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But that’s not the main reason why I go.
There are things in writing that are easy to master, if you put your mind to it. We begin to learn the first layer in grade school: spelling, punctuation, grammar, paragraph structure, beginnings, middles, and ends.
The next level most people don’t truly conquer, because they stop writing as soon as they are no longer in the presence of an evil-minded teacher who forces them to. It’s about the story telling: characters, setting, theme, and plot. People who love reading and writing in high school and college begin to see these elements in stories even when not writing a two-paged essay on them. They become eager to apply these concepts to their own work, layering them into their stories with equal attention.
Many literary-minded college courses and even professional workshops stop at this point, although some will move on to smaller pieces of the puzzle: scene structure, dialogue, transitions, pacing, and more poetic word-smithing techniques such as alliteration, consonance, and rhyme–all good pursuits.
I was stuck at this level for decades. I kept taking classes, joined critique groups, and read books. But one additional layer needed attention. And it wasn’t one you could easily come by, because it was large, unwieldy, subjective, and ever changing: writing to the audience.
I think one reason that this is ignored in the literary world is that it sounds like selling out, burnt on the edges in the fire of commercialism.
But when you’ve poured your energy, time, and hope into novels, all written on spec, with the optimism that it will one day be traditionally published, it can be a cold hard dash of reality when the letter come back, often as a quarter-page form, saying your story isn’t competitive in today’s market.
What? How can that be? YOU are part of the market, and you LOVE this. And second, it’s a form letter. It means nothing.
Actually, it’s a form letter because it’s so common. Many of us have great ideas, many of us can string words together that communicate what we want to say. But very few of us can make that message resonate with the readers we are trying to reach.
I see it every day in critique groups or in writers who post their query letters online for review. I’m no expert, and I can still see that they don’t have a handle on their story. Their summaries wander. They can’t write a one-sentence premise about the plot. They know very much what they WANT to do. And this is often worded in their letters in phrases like, “This book reminds us that…” or “Readers of this story will remember what it is like…”
We write sentences like that because we are frustrated by our own stories, our inability to show the lives of characters who will communicate a message without preachiness or head-smacking. And that last layer of the novel, which is part of every word on the page, is what ultimately causes the novel to fail, either at the query level, because the agent can see the writer isn’t communicating this part, so it’s doubtful the book will be any better, or at the novel level, when an agent has requested the work and stops reading around page 50 because the book just isn’t rising as it should.
Ms. Snark, in her query bashing and crushing responses to reader questions, cut through the literary high-brow and got straight into the issue of does this book work for the reader it was intended to impact? She did this with humor, with biting candor, and intelligent analysis. She made us able to look at our own work more critically, to slip on her stilettos and step back from our emotional attachment to what we’d written and see it from a difficult-to-please point of view.
It’s a debilitating blow to realize you’ve spent a year, or several years, on a novel that doesn’t work. But only when we fail can we figure out what we don’t know. Until you’re querying, putting your tender babies into the world, it’s not easy to know what you’ve done wrong.
But Ms. Snark can educate you ahead of time, before you burn through the agent list, without dealing with the hard reality of rejection in your inbox. Go, and read, and learn from her, not just once, but every year or two. We can’t absorb everything until we’ve moved to the next layer, when all the things we’ve fixed about our work reveals the next set of weaknesses.
It’s not an easy process and there aren’t any short cuts. But reading Ms. Snark can cut a lot of time out of the write-revise-rejection period of your authorly rise to success. And you can laugh along the way with Killer Yapp and hearing that once again, Ms. Snark has read something that makes her want to set her hair on fire.
So, what are you waiting for? Discover her again. I’ll see you there.
I should have asked them first.
The fourth-grade class hustled like they hadn’t done all day to pack up their bags and sit on the floor around my chair.
I hadn’t served as a substitute in ages (although last time had been memorable), but their teacher had taught my daughter, and personally asked for my help. I tucked the pink hair away as best I could and at the last minute tossed my middle grade manuscript Jinnie Wishmaker into my bag.
The students had worked quickly and quietly in order to get a chance to hear a story no one had ever read. I told them I needed help, that lots of agents had thought about representing it, and some had come really close, but couldn’t really tell me why, in the end, they just said no.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I began reading aloud. The class had been antsy all day. We’d actually done a lesson on “Show, Don’t Tell,” for writing, but I suspected I had bored them. But the idea that they were doing something “for real,” not just as an assignment, really motivated them to finish their work and pile onto the carpet to listen.
I reminded them what was important to the beginning of a novel: a character that interests you enough to read a whole book about. And a story that doesn’t just sit there, but moves forward, and makes you worry about what will happen next.
So they settled in, twenty nine-year-olds curled around backpacks and lunchboxes, more riveted than I ever expected. The opening scene unfurled, a girl and her younger bother plotting to run away rather than to be taken to live with their snobby rich aunt and uncle, characters taken from a page of Roald Dahl, where the grown ups are hyperbolic and the kids represent the voice of reason.
At the end, I asked them what they thought.
“Is Jinnie going to be mean the whole time?” a boy asked. “She seems mean.”
“Yeah,” a girl said. “She’s angry.”
I couldn’t believe it. Why hadn’t I seen it? I knew Jinnie was sensitive and fairly shy, but in this first impression, with just her little brother to tug around, they were right. She seemed mean.
“I’m really worried about her,” another girl said. “I don’t think she should run away.”
“Running away is never the answer,” a boy concurred. “She should have a really good reason.”
She wasn’t sufficiently motivated. They knew. They were nine years old, and they knew.
The bell rang, but I didn’t need to hear any more. I had it. I knew it. The story had been through four critique group grillings, read by five or six other writers, and even several agents had nurtured it though some revisions, and yet still, I hadn’t seen it until now. No one had been able to just say it.
We lined up by the door, my head buzzing. I knew I could fix it.
One of the boys tapped my arm. “Ms. Roy? Will you be back tomorrow?”
I had no idea. “Not unless your teacher still needs me. Hopefully she’s better.”
“If you come back tomorrow, will you read some more?”
Oh yes. Of course.
Last Sunday, six of my writer friends got together for Live Character Interviews, where we assumed the persona of our protagonist and got barraged with questions on our past, our motivations, our fears, and our hopes. We had no idea how helpful this exercise would be when we sat around a large table at a coffee shop with printouts of our character questionnaire, but by the time we were through, we realized that when we're under fire, our characters sometimes say things we don't expect.
I strongly urge you to try it, in a small group (six really is the max). Have each writer prepare a list of basic traits--physical features, history, story arc over the book, goals, dreams, embarrassing moments, as a springboard for the discussion. As you articulate what your character is feeling, thinking, and rationalizing, you'll get to know him or her better, and that person you thought you knew so well just might surprise you, adding depth to your characterization and authenticity to your story.
Here's the character questionnaire I created:
Character Interview
Author Name:
Title of Book:
Name of Protagonist:
Age:
Hometown of childhood:
Current town name and brief description (location, size):
Job or primary occupation of time:
Married/single/divorced:
Body style:
Hair color
Skin tone:
Eye color:
Distinguishing features:
Religious leaning:
Political orientation:
Sexual orientation:
Education:
Overall goal in the novel:
Briefly state the plan to achieve this goal:
External obstacles to this goal:
Internal obstacles to this goal:
Primary rival:
Primary ally:
Most embarrassing moment as a child:
First love/how it ended:
Most shameful secret:
How feels about parents:
Dream career/occupation/way to spend time:
What actions, if any, to try and achieve dream:
Biggest tangible fear (i.e. spiders, public speaking):
Biggest internal fear (i.e. death, loss, exposure):
Bad habits:
Promiscuity level/view of sex:
Primary character change-growth arc in this novel:
Take, for example, the time I electrocuted myself while unplugging studio strobes in a Travis County Courtroom. There was no need to tattoo "Discharge lights before touching metal" on my wrist. Two hours of EKGs later, my heart rhythm did go back to normal. No way would I do that again.
Writing, though, feels a little different. I seem to have the ability to make the same mistake repeatedly. I think it comes from the way I draft--maybe the way many people draft--in that white heat that keeps you interested in your story, and the inner editor remains locked in the closet.
I finished Bickham's Scene and Structure last week, and busily began fixing the problems in my manuscript, which is getting close to ready for submission. One list I might ought to tattoo on my wrist (or at least tape to my computer screen) is this:
Common Errors in Scenes
1. Too many people in the scene
2. Circularity of argument
3. Unwanted interruptions
4. Getting off track
5. Inadvertent summary
6. Loss of viewpoint
7. Forgotten scene goal
8. Unmotivated opposition
9. Illogical disagreement
10. Unfair odds
11. Overblown internalizations
12. Not enough at stake
13. Inadvertent red herrings
14. Phony, contrived disasters
Bickham says writers seldom make more than one of these mistakes in any given scene. He apparently has never read my manuscript.
And so my work begins anew. I love the idea of having a checklist of errors I can tick off, as though this might assure me I've done the right thing, gotten the scene letter perfect. But that doesn't account for the Spike factor.
He walks in, all bad boy in leather, helmet under his arm, sidling up to the bar to fix his grin on you. You sit there, warning bells clanging, but the pages full of warnings flutter to the floor, and you end up doing what feels right at the time.
Maybe it will work. Literary purists say it will. Commercial fiction analysts say, fat chance. But it seems to me that even if you let Spike buy you the drink, whisper into your ear, and ride you off into the sunset on his roaring machine, there will still be tomorrow. And tomorrow is for checklists, regrets, and chagrin. As long as your heart is still pumping after the jolt of electricity, you'll live to edit another day.
Yesterday I realized I didn't know squat about writing.
I've taken some twenty college hours specifically on the topic, taught creative writing myself, published short stories, drafted four novels, and read thousands of books. And yet, I still have so much to learn.
I blew through the first third of Bickham's book Scene and Structure, and literally could not stop. He made clear that every single scene--EVERY SINGLE SCENE--needed a statement of a scene goal, a middle filled with obstacles and conflict, and an end where the goal leads to disaster. The character simply must be worse off than before.
At first read, I railed against this. Formula! Genre fodder! Where is the subtlety, the texture! How can your story flow with these requirements?
And then I realized something obvious: I was wrong.
I started looking at books. Not just popular fiction. But great works. And they did this. What I thought was trite and too obvious (the character must state his goal in the scene!) was necessary. Because that is what engages the reader. Books are not life. They are larger than life. Books are not day-to-day. They are very specifically chosen days--days where things happen, where change sets in, where people recognize they have a new status quo, a new problem, and a new goal.
Here, I'll take a book off my shelf--Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. Let's take a peek.
The novel begins with sequel, not scene--backstory. But here we come to our first true scene, and there in paragraph one, is the scene goal:
But his legs felt strong, and that worried him. As soon as he was fit to fight, they would ship him right back to Virginia.
So clearly he has a goal--avoid getting shipped back. We have a story problem large enough to arc through the whole book--getting home. And one small enough for a single scene--getting away from the hospital. The conflict is set up in seeing the other soldiers, any of whom could arrest him if he's caught trying to desert.
And at the end of the scene:
He set his foot on the sill and stepped out the window.
Disaster indeed. He's injured, likely to be caught, but he can't stop himself. He deserts.
So take the first sentence of my novel, which I thought so clever and pithy:
Photographers were never meant to babysit Bridezillas.
And turn it around, so that instead of a statement, it is a scene goal:
I would not let this Bridezilla cost me two grand.
From the next sentence on, the story is EXACTLY the same. But the difference in reader expectation and involvement is huge. In the first instance, you might have a story question or two--why is she babysitting a bride? Or, what is going on? But those are passive questions.
Now, the question is--Why is this Bridezilla going to cost her two grand? And how is she going to prevent it from happening? Now, the reader is ACTIVELY seeking an answer, rather than just following along. She is engaged. And the obstacles and comedic conflict between the photographer and the bride are not just an unfurling of story, but a race to see who is going to win a conflict.
Here is the problem with not following scene structure: people who are evaluating your manuscript know it. If you don't, even if your writing is clever and nuanced and beautiful, it won't carry a reader for more than three pages. Without this structure in place, the story flags, and anyone who is going to represent you or publish you will flip back to the beginning of the scene where interest waned, and realize that despite initially flowing well, the story structure just isn't there.
This is not a mistake I'm going to make again.
So I’m reading Scene & Structure by Jack Bickham. I’ve set aside my multi-protagonist novel (thank you readers for your suggested books) and am back to my romantic comedy, which I’m taking through Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook.
This last year, I’ve also read Robert McKee’s Story and John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story.
As you might have guessed, I’m getting serious about examining the structure of my novels.
My current book has more promise than all the others I have written combined. It’s funny, it’s timely, and it involves everything I hold dear--photography, the civil rights of my friends, and recognizing that perfect love when it comes along (and, of course, stalking it on the internet to see if it is already “in a relationship,” Facebook or otherwise.)
McKee and Truby had a lot to stay about plot. Maass has really helped me with character and story arc development.
But Bickham’s book, I hope, will help with the individual building blocks that carry all those things off.
What I’ve already learned: You should be able to write your main character’s self concept in fifteen words.
So, let’s try it: Zest believes she can have it all--a small independent business and a happy marriage.
Then, Bickham says your novel begins at the moment your character’s self concept is threatened.
I think I got that right: She comes home from a wedding job to hear a message from a lawyer that her husband has filed for divorce.
This threat should create a story goal, a way to get back into equilibrium. I think I have that:
Initially, Zest’s story goal is very pragmatic: figure out what went so wrong that her husband would secretly file for divorce, and then to fix it, even if draws her attention away from her new business.
This creates story questions: Why did her husband do this? How can she fix it? And further more, should it be fixed?
You have some hints before you even get to the dramatic moment. Zest is snarky, biting, and probably not so easy to live with. She’s plunged into this business without enough forethought, on the assumption that her husband is behind her all the way. Because we’re in first person, and we find Zest amusing and entertaining, we go along with her in the first chapter, but when trouble hits, we find ourselves wondering--did she deserve it? So, separate from Zest’s own story question--how could he do this to me? We the readers have a separate one, one we keep from her--should we hope her husband runs for the hills?
What I hope Bickham can really help me with is the sagging middle. I have a great start and a killer end. But I find myself standing below the arch, arms above my head, propping up the noodling bridges and praying for some structure before my muscles give out.
This is admittedly the topic I had thought about the least, and the chapter I skimmed the most.
Up until now, I had found Truby’s ability to layer each element of the story — the designing principle (the skeletal structure of the plot), the moral argument (theme), the character web, and the hero’s desire line — to be brilliant and fairly smooth to follow.
Then came the story world. Suddenly page after page seemed trite and forced to me. Truby carried on about the ocean as a metaphor, the mountain as pinnacle, jungles, deserts, and islands, and I had to start skipping. We all KNOW what these settings evoke. And most likely the designing principle has already dictated the story world to a great extent. Star Wars is obviously a space epic. No use pondering Roman baths. We couldn’t exactly place Hogwarts under the sea. I skipped past sections on the use of “the warm house,” and cellar versus attic.
None of this made any useful sense to me, even how the world and the hero should grow and change together, until we got to the examples. And so, to remember the best cases of matching scene to story, I’ll leave you with an excellent example from the book in how the opponents, theme, desire match up in a movie where there were lots of options about where and how to set scenes:
It’s a Wonderful Life
- Weakness and Need: A man ready to jump from a bridge, night sky, the city from above.
- Desire: This man’s warm house growing up, explaining how he wants to build things.
- Opponent: The man’s nemesis, Potter, set at the bank where the city is controlled.
- Apparent Defeat: The man crosses the bridge in heavy snow after Potter’s money goes missing.
- Visit to death: The dystopian version of the man’s town if he had never lived, shown to him by the angel.
- Freedom: Return to his utopian home town, running down the street to a warm house full of friends.
Citizen Kane: “A man who tries to force everyone to love him ends up alone.”
- State hero’s values.
- Reveal moral weakness and need, what he has to learn.
- Commit the first immoral action as an outgrowth of the weakness.
- Hero develops a goal that leads him into conflict with an opponent.
- The hero and opponent act against each other to reach the goal.
- Hero begins to lose, taking increasingly immoral actions in his desperation.
- Other characters criticize the hero and he tries to justify his actions
- Hero becomes obsessed to win and his immoral actions intensify.
- The final battle decides the goal.
- Hero takes one last action (moral or immoral) just before or during battle.
- Hero has a self-revelation about how to act properly and drives the theme home.
- The hero chooses between two courses of action to prove moral self-revelation.
- The thematic revelation expands the message beyond the hero to the world in general.
I'm not sure I'd take this approach to the letter, but if you do feel you are smacking your reader with your theme and you're not sure why it stands out so much, I'd just use this as a checklist. You may have started hammering it too soon.
Conversely, if you feel your theme is lost, double check that you have integrated it into the story as a whole, and not just as an "ah ha!" moment at the very end.
After rereading this chapter three times over the course of a couple weeks, I finally feel prepared to summarize it.
One of the more enlightening elements of the chapter is the idea of a character web. Great heroes are not created alone, but as part of an entire cast of allies, opponents, and combinations of the two that are carefully designed to draw out his weakest and strongest qualities. Never just create a minor character merely to fill a plot role, sculpt that personality to highlight something about the hero.
Two interesting variations on character were the fake-ally opponent—someone who seems to be on the hero’s side but ultimately is not, such as Blanche’s sister in A Streetcar Named Desire. And the fake-opponent ally, someone who seems to be against the hero, but ultimately helps, such as Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.
As Truby prattled on about archetypes, I found myself uninterested in kings, warriors, shamans, and rebels, but ready to get on to the real work of creating the hero.
Truby had very specific steps:
1. Make him constantly fascinating
2. Make the audience identify with him, but not too much
3. Make the audience empathize, not sympathize (understand his motivations, not just react emotionally)
4. Give your hero a both a psychological need (something to fix about himself) and a moral need (something to fix that affects how he treats others.)
5. Make your character change over his arc, and not just at the end. He should be a range of possibilities from the beginning, naturally falling into his self revelation just prior to, during, or right after the climactic battle.
6. Create a strong desire line—a very specific goal that is clearly accomplished (or, in a tragedy, failed)
7. Give him an opponent who is necessary, constantly in the way, and after the same thing as the hero.
8. Make the opponent human, not a cardboard bad guy, who personifies a different set of moral values than the hero, but with still a strong (if flawed) moral argument.
9. Make the opponent have similarities to the hero. They should not be extreme opposites, and often have the same goal, just go after it in different ways.
10. Always keep the opponent near, working against the hero.
11. Build minor characters as variations of the hero’s weakness and moral needs
One point I took away from this chapter is that the opponents in all my books were too extreme-end bad guys. They needed motivations of their own, ones that the audience could understand, to make them real people. I also loved the idea that someone in the story could seem to be working against the hero, but was helping her all the time. Isn't that how it so often works in real life? A teacher, a coach, a coworker, or a difficult friend turns out to be the very thing you needed to push you all along.
I've got work to do!
Everything past the blockbuster blurb lies solely in the work the author has put into a well-rounded story. It's a point that lit up the bulb for me on one of my own high-concepts. I really DID only have two or three good scenes, the rest either "showing character" or "leading up to the big moment." Every scene must stand on its own with a beginning, middle, and end.
In Chapter 3, Truby gives us the seven key steps of story structure. They are:
1. Weakness and need
2. Desire
3. Opponent
4. Plan
5. Battle
6. Self revelation
7. New equilibrium
Mostly they are self-evident, but Truby made a few points I paused to consider:
The hero should not be aware of his need at the beginning of the story (the need, of course, being what is required to overcome his weakness and grow as a character.)
Another point I had never considered is the difference between moral needs and psychological needs. Truby is adamant that you need both.
A psychological need is something internal, a flaw that affects only the character.
A moral need means a character is harming at least one other person.
This is completely separate from the external desire, which is the plot device--the journey that moves the story forward. The desire is usually the plot line, the high concept, the one-sentence summary. Both the needs and the desire must be there.
The desire is on the surface (saving the galaxy, finding the murderer, having a baby despite the risks.)
The need below the surface (to find his place in the world, to prove himself worthy of the detective job, to believe in life when your own has been miserable and painful.)
Most of us have a pretty good handle on plan and battle, as these are easy to glean from movies and good books, but the self-revelation is the point where the hero sees himself honestly in light of his own moral and psychological need. The most obvious self-revelations come in movies like Big, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, and Dances with Wolves.
I won't go into chapter four, characterization just yet. It's a big chunk of the book and probably worthy of more than one post. Overall, though, I'm finding Truby's book way too big and too full of information to handle easily. I'm summarizing to motivate myself beyond a surface read and tiny lessons. The big picture is really not simply too much to handle in one read, but too much to handle in a year a study. Truby should probably go the way of workbooks for anyone to get real use of his book, but The Anatomy of Story is probably a good supplement to his workshops.
Trying to read and absorb this book in one sitting is like trying to defend yourself in a lawsuit after reading a single book on tort. Even if you know your case intimately, and even if you are passionate about learning enough to do the job right, you simply can't get the whole context.
John Truby is a polarizing figure among writers. Some believe his methods, including his much maligned Truby's Blockbuster Screenwriting Software is evil incarnate, everything that is unoriginal, trite, rehashed, and formulaic. Others feel he is the most brilliant storyteller of all time and credit him with teaching them everything they didn't understand about how stories work.
I am good friends with writers in both camps, but I've never looked much into his methodology. While at the library, I happened to randomly spot his book The Anatomy of Story. So I picked it up.
I'm going to summarize and review the book as I go along, both as something to forward to my writing groups, and as a way for me to absorb the lessons. He has a lot to say about story structure, and fifty pages in, I'm already swimming in concepts that I possibly do naturally, but will take a lot of introspection to iron out consciously.
The first chapter, "Story Space, Story Time," has a chip on its fifteen-page shoulder. Truby simultaneously blasts the three-act structure and the beat system (take THAT, Save the Cat) and repeatedly reminds us that his way, the way he will illustrate in the next 421 pages, is The Way, or in his words, "internal, organic, interconnected, and original." He hammers the lesson, until the nail is buried in the beam, that other methods are "external, mechanical, piecemeal, and generic."
I found his defensiveness a little offputting, something that belonged in promotional hype rather than the book itself. But I was already getting stirred up as I read, thinking about my own stories in different ways, so I plodded on.
What Truby does best is give us his samples of his vast cinema knowledge, rattling off story premises as if he has IMDB downloaded between the ears. His narrative voice is trustworthy and confident, and we feel certain that if we called to chat him up, he could still pull twenty story lines out of thin air to demonstrate any point.
Chapter two, "Premise," hurls ten steps in rapid succession.
1. Write something that may change your life (list all the story ideas you have and find themes that matter to you)
2. Look for what's possible (consider all your options for the story before running off prematurely with one)
3. Identify challenges and problems (and conquer them before writing)
4. Find the designing principle (figure out your method of organizing the story)
5. Determine your best character (let the lead be the most interesting person)
6. Get a sense of the central conflict (who fights whom over what?)
7. Get a single cause-and-effect pathway (narrow it down to ONE--the thread the other paths flow from)
8. Determine your hero's possible character change (and they must change--start with that critical weakness)
9. Figure out the hero's moral choice (and make the choice two almost equal things, not a good and bad choice)
10. Gauge audience appeal (don't write only for yourself if you can write for yourself and others too)
This was a lot of information to take in. I don't think the breakneck pace served the reader well, but maybe Truby didn't put a lot of stock in the first ten steps, and later ones will be more clearly delineated, or build and expand on these.
