reader’s experience might be improved.

I am deaf to that excuse because I worked with the most disadvantaged writer in history, Christy Brown, who had the use of his brain, the little toe on his left foot, and little else. When he was a seemingly helpless baby lying on the kitchen floor of a cottage in Ireland, his remarkable mother saw him reach out with his left foot and with his one good toe manage to pick up a crayon that one of his siblings had dropped. That was the beginning of a writer. Eventually someone at IBM made a special typewriter for Christy that enabled him to punch in a letter at a time with his one working toe. I published five of Christy Brown’s books, one of which made the national bestseller lists. I urge you to see the video of a remarkable film called My Left Foot. It won an Oscar for Daniel Day-Lewis, who played Christy. The film may cure you of fishing for an excuse for not writing.

Elia Kazan, brilliant director of stage and screen as well as a late-blooming novelist, told me that audiences give a film seven minutes. If the viewer is not intrigued by character or incident within that time, the film and its viewer are at odds. The viewer came for an experience. The film is disappointing him. Today’s impatient readers give a novelist fewer than seven minutes.

Today, first sentences and first paragraphs of any writing are increasingly important for arousing the restless reader.

Without early arousal, the reader does not yet trust that he will enjoy the experience that the writer has prepared. The ideal goals of an opening paragraph are: 1. To excite the reader’s curiosity, preferably about a character or a relationship. 2. To introduce a setting. 3. To lend resonance to the story.

As readers, we are immediately interested in a character who wants something badly.

surprise unsettles our expectation. It is astonishing how much the first words of a novel or story affect editors, reviewers, and readers. They are the trigger of curiosity, what writers have long called the “narrative hook.” In addition, the early words suggest the kind of book one is reading.

There are questions you can ask yourself about your own first sentence: • Does it convey an interesting personality or an action that we want to know more about? • Can you make your first sentence more intriguing by introducing something unusual, something shocking perhaps, or something that will surprise the reader? Your entire story or novel may depend on that first sentence arresting the reader’s attention. A terrific sentence on page two won’t help if the reader never gets there.

The value of a well-written opening is that it makes the reader ready to give himself to the writer’s imagined people for the duration. It should be clear by now that the unusual is a factor in arousing the reader’s interest. And so is action and conflict. So many writers fight an uphill battle trying to interest their readers in matters that have no inherent conflict. The worst possible way to start a story is with something like “They were a wonderful couple. He loved her and she loved him. They never argued.”

Beginning a book with an intriguing opening is the easy way to capture the reader. There are, however, more leisurely ways to seduce the reader, through omens.

There are many ways to arouse the reader’s interest at the start of a story or novel. A character can want something important, want it badly, and want it now. Or a likable character can be threatened. The reader who savors language can be aroused by the author’s language, but that arousal won’t last unless the reader also becomes involved in the life of a character who is quickly more interesting than most of the people who surround us in life. If your aim is publication, your best bet is to start with a scene that the reader can see. Where do you start that scene? As close to its climax as is feasible if your aim is to involve the reader quickly.

yearning of today’s audiences for what we have come to call “immediate scenes,” scenes that take place before the eye.

Narrative summary, if written well and briefly, can transport the reader from one immediate scene to another, though this isn’t always necessary. Fiction and reporting have now borrowed a film technique called “jump cutting,” moving from one scene into the next with no transition for time to pass or locales to change. If the scenes must be linked, brief narrative summary can do the linking. How brief? Martin double-locked his door and went to work. In the office … In the first part of the first sentence, we actually see Martin locking his door. That’s immediate scene. “Went to work” is narrative summary. Just three words get us from one scene to the next.

Editors tell us that a primary reason for the rejection of novels is that they consist of far too much static description and narrative summary.

minimize description, and be sure you don’t stop the story while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator.

Writers are directors of what transpires on the other side of the glass. They are not one of the actors.

if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on stage and yourself mum.

During all the many years in which I was an editor and publisher, what did I hope for when I picked up a manuscript? I wanted to fall in love, to be swept up as quickly as possible into the life of a character so interesting that I couldn’t bear to shut the manuscript in a desk overnight. It went home with me so that I could continue reading it.

The events of a story do not affect our emotions in an important way unless we know the characters. Some books center on catastrophic events that don’t move me at all. The characters in those books come across as stereotypes with names. If they are not alive, why should I care if their well-being is threatened?

If there is a common error among inexperienced writers, it’s that they say too much, they try to characterize with an excess of detail instead of trying to find the word or phrase that characterizes best.

There are at least five different ways to characterize: 1. Through physical attributes. 2. With clothing or the manner of wearing clothing. 3. Through psychological attributes and mannerisms. 4. Through actions. 5. In dialogue.

Characterization should be kept visual whenever possible: “He walked against an unseen wind” is visual. Opportunities are available in a character’s gait, posture, demeanor, and other physical behavior. For instance, there are a lot of ways that a character can get across a room. Walking is the easy, lazy answer. The writer’s aim should be to pick a way that both characterizes and helps the story.

If you develop a characteristic that’s especially pertinent to your character, or original, it’s a good idea to use it on the character’s first appearance, to “set” the character. For instance, if you now know that your character will first be seen walking, then gait is a characteristic that should appear right away.

potential richness of the characterization. To the extent that the complexity reflects the intricacy of human nature, the characters will come alive to the reader and remain alive in the reader’s memory.

In the best of mainstream fiction, and in literary fiction, the most complex characters seem to graduate to a permanent place in our memory, as good friends do.

fiction at its heart involved the differences between classes. While this observation is invaluable to writers of fiction, it is also a match tossed into flammable material. The fact that acute differences exist between social and cultural classes seems to be acknowledged in most of the world, but in the United States, where democracy is often confounded with egalitarianism, even the idea that social classes exist has long been taboo. 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. Moreover, because touchy subjects arouse emotion, they are especially useful for the writer who knows that arousing the emotions of his audience is the test of his skill.

We are driven through life by our needs and wants. So must the characters we create be motivated by what they want. The driving force of characters is their desire. Inexperienced writers, sometimes ill read in the great works of their own and previous times, often try to write novels with a relatively passive protagonist who wants little or has largely given up wanting. I have met more than one writer who says that his character doesn’t want anything—

The most interesting stories involve characters who want something badly.

In the chapter on characterization, I suggested that some of the most memorable characters in fiction were eccentric. To carry the point a step further, I suggest relating the character’s deepest desire to the character’s fundamental difference from other characters, especially the character of the antagonist.

Those are the three keys: the want and the opposition to the want need to be important, necessary, and urgent. The result should be the kind of conflict that interests readers.

The essence of dramatic conflict lies in the clash of wants. You need to be certain that the conflicting wants are connected significantly and are over something that the reader will view as important.

It is easier for the reader to identify with a want that is close to universal and not too specialized (a stamp collection is relatively specialized). The wants that interest a majority of readers include gaining or losing a love, achieving a lifetime ambition, seeing that justice is done, saving a life, seeking revenge, and accomplishing a task that at first seemed impossible.

In transient fiction (sometimes called “commercial” or “popular” fiction), the wants are less personal and often more melodramatic. Events happen rather than grow out of character. Though my personal preference is for literary fiction, I have worked with a number of highly successful professional bestselling novelists who didn’t seem to care whether their characters were remembered years later. They mastered craft; their storytelling was suspenseful and compelling for large numbers of readers.

Larger clashes resonate for the reader. Ask yourself these questions: Does the conflict you are working on lead to profound unhappiness, injury, or death? Or is the conflict over an object that is exceedingly valuable to the main character? Is the conflict over an important life decision—to move far away, to change one’s career, to leave for another partner, to follow a hazardous opportunity, to avoid intolerable circumstances? Ask yourself, will the clash between your protagonist and your antagonist seem inevitable to the reader? Have you avoided coincidence as the cause of their clash? Will the clash take place in a highly visible environment so that the reader will see the action? If you have some concern about the intensity of your plot, ask yourself, Does the conflict you’ve invented involve the best possible thing that could happen to your protagonist? Is what happens a surprise to anyone? Can you make it surprising by setting up an action and then showing the opposite of what your reader is likely to expect? Would the conflict you have described result in a verbal or physical struggle? Would that struggle call for strong scenes in which your characters clash in an exciting way? Remember your book is told in scenes each one of which should produce an excited reaction in the reader.

If any scene seems not yet exciting enough, think of introducing a new character into it, which always generates possibilities for conflict, especially if the new character has something important at stake in what is happening in that scene.

think of your very best friend. Conjure up a picture of him or her in your mind. Remember the good times with your best friend. What is the worst thing that could happen to him or her at this very moment? It has to be something different from the worst thing you imagined happening to you. It should be linked to your friend’s character, ambitions, or desire. Now imagine the same worst thing happening not to your best friend but to the character in your story. Would that create a suitable obstacle in the plot you are developing? The protagonist’s biggest obstacle is usually the antagonist and what he does. But there can be numerous other obstacles that will thwart the protagonist on the way to achieving his goal, including, perhaps, what you imagined happening to your friend.

It’s common to think of the obstacles of all being generated by the villain, but we’ve seen that acts of nature can also be obstacles. And there are always other people butting in. You can devise an unwanted intervention by someone who wants to help but makes things worse. Or you can have an unwanted intervention by someone unrelated to the villain who wants to block the protagonist for reasons of his own.

Here are some clues to areas of reader interest: • Reading about enemies trapped together. In life, one of the most uncomfortable experiences people have is being with someone they don’t want to be with. In fiction, when readers observe someone else in that predicament, it engages a strong concealed emotion. The reader wants to know the outcome. • Experiencing a character’s embarrassment involves the reader. Causing a character to be embarrassed will almost always create an interesting plot development. • Experiencing a character’s fear creates enormous tension. It can be fear of mortal danger, of course, but experienced novelists generate fear from small things. Eric Ambler’s The Light of Day has a scene in which the protagonist is chauffeuring a car with a loose door panel concealing smuggled arms. As the screws rattle, so does the reader, afraid that the car’s owner in the backseat will hear the rattling. The scene is full of tension. • Change in a relationship invites the reader’s tense interest in the outcome. In life, people get bored when nothing changes even though changes in life are fraught with peril. If the perils of major change happen within the covers of a book, the reader will be absorbed. • Readers enjoy being surprised. Nice surprises are one of the pleasures of life. We like to receive surprise presents, good news, the announcement of an unexpected visit by friends we want to see. Bad surprises in life bring hurt, sadness, misfortune. But in books reader...

Think of the character as getting instructions from you, the writer. It is important to keep the instructions brief.

For plotting an entire work, I especially like the use of a crucible. In ordinary parlance a crucible refers to a vessel in which different ingredients are melded in white hot heat.

Characters caught in a crucible won’t declare a truce and quit. They’re in it till the end. The key to the crucible is that the motivation of the characters to continue opposing each other is greater than their motivation to run away.

A crucible is an environment, emotional or physical, that bonds two people. It can be a scene or a series of scenes, but more often the crucible is an entire book. The crucible is a relationship, often one influenced by locale.

When devising a locale for a scene, it always pays to give a few moments thought to the possibility of choosing a closed environment. It will invariably increase the tension of the scene. The ideal time to think of that locale is when you are first imagining your characters. What crucible might they be in? If you can find the right crucible, you will be on the way to a mesmerizing plot.

if your goal is publication, whatever the nature of your story please pay close attention to what follows because suspense is the most essential ingredient of plotting.

Suspense is achieved by arousing the reader’s curiosity and keeping it aroused as long as possible. Readers aren’t articulate about what keeps them reading a particular work. Some, impatient to find out what happens to the characters next, will say, “I can’t put this book down,” which means the reader’s curiosity is greater than his need to do almost anything else. Suspense is strong glue between the reader and the writing.

Suspense needles the reader with a feeling of anxious uncertainty. Here are examples of the kinds of situations that create suspense: • A prospective danger to a character. • An actual immediate danger to a character. • An unwanted confrontation. • A confrontation wanted by one character and not by the other. • An old fear about to become a present reality. • A life crisis that requires an immediate action. The writer’s duty is to set up something that cries for a resolution and then to act irresponsibly, to dance away from the reader’s problem, dealing with other things, prolonging and exacerbating the reader’s desperate need for resolution. Therefore: • Don’t eliminate the prospective danger to a character. • Don’t let the character overcome the immediate danger without facing an even greater danger. • If your character is apprehensive about an unwanted confrontation, make sure you hold off that confrontation as long as possible. • When an old fear is about to become a present reality, don’t relieve the fear. Make the situation worse than the character anticipated. • If a character’s life crisis requires an immediate action, make certain that the action backfires. Prolong the crisis. The point, of course, is that you don’t resolve the suspense you’ve aroused. Your duty is to be mean. You are giving the reader a thrill he yearns for in books and detests in life. You frustrate the reader’s expectations.

It helps to jot down the location of each of the scenes in your book to see if they can be arranged in an order that will take each scene to a location different from the one at the end of the preceding scene. It isn’t necessary to do this with every scene in a book. I find that if you change location or character in a majority of instances, you can also, where appropriate, continue the action of a suspenseful scene in the following chapter. The plan should be followed to achieve the purpose of suspense, not to follow a rigid pattern. Many writers also find this exercise useful in imagining different locations, which always increases reader interest.