This little boy, see, talked just like a kid of fifteen, but he wasn't a day over seven. It said so in the story. Poor little tyke, I like ta squeezed out a salty tear or two over his piteous plight.
Why, doggonit, that kid wanted a dog. What boy doesn't want a dog? Me! I got six of them. They wake me up in the morning, by licking my face, et cetera.
Oh -- the kid. And there sat the author of this story, waiting for me to tell her what was wrong with it.
What is wrong with it, Mr. Dewey, she asked me.
Well, I said, sparring for time, I'm getting an idea or two. Just let me read a little further ....
I read a little further.
Not only did the poor little brat have no dog, but his parents had done set their foots down. No dogs in this house, they sneered.
Companionship. That's what the kid needed. The companionship of man's best friend. He had no playmates. He was crippled, too, you see. Gimpy!
Well, I read along, like I said.
How does it read, she asked me.
Pretty good, I lied.
The seven year old kid, who talked as semantically as a fifteen year old boy, finally gathered in a mutt from somewhere, and smuggled it into his room. Of course his maw found out, and raised all kinds of hell. She banished the dog from the people house to the dog house, pending the morn, when his father would deliver it to the antivivisectionists, who are scouring the nation for dogs, just any kind of dogs.
During the night the kid sneaked out (I'm still reading), carrying a bundle of clothes and food, liberated the pooch, and they took off for the Norwescon, Mecca of all true fans.
Pretty quick now Our Boy --- but why go on? I'd read this story scores, hundreds of times before. How the dog rescues the lad, going back after his parents, bringing them to the rescue in the Nick of Time ....
I laid the pages down and raised my eyes.
How is it, she asked me.
I didn't tell her that the story was as loose as a Toulouse goose. Authors don't understand about leese geese.
Your story, I told the woman, simply needs tightening.
Her face lit up. Tightening, she asked.
Yes, I said. Take it home with you, and tighten it up. That's all it needs. Tightening.
She understood that perfectly.
Any writer knows that stories have to be tightened.
I remembered how many hundreds of people, and writers, I'd told to tighten up their stories. Those poor wights had to take those stories home and tighten them by hand. Have you ever seen anyone tightening a story by hand? Have you ever tried to tighten a story by hand?
I decided to invent a story tightener.
I spent the better part of an afternoon inventing this story tightener, something which has never existed heretofore.
It has no moving parts!
It has a complete set of attachments, and will handle most types of stories, though I can see, using my fine mind, that it would jam up on television scripts and Greek tragedies.
I'll tell you how it works.
All you do is write your story. You don't have to think about tightening it as you write. Relax. Take it for granted that it will need tightening: all stories need tightening. Most of the stories in print should have been tightened.
Having written the story, you simply place it in the story tightener, firmly, of course; set it for the degree of story tightness, or Fictional Tension, that you desire, and walk slowly around to the other side of the tightener.
When your story comes out, it will be TIGHT.
There will be no loosenesses, no flabby sentences, no wiggly words, no ill fitting paragraphs. Everything will be firm, snug, machined to close tolerances. Every episode is now smoothly dovetailed into the preceding and the following episodes. Each incident is rabbetted into its neighbors.
That story, friend, is TIGHT.
If now you should be so injudicious as to remove a single word of this newly tightened story, it would set up such an unbalancing of stresses and strains, according to the Dihedral Internal Resonance Effect, that within seconds the story would resolve violently into its discrete component parts, and you'd have the job of writing it to do all over again.
I have developed various attachments for the story tightener, which can be used to achieve special effects.
None of the attachments has moving parts.
Editors say that stories should be tense. That's something different from regular story tightness, and there is a special attachment for intensifying Narrative Tensity.
Stories need suspense, also. That too is not quite the same as Fictional Tension, or as Narrative Tensity. I have devised a special attachment for enhancing Relative Suspensivity.
There are limitations, naturally, to what the Tight Righter will do. I just now decided to call this machine without moving parts a Tight Righter, because after you have out your loose story through it, it comes out not only TIGHT, but RIGHT.
But getting back to its limitations.
It tightens whatever story you feed into it, by an amount designated by the index of tensity for which you have set it. That means that you have to know, yourself, that the story needs tightening, and that you should have a pretty good notion of approximately how much.
If, for example, your story is already as tight as it should be, or if you have tightened it by hand and gotten it reasonably snug, it might not need tightening in the Tight Righter. In fact, it might be a mistake to process it. There is such a thing, believe it or not, as getting a story too tight!
Another consideration is the matter of markets. Besides being tight, stories should be slanted. The Tight Righter does not slant stories. I'm going to invent a Slanter later today, or maybe tomorrow, if I still have enough non-moving parts left over from inventing the story tightener.
The thing is, after your story has been tightened, it's RIGHT and TIGHT, for the ideal market. But for some markets, say, perhaps, aSF, you may have to go through it and loosen it up by hand, here and there. You'll get the feel of it after you have tightened a few stories the efficient way, using the Tight Righter.
The Man Burbee brought up a point which must be clarified. The story tightener does not penalize the author. That is, if you write five thousand words of story, and put that wordage into the tightener for tightening, you get back five thousand words of story.
Not a word has been removed!
The only change in the story is that whereas before it was loose, now it is tight. You can still sell it as a five thousand word yarn, and get paid for five thousand words.
There is another limitation, one which won't concern the writer writing BIG stories, GOOD stories, but one that does concern the writer who writes for his Art, who lives only that he may spawn immortal literature.
The tightener has a Built-in Cumulative Cyclic Resonator, which reverse--tapers as it tightens, arranging the emotional progression of the plot on an ascending scale, culminating in the climax.
Obviously, then, a story based on the Greek Tragedy pattern would come out as sheer hodge-podge --- though remember that it would still be TIGHT. A moment of consideration will show you that there are other types of so-called stories that would not be suitable for normal tightening.
I invented the Tight Righter scientifically reasoning logically from cause to effect. In my own mind I know what it will do, and I have proved it to myself.
I realize that the correct scientific approach demands that I offer to a waiting literary world something more than empirical proof.
I must have recourse to the Statistical Method.
I could turn out a number of Tight Righters, and sell them to various authors. In fact, my first impulse was to do just that.
But think what would happen. All writers but Max Brand have, or had, a stack of unsold manuscripts. All those writers would have to do would be to run them through the Tight Righter, and send the newly-tightened stories off to market.
The markets would be glutted with tight stories!
Editors would have no choice but to buy them: any writer in the business knows that once a story is tight, it's as good as sold.
So that's out. The alternative is to test the Tight Righter statistically myself, using a great variety of stories to prove that it tightens them all, indiscriminately.
I have neither the time nor the desire to write a great variety of loose stories. I've picked up a few from Burbee, and from F. Towner Laney, who self-admittedly is a Great Big Man.
I need more loose stories!
That means that you, and you, and you are going to have to send me your unsold stories. The looser, the better. I will run them through the Tight Righter.
They will come out TIGHT, and I'll sell them just as fast as I can get them mailed off to market.
After I have tightened and sold a thousand or so, I'll compile the results, and analyze them statistically. In fact, I'll do it now, simply using the sales results to prove what I already know; that every one of those loose stories, properly tightened, as they will be by my Tight Righter, will sell.
I will keep a record of the names of the authors of these stories, because it is only fair to these authors that they have a chance to read their stories in print -- yarns which once were goose-loose, but which now are
TIGHT!
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Text versions and page scans Judy Bemis
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Updated June 19, 2015. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.