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

the best fiction reveals the hidden things we usually don’t talk about.

The stories and novels that get turned down are full of the things we talk about freely—the snapshots in your photo album that you show to friends, family, and neighbors. Readers don’t want to see your photo album. They have their own. They want to see what’s in the picture you’re reluctant to show.

A writer needs the courage to say what other people sometimes think but don’t say. Or don’t allow themselves to think. If you elect to conjure up someone else’s secret snapshot, it has to be one that you wouldn’t be allowed to see under any circumstance.

Hazardous conditions frighten us all. The possibility of premature death haunts our lives. The thought of not seeing a loved one again causes pain. And what love is as binding to a woman as her child, asleep in his innocence, his mother going off to a night’s work from which she might not return? In that snapshot lay the emotional root of her book. After our session, the writer started her novel with a scene in which the decoy was patting the sleeping head of her child before going off to her hazardous work.

From that first scene, the reader wanted to say to the woman, “Watch out! Be careful, come back to your child.” With every danger the decoy faced, the reader thought of the sleeping child. The reader, full of emotion now, read the novel not as an interesting plot but as a moving experience.

as writers, we let three of our senses atrophy, as if our characters had lost part of their humanity and didn’t need to touch, taste, and smell.

We writers have an obligation to use all five senses in our work if we are to enrich the laymen’s experience.1 And we cannot neglect the sixth that haunts our lives and our literature.

We deprive ourselves and our readers. Most writers use sight and some conventional sounds, and little else. This chapter, then, is a course in enrichment of your sensory awareness, and through that awareness an enrichment of your writing.

A writer can use the sense of smell to good effect in many ways, for instance, to help a reader experience a setting:

Smell can be used to establish a relationship:

Your writing can only gain if you attempt to use the sense of touch at least once in every scene.

That imaginary guest from another planet can also be useful to you in cultivating your ability to describe what you taste.

You wouldn’t feed cardboard meals to guests. Don’t feed cardboard meals to your characters. Make your reader’s taste buds pop, even if he’s from outer space.

We speak of a “sixth sense” as a sensation we cannot identify with seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, or tasting, but which we know is there. “It” can be anything imagined or real, a person or a higher power. Some people refer to the phenomenon as extrasensory perception, or ESP. A writer can make excellent use of a “sixth sense” in mainline fiction as well as in mystery and suspense fiction. You are alone in the house, and you hear a door close. Is it the wind? But there is no wind inside the house.

The denial of a child’s craving for affection touches many readers. Love between a parent and child, or unrequited love between a parent and a child (in either direction), or the belated recognition of parental love or love of a parent, or a child or parent who rejects affection—all are possibilities.

a child showing immature affection for another child (sometimes called “puppy love”) is widely acceptable. This is not a frequent subject of fiction and is difficult to do well.

scenes, I urge you to find subtleties that will enable readers to fill the envelope you have created, which is the subject of the next chapter.

point: less is more.

My advice on achieving a balance is to choose the most effective detail and to err on the side of too little rather than too much. For the reader’s imagination, less is more. You can’t have come this far without knowing that my most urgent message to writers is that you are providing stimuli for the reader’s experience.

Most rejected manuscripts move too slowly, encouraging their readers to put them down.

There are quite a few techniques for stepping up the pace of fiction, ranging from the simple to the quite complex. Most of these techniques are adaptable for nonfiction also. Journalists know that short sentences step up pace. They also know that frequent paragraphing accelerates the pace. Short sentences plus frequent paragraphing step up pace even more.

It isn’t necessary to use dialogue to pick up the pace; short sentences and frequent paragraphing alone can do the job. Here’s a rather extreme example:

Skipping steps can also increase the reader’s sense of pace.

is flipping forward past a scene that never appears in the book.

“jump-cutting.” It works just as well in novels as it does in movies. With this technique, a story moves from one scene to the next without the in-between matter that would be part of getting from one place to the next. In life, you might leave your apartment, go down the stairs and out into the street, get into your car, drive to your destination, and enter a restaurant. Showing all of that in a movie, or including it in fiction, would be a drag and boring. In jump-cutting, the viewer of a film might see a character close the door of a house and immediately appear in a restaurant, perhaps even at a table in the middle of a meal. Viewers have no trouble with jump-cutting. And it makes the film seem to move fast. In a novel, a character might close a door. This would be followed by a line space. The next scene is in a restaurant.

liposuctioning. It’s a perfect description of an important part of the editorial process. Flab is not only the enemy of anyone with excessive flesh, it is the enemy of every writer. Superfluous words and phrases soften prose. Fortunately, there is an antidote.

Flab, if not removed, can have a deleterious effect on the impatient reader, who will pay less attention to each word and begin to skip. Skimming—trying to pick out the best parts of text while reading—is as unsatisfactory as trying to pick out the seeds of raspberry jam.

The quickest way of increasing the pace of a manuscript and strengthening it at the same time is to remove all adjectives and adverbs and then readmit the necessary few after careful testing.

I delighted in saying the same thing over and over, thereby minimizing its impact (“One plus one equals a half,” Sol would say).”

I’ve been teaching my strange formula “One plus one equals a half” for a long time. It has been of value even to the most talented and successful of writers. The formula gives beginners insight into one of the factors that hurts chances for publication. Catching “one-plus-ones” is a function of what is called “line editing.”

it incumbent upon writers to become, in effect, their own editors.

Many authors first find their “voice” when they learn to examine each word for its necessity, precision, and clarity, as we are doing here. The originality of some of the writers I have worked with was immediately apparent:

imagine yourself on a rooftop, the townspeople assembled below. You are allowed to shout down one last sentence. It is the sentence that the world will remember you by forever. If you say it loud enough, everyone in the world will hear you, no matter where they are. Think of shouting the sentence, even if you seldom shout. What one thing are you going to say? If you’d like to try that exercise now, write down the sentence.

Is your sentence one that could have been said by any person you know? If so, revise it until you are convinced no one else could have said that sentence. When you’ve reworked your original sentence, consider these additional questions: Is your sentence outrageous? Could it be? Is your sentence a question? Would it be stronger as a question? Make whatever changes you like. I have still more questions: Would the crowd below cheer your sentence? Can you revise it to give them something they’d want to cheer? As you can see, I am asking question after question to help you strengthen and individualize your sentence. I continue: Suppose the person you most love in all the world were to strongly disagree with your sentence. Can you answer his or her disagreement in a second sentence? Please add it.

If your sentence is original, the chances of another person—even your closest loved one—agreeing with it without the slightest exception is extremely unlikely. Has your second sentence weakened your first? It usually does. If so, make it stronger than the first. When you’ve done that, you now have the option of choosing one or the other sentence. There may be value in combining and condensing them. Finished? Now imagine that you look down and see that the crowd below you is gone. You see only one person, your greatest enemy, who says, “I didn’t hear you. Would you repeat that?”

given one last sentence, addressing one’s enemy can light up the imagination more than an anonymous crowd can. You don’t want to give your enemy the last word or let him respond in a way that would demolish what you’ve said. Can you alter your sentence so that your statement will be enemy-proof?

my experience has been that often the first run of this exercise will direct you to a theme or expression of a theme that is uniquely yours. You have begun to tap your originality, to find your voice. In the meantime, you’ve had another lesson in the value of shunning the sentence that comes first, and honing, changing, polishing the words of a single sentence to test all of its possibilities.

I have met many talented writers who insulate their books from the public with titles that are not likely to arouse a reader’s interest or to promise a rich experience. That stubbornness is persistent. Many years after Kazan’s book left my care, he recycled his original title and had another publisher, perhaps less willing to oppose his strong will, issue a novel with the title The Anatolian. That was the first time one of his novels missed a run on the bestseller list. The author was the same. The quality of writing was the same. The title, an avoidable mistake, may have turned off the many millions who were part of his longstanding audience.

seven of those titles are metaphors. They put two things together that don’t ordinarily go together. They are intriguing, resonant, and provide exercise for the reader’s imagination.

a good title is like coming to a house you’ve never been in before and having the owner open the door and say “Welcome.” A good title can make a tremendous difference in the early acceptance of a book.

In preparing to write any passage or scene involving two people, if the writer focuses on their differing intentions (or “scripts”), he will immediately see the dramatic advantages of positioning their conflict in many kinds of adversarial situations in which conflict is inherent in the circumstances.

In considering suspense, you might want to refer to the following checklist: • Can your first paragraph arouse curiosity by withholding a piece of information till a bit later? • Does your story set up a question or controversy and not answer or resolve it immediately? • Are you loading in facts that unnecessarily diminish suspense early? • Have you described an action that may arouse curiosity but that isn’t explained in the same paragraph? • Can you convert any sentence to a question that will arouse curiosity rather than satisfy it?

Suspense arouses a feeling of anxious uncertainty in the reader about what might happen, or a hope that something bad won’t happen. Tension usually involves the sudden onset of a feeling of stress, strain, or pressure. As I’ve pointed out earlier, we deplore suspense and tension in life and enjoy them in writing.

Tension can be created by the simple mention of a time or date. “It was four o’clock in the morning” creates tension because it’s an hour when most people are asleep. Therefore, anything that happens at four in the morning is in itself tension producing or could be. It’s the “could be” factor that creates tension in the reader because he expects tension as part of his experience.

how stretching out a sequence of acts produces tension that the reader finds pleasurable. Short sentences and short paragraphs help increase tension. A common error is the writer’s temptation to rush to a conclusion. In life we savor good experiences and long for them to continue. The rush to end a good experience is counterproductive. The writer must discipline himself to hold back.

the single characteristic that most makes a difference in the success of an article or nonfiction book is the author’s courage in revealing normally unspoken things about himself or his society. It takes guts to be a writer. A writer’s job is to tell the truth in an interesting way. The truth is that adultery, theft, hypocrisy, envy, and boredom are all sins practiced everywhere that human nature thrives. What people who are not writers say to each other in everyday conversation is the speakable. What makes writing at its best interesting is the writer’s willingness to broach the unspeakable, to say things that people don’t ordinarily say. In fact, the best writers, those whose originality shines, tend to be those who are most outspoken.

commercial novelist is a storyteller who is most concerned with plot and plot gimmicks, with maintaining a high level of suspense and physical action. The success of commercial novelists is usually derived from tapping an area of adventure, romance, espionage, or whatever may be popular at the time, creating characters with sufficient skill that the reader is willing to suspend disbelief and follow the hero as he triumphs over unambiguous antagonists.

The literary novelist is concerned primarily with character understood in depth and engaged in activities that are resonant with the ambiguities and stresses of life. The richness of the best literary fiction is derived primarily from the creation of characters who will persist in the reader’s mind after the reading experience is over. Those novelists and nonfiction writers who strive to produce durable work share an interest in precision and freshness in the use of words, in insights into human nature and the physical world, and in resonance. These writers usually develop a “voice” or style that is distinctive.

I have edited and published both kinds of writers and both kinds of books. I have worked closely with writers of each kind who have made millions from a single work. What I have never witnessed is a writer’s work succeeding notably in a field he doesn’t habitually read for pleasure.

In fashioning poetry, a common beginner’s mistake is to emote instead of to evoke, to convey the writer’s emotion rather than to stimulate an emotion from the reader. One way to a reader’s emotion is to bring two words together that have not been together before. Therefore precision is achieved in poetry by the creation of a new grouping of words rather than by using each word for its exact meaning.