ACTION
The very first rule our textbooks endeavor to impress upon the would-be
story writer is that action must dominate his story. Whole chapters
are devoted to the importance of this ingredient, bringing quotations
from sundry editors proving beyond the merest suspicion of a doubt that
action is the life and health of a story, the “punch” and “pep” and
“pull” of it. Then follow chapters on how to capture action; on how to
introduce it into one’s own stories; on how to govern its course to the
greatest advantage.
The editors quoted are, of course, all of the adventure and action type
magazines. One is reputed to have stated his ideal beginning of a story
to be something like this: “He got up and looked at his watch. It was
twelve o’clock. He went up into the garret and hanged himself.” Another
is said to like a more mystifying beginning, something like this: “Who
was the lady in 43? Was she the blond man’s wife, sister or sweetheart?
John couldn’t sleep nights trying to find out.” And still another gives
his preferences, in the form of an announcement of a contest widely
advertised in professional magazines, for stories of “plot, of action,
of interesting complication. Spend the sweat of your brow on deeds, not
on acute character analysis; on big situations, on suspense and appeal,
not in tedious description and fine writing.”
The few editors who express preferences that conflict with this cry
for action are not quoted. Here is one, for instance, who likes
“realistic and psychological stories from writers who want to do for
American life what Chekhov did for Russian life. ‘Plot’ fiction of the
type desired by popular magazines is not wanted.” But, then, there is
the implication that his is not a popular magazine, and besides, he
goes on to say that “our rates for fiction are very modest.” And here
is another editor who wants stories “that are characterized more by
feeling and artistry than by ‘punch.’” But who is she, for it is a she
in this instance, to tell us what is wanted! Why, the circulation of
her little periodical is so insignificant that she is hardly justified
in having any wants at all! The fact that this little publication
publishes some of the most distinctive stories written in America today
does not count, of course. It is not a widely-read magazine; it does
not pay for contributions;--it deserves no attention.
Plainly, our duty as instructors and moulders of the new generation of
story writers is to base our instruction on the needs and preferences
of the fiction periodicals having the largest circulations and able
to pay well for material used. The inculcation of literary ideals,
the stimulation of original talent and the enriching of our national
letters are all excellent themes for papers to be read before high-brow
clubs and respectable societies, but as practical propositions, in a
practical world, they do not lead anywhere. Any one who joins a class
to take up story-writing as a profession wants to sell--and as quickly
as possible. And the story that sells today the quickest and brings the
fattest check is the story of action. Hence our first rule: “Spend the
sweat of your brow on deeds!”
It is true that there do creep up some unpleasant contradictions in
our methods. After laying down the law of action we refer students to
Edgar Allan Poe or Robert Louis Stevenson or Maupassant for perfect
short-story models, and they come back to us in a state of perplexity.
They have picked up Poe and some garrulous old critic, in a superfluous
introduction, had pronounced “The Fall of the House of Usher” to be
Poe’s best tale. They have picked up Stevenson, and some equally
old-fashioned pedant had classed “Markheim” as a masterpiece. They
have picked up Maupassant, and, again, some ancient scholar had lifted
“Solitude” to a pre-eminent position. Yet not one of these three
stories is particularly conspicuous for action. Poe seems to have spent
the sweat of his brow in creating an atmosphere of extreme morbidity
(oh, terror-striking word in our optimistic texts!); Stevenson, on
acute character analysis; and the insane Frenchman on some irrelevant
prattlings about solitude and the whys and wherefores of this queer
life of ours.
Occasionally some student with sufficient courage to voice his
perplexity timidly inquires: “Would any magazine accept such stories
today? There is so little action and still less optimism in them!” I
think of all the stories I have read in recent periodicals that I can
remember and am obliged to admit that few present-day magazines would
be tempted to accept a story of the type on which the masters chose to
lavish their best work. I think this estimate conservative, but soon
the various anthologies of the best short stories that have appeared
in our magazines in the last half dozen years leap into my mind and
protest against my harsh verdict. Some sort of a change really has come
over our fiction recently. Fully twenty-five per cent. of the stories
in Mr. O’Brien’s yearly collection, for instance, are decidedly not
of the “rapid action” type, and more than seventy-five per cent. of
the stories in such an anthology as that compiled by the late William
Dean Howells would not stand the “action” test, although the latter
anthology is not a very exact reflector of modern tendencies since but
few living writers are represented.
So it becomes necessary to explain the discrepancy between the type
of story we teach our students to produce and the type of story we
refer them to for study purposes. It becomes necessary to emphasize
the fact that such periodicals as “The Little Review,” “Midland,” “The
Pagan” (discontinued), “The Stratford Journal” (temporarily suspended),
“The Wave,” and a few others of the “unpopular” group do not pay for
contributions and that the few “leaders” or “giants” in the group pay
but little, and that, therefore, few “respectable” writers contribute
to them. Of the youngsters that do make their way to the top, once in
a great while, through the medium of these high-brow little magazines
one or two may ever hope to get into the “Big Four” or similar
high-prestiged and well-paying periodicals. So that while it may be
flattering to receive the pale encomiums of a few snobbish critics,
the safest way is to write “real” stories full of red-blooded action
and reap a golden harvest. Let those who do not care for the riches of
a material world be satisfied with the deluge of praise poured upon a
Sherwood Anderson; as for most, Holworthy Hall or Octavus Roy Cohen
seems a more inviting model.
And if this does not really explain the uncanny discrepancy in our
texts and they still seem somewhat confused and more than a bit
contradictory, we can, as a last resort, have recourse to that eloquent
dictum: Laws should be studied to be broken! And we suddenly acquire
the becoming halo of iconoclasts and have at last a satisfactory
explanation of why our students should read Poe and Maupassant and
Stevenson, yet not model their own work along the best of these
masters; why they should study our anthologies full of such “anemic”
stories as those of Dreiser, Anderson, Cabell, Waldo Frank, Ben Hecht,
Djuna Barnes, and even those of Susan Glaspell and Alice Brown, yet not
write in similar vein but should emulate rather writers whose names
never appear in anthologies.
Having thus explained the validity of our first rule and having
insisted on strict compliance therewith, we proceed to evolve methods
for a satisfactory meeting of our rule. If action must dominate a
story there should be some system of capturing this indispensable
ingredient, of imprisoning it within our brief literary form, of
whipping it into marketable shape. We find this system and reduce it to
terse understandable terms. We dig down into our bag of story-lore and
lo! we flourish before the weak eyes of the uninitiate another magic
commandment: Complicate! Complicate if you would have Action in your
stories. Complicate if you would have Suspense. Complicate if you would
exchange rejection slips for checks!
It is true that we are careful to explain our schemes of complication,
lest they be taken too literally. Accompanying our commandments are
various precautionary remarks about Logic and Plausibility and numerous
other qualifying statements. But in the main Action and Complication
are held forth as the two most important principles of sound
story-writing. First of all, then, our students are urged to plot and
complicate so that there be not a tedious moment in their product. Let
every sentence move forward the action. Let new developments, startling
in their unusualness and unexpectedness, crop up all the time. And
don’t forget to keep in reserve the grandest development of all,
the most surprising, for the very end. The Dénouement is the thing!
Charming word--French, you know.
I remember a young girl who attended my classes but a short time. “My
weakness seems to be a lack of inventiveness,” she confided to me. “My
plots are too quiet.” She handed in a story and I agreed with her. Her
plots were quiet, but it was the quiet of Spoon River and Winesburg
and Gopher Prairie. She knew intimately the little old Southern town
she hailed from, and she had the gift of making me know it. I knew
it in its past and present and future, which was all of one tone and
texture; I knew its proud inhabitants, patrician and plebeian; I felt
its pulse. I told the girl not to attempt to infuse plot into her story
and suggested a number of magazines that might accept it as it was.
“But I don’t want to write for these small publications!” she objected.
“Nobody has ever heard of them. I want to get into the ‘Saturday
Evening Post,’ the ‘Cosmopolitan,’ and the ‘Red Book.’ And they want
more plot than I manage to put into my stories; that’s what--told me.”
And she named a much advertised commercial critic.
Evidently I proved incapable of generating within her the coveted
element of inventiveness, for the girl dropped out after an exceedingly
brief stay and I have heard nothing from or of her since. Her name
has not yet appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_, nor in the
_Cosmopolitan_, nor in the _Red Book_--nor, to my knowledge, in any
other magazine. The eminent critic had done his work very well indeed.
His teachings that _every_ story must have an ingenious plot had
seemingly struck root, and the girl with her plotless little town and
its plotless little lives has probably decided, in utter despair, that
her mind is hopelessly devoid of the one essential for successful
story-writing--inventiveness.
Of course, she could have been made to stay and persevere a little
longer, and perhaps she might have yet attained her modicum of success.
If to her quiet little story a few entanglement tricks had been
dexterously applied the girl would have been satisfied and probably
also some editor or another of the more remunerative magazines to
which she aspired. The aspect of her sleepy Southern town would have
undergone a strange metamorphosis, and her lethargic hero and heroine
would have been changed into inhabitants of some hectic metropolis, but
that, of course, would have merely proved the magic of sound technique.
One of the surest of these tricks of ours is the introduction of
a second or third line of interest. Where a story is thin and
uninteresting an entirely different story can be brought in and the
two skillfully connected, related and correlated. Our texts abound
in geometric diagrams of lines and curves and circles, bisected and
intersected, zig-zagging, up and down, rising to various points of
crises and climaxes and catastrophes, and falling again with the
inevitable dénouement. These diagrams look like sacred hieroglyphics
to the credulous student who approaches their cryptic meaning with a
reverent awe. Given a story that reads too “narrative”-like, that lacks
interest because too few crises are arrived at, and its weakness can
usually be traced to its single line of interest which is not thick
enough to generate the necessary amount of suspense. The introduction
of another line brightens it up, adds suspense, complication--Interest.
The process really is a simple one. The moving pictures employ it,
invariably, with greatest effect. A young man is leading the confident
life of a freshman in some Middle-Western town. The first line is
started. The young man’s environment is pictured, his habits and likes
and dislikes and his towering ambitions. He is a marked man. But here
his line breaks. The continuity writer has become busy introducing an
entirely different line of interest. Beautiful Lady Psyche has left
her shire castle and is sailing for America on the Mammoth liner. The
orchestra is playing, and the Lady is standing on the upper deck,
her delicate white hands grasping the railing. Her eyes are deep and
wistful and hopeful. We know, of course, even at this time, that
she will in some fateful way meet our unsuspecting freshman. It is
only a question of time. Her career and his will become entangled
and merged into one. In the meantime we are watching and waiting.
But at this point the continuity writer again breaks the line and
begins an entirely new one. On the liner is “Taffy” Slim and he is
scheming to rob Lady Psyche of her famous jewels. Now we are watching
Taffy’s career. He succeeds and makes his get-away, but Lady Psyche’s
jewels are known the world over, having been photographed on numerous
occasions for the rotogravure supplements of our Sunday newspapers,
and Taffy finds himself unable to dispose of them. He wanders through
the length and breadth of our land starving, with a fortune’s worth
of jewels in his pocket, until finally, he comes to our Mid-Western
college town and meets our freshman. This clever hero buys the jewels
for a bun and--oh, gallantry of gallantries!--undertakes to return
them to their beautiful heart-broken owner. Now we see how these three
lines have been crossed and recrossed and why! We don’t know yet what
the gallant’s reward will consist of but we hope it will be a proposal
of matrimony; in fact, we are not willing to accept anything less for
our hero.
In the short story this double-or multiple-line-of-interest method
was employed most successfully by O. Henry and is clung to by most
of his followers. Its skillful manipulation undoubtedly results in a
more marketable product. It insures a thrilling sequence of events, if
not always a logical one. It is one of our most venerated tricks. We
underline it in our texts. We point out its potency in unmistakable
terms. We hold it up as a shining revelation to a gasping novitiate,
and for revelations the timeworn practice is to demand blind, absolute
acceptance.
One result of our attitude has just been traced in the experience of
the girl with her sleepy little Southern town story. The incompetent
who cannot think in terms of criss-cross lines is eliminated.
Artificiality is not only encouraged but placed at a premium. Sincerity
and that highest of artistic qualities, simplicity, are held up as
baneful stumbling blocks in the way of successful authorship. We
may have read Joseph Hergesheimer but we have never heard of his
philosophic Chwang-Tze whose pithy sentence prefaces “Java Head,”
a sentence full of illuminating words: “It is only the path of pure
simplicity which guards and preserves the spirit.” By undermining the
young story-teller’s faith in the path of pure simplicity we undermine
his spirit; we maim it; often destroy it completely.
Aside from the effect upon our story writers, this doctrine of constant
action and complication and entanglement has also been one of the
causes that have kept American fiction until very recently almost
entirely in the cheaply Romantic school of the long-forgotten past. It
has become strongly rooted in our readers through a perpetual diet of
fiction that embodies these “vital” ingredients, and consequently also
in our editors who must alertly watch the demand to engage successfully
in its supply. As far as we are concerned it would seem that the great
realists and naturalists have lived and died in vain. We are still
writing largely fairy tales, American in color and setting to be
sure, about bizarre adventures and quixotic adventurers. And in our
institutions of learning we are still preaching that stories must be
full of thrilling incidents and brave dénouements to be interesting and
meritorious. We are still living in the fantastic land of improbable
plots where men bound and rebound according to specific orders of
the author. That “the value of a dramatic action has nothing to do
with novelty of incident or the tingle of physical suspense”; that
“Character, motive and fatality, man and the earth and the gods--such
are the elements of dramatic action,”[3] has, as yet, occurred to few
of us.
An admission must be made: It is becoming increasingly difficult to
find plot material that hasn’t been worn threadbare by immoderate use.
The South Seas and the Pacific Islands have been pretty well covered.
Alaska and Hudson Bay are no longer inviting. The cow-boy story,
though not yet entirely extinct, is fast becoming so. The crook story,
though still popular with a particular type of magazine and magazine
purchaser, requires a greater measure of ingenuity to be attractive.
Baseball and football heroism is still going strong but the market is
limited. The Country-Boy-who-becomes-a-Wall-Street-magnate story will
probably continue as long as the large business fiction magazines will
retain their million-and-more circulation marks, but it is beginning to
tax the writer’s inventive capacity for brilliant deals for the hero
to get to that crowded narrow thoroughfare below Brooklyn bridge. The
rash-things-that-pretty-girls-do story is just now having its vogue,
but will blow over like a Bill Hart or Douglas Fairbanks fame. The
situation is gloomy indeed, even critical--if we wish to look at it
that way. Many old writers as well as young ones admit it.
But we don’t. We are optimists. When cornered we say: “Yes, the present
market does have some such aspect, but it simply proves one thing--the
necessity for the greater mastery of technique, for more originality.”
Then we proceed to elucidate. We define originality. It isn’t concerned
with theme but with the handling of theme. There are no new themes
under the sun; never were. A novel twist applied to a threadbare theme
is originality. These twists can be learned--that’s what we, teachers
of technique, are here for: to show how. The secret lies not only in
plenty of action and complication but in the spectacular handling of
these elements. There are many ways of doing it effectively; plot
order, for instance.
The common fault of the inexpert literary mechanician is that he
usually tells his story in the chronological order. Assuming that his
story presents a series of twenty steps, composed of incidents and
episodes of varying intensity, he presents them all in the order of
time of occurrence, thus obtaining a quiet narrative lacking in either
suspense or “punch.” But it is possible to juggle these steps in
different ways so as to get them to unfold in a most dramatic sequence.
It is possible to reverse this chronological order and begin with
incident number twenty and work back to number one. That is, instead of
narrating the crimes of our picaresque hero, which finally get him into
jail, in the order of commission, we begin with the man already safely
tucked away behind the bars--it is nearly always a man; women get into
jails but rarely in our fiction, except for the heart-rending scene
of meeting their husbands or sweethearts--and then work back to his
crimes and the day when evil was not yet in his heart and he was still
attending the Y. M. C. A.
We may then use this “logical” method of plot order or we may use a
mixed method or we may use any one of a number of variants of these
methods. We may, for example, begin with step number five and run up
to step number ten, then work in steps one to five and proceed with
step number eleven. Or we may begin with step one, then skip number
two, withholding it as a missing link in the chain for the sole purpose
of intriguing the reader, and spring it after step nineteen. All we
need to know is how to do these jugglings with the greatest possible
skill--and this is where originality comes to the fore: in the play of
craftsmanship.
This jugglery we can teach with an absolutely clear conscience. We can
cite any number of great masters who have at various times employed
these several schemes of plot development. Maupassant and Kipling and
Stevenson and Poe and O. Henry and even the quiet Chekhov have all
placed their stamp of approval upon these methods by employing them in
their own celebrated little masterpieces. There is really no necessity
to question whether they came upon these methods consciously or
intuitively, from within or without. This would raise the uncomfortable
problem of synthetic and analytic processes, which would merely
confuse the student and lead nowhere. There may be a distinction
between incidents marshalling themselves in some inevitable sequence
of which the author may not even be aware and incidents juggled about
artificially by a writer who has had it impressed upon him that method
A is more dramatic than method B. There may be a distinction; but for
our purposes it is best not to consider it. Suffice us merely to point
out that our story-construction lore is justified by the masters. The
deductions are simple enough: Learn the tricks of the masters and be a
master yourself.
I said we can teach plot legerdemain with a clear conscience. As for
me, however, I have often shuddered to think what a zealous graduate
might have done to such a story as Conrad’s “Youth.” In his or her deft
hand it certainly would not have remained a mere “Narrative,” told in
the colorless chronological order; it would have become a finished
short-story. Assuredly finished.
And yet it must be admitted that a skillful manipulation of our
tricks is, after all, not so easily acquired. There is a brain and a
temperament which is especially adaptable to them, but to the majority
they remain an occult science forever beyond their ken. These unhappy
toilers cannot apply them to their labors. For most students are unable
to construct the slightest kind of plot. There’s a certain knack that
must be acquired. The young, inexperienced mind must be disciplined
along certain grooves. Most students seem to be unable to concentrate
unless driven to do so. I experiment with my class. Unexpectedly I
announce a theme and request the class to construct an incident. Like
children bent upon solving a puzzle, they go to work and I am left to
examine the result. Fully fifty per cent. have used the same situation
and dénouement, as if by agreement; forty-nine per cent. have striven
to inject a novel twist or “O. Henryism” at the end. But the one per
cent! Why here is but a thin bit of paper, with just a few lines
scribbled on it. If this is an incident, it is a very short incident,
indeed. It reads: “I have never been able to write under pressure. I
must find myself in a proper mood. I suppose I shall never make a story
writer.” I smile. I have a vivid picture of young Tommy Sandys losing
his scholarship because one elusive word had refused to respond to his
bidding.