How To Press A Duck

( Originally Published 1944 )

I hold that nothing lives but what is dead

MANY writers have the idea that a story is like a cake: you make it from a recipe. I have been doing some experimentation in cooking for, the past year or two.

Suddenly all the good restaurants in Hollywood and environs went to hell completely. Suddenly it became impossible to get any sort of cook and hold him or her especially for a writer whose hours scandalize cooks.

I started with formulas. Alas! I can take the same recipe as La Maze and, after working out on it, achieve something I have to give to the dogs. They eat it and vomit.

After satisfying myself that a cook book is about as much use as a book on writing to a would-be writer I threw out the cook book and started from scratch, just as I started writing from scratch, retaining the itch in a very modified form to this day. It's far easier to make money telling someone else how to do it than doing it yourself.

After I started to cook from the ground up without recipes I began to get somewhere; to develop what might be called a cooking style all my own. Now I can cook things that even the dogs can digest. And, what's more, I enjoy it.

Maybe I shall go on cooking. As a matter of fact I have developed such a style for suiting my own taste that I doubt if any cook could satisfy me now. But I still can't cook from a recipe, although I could write a recipe book of my own from the which NOBODY COULD ANY MORE LEARN TO COOK THE WAY I COOK THAN THEY COULD LEARN TO WRITE THE WAY I WRITE FROM ONE OF MY BOOKS ON WRITING.

Thoroughly to make you understand precisely what I mean, let's consider another example. There are any number of bartender's manuals. They tell how to make every drink on earth. Suppose you hire a choir boy from the Baptist Church to tend bar, and give him the Bartender's Manual. Can he make satisfactory drinks? You know that he cannot. He can use the same recipes as would a seasoned bartender, but still his drinks will stink. Why is that? Ask God. In case any of you really wish to ask God something it is very simple. Just drop Him a postal card addressed: "God, Heaven." If you get an answer let me know. Remy de Gourmont once said that that was the whole trouble with God. Address "Unkennat."

When you learn the piano you practice scales. When you have practiced them to the point that you can hit any note on the keyboard without error you take up a recipe called "St. Louis Blues." You strike each note exactly as indicated in the recipe. You hold it for the precise interval of time required. You stink. Some dinge in a jernt who cannot read a note of music can listen to you play it perfectly once (it sounds like all billy hell) and then, having heard you play it perfectly, and awfully, he can sit down to the same piano and play it all wrong beautifully. People will flock to hear him play it all wrong. They will walk out on you when you play it right according to formula. Why is that? Ask God. Try putting a zone number on your postal this time.

Since your chances of reaching God are remote, I will pinch hit for him and try to answer you. The reason, God concurring, is style, mannerism, your idiosyncrasies; the quotient of your glands, your psyche; your early impingements, the things Iurking in your germ plasm. The Mendelian traits carried over in you from your ancestors ten thousand years back. The essence de you.

Actually there are very few recipes from which to bake any kind of story from a short-short to a play, movie, radio serial, novel, or dithering Aht and Beauteh crap for Story Magazine.

The safest and most fundamental of all formulas is the simplest, the surest, and the most elemental one: Sex.

A curious thing about Christians is that they do not consider murder immoral. Nobody in the Legion of Decency considers murder immoral. The Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant Churches do not consider it immoral. Motion pictures, radio, novels, plays, short stories can delineate murder to their heart's content, because nobody considers it immoral. Such narrative can carefully outline the way to commit a perfect crime and none of the Holy or Righteous care. This is an anomaly I shall some day drop a postal card to God about myself.

The only thing that the Holy and the Righteous consider immoral enough to do anything about is Sex.

They'll sabotage your Free Speech worse than Hitler ever dreamed of doing if you talk much about Sex. So all of us writers, presumably possessed of billions of dollars worth of Free Speech, have to camouflage Sex as "Love." "Love," if I were personally to define it, is a sort of pious giggling in nervous fashion that goes on between people of the opposite sometimes the same set while they are taking down their pants.

So the most fundamental of all formulas or recipes is that you take two elements, let us say water and a hunk of meat, and apply heat, in cooking. You do the same in writing. You take two elements, Male and Female, and apply heat. In both cases what you get is a boiling point. The boiling point is conflict. The boiling water breaks down the fibres in the meat; the boiling emotions break down certain resistances in the Boy and Girl.

The more heat in the middle action (conflict, suspense) the more tenderness in the final result, in either case. A Boy and a Girl, like what you put in a pot to boil, are animals. They have but one natural function in life: to produce other boys and girls so that their countries shall not lack for G. I. Joes and WACS to go out and annex land, and secure investments, for the rich.

Let us then take the most simple recipe and proceed. Take one Boy.

Take one Girl.

Apply Heat.

Let the Boy take the Girl.

My erratic and delightful friend, H. Allen Smith, puts it very succinctly:

"Boy meets Girl. Girl gets Boy into Pickle. Boy gets Pickle into Girl."

There you have the all-time tried-and-true formula, just as tried and true as water, flesh, and heat, in cooking.

Next you have to consider for whom you are cooking. You would hardly serve pressed duck under glass to a bunch of factory hands who would rather have corned beef and cabbage.

So as you consider your recipe you consider care-fully, also, your guests. Whom do you wish to attend your fictional dinner?

If you never in your life ate pressed duck under glass you will probably not understand the sort of guests to whom you might serve it. They need a very special sort of chef. Pressed duck under glass belongs, of course, to the slick-paper guests. If you are not slick yourself you will never in this world be able to serve them and make them like it.

Your understanding of other people's digestions will be entirely conditioned by your understanding of your own digestion.

In short, as I pointed out elsewhere, that is why you must write what you habitually read.

When, therefore, you take one Boy and one Girl and apply Heat you have various selections. A pressed-duck girl, if you really understand such rarae aves. If not, then the sort of girl you do understand: a corned-beef girl. No matter how you twist or turn to avoid it all your writing all your life will be according to the type of person you yourself are; and it will be obliquely autobiographical. Most tyros ruin their chances by trying to write of the sort of people they are not.

Somerset Maugham is definitely the pressed-duck type. He began life as an educated man a doctor. He traveled widely. He ate pressed duck under glass at some of the finest hostelries in the world. When he writes of such things he writes, autobiographically, of himself, and of heroines he has known.

You, no matter where you are or what you do, can hope to creep up on Maugham only if you write of the people and the things around you, people and things you know. Your main recipe is always the same: One Boy. One Girl, Heat.

The heat can take many forms. It can be animal, vegetable, or mineral. It is usually human. The villain, male or female, is the heat, usually, that cooks the Boy and the Girl until they are tender, and the reader swallows them with gusto in the end. The heat can be an avalanche, a Republican, or any other catastrophe. It can be psychological or it can be meta-physical; but it must be there because the Boy and the Girl, raw and uncooked, will never be palatable.

It is the same with all the other recipes-sciencefiction, detective-fiction, anything. You can write science-fiction without a Girl; but you cannot write it without Heat. You can take a Boy and a Fact, and apply Heat. In detective-fiction you can take a Prospective Corpse, a Murderer, and a Detective, and apply Heat. But whatever your ingredients, whatever the form of heat you use, no matter how profound your formula, you will go through the process I went through when l learned to cook: Trial and Error.

At first you will singe the Girl and get the Boy underdone, and the editor will return the mess to you with ambiguous remarks about This and That; all of which remarks simply mean that you are not yet a good cook. His remarks will seldom mean that your ingredients as such fail to meet a formula or recipe. He will mean simply that the Girl, as meat, was "high!" and that the Boy, as meat, was green; that the Heat, as such, was too much, or too little; that your Mess boiled over, or didn't boil long enough. You will in vain ransack the whole list of paid literary critics to tell you what was wrong with the mess. They can't tell you any more than I can tell when I have ruined a stew what, precisely, ruined it. It just didn't straighten up and stew right; so I have to try again and again, and finally when I get the knack I do not know myself what was changed. The change occurred in my subconscious somewhere; to save my soul I couldn't write a recipe to account for it.

Let us be even more objective. Let us say that when you go to a magazine it is like going to a restaurant. The magazine has a bill of fare which is more or less constant from month to month until the readers get sick of the "slanted" diet and the magazine gets a new chef with a new bill of fare. While, however, the old chef is on the job you have to consider what sort of meals customarily he serves, and how well-cooked they are.

In order to make the grade in that restaurant as an assistant to the temporary chef you will have to see eye to eye with the temporary chef as to his menus. Perhaps it is liver and onions. A very virile boy meets a very virile girl. Perhaps it is truffles and pheasant. A psychological boy meets a metaphysical girl. Maybe they cook very lightly and become tender under only a mild degree of heat. Perhaps there are calves' brains. Boy meets volcano; boy loses volcano; boy gets volcano. Perhaps ham and eggs is the favorite on the bill of fare. Maw meets Paw; Maw loses Paw; Maw gets Paw. Perhaps it is even more complicated. Gefulte fish and corned beef. So you have "Abie's Irish Rose." Perhaps it is fricasseed grunion. You have Story Magazine.

Your recipes can be found in any magazine. They are the formula catalogues, the recipe books of the writer. You will find your components there. So, in writing a formula for a woman's magazine, you take , one cup of hoity toity lady living in a white house with green shutters in Connecticut. You take one emasculated male who is a psychoanalyst in New York. For this you cook with gas. But it all depends on how you as a cook finally get these ingredients together in palatable form. You can't cook, even with gas, a hoity toity lady and an emasculated male for the women's magazines until you have practiced long enough to get a synthesis that will smell good to the editors of those magazines. Every one of your ingredients can be right, and your heat right, and everything according to recipe, but until your sub-conscious has taught you how to cook such a stew and get it tasty your correctness of formula definitely will not help you.