(The following is an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript tentatively entitled How to Succeed by Trying. This manual, which for obvious reasons never will be published, prescribes, with the use of numerous examples, techniques to ensure success in several popular fields of endeavor.)

OF the several categories mentioned above, one of the simplest is the love story. Love is an ever-popular theme, but for this very reason you must add to the basic story some distinctive feature to differentiate it from all the other love stories published each week.

In the example we will use, appropriately called Love Story (see chapter VII, "Making the Movies," for comments on Love Story as a film), author Erich Segal has chosen a Harvard setting to convert the universal to the particular. But you must be careful not to let the setting intrude upon the story: once you have described the locale and dropped a few place-names, remember to keep it a story that could happen anywhere to anyone.

Now that you have the setting, you must construct a plot around the basic love-story theme of boy meeting girl- which is merely the skeleton. Segal cleverly dresses up his skeleton with class conflict- he chooses a poor Cliffie as the girl his richboy hero meets- and a sad ending. The sad ending is a good device: it prevents reviewers from degrading fiction by calling it "light" or "trivial."

But more than this Segal gets maximum mileage from his sad ending (the death of the heroine Jenny) by revealing it at the beginning. This not only imbues the entire novel with foreboding (so dear to the hearts of the Ladies' Home Journal readers for whom this particular novel was serialized; see chapter IV on writing for magazines) but keeps the readers reading to see how the author gets to his announced end. Nowadays surprise, unless you are able to handle it with finesse, is best avoided.

WITH the plot out of the way, you must concern yourself with its handling. First-person is an excellent narrative mode: it allows you to commit incredible errors of style and pass them off as a characterization of your narrator. Segal takes full advantage of this technique (although his lapses are more the voice of a wisecracking writer than that of a Harvard preppie jock), which also permits brevity by enabling you to describe characters rather than illustrate them. The reader might not accept the words of an author who says. "Jenny was brilliant," but if Oliver Barrett IV himself says so- in the third sentence of the book- what can one do but believe him?

Character, of course, is an integral part of the love novel. Plot and character must work together. It is advisable to add several secondary characters to amplify the basic falling-in-love sequence.

Segal skillfully uses secondary characters to add complexity to his story. Not only do we have tension between Oliver and Jenny, we have a second conflict between Oliver and his father the man who can't get through to his son because they are both too proud. (A working knowledge of psychology is-very handy here.) At the end, the aforementioned sad ending draws the two together, thus making the novel optimistic and morally defensible without sacrificing the tears which readers so enjoy.

Segal's Love Story provides a good example of another use to which the secondary character can be put. Jenny's father, while having little to do with the plot per se. shows that Jenny is indeed from a poor Italian family, for now she is at Radcliffe this is hard to see in the girl herself. Oliver, of course, who has found this out, gives the reader reminders; Jenny's father is a subder means to the same end.

The final element to consider in the handling of the plot is time. The passage of time can cause events as well as follow from them; that is, if you announce a movement forward in time, you can also have the characters accomplish an action without necessitating lengthy explanations. In this manner Segal has Jenny and Oliver fall in love without dragging the reader through a lengthy exposition of their developing relationship. You, like Segal, must invite the reader to participate: let him imagine how it could be that the protagonists could fall in love, rather than knocking him over the head by showing it happening.

This technique leads to the final characteristic of a successful and easy love story: it is short, saving the time of both writer and reader.