UPDATE: The legendary Anne Lamott is raising donations for the Obama campaign. She and her hordes have already raised over $70,000, exceeding her original goal of $10,000 by—let’s see, that would be—seven times over.

And you can join her! Please do.

Never doubt that thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.—Margaret Mead

Now, as far as genius, you think I’m going to say, “Shut up and write,” don’t you? But unfortunately that won’t make you a genius. It won’t even make you a writer. That will only make you a scribbler, which isn’t a bad thing to be, at all. . .but it’s not the same thing. We’ve talked about 2 Tricks for Breaking Writer’s Block in One Day. And 3 Tricks for Ratcheting Tension in One Day. And 4 Tricks for Improving Your Fiction in One Day.

So now I’ll reveal the real secret to becoming a genius, particularly a genius writer. Pay close attention.

1. Realize what exactly genius is

   What do you mean by, “becoming a genius”?

   Do you mean, “having extraordinary intelligence granted to me without me lifting a pinky”?

   Do you mean, “being recognized by the smartest people on earth”?

   Do you mean, “relishing every spec of living I possibly can in the few fleeting years granted to me on this planet—years I see flashing past me more and more quickly the older I get—because, baby, we’re none of us getting any younger”?

   • Extraordinary intelligence doesn’t come to anyone without them lifting a pinky.

     Extraordinary intelligence is developed by the constant creative use of the the brain. How much of your time do you spend using your brain creatively—developing your skills with logic and critical analysis of the things that truly matter to you, using all five senses to perceive your moment-by-moment experience of life to the fullest capacity, asking not just, “What do I think or believe or feel?” but, “What do I think and believe and feel that I would never have guessed about myself?”

     Do you have the courage to face your disowned self? Honestly, truly face it?

     Eight hours of that will ratchet your genius for human understanding—the core of all storytelling—through the ceiling.

   • Being recognized by the smartest people on earth involves being seen by them.

     And on an increasingly crowded planet, that means not getting the attention of those recognized in the media—how smart could Charlie Sheen be anyway?—but finding the unrecognized geniuses who walk among us every day and devoting yourself to learning what they know. Apprenticing yourself to them. Earning their recognition.

     Would Einstein have been as smart if nobody had ever heard of him? Yes. Was Franz Kafka a great literary and philosophical genius even though he died before anyone ever found out? Yes.

     Who can you identify in your life right now who’s one of the smartest people on earth?

     Eight hours of listening at their knee will teach you the secret uniqueness—the core of all memorable storytelling—of their genius.

   • Relishing every spec of living you possibly can in the fleeting years granted you starts right now.

     Let me tell you a story, okay?

     My husband and I spent this weekend working on our house, even though we burned ourselves out on it so badly when we built it four years ago that we’re still content to live with subfloor on the stairs and big, gaping holes for lag bolts in the hall floor and cracks you can see light through where there’s supposed to be trim.

     We really hate working on the house.

     So late yesterday we were in the attic, me on the stairs exhausted from moving stacks of flooring, him on his knees cutting a piece of wood. He glanced up and said, “Are you okay?” and I said, “I’m just thinking. It looks like I’m in pain when I do that, I know.”

     And we started laughing.

     In that instant I knew what we’ll remember when we’re old and sick and frail and, maybe, there’s only one of us left alone in this world. (I spent a lot of time with my grandfather after my grandmother died. I know what it’s going to be like.) We’re not going to care that we were working on the house even though we hate working on the house, or that we were exhausted and bruised and filthy, thinking about bills and work and mortgages and the difficulties of raising a teen.

     We’re going to long with every fiber of our being to be back in that over-heated attic together at the end of that long, hard Sunday. . .laughing.

     And knowing that—knowing I’m already living the life I long for with all my heart—you better believe. . .that’s genius.

   How close are you to being a genius right now?

NOTE: I’m offline for the rest of August working on my second book on writing, The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual, to be released September 30.

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We’re talking this month about instantaneous ways to improve craft—because, as Carrie Fisher says, “Instant gratification takes too long.” We’ve talked about 2 Tricks to Breaking Writer’s Block in One Day. And 3 Tricks to Ratcheting Tension in One Day.

Now let’s talk about how you can use your own life to improve your fiction. . .in one day.

1. What do you most want?

   Protagonists are people who want.

   And when you’re talking about characters who want things badly enough to keep readers intrigued for 300 pages, you’d better know those characters inside and out. In fact—you’d better know them as well as you know yourself.

   Know what drives you through life. That’s the best drive to give your protagonists.

   Most of the great writers wrote the same character over and over again under different names, in different plots, throughout their lives. Those particular characters have the motivations those particular writers understand. Deeply. Profoundly. In the magnificent, complex manner necessary to write about it.

   Raymond Chandler wrote a whole series of characters exactly like Phillip Marlowe before he finally settled on the name, career, and face of Marlowe.

2. Why can’t you have it?

   What the hell is wrong with you?

   That’s what the hell is wrong with your protagonist.

   And don’t mistake this to mean it’s something outside of you. Of course you’re strapped for cash, tied to a job, inevitably tethered to the need to make a living. But your need to survive lives inside you. And that’s an excellent need to impose upon a protagonist.

   You’re also desperate for love and understanding, lonely, frustrated, trapped alone in a tormented little skull without the skills or confidence to survive what you have to do just to survive. That’s also all going on inside you. Another excellent need.

   Why do you think so many books are built around protagonists torn between a fight to stay alive and the need to be loved?

   Even Pride and Prejudice—with Austen’s pivotal exploration of entailment and the precarious futures of disinherited young gentlewomen—is about nothing but love and survival.

3. How are you buying into this?

   Make no mistake about it: you are.

   And that’s what makes you interesting. Otherwise, you’re just a blob.

   That’s what makes your protagonist interesting, too. Internal conflict. How are they buying into their own nightmare? What inside them keeps them strung up on their own self-made scaffold? What makes them kick? What makes them kick over the chair?

   If you’re not interested enough in human nature to sink to this level of self-examination, to bare your chest to the elements, to admit to this severe of self-sabotage (and you have it—we all do), you’re simply not tough enough to write fiction.

   Emily Bronte exposed her guts in Wuthering Heights. Self-loathing doesn’t get any more fascinating than that.

4. What would force you to choose?

   Because eventually you’re going to choose.

   In your life. And in your fiction.

   This is what readers read for: what do you choose when you can’t have it both ways? How do you make sense of a life that is, in the final hour, senseless?

   Everyone reads to learn how life makes sense. You’re here to drag the ultimate nightmare—what if life doesn’t make sense?—out into the light and reveal it for what it really is: angel or devil, creation or destruction, incandescent hope or crippling despair.

   Nothing less.

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

NOTE: I’m offline for the rest of August working on my second book on writing, The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual, to be released September 30.

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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 ratchet 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 identify—with a scene in which Tom Ripley scurries down a busy street escaping in great distress a man obviously following him, whom Tom believes is a police officer set 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—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 paragraphs. Cut scenes. 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 sky-high 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

NOTE: I’m offline for the rest of August working on my second book on writing, The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual, to be released September 30.

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Last week I talked to a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile who’s writing a memoir. She told me she was having a lot of trouble with it—she can’t make herself write about a particular incident she seriously needs to write about.

She asked me if I had any advice: does 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 couple of lines 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 Ratcheting Tension 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

Note: I’m offline for the rest of August. That’s right—three whole weeks incognito. I’m working on my second book on writing, The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual, to be released September 30.

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This is a special midweek post, not part of my regular blog series, to make a long overdue announcement—I’ve been working all summer on the sequel to The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual.

I call it The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual, and I expect to release it September 30th.

That’s in time for all you NaNoWriMo writers to read it and use it for a whole month before you fling yourselves out of your airplanes into thin air. I’m thinking of it as a parachute.

And for every single one of you who’s ever gotten yourself passionately worked up over the depth and brilliance of your fictional world, dashed to your keyboard to plunge headlong into the splendor of this work, written and suffered and gloried hour after hour, day after day, in your incandescent vision, and come up gasping some weeks or months or even years later to stone-cold writer’s block with the heart-stopping realization you have no idea what you’re doing. . .this one’s for you.

In The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual I tackled this work we do globally—on all three levels, Developmental, Line, and Copy, with a whole section on how to survive as a writer.

In The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual I’m focusing only on Developmental Issues: plot structure and character development, with a large section on storytelling—what it is, how to do it, what readers get out of it and why—plus in-depth advice on revision on a Developmental level, that eternal Pandora’s Box of writing.

Here’s the Table of Contents:

INTRODUCTION
The State of the Industry: Fiction

PART 1: STORYTELLING

Chapter 1: Loving in the Time of Cholera with Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Chapter 2: Searching for Entertainment-Industry Intelligence

Chapter 3: How Stories are Written

Accepting the Gullibility of Being a Storyteller
Reviewing the Definition of a Story
Reviewing the Defintion of Fiction
Reviewing the Purpose of Storytelling
Character Arc/Narrative Arc

Chapter 4: Relationship & Quest—the Only Two Stories

Mining Yourself
Distinguishing Between Together & Alone
Molding & Being Molded by Relationship
Aiming Past Ecstasy through Quest

Chapter 5: Reading with Attention

Reading for Plot Design
Reading for Character Development

Chapter 6: Creating Reader Addiction

Creating the Basic Tension in Character
Creating the Basic Tension in Plot

Chapter 7: Creating Reader Fulfillment

Touching Your Reader’s Core with Resonance
Playing Fair with Resonance

Chapter 8: Graphing in Three Dimensions with (x,y,z)—Theme

Chapter 9: Drawing a Visual Analogy

Drawing an Icon
Applying the Analogy to Storytelling

PART 2: CHARACTER IS CONTENT

Chapter 10: Being Mesmerized with Louisa May Alcott

Chapter 11: Hunting the Ghost Tiger

Taking the Tiger by the Tail
Focusing on the Tiger

Chapter 12: Developing Character

Differentiating Between Yourself & Your Reader
Getting What Your Reader Gets Out of Character
Sucking Your Reader in with Sympathetic Character

Chapter 13: Condensing & Contrasting Characters

Condensing Multiple Characters into One
Condensing Characters for Internal Conflict
Condensing Characters for Contrast

Chapter 14: Using Character

Using Character to Discover Plot
Using Character to Fuel Momentum
Using Character to Addict Your Reader

Chapter 15: Layering Character—Complexity

Layering with Behavior
Layering with Confusion
Layering with the Two Classical Elements

PART 3: PLOT IS CONTEXT

Chapter 16: Designing an Impossible Plot with Maria Dermout

Chapter 17: Beating Your Drum—Introduction to Holographic Structure

Chapter 18: Designing a Crescendo—Explication of Holographic Structure

Fatal Ignition
Backstory
Three Acts
Two Plot Points
One Fulcrum
Feinting
The Whole Point

Chapter 19: Layering Plot—Complexity in Holographic Structure

Main Plot
Subplots
Plot threads

Chapter 20: Hook—Holographic Structure, Act I

Act I Hook, hook & development
Act I Hook, faux resolution & climax: Fatal Ignition
Act I, Backstory
Act I Conflict #1, hook & development
Act I Conflict #1, faux resolution & climax: First Plot Point

Chapter 21: Development—Holographic Structure, Act II

Act II Conflict #2, hook & development
Act II Conflict #2, faux resolution & climax: Fulcrum
Act II Conflict #3, hook & development
Act II Conflict #3, faux resolution & climax: Second Plot Point

Chapter 22: Climax—Holographic Structure, Act III

Act III Faux Resolution, hook & development
Act III Faux Resolution, anti-faux resolution & climax: Feinting
Act III Climax, hook & development
Act III Climax, faux resolution & climax: the Whole Point

Chapter 23: More Climax

Pinpointing Your Climax
Structuring Your Climax
Making a Scene Out of Your Climax
Building Total, Complex, Overwhelming Significance into Your Climax

Chapter 24: Epiphany—Beyond Holography

PART 4: REVISION

Chapter 25: Writing and Rewriting with Franz Kafka

Chapter 26: Vision & Revision: the Story You Need to Tell

Rethinking Motivation—Character Arc
Reorganizing Events—Narrative Arc
Re-ignoring Theme

Chapter 27: Reshuffling Your Deck—Planning the Revision

Brainstorming
Overall Organization
Scene-by-Scene Arc
Intuition
Fun
Staying in Motion
Resting When Necessary
Rewriting Out of Chronology
Taking Notes
A Word of Warning about Resolution

Chapter 28: Spiraling Up the Helix—Multiple Drafts

First Draft
Second Draft
Third Draft
Nth Draft
Final Draft

Chapter 29: Going Beyond the Beyond

CONCLUSION

‘Riding Out the Winter of Our Discontent

I’ve opened up a discussion on the Amazon page for The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual asking for input on exactly what you’d like to see in this sequel, The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual. Please—if you have a wish list, put it out there! Now’s the time. I’m sending preliminary ARCs to a few select reviewers in the next couple of weeks, but I can still squeeze in another chapter or two.

I know I should have been asking you folks for your input throughout the summer. I know. But I’ve been all over the map traveling with my husband for work, and my client load has been huge, keeping me up to my eyeballs in the luxurious world of working one-on-one with you crazy people (you know who you are), so I’ve been slacking.

I apologize.

Stop being so damn fun to work with, people! You know who you are.

And if you’re too excited to wait, everyone on The Art & Craft of Fiction Lab is reading The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual chapter-by-chapter right now. We’re talking about each chapter. Readers are offering opinions. We’re hashing things out.

You know you’re always welcome to join us!

NEXT YEAR: The Art & Craft of Prose: 3rd Practitioner’s Manual

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