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

chapter. A scene is a unit of writing, usually an integral incident with a beginning and end that in itself is not isolatable as a story. It is visible to the reader or audience as an event that can be witnessed, almost always involving two or more characters, dialogue, and action in a single setting. A chapter is a part of a longer work that is set off with a number or a title. A chapter may have several scenes or scenelets.

When each chapter of a novel (except the last) ends, the reader’s interest should be aroused anew, thrusting him forward in the novel. The key is not to take the reader where he wants to go.

It is an important part of designing a novel to influence the emotions of the reader. And as we know, the emotions of the reader are affected by suspense more than by any other factor. If you want to group your scenes into chapters, here are some guidelines: • Short chapters make a story seem to move faster. • Normally avoid chapters of fewer than three printed pages. They may not be long enough to engage the reader’s emotions. • Ideally, each chapter might end the way the movies used to end their weekly serials: with the hero or heroine in unresolved trouble. If you’re not familiar with those serials, use a soap opera as a guideline, with the end of each episode making you want to see what happens next.

Your chapters are not cemented in place. You can reorganize them in any fashion that accelerates the suspense of the whole.

Writers are not psychotherapists. Their job is to give readers stress, strain, and pressure. The fact is that readers who hate those things in life love them in fiction. Until a writer assimilates that fact he will have difficulty in consciously creating sufficient moments in which the reader feels tension.

Tension is the most frequent cause of physiological changes in the reader. The sudden stress causes the adrenal medulla to release a hormone into the bloodstream that stimulates the heart and increases blood pressure, metabolic rate, and blood glucose concentration. The result is an adrenaline high that makes the reader feel excited. That excitement is what the reader lusts for. Like all excitement, it is endurable for brief bursts, which is one of the factors that distinguishes tension from suspense. Suspense can last over a long period, sometimes for an entire book. Tension is felt in seconds or minutes.

A common way to create tension in a novel is to simply note a “fact” that is likely to chill any reader. The following is the opening sentence of a thriller I recommended earlier, The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth: It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. Does the precise time convince you

Isn’t my job in the first few pages to create a living breathing character that will interest the reader?” Yes, of course. The closer writing gets to literature, the more likely it is that what fastens us to the early pages is our interest in a character. And then, as soon as possible, the writer creates some moments of tension for that character. Here, in outline, are the kind of plot situations that provide opportunities to create tension: Dangerous work is involved: The

A deadline is nearing:

An unfortunate meeting occurs:

An opponent is trapped in a closed environment:

By the time you finish reading this chapter you should know more about dialogue than ninety percent of published writers. The fact is that the majority of writers write dialogue by instinct with little knowledge of the craft. I was lucky. Plays consist entirely of dialogue. Before I was a novelist I was a playwright

Readers enjoy dialogue in stories and novels. Those same readers would hate reading court transcripts, even of dramatic confrontations. What makes dialogue interesting and so much actual talk boring? Talk is repetitive, full of rambling, incomplete, or run-on sentences, and usually contains a lot of unnecessary words. Most answers contain echoes of the question. Our speech is full of such echoes. Dialogue, contrary to popular view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that build in tempo or content toward climaxes.

As you know from an earlier chapter, fiction consists of three elements: description, narrative summary, and immediate scene. The twentieth-century reader, influenced by a century of film and a half century of television, is used to seeing what’s happening in front of his eyes, not hearing about events after the fact. That’s why immediate scenes—onstage, visible to the eye—dominate today’s fiction. Dialogue is always in immediate scene, which is one reason readers relish it. When talk is tough, combative, or adversarial it can be as exciting as physical action.

Confrontational dialogue—whether in Shakespeare, a contemporary novel, or a policeman talking back to a judge in a TV drama—is immediate, creating a visual image of the speakers as it shoots adrenaline into our bloodstream. *

In life, speakers answer each other’s questions. We compliment a speaker by saying he is direct. Dialogue, to the contrary, is indirect. The key word to understanding the nature of dialogue is that the best dialogue is oblique.

Dialogue is a lean language in which every word counts. Count for what? To characterize, to move the story along, to have an impact on the reader’s emotions. Some writers make the mistake of thinking that dialogue is overheard. Wrong! Dialogue is invented and the writer is the inventor.

When I examine dialogue in chunks, mine or someone else’s, I ask myself the following: • What is the purpose of this exchange? Does it begin or heighten an existing conflict? • Does it stimulate the reader’s curiosity? • Does the exchange create tension? • Does the dialogue build to a climax or a turn of events in the story or a change in relationship of the speakers? The next step is to check if the lines spoken by each character are consistent with that character’s background. Then I remove clichés that are out of character. I remove any echoes that slipped in. Talk is full of echoes. Echoes don’t belong in dialogue.

An often overlooked advantage of dialogue in novels and stories is this simple: it provides white space on the page that makes the reader feel that the story is moving faster because the reader’s eyes move quickly down the page.

There are three areas in which the writer is particularly vulnerable to telling rather than showing: when he tells what happened before the story began; when he tells what a character looks like; and when he tells what a character senses, that is, what he sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes. Those are all places where the author’s voice can intrude on the reader’s experience. What happened before the story began, sometimes called “back-story,” should be shown rather than told about either in narrative summary or in a flashback.

What a character sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes can be shown through actions rather than described. And feelings, of course, are best shown through actions.

Helen was a wonderful woman, always concerned about her children, Charlie and Ginny. There is nothing for the reader to see, therefore the reader feels that he is being told about Helen. Here’s an example of showing the same thing: When Helen drove her kids to school, instead of dropping them off at the curb, she parked her car and, one hand for each of them, accompanied Charlie and Ginny to the door of the school. We are shown Helen in action without being told that she’s a mother who is especially concerned about her children.

The reader wants an experience that’s more interesting than his daily life. He enjoys and suffers whatever the characters are living through. If that experience is interrupted in order to convey a character’s background, or anything else that the author seems to be supplying, that’s telling, not showing, a major fault because it intrudes upon the reader’s experience. Put simply, the reader experiences what is happening in front of his eyes. He does not experience what is related to him about offstage events. If his experience is interrupted, he gets antsy. “Telling” starts the reader skipping. Elmore Leonard said he avoids writing the parts that readers skip.

“Tell me, and I’ll forget. Show me, and you’ll involve me. Involvement is the first step toward understanding.”

Showing means having characters do things that excite our interest, making those pages visual, letting us see what happens firsthand. I have a small suggestion that carries with it a big reward. In a three-word note to yourself say, SHOW THE STORY. Then hang the note where you will see it whenever you sit down to write. Think of it as an antidote to a lifetime of hearing that a story should be told.

Without a firm grasp of point of view, no writer of fiction is free to exercise his talent fully.

The omniscient POV allows the author to speak in his own voice, to say things that would be inappropriate for any of his characters to say. The author’s voice, however, should have personality, authority, some wisdom, and ideally a fresh sense of humor.

The danger of the omniscient POV is that the reader will hear the author talking instead of experiencing the story. The omniscient POV lacks discipline. Because the author can stray into anybody’s head, it is hard to maintain credibility and even harder to gain a close emotional rapport with the reader.

One advantage of understanding point of view is that if your work isn’t satisfying you, you can always put the draft aside and rewrite it from another point of view. If you’ve used third person, try first. If you’ve used omniscient, try third or first. Or both. Switching points of view has saved novels that were going nowhere.

• Is your point of view consistent? If it slips anywhere, correct it. If it isn’t working, try another point of view. • Is your point of view sufficiently subjective to involve the reader’s emotions? Have you been too objective? • Have you avoided telling us how a character feels? Have you relied on actions to help the reader experience emotion? • If you’re using the first person, have you used another character to convey in conversation what your first person character looks like? • Is the “I” character sufficiently different from you? • Have you told the reader anything that the “I” character couldn’t know or wouldn’t say? Is the author’s voice showing? • Is there anything in your material that is not likely to be known to someone with your character’s background or intelligence? • If you’re using third person or the omniscient point of view, have you used particularity in describing that person? • Would it pay to narrow your focus so that the reader can identify more readily with one of the characters? • Have you established limitations or guidelines for your third-person point of view? Have you then adhered to those limitations?

Writing is a discipline. And one of its most disciplined techniques is that of point of view. The choice of point of view is yours, but once you’ve decided, be sure that you stick to it as if your reader’s experience of the story depended on it. Because it does.

Ideally, all fiction should seem to be happening now. That sentence is worth pasting on your makeup or shaving mirror or on your computer where you will see it every day. We don’t read in real time. A writer can brush hours aside by one word: “Later…”

The reason flashbacks create a problem for readers is that they break the reading experience. The reader is intent on what happens next. Flashbacks, unless expertly handled, pull the reader out of the story to tell him what happened earlier. If the reader is conscious of moving back in time, especially if what happened in the past is told rather than shown, the engrossed reader is reluctant to be pulled out of his reverie to receive information.

A flashback is any scene that happened before the present story began. Note that I said any scene. A true flashback, however short, is a scene, preferably with characters in conflict. If you find that you absolutely must use a flashback, there are a number of points to engrave on your mind: • A flashback must illuminate the present story in an important way. Otherwise, why bother? If it doesn’t enhance the present story markedly, you may not really need it. • Whenever possible, the flashback should be an immediate scene rather than an offstage narrative summary. The reader needs to witness the flashback rather than be told about what happened. • You can go into a flashback directly or segue into it. The object is to make the transition to the flashback as unobtrusive as possible. Slipping into the flashback quickly avoids the risk of the impatient reader skipping pages because he sees the flashback coming before it grips him. • The first sentence of a flashback needs to be arresting. A flashback is presumably there because it provides information. To the reader that information should not come across as information about the past; it should be as immediate and gripping as a scene in the present.

If the flashback is necessary, can the reader see the action in it as an immediate scene? Is the opening of the flashback as interesting or compelling as the beginning of a novel or story? Does the flashback enhance the reader’s experience of the story as a whole? A good flashback is a scene that is depicted exactly as it would be in the present story except for how it is introduced and how the present story is rejoined. Certain words should carry warning labels for the writer. “Had” is the number-one villain. It spoils more flashbacks than any other word. Most fiction is written in the straight past tense. When writing flashbacks, as quickly as possible use the same tense you’re using for the present scenes. That means in almost all cases the straight past tense, not the variants. Instead of saying, “I had been remembering…”, say “I remembered…”

In starting a flashback, your aim is to get into an immediate scene as soon as possible. Since dialogue is always in immediate scene, one way of handling flashbacks is to use dialogue early. What most writers don’t realize is that you can use dialogue even if the flashback is short.

On the sixth page, he tells his therapist: “I’ve always told jokes, Doc.” The next paragraph begins a flashback in a direct manner: Which is true. Go back as far as I can remember, and I’m telling jokes. In fact I think he’s right, it was a defense; or it began as a defense. At home, at school. My father, big bastard, keeping that pub in the Mile End road, always handy with his belt. And so on, into the comic’s childhood.

equally simple ways of concluding a flashback. You can use a line space (four blank lines) to mark the passage of time and restart the present scene after the line space. Or you can begin a new paragraph with “One week later…” Or you can restart the present scene with dialogue: “Last week you didn’t talk this way.”

While flashbacks are to be avoided whenever possible, the flashback thought can be immensely useful in enriching both a character and a scene. In life our thoughts interrupt us all the time. Frequently the thoughts are relevant to where we are, what we’re doing, what people are saying to us. Thoughts give texture to life and also to novels.

If the flashback element is to consist of more than quick thoughts in an ongoing scene, the writer must be certain to create a flashback scene that stands on its own to avoid the flashback becoming a narrative of something that happened elsewhere. To move from what is happening in the present to a scene from the past without breaking the reader’s experience requires segueing to a scene in the past as inconspicuously as possible. The term segue is derived from music. It means to glide unobtrusively into something new. I prefer the segue into a flashback to the more direct method, moving from the present scene to a scene in the past inconspicuously.

I inserted three flashbacks into the scene, remembered by Nick, designed to increase the suspense by postponing the outcome of the confrontation. Each of the flashbacks illuminates the long scene and adds to its meaning. And each is segued into and out of as surreptitiously as possible.

does the flashback reinforce the story in an important way? Is it absolutely essential?

Can the reader see what’s happening in your flashback? Can you give it the immediacy of a scene that takes place before the eye? If your flashback is not a scene, can you make it into an active scene as if it were in the present? Take a close look at the opening of your flashback. Is it immediately interesting or compelling? Is the reader’s experience of your story enhanced by the flashback or—however well written—does it still intrude? Has the flashback helped characterize in depth, has it helped the reader feel what the character feels?

You’ve just seen how information can be conveyed in present dialogue in such a way that the reader is witnessing a dramatic scene that takes place in the present, thus eliminating the need for a flashback. The example above is entirely in dialogue. Thoughts can accomplish the same purpose, as in the following example in which only one of the characters is speaking,

However, I’ve never seen essential background material that couldn’t be made to work as scenes. And more of that background can become foreground than you may suspect. The time it takes to do it right is an investment in the reader’s experience.

Credibility is central to much of what the writer does. He creates a world in which the invented characters must seem as real as the people who surround us in life. What happens to them, however extraordinary—and it should be extraordinary—must be believable. The motivations of the characters should be credible.

Above all, remember that the main actions of your work are like great flowering plants. Put the seed down well earlier and admire the harvest. Leave coincidence to the hacks and the god in his machine.

The characters and themes that lie hidden within each author are the source of work that strikes readers as original and real. How do we jog the author to write from the inside, in touch with subject matter and feelings that will enable him to brush the reader’s emotions? I’ve used the secret snapshot method in individual conferences with writers and in seminars.

if you want to write something that will move other people, you have to come to terms with the fact that the writer is by profession a squealer. He learns by starting to squeal on himself. If you’re thinking that you may not have the courage to be a writer, I can tell you that’s what most writers think when confronted with this assignment for the first time. Few people have the natural ability to open themselves up to strangers. The writer learns how. One of the ways is to write down what you see in your most secret snapshot. If you’re tempted to fudge, don’t. If you’ve decided to give us a made-up snapshot, you’ll serve your writing better by changing it to the snapshot you’re hiding.

The snapshots that work best are embarrassing, revelatory, or involve a strong and continuing stimulus to memory.