I love the idea that so much of learning to write well starts the instant you learn it. What a fabulous craft! Last week we learned 2 Tricks for Breaking Writer’s Block in One Day. Now for the rest of the month we’ll be talking about other tricks that also work in one day.

We’re always hearing about how we need to increase the tension in our stories, how we need to get ahold of the reader by the lapels and never let go.

But how?

1. Curiosity

   Don’t answer your questions the minute you ask them.

   Give the reader time to wonder. Who is that suspicious character? Why are they involved with your protagonist? Why is your protagonist reacting the way they’re reacting?

   You’re constructing a puzzle, and the reader keeps turning pages to collect the clues and discover whether or not they’ve solved it correctly.

   Patricia Highsmith began The Talented Mr. Ripley—about a man who drifts into murder for the sake of wealth and a new identity—with a scene in which Tom Ripley scurries down a busy street escaping in great distress a man obviously following him, who Tom believes is a police officer sent to bust him for one of his confidence tricks. He’s not from the police, it turns out. In fact he doesn’t mean Tom harm at all. He’s just desperate to offer Tom the opportunity of a lifetime.

2. Cutting

   Don’t let your final draft ramble.

   Far too many aspiring writers write and write and write and forget to revise out the standard 75%. Go ahead and write everything you can discover about any given scene, but then go back later and cut everything you possibly can—almost all exposition, every possible dialog tag (especially internal dialog), every single extraneous scrap (choose one action instead of two or three, one line of dialog instead of back-&-forth, one pivotal descriptive detail). Cut scenes. Cut paragraphs. Cut sentences, phrases, individual words. Trim it down to the lean, mean bones.

   James M. Cain packed so much into so few, simple words that his classic novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity read like explosions.

3. Contradiction

   Don’t let your stories lie flat.

   Toss them like hot potatoes from one plotline to another. Now we’re startled. Now we’re entranced! Now we’re scared. Now we’re intrigued! Now we’re freaked out of our seats. Now we’re flying high. . .

   Zane Grey, the granddaddy of all great adventure stories—from which sprang such modern post-apocalyptic blockbusters as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—wove double plotlines through his novels so thickly the reader is forced to let go the reins early on, so they wind up airborne without either wings or parachute by the end of the Hook.

And that’s where you want your reader: in the air, out of control, completely possessed by an ungovernable urge to discover what on earth your story is all about.

NEXT WEEK: 4 Tricks for Improving Your Fiction in One Day

FINALLY: 1 Secret Trick to Becoming a Genius Writer in One Day

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The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special club that gets to read this book.”—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel


The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

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We’re going to spend this month talking about tricks of the trade that work in one day. There are a lot of them, and with all of us struggling to juggle work, family, social life, and writing (plus all that time we wind up paying attention to marketers to whom we don’t even want to pay attention). . .we need ‘em.

This is all because last week I ran into to a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile who’s writing a memoir. I asked her how things were going. We talked a bit about a time a couple of years when she’d told me she was having a lot of trouble with it—she couldn’t make herself write a particular incident she needed to write.

She’d asked me if I had any advice: did she need a class? a group? a coach?

Now, I do this kind of work with writers all the time, helping them write what they need to write when they need to write it, so, yeah, I had some advice for her.

And I’ll give it to you too, in case you’re ever up against a similar block.

Groups and classes can help if all you need is a little peer pressure to get yourself in gear, but they can make it worse if you’re really struggling with an emotional block and find yourself embarrassed to be unable to break through, especially in front of others. So before you invest in anything try these two tricks:

1. Permission

   Give yourself permission to pause and write about this issue whenever it strikes you, even if it’s only a line or two between work projects that you can go back to and develop later.

2. Details

   Whenever you do have a chunk of time in which you’d like to write, focus first on recording some concrete, neutral, unrelated details—what you had for lunch, the view from where you’re sitting, some conversation you had recently—to kind of grease the writing wheels so the words will come out of you more easily.

Frequently it’s the effort to make two transitions at once (the transition into writing mode plus the transition into a safe emotional space) that can cause this kind of writer’s block, and it helps to take them one at a time.

Remember: you’re writing what you write not to bind yourself ever-more tightly in your painful emotional paralysis, but to free yourself so you can live this one life you get as fully as humanly possible.

NEXT WEEK: 3 Tricks for Increasing the Tension in Your Story in One Day

THE WEEK AFTER: 4 Tricks for Improving Your Fiction in One Day

FINALLY: 1 Secret Trick to Becoming a Genius Writer in One Day

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The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special club that gets to read this book.”—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel


The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

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And now that we’ve plotted wrong, characterized wrong, and written wrong. . .let’s talk about how to sit down with that baby and revise it wrong.

1. Be obsessed with letting your language ‘breathe’

This is code for: “Be unwilling to revise anything but inexcusable errors and typos.” This is because you must trust, you must trust in the process (didn’t your Discount Life Coach tell you that only last week?), you must understand that those words in that order in those sentences came out of you by Divine Inspiration and cannot be tampered with without losing their ‘freshness’ and ’spark.’

‘Freshness’ and ’spark’ being code for: “Accidentally getting it right.” Because you don’t actually have a clue what you’re doing.

Experience? Practice? Education? Time-tested techniques for shaping, honing, polishing written language? What do you think you are, a buffing wheel?

Don’t waste your time on rewriting stuff you’ve already written, whatever you do. Think about how many more books you could publish if you stopped worrying about how the last one turned out and got busy on the next. You’d be a millionaire in no time!

This is why so many people are self-publishing books these days with titles like God Wants You to Write.

2. Look for guidance only from peers on unsupervised critique forums

Because, as we all know, money always flows toward the writer. So be sure to get everything you need to become a successful author for nothing, as a fool and their money are soon parted.

At least you hope so. After all, you’re counting on lots and lots of fools out there with lots and lots of money to buy this book you’re accidentally writing in spite of yourself.

3. Be correct that your peers have little to teach you

   Well, it’s true.

   Which is why it’s so easy to dismiss them as callow unbelievers if they actually suggest revisions. Or—heaven forbid—going back to the drawingboard.

   The problem is that your peers don’t know any more about this work than you do. So their opinions, no matter how well-meaning, can’t possibly be any more than amateurs’ surface reactions to a deep, complex, multifaceted craft no one has ever completely mastered before they died. Not even Stieg Larsson.

   The truth is that you’re probably an unrecognized genius—that’s why your critiquers misunderstand you. I mean, what expertise are they going to use to recognize you with? They’re a bunch of amateurs.

   Except the ones who are even more amateur than you are, of course. Those guys love you!

You are the only real authority on your own work, unlike all those OCD nitpickers who style themselves ‘experts.’ (Good thing publishers have unloaded most of them.) Publishers are a big, shiny store window. You are a customer.

And the customer is always right.

I only know this stuff because I’ve been there.

---

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special club that gets to read this book.”—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel


The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

---

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Last week we learned how to characterize wrong. The week before that we learned how to plot wrong.

And today I’m going to teach you how to cripple your book so that—even if your plot is maximum overdrive and your characterization nothing short of brilliant—no one in the industry will touch it with a ten-foot pole.

So let’s get busy and write wrong:

1. Model your writing on crap

If the single best way to learn to write well is to study the literary canon with enormous care and all the intelligence you can muster to learn the techniques of the greats. . .that makes the single best way to learn to write wrong reading nothing but cheap modern crap and telling yourself, ‘If they can get away with that, I can get away with anything.’

Because writing is all about ‘what you can get away with,’ isn’t it? Heaven forbid it should be a highly-developed craft with a long and illustrious history of hard work, dedication, and sometimes real genius behind it.

It’s a slot machine!

Garbage in, garbage out.

2. Believe the uber-marketing hypesters who tell you, “The writing doesn’t matter”

So don’t waste your time actually learning how to write, people. The writing doesn’t matter. Throw your random, half-baked ideas into unpolished words—your ideas, your brilliant ideas that no one, not even the geniuses in the history of literature, ever, ever, ever thought of before—and shove them PDQ down the Golden Query Chute. And that deafening silence you get in reply? That just means they’re too busy shuffling through the mountains of shlock everyone else who doesn’t care about the writing keeps shoveling through their mail slots—they can’t recognize natural talent anymore when they see it.

It’s the era of entitlement! And you’re entitled to be rich and famous.

Don’t pause to learn how to write. You don’t have time. (Why not? I don’t know. But you don’t.) Just keep on shoveling. Someone’s bound to be young, inexperienced, and/or desperate enough to take you on. And after that—whoa!—it’s Easy Street.

Move over, J.K. Rowling.

3. Be in a hurry to get published

And this is why it’s best to read only stuff being shoveled as fast as possible through the chute right now, this minute—because that will show you what sells.

No, you don’t have a famous name or a devoted following of hundreds of thousands or insider knowledge of how writing and modern publishing work, like the best sellers who—for business reasons of their own—often no longer have the time to polish their work properly before they publish it.

But you’re going to skip right over that little detail. What they do you can do.

Without their famous name. Or their reputation. Or their understanding of the craft and industry. Or their publisher. Or their agent. Or their mega-numbers of readers. I guess. . .

So, when in doubt, be sure to ramble on for pages in exposition, explaining your story in vague abstractions for that dimwit you expect to buy it (a fool and their money, yesirree), substitute noises you make up yourself for dialog (“Waaaghghghgh! Nngngng. Uh, dunno, duncare”), brand names for telling details (doesn’t everyone know brand names? I mean, we’re all glued to our shopping malls and TV commercials together, right?), and the verb ‘grab’ for every action you possibly can (“She grabbed the door, ran in the house and grabbed her keys, grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge, and as she ran out he jumped out from behind the door and grabbed her”).

Your reader will get the general idea. Because these days readers don’t read books carefully, anyway, only buy them for the famous names on the covers (although you did, you admit, skip over that little detail). And since they’re reading standing in line to buy cheap plastic crap they don’t need, anyway, that’s all they care about.

Literature? It’s the twenty-first century, people! We don’t need no stinkin’ literature.

Next week we learn how to revise wrong.

Naturally, none of this helps at all if we don’t know 9 Ways to Find the Time to Write.

Hi, my name is Victoria, and I have written mountains of shlock. But I didn’t publish it—not most of it, anyway—and I’m working to get better now, one day at a time.

UPDATE: Phyllis K. Twombly has added: Neglect Feedback; Ignore Concepts Within One’s Chosen Genre; Don’t Research

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The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special club that gets to read this book.”—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel


The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

---

Subscribe:

Last week we learned how to plot wrong. That was fun! Now we all know how to do it so nobody will ever be interested and our stories will never get published, much less read.

Interestingly enough, when I wrote this whole series two years ago it was the post on how to characterize wrong that got all the attention.

So I’m going to send you on over to that original post to find out why.

What you’ll learn over there is something I learned—not by reading lots of books on writing or taking lots of classes or attending a lot of writers workshops or following lots of blogs—but by studying storytelling. Novels. Stories. Ballads.

The real thing.

And I want to remind you: you should be learning the bulk of your craft this way too.

It’s all about the real thing.

Next week we talk about how to write wrong.

And the week after that we talk about how to revise wrong.

Plus, of course, we need 9 Ways to Find the Time to Write.

---

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special club that gets to read this book.”—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel


The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

---

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I’ve got a logger out there felling big trees around my meadow today—zzzzz, BOOM, instant sunshine!—so I’m just popping in very quickly to let you all know that I heard from Writer’s Digest this morning that my blog has been judged one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers 2013.

I know I’m supposed to thank my mother and my father and all the people who ever taught me about writing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. . .but I’m not going to.

I’m going to thank you.

You guys. You’re the ones who make it worthwhile!

Thank you all!

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The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special club that gets to read this book.”—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel


The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

---

Subscribe:

April is the cruelest month.
—T.S. Eliot

Apparently bank clerks really have a hard time with April. Of course, the last person you’d expect to write canonical poetry is a bank clerk.

So I’m going to spend the month of April talking about how to do everything backward. There’s nothing like doing something wrong to bring out the unique creativity of the individual.

Let’s start with plot, because that’s the simplest thing to learn and therefore the simplest thing to screw up:

1. Hook at the wrong place

Most aspiring writers have no idea what they’re going to write about in their novels—they just sit down and dive into something that seems interesting. And that’s a lot of fun! Whee, doggies. Who are these characters? What are they doing here? What are they up against? Why don’t they know it?

And this last bit is what bites them in the butt—Why don’t they know it? Because the writer doesn’t know it, that’s why. But the characters should know. They should be completely and shockingly clear on what they’re up against in the Hook. And they should be absolutely desperate to get it resolved.

When you launch into a story this way—expecting to keep this Hook in the final draft—all you do is share with your reader your own fogginess and indecision about your story. And they don’t want your fogginess and indecision. They have plenty of their own.

Unfortunately, your characters can’t possibly know, in all its depth and import, something you don’t know. You need to know why you’re starting where you start. That Hook casts its shadow forward over your entire novel.

2. Develop in the wrong way

And because these aspiring writers don’t know what their novels are about when they start writing them, they have no idea where to take them. They just keep writing scene after scene, bumbling along, feeling around in the dark, wondering what on earth is going on.

Again—all kinds of fun and excitement. For the writer. Beyond boring for the reader. The reader needs you to have already figured out what on earth is going on. Otherwise, they’ll go find a writer who has.

You would not believe how much of my time I spend kindly separating the wheat from the chaff for aspiring writers. “This scene is fabulous and gripping and carries your story forward exactly right,” I’m telling them. “These other ten scenes must have been great fun to write, I know. But they’re your background notes. They belong on your desk, not in your novel.”

If you could figure out just how much of my time that takes. . .you’d know just how much money you could save by doing that part for yourself.

3. Climax at the wrong place

And when these aspiring writers finally burn themselves out on all this random fantasizing, they tend to throw up their hands and end on the real point of all this for them: a long, detailed description of how happy all the characters are when they’re no longer struggling anymore. This can go on for a really long time. This can go on for chapters.

Which just caps off this exercise in writing for the sake of the writer. Unfortunately, this is vastly different from writing for the sake of the reader.

Even John Gardner was told to cut 1/3 of his 1970s magnum opus, The Sunlight Dialogues. (He did.)

Because this is the crux of the matter: you can write your first draft solely and entirely for your own sake if you like. Everyone knows how thrilling that is, what a pleasure to the writerly soul. We all wallow in it, to some extent or another. Otherwise, why would we be doing this work?

But if you want to sell that novel, that final draft must be plotted with unerring care and precision for the sake of your readers.

Next week we talk about how to characterize wrong.

The week after we talk about how to write wrong.

And the week after that we talk about how to revise wrong.

Plus, of course, we need 9 Ways to Find the Time to Write.

I can’t be the only person who learned all this the hard way.

---

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special club that gets to read this book.”—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel


The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

---

Subscribe:

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I’ve been on posting cartoons for my up-coming webinar through Writer’s Digest:

3 Secrets of the Greats: Structure Your Story for Ultimate Reader Addiction.

And now the Big Week has finally arrived.

Halleluah!

So I’ll tell you a little story about that. . .

ACT 1

Hook

I’m having a complicated week this week—but not as complicated as it could have been.

Backstory

You see, last fall I decided to scale back on blogging and editing and actually closed my editing business to new queries (unless someone has a story and passion for craft to which I simply cannot say no).

I wanted to spend more time with my teenage son, so I volunteered to work with our local high school radio station teaching the kids all aspects of writing: journalism, interviewing, debate, storytelling, comedy, all that good stuff.

Conflict #1

Then a couple of months ago, the teacher of the radio station asked me to come in during Alternative Education Week to help him shepherd a classroom of kids with little or no experience in storytelling through a week of filmmaking. I said, sure, I’d teach the kids how to tell a story in a short film. I don’t know beans about filming, but I can make sure that whatever they spend all week filming turns out to be entertaining in the end.

I’d have to be fingerprinted by the school district, but that’s okay because I’ve been fingerprinted for work with children a zillion times in my life. And if there’s one thing in this world I am completely absolutely 100% behind, it is protecting our kids from potential pedophiles.

Honestly, the only real difficulty I foresaw was the fact that the high school—for god only knows what reason—starts classes on Monday mornings at 8:00 am. I didn’t realize this beforehand because my son is homeschooled, so we get up whenever we darn well please around here.

It’s been an awful long time since I myself was forced to show my face at school at that ungodly hour.

I can’t tell you how I dreaded stumbling blurrily to my feet at 7:30 am in order to reach the high school by 8:00 and then try to appear even remotely intelligent in front of a bunch of teenagers who might possibly be looking to me to teach them something very important to their week.

But anyway, this filmmaking venture was set for this week:

April 8 — 12, Alternative Education Week at Mendocino High School.

ACT 2

Conflict #2

Now, about two minutes after I agreed to this, I was contacted by Writer’s Digest asking if I’d be interested in teaching a webinar on craft for them. I said, sure, there’s lots of aspects of craft I can teach that I don’t see commonly taught out there in the online community.

We tossed around some ideas and came up with structure—specifically, secrets of structure that no one else is teaching.

That’s why they’re secrets.

Then we talked about timing, and I said, let’s do it in the spring because my summers are always heck of busy with family travel and stuff. We settled on this Thursday:

Thursday, April 11, 1:00 EDT (noon CDT, 11 MDT, 10 PDT)

You all should be hearing Beethoven’s Fifth right about now.

Because—that’s correct—I had completely forgotten which week I’d agreed to teach writing at our high school for Alternative Education Week.

Faux-Faux Resolution

The thing is that I have a really strange memory. I can remember word-for-word conversations that took place among people around me forty years ago, but I can’t remember for thirty seconds why I went upstairs or what I meant to do when I got there. And I’m even worse about this, now that I’m past half-a-century on this planet, than ever in my entire life.

Which is, frankly, saying something.

Conflict #3

Luckily, I sent the Writer’s Digest email to my husband, who immediately responded, “What about AE Week?”

Faceslap.

I immediately contacted Writer’s Digest, and we messed around with dates and ideas for a special one-time webinar a different day of the week.

But it really just turned out they couldn’t find me another spot until mid-summer. And I didn’t want to do it in mid-summer. My family tends to travel, and I always take a week off in July, and it always all just turns into scheduling spaghetti.

So I finally said, “No problem, don’t worry, I’ll do both things that week, I’m sure it will all work out just fine.”

I mean—what could wrong wrong, right?

Right?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Act 3

Faux Resolution

So you can imagine my reaction when I got a call last Monday morning from the teacher of the Alternative Education Week informing me that he’d just learned from the high school that I needed to be fingerprinted and it could take up to thirty days to process through the police department.

I don’t care how bad you are at math, there’s not one of you out there bad enough to condense thirty days down to seven.

I was off the hook!

I didn’t have to get up at 7:30 am this morning!

Instead, I put together a PowerPoint presentation on storytelling and gave it to the filmmaking teacher—I wrote down everything he’d have to say, and I used a bunch of cartoons that I drew. And he was very happy with that.

Which means I have all week now to be charging my batteries and giving a final finesse to my Writer’s Digest webinar for you people.

Which can only work out better for everyone involved!

Climax

But, yeah, I am going to drop in on the filmmaking class briefly this morning to see how things are going.

Like they could keep me away.

And I still get to go to the party on Friday and be one of the judges.

So in the meantime, this Thursday at 1:00 EDT:

3 Secrets of the Greats: Structure Your Story for Ultimate Reader Addiction

We’ll all be there.

We’ll be saving a spot for you!

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UPDATE: Yeah—

“briefly this morning to see how things are going.” “What could go wrong, right? Right?”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

As it turned out, I dropped in just after lunch and learned that the filmmaking class had divided itself up into four teams making four films: three teams of three and one team (the entire gang from the alternative high school) of nine. Or ten. I lost count.

If any of you have—or have ever had—teens, you know the odds of nine of them cooperating without a leader on any massive project like, I don’t know, creating a film from scratch in one week with no previous experience.

So I was asked to go into the cage with the Big Team and help them put together their storyline.

Two hours later I staggered out with eyes like saucers and all my hair on end.

But we did get a three-act story plotted out in a series of scenes from Hook through Development to Climax with which they were all happy! So I went home and collapsed.

And now I have to take my son to the high school this afternoon, so I’ll “drop in briefly” again just to make sure they’re all still alive.

Pray for me.

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UPDATE AGAIN: I didn’t see the kids yesterday, except as a sort of ectoplasmic event on the horizon wandering the high school campus, but I was told that they’d decided:

1. they don’t all nine need to be present in order to shoot every single scene

2. they’re getting by without a director because they couldn’t agree on who should give orders to the others

So I’ve changed my mind: you don’t need to pray for me.

Pray for them.

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The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special club that gets to read this book.”—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel


The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

---

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Please: have a balloon!

In case you weren’t around for the excitement on Twitter last week and are right now sitting there scratching your head and wondering,

“What? A Balloon Order of Knights? What could that possibly be about?”

I’ll sum it up for you here—

Over 400 500 RTs and favoritings about my up-coming Writer’s Digest webinar on structure:

3 Secrets of the Greats: Structure Your Story for Ultimate Reader Addiction

Hot damn—I love you people!

So I awarded each and every one of you your very own balloon.

You bet.

Spontaneous party!

And this is exactly why I love working with you all, a writer among writing folk, living my life just Grateful to be a Writer.

So today instead of ranting about the writing of fiction, I’m going to show you a few of the cartoons I’ve drawn for my webinar next week. I’ll leave it to you to decide which ones are good things for your story and which are bad things.

Then next week in the webinar we’ll talk about what on earth I might mean by the remarkably erudite and academically technical terminology: “things” in:

3 Secrets of the Greats: Structure Your Story for Ultimate Reader Addiction

Thursday, April 11, at 1:00 pm EDT, noon CDT, 11:00 am MDT, 10:00 am PDT.

(I promise: That title is not hyperbole. I really will teach you how to create the difference between common garden-variety reader interest and reader addiction and between regular run-of-the-mill reader addiction and ultimate reader addiction.)

---

The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special club that gets to read this book.”—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel


The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

---

Subscribe:

We have this convention at our house where, whenever someone says something especially hilarious, we write it down on a yellow-sticky and stick it to the refrigerator.

As you can see, when you post yellow-stickies of your best dialog on your refrigerator, it eventually becomes a veritable blizzard of yellow-stickies. Especially if you live—as I do—with extremely witty people.

Dialog is tricky stuff.

So this week, instead of reproducing my original post on dialog, I’m going to send you all right on over to read it in all its original glory:

3 Reasons Dialog is Important, 3 Reasons It’s Not

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The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .demystifies essential aspects of craft while paying homage to the art.”—Millicent Dillon, five time O. Henry Award winner and PEN/Faulkner nominee

“Teeming with gold. . .makes you love being a writer because you belong to the special club that gets to read this book.”—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel


The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

“This book changed my life.”—Stu Wakefield, Kindle #1 best-selling author of Body of Water and Memory of Water

“Opinionated, rumbunctious, sharp and always entertaining. . .lessons of a writing lifetime.”—Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”—Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”—Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop

---

Subscribe: