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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
So this week let’s talk about how to handle character wrong. Because this one is trickier—character is a trickier element of fiction while, at the same time, an even more essential one than plot. It’s possible to get by on pretty darn thin plot, providing your characters are fascinating. But any kind of plot with boring characters is shlock.
Don’t write that stuff.
Give your protagonist only one need
This one happens a lot. I’ve done it a lot. Everyone’s always telling you, “Your protagonist needs a goal, your protagonist needs to be fighting for something.”
They need their beloved to fall in love with them
They need to survive a deadly plague from outer space
They need to not get killed by the bad guys
Which is all well and good. . .but why can’t they get it?
So you add a lot of complications—interfering ex’s, domineering relatives, cruel bosses, nosy neighbors, malicious space aliens, fickle and faint-hearted gods of doom who victimize your characters until you find yourself weeping into your keyboard. All very poignant and meaningful to you.
But when you show it to readers, they say, “You’re a perfectly good writer. But why do I care?” And when you show it to agents, they don’t even respond.
We don’t care about victims. We care about strong people fighting against themselves. This requires more than one overwhelming need: internal conflict.
Make your protagonist’s needs weak or trivial
And this leads to the the next issue, which is giving your protagonist two conflicting needs but making them so minor the reader can’t work up any interest.
They need to clean the house and they need to get Jeb back from the barn
They need to watch the game with their pals and they need their to prove they know the most about it
They need to win the popularity contest and they need not to chip their nails
Once again, it all seems terribly powerful and gripping to you, your readers like it, and when you show it to agents they say, “You’re a good enough writer, but somehow I couldn’t get into this particular story. It just didn’t speak to me.”
You know tension is important, and you’re wondering how to ratchet the tension on basically boring stuff. So you add complexities, other people’s agendas. And once again, you get the shake of the head, more final this time, and the slightly-crisp suggestion, “Maybe you should try another story.”
We don’t care about trivial conflicts. We have plenty of those of our own, which bore even us. We want stories about scary crap that affects lives.
Never force your protagonist to choose between their conflicting needs
So you think, ‘Aha! I know what’s wrong. Those two needs don’t matter enough.’ And you’re intensely pleased with yourself, because—you know what? You’re right.
So you give your protagonist two big, overwhelming, dastardly, fabulous needs, and you make them in stark opposition to each other.
They need to save the home they inherited from their tragically-dead parents that’s all they own and they need to survive a tornado/avalanche/desert island/inner-city gang war.
They need to save their boss’s reputation for the sake of their own career and they need to get their ex back from that boss.
They need to disable a covert operation aimed at world domination before all they hold dear is violated and they need to survive the bad guys’ ruthless efforts to thwart them.
Wonderful stuff! Gripping, intriguing, conflicting. Such an exciting story to write! Even your readers are cheering you on every step of the way. “I can’t put it down! Write faster.”
But in the end it’s still—just—a—flop.
And the agent who loved the premise, loved the story, loved you for coming up with the whole thing—stops taking your calls.
Because although your protagonist has those powerful conflicting internal needs (pride and survival, career and love, integrity and life) and even though those needs are huge and easy for even the most simple-minded reader to identify with, and even though you’re a perfectly good writer. . .your protagonist never has to choose.
They get out of it the easy way: by you letting them.
Sigh.
Make your characters fight themselves, make it important and painful, make ‘em choose. There is no other formula.
Can you believe it’s June already? You’d never know it from the weather on the Northern California Coast. It’s been pouring rain for days. It’s practically the Pacific Northwest.
So I’m going to spend the month of June talking about how to do everything backward. And I’m going to need your help with this. I’ve spent the bulk of my life learning everything about fiction the hard way, so I’m pretty conversant with that part, but there’s nothing like doing it wrong to bring out the unique creativity of the individual.
This conversation won’t realize its full potential without your creativity added to the mix.
Let’s start with plot, because that’s the simplest thing to learn and therefore the simplest thing to screw up:
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.
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.
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.
We’re talking about the pros and cons of the three aspects of scenes: description, action, dialog.
Now, as we all know, dialog is the mainstay of modern fiction. Raised in a world of television, radio, and telephones, we as an industrialized race are familiar with nothing if not the power of talk.
Dialog is important because:
Fiction is talking, and dialog is talking from the core of character
It’s words, all words. Words in your mind, words on the page, words in your characters’ mouths. That’s what fiction is. That’s what sets it apart from the other arts.
When you take that one step further—move from your own words to your characters’—you pull your reader that one step further into your imaginary world.
And writing is all about pulling your reader as far as humanly possible out of their world into yours.
We are social animals, and we socialize through speech
More than anything, your reader is human, and human beings need connection. When we speak to each other, we’re making connections to each other. When our characters speak to each other, they’re making connections to each other and to your reader.
Be aware of this at all times: your reader is in the room with your characters, listening to them talk and getting to know them through their conversation. That’s your magic pill! Take full advantage of it.
Readers love eavesdropping
Even better than hearing what they’re supposed to hear, readers love hearing what they’re not supposed to hear. She said that? He blurted out this? They confessed what?
The thrill of eavesdropping through fiction—rather than real life—is that no character ever says, “Our reader’s such an idiot.” And this sometimes does happen to eavesdroppers in real life.
It’s a win-win situation!
Dialog is not important because:
We say a lot more than anyone cares to hear
Even the most stoic non-conversationalist says more than they need to. Nobody gets the chance to go back and edit their own dialog. That means all that extra crap is always there.
Your job as a writer is to edit out the extra crap.
A great deal of real conversation is boring beyond boring
By far, the majority of what we say in real life is shorthand allowing us to cooperate on the things we want to do.
Do not inflict this on your reader. They don’t even listen to it when people they like say it.
Talk is cheap
What readers want is a story with legs.
Use dialog to introduce your reader to your characters, to reveal the hidden dramas inside that complicate the characters’ worlds all out of proportion, to move your plot always, inevitably forward toward the catastrophe that is the point of using all these words and characters to illuminate something about life that your reader needs to know. . .
You know how everyone’s always telling you “Show, Don’t Tell”? Well, that means “Write Scenes, Not Exposition.” So we’re spending three weeks covering the three aspects of scenes: description, action, dialog. Last week we did description. Next week we’ll do dialog. And this week we’re doing action.
Action is important because:
Fiction is about movement
This is the fundamental purpose of fiction: to get a protagonist from point A to point B with the greatest difficulty possible.
Don’t make it easy on them, whatever else you do. The excitement lies in the complications, the many and varied ways in which you can pull the rug out from under your characters and force them, time and again, to scramble to their feet with every ounce of strength and wit they’ve got. And the very best way to pull the rug out from under them is to give them needs and internal conflicts that make them pull it out from under themselves.
It may be possible to write an entire novel without action, but I’ve never seen it work. Even Virginia Woolf’s alarmingly passive classic To the Lighthouse is about—what else could it be?—a trip to a lighthouse. It’s not a long trip, and it gets canceled at least once. But, yeah. She did eventually have to send them.
And a novel packed with action is not only thrilling but gets from point A to point B. Making that journey the gist of the novel is the very stuff of great storytelling.
Readers are fascinated by characters in motion
You know how interesting people are when they never move? Uh-huh. Just about that interesting. How much time can you burn up watching your co-workers stare at their computer screens in their lonely little boring cubes?
You just fell out of your chair, didn’t you?
Now ask yourself why mysteries, paranormal, thrillers, romance, urban fantasy/sci-fi (contemporary Westerns) are such long-time staples of best-selling fiction. Because the characters never sit still.
In mysteries they’re always rushing around tracking down the activities of the other characters—except Rex Stout’s canonical Nero Wolfe, who spends most of his time tending his orchids and drinking beer while his sidekick Archie does the rushing around (there’s a really good reason those stories are told from Archie’s point-of-view rather than Wolfe’s).
In paranormal not only do the characters move, they move in really weird ways.
In thrillers they move at top-speed in terror for their lives (and thriller is the number one best-selling genre after romance).
In romance, of course, the ways they move tend to do things to the readers’ gonads.
And although Westerns have faded—to be replaced by urban fantasy/sci-fi, the new Wild West—it’s all about action. Westerns were riveting to generations of men who’d been raised to be intensely active boys and then wound up working rather less-active jobs in their adult lives. Urban fantasy/sci-fi readers can’t get enough of an industrial landscape much like the cities and even modern rural environments where children these days learn what adult activity is all about. . .sadly enough for those who grow up to while away their days among endless five-foot carpeted walls.
Action creates that essential visceral response
Of course, the whole purpose behind the purpose of fiction is visceral response.
Readers read for experiences. They want to suffer your characters’ traumas and learn through that suffering how to survive. They want to learn how it feels to survive.
That means viscerally. In their bodies. In their guts. In their hearts.
Have you ever read an action scene that made the hair stand thrillingly up on your head? That visceral response is the entire point of action scenes.
And if you can create that in your reader, you have earned the right to call yourself a writer.
Action is not important because:
Action is easy to screw up
And. . .that’s why not everyone who wants to become a best-selling thriller author does. Because action must be meticulously choreographed, tightly worded, designed and polished exactly right for maximum impact.
Aspiring writers screw up high-tension action scenes all the time, writing them long, writing them disorganized, writing them without even realizing they need to shape them perfectly, which means cutting every single word possible.
It is far easier to learn to shape scenes around simpler internal conflict—a conversation in which the characters misunderstand each other, or an exchange of information, or a moment of regaining balance—than around external conflict or action that requires perfect timing.
I spend a lot of my time teaching clients how to shape action scenes exactly right. It’s not easy. But it is essential if you want to use them.
Action is not plot
You can write all the action scenes you like, and if they don’t move your plot forward they’re still just churning mud. An endless number of perfectly-shaped fight scenes will eventually lose all but the most die-hard fight fans. And even those guys are probably already at the movies.
Every word you put into a story must be essential to getting the protagonist from point A to point B. If an action scene doesn’t do that. . .throw it out.
Action without meaning is just a windmill
Because, in the final analysis, we don’t read simply to learn how to act. We read to move alongside characters through their worlds toward and through their worst nightmares. It is the movement through the nightmare that has meaning. Everything else is set-up for that.
That meaningful action teaches your reader how to live.
This topic came from @__Deb, and it’s such a good idea I’m going to extrapolate from it for two more weeks, covering all three aspects of scene: description, action, dialog.
“Show, Don’t Tell.” Write scenes, not exposition.
Description is important because:
Details create the life on the page
If there is one key to the difference between amateur and professional writing, this is it.
Do you know why agents toss certain manuscripts aside without even pausing to roll their eyes? Not because they’re imps of Satan. But because they can often tell from a single page whether or not the writer has any experience at all with what they’re describing. And that authenticity is essential.
Do you know why Grisham sells? Not because he’s Dickens. But because he fills his novels with the telling details of his characters’ worlds. Those details make his shenanigans ring true—as though he’s chronicling the real adventures of real people.
Readers want that. Even when they’re freaking terrifying adventures.
Readers read for new experiences and new angles on old experiences
We all know how to live our own lives. I don’t need some faceless writer out there to tell me what it’s like to be me (although if they could tell me where my toothbrush has gone, that would be fab).
A great deal of incredibly poor storytelling gets bought and gobbled up every single day solely for the sake of the experiences described. Best sellers routinely set their stories in celebrity fat farms, tourist destinations (the Louvre!), cruise ships (the Titanic!), pretty much anywhere in New York City. Readers want to believe they are also celebrities, tourists, on a world cruise. (And some of the powers of the publishing world, apparently, want to believe everyone’s as interested in their hometown as they are.)
Give your reader an experience they couldn’t get without you.
Writing is about using your senses to recreate the world
Flannery O’Connor taught me this in her canonical work on writing, Mystery and Manners, decades ago, and it was an epiphany I’ve never gotten over. Five senses. All the words in your language. Put them together: a believable fictional world.
Description is not important because:
Setting is static, and character is dynamic
However, the reason stories aren’t entirely description is that readers don’t read only for the visual (or audio or olfactory or tactile). They can get that from a painting—and in less than a thousand words, too.
Readers read for character. They want to know how that charismatic rascal is going to pull yet another Houdini to extricate themself from whatever dreadful predicament they’ve gotten themself into. They want it to feel real, sure. But they really want it to move.
Readers want room to project themselves into your scenes
You’ll hear teachers, editors, and other mentors pussyfooting around this one—”Use enough detail, but not too much.”
How much is too much?
“You’ll just know.”
No, you won’t.
Too much is more than the absolutely bare-bones essential bits it takes to sketch this one scene with only those details the characters need in order to get through their story to the epiphany at the end. O’Connor used the general rule three telling strokes to sketch a character or scene.
If your scene has towering philodendrons and leafy maidenhair and fat succulents and towering ficas and leafy swordfern and fat nasturtiums and towering bamboo and leafy begonias and fat little lemon trees, and the characters need a sturdy flower, a lacey screen, and a long stick. . .pick what you need and leave the rest to the reader’s imagination.
Writing is about going beyond the senses into the very meaning of life
Which means even Emil Zola had a heck of a time creating great fiction out of purely Naturalistic description. He (and Dashiell Hammett, too) needed both action and dialog to flesh it out.
Fortunately, you actually can get beyond the senses through just the nuts & bolts of detail. That’s part of the magic of fiction. In fact, if you’ve crafted your story properly they can be pretty simple nuts & bolts.
One of my favorite endings ever is Raymond Chandler’s beautiful, “It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way—but not as far as Velma had gone.”
Even if he’d left off the exposition about Velma he’d have made his point, putting the reader into that simple final experience after the long, rich, complex experience of his novel—letting them understand for themself what the whole thing means.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too.
—Rudyard Kipling, “If”
So, last week I completely forgot to write about what I’d intended to write about, which was a talk I’d given the Wednesday before to my local group, the Mendocino Writers Club. But it worked out okay, because instead I wrote about pickles, and within a few hours it was all over StumbleUpon and I had a Pickle Revolution on my hands.
This kind of thing happens to me a lot—forgetting what topic I was planning to address. In fact, I was so sure it would happen that week (I’d just gotten back to town and had a headful of work I was still catching up on) that I sketched out notes and then downed a quick half-glass of wine about twenty minutes beforehand.
For the record: it worked. I talked non-stop for forty minutes before I even remembered I had notes.
Now I want to chat with you guys a little about the questions my local writers asked after my talk, because everyone everywhere has the same questions, and they’re really good questions, and you guys ought to be getting honest, straight-forward answers that make sense from industry professionals. But only too often you do not.
And although I originally wanted to cover all the questions from that talk in one post, it turned out I not only have too many questions, but my answers are way too long. So I trimmed them down to Four Questions, and I’m answering one a week for the next four weeks:
1. An agent told me to a) force my novel into a pre-set length, b) force my novel into a pre-defined genre, and/or c) “dumb down” my novel. What’s going on? Can’t I just write the best book I have in me?
Sigh. This is such a terrible situation, and you poor guys are like that excruciating character in the J.D. Salinger story, “The Laughing Man,” with your heads in vices until you come out all squished and looking like you’re laughing when you’re really screaming, “What is wrong with you people?”
The industry right now is a mess. Particularly since Black Wednesday of December, 2008, when the publishing houses, in a desperate bid to unload ballast as the unexpected shift in the economy began taking them down, laid off hordes of their in-house editors. What do you suppose happens to publishers without enough editors to edit their authors? That’s right! They wind up relying on cookie-cutter marketing stats to try to determine what to buy, hoping against hope this will allow them to continue to make money without contributing the literary value they were once relied upon to contribute.
a) Yes, you must make certain wordcount milestones if you want a traditional publisher in these rocky times.
Tortilla Flats, The Postman Always Rings Twice, To the Lighthouse, Heart of Darkness, The Little Prince, all early Vonnegut and pretty much anything by Jean Rhys or Richard Brautigan or Camus, each and every one would be rejected out of hand as too short and therefore “unpublishable” by the number-dizzy of today’s agents.
Some of them are quite free with the information they won’t even respond to queries for novels under 70,000 words. Imagine being the one to casually dismiss the chance to publish half the classic literary canon just because those novels are too short.
But working within restrictions is part of the fun of craft, so this mostly means you just have to design your novels especially thoughtfully now, weaving in vivid, illuminating subplots for greater length or (even better) cutting and trimming down to the lean, mean tendons of your novel, the part that’s always, always moving your characters inevitably forward toward their doom. Thoughtful design has never hurt a novel. And it never will.
b) Yes, you must play the genre game to put your story into some prefab one or two genres.
Again, Louise Erdrich, Judy Blume, Anne Rice, Robert Heinlen, Madeline L’Engle, Raymond Chandler, Ursula K. LeQuin, Dasheill Hammett, J.R.R. Tolkien, all automatic rejects for their day’s genres according to today’s genre-fixated agents. So write what you want to write, make sure it is the best-written novel it can possibly be, and then call it by whatever genre predominates in it. (If it’s mainstream commercial or literary fiction, call it that.)
Be really clear on that bit: make sure it’s the best-written novel it can possible be.
Will agents notice you’re fudging? Who knows? At the very least they won’t. Or they’ll see the other genres in it and say, “Hey, why don’t we market this as blah-blah-blah instead?” and then they’ll think they’re marketing geniuses.
At the most you’ll discover you’ve serendipitously acquired one of the real agents, the ones who mean it when they say they’re looking for something “fresh and new,” something “challenging genre,” something “trendsetting.” They will notice, and they will love it. And you’ll do everything in your power to hang onto them, because they are the pros.
c) Make no mistake—aspiring writers are, indeed, being told by certain agents to “dumb down” their novels. In those words.
The bastards.
There is nothing we can do about this but stand shoulder-to-shoulder and refuse. Those agents are not savvy long-time professionals who have weathered the storms of the industry for decades. (If they are they ought to be ashamed of themselves.) They are mid- and entry-level grapplers on the sheer cliff-face of the business, buckling to mega-bookstore reps now infiltrating the publishing offices who don’t give a fig whether they sell books or T-shirts or cheap made-in-China trash so long as they move merchandise off those Walmart shelves fast.
They’re welcome to foul their own nests scrambling mindlessly for ephemeral loot, reducing modern traditionally-published fiction to an unsightly blot on the landscape, if they like. But they’re not taking me down with them. If I can’t make my living upholding the standards of this craft I love, I will go into some other line of work.
And I have the whole history of literature standing behind me on this one.
Update: If you’re wondering who’s behind the shift in American publishing since the 1980s from literature to cheap crap, it’s actually a lot simpler than you might think. Bertelsmann.
“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .it demystifies the essential aspects of the craft while paying homage to the art.”
—Millicent Dillon, five time O.Henry Award winner and author of the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Harry Gold
“Teeming with gold. . .will make you love being a writer if only because you belong to the special little club that gets to read this book.”
—KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel
“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
As we all know, there are more ways to make a mess of your manuscript than angels on the head of a pin. So I’m not going to try to hit them all here, just some of the main ones I see crop up repeatedly in the work of fresh, innocent, hopeful aspiring writers.
Too many protagonists
Omniscient narrator. Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald made a hash if it.
So the innocent aspiring writer tells themself, ‘I just go into the point-of-view of whomever I’m interested in at that part of the story.’ And the next thing you know, the reader is asking themself, ‘What ever happened to the guy with the headache on page one? Why have we never heard again from the woman with the mowhawk? Since when does the PARROT get a say in all of this?’
Boing-boing-boing. It’s everybody’s story, which means it’s nobody’s story, which means the reader has no one to identify with, and the call of stale cookie dough in the freezer echoes louder in their head than the call of your increasing series of conflicts.
Pick a protagonist. If you’re designing two entirely distinct and separate subplots to weave in and out of each other, pick two. If you’re designing three or four distinct subplots, you can pick three or four protagonists (as Carson McCullers did in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and William Gibson did in Mona Lisa Overdrive), but you’d better be darn sure you need all those subplots, and with that many protagonists you’ll have to pick a primary one.
Then stick to them like glue. You don’t have to live inside their head with them. But make sure they’re the only one who gets a narrative perspective if you do zoom in for a close-up. Everyone else must SHUT THEIR YAP.
Sympathetic villain
This is a by-product of too many protagonists. The villain becomes the reader’s favorite.
How does this happen? And why?
Easy: readers are fascinated by characters with powerful internal conflict. That’s why they read. ‘What if someone just like me—amped to the nu-nu’s on conflicting needs and desires without adequate resources to achieve any of them—were to land in the hottest of hot water?’ They don’t want to live through it. They want some imaginary character to live through it on their behalf. Vicarious triumph! It’s all the rage in fiction and has been for four hundred years.
So you give them a protagonist with only goodness inside, struggling courageously in defense of the brave and the free. And you give them an antagonist, a seething bundle of angst and outrage and despair, determined to bring down the brave and the free because, goddammit, they deserve it! And the next thing you know you’ve written Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, and your reader identifies with the guy underground.
Pick your protagonist, and then pile them sky-high with all the good and bad traits, the empathy and the greed, the sorrow and the malice, the heroism and the self-sabotage you have at your disposal. Make them fight themself. Make them lose. Make them rise from the ashes like a phoenix, and always give your reader the fleeting, contradictory, anguished hope that this time it’s going to be for real.
Book report instead of fictional dream
This is a simple one to fix, but it’s a ton of work, which is why it turns up in so many early-draft manuscripts. Exposition: it’s not a novel, it’s a synopsis.
A novel is set almost entirely in scenes: action, dialog, description—characters moving and speaking and suffering and transcending in realtime. A synopsis tells the reader in exposition what’s supposed to go into those scenes.
Your work as a writer is to give your reader an experience of life. They don’t get an experience of life from reading a book report. If it’s a really, really great book report, it just makes them want to read the book.
Write that book.
Endless, boring climax
You have so much to say. There’s so much that needs to go into this climax in order for the reader to get the full, shattering impact of your vision. There’s so much more that didn’t fit into the rest of the novel. You’re scrambling to pack it all in. It goes on and on and on. . .but you don’t notice because, you know, you love this stuff!
A climax by definition is the most powerful point in your novel, and power by definition hits hardest when it hits the smallest surface—which in fiction means the smallest number of words. The craft of fiction is the craft of deftly dropping addictive hits of power into your manuscript at regular intervals to keep your reader hooked and salivating, building their addiction, until they’re so needy for your climax it takes barely a handful of words to blow them sky-high out of the water.
Henry James could do it with ONE word. Strive toward Jamesism.
Garbled resolution
And hot on the heels of the climax that never ends comes the resolution that makes no sense. The reader has stuck with you through 70,000+ words, hundreds of pages, soaking up those addictive hits of power until their pump is primed like nobody’s business. And you give them. . .what? used coffee grounds?
This happens most often because the writer has tried to plan out the resolution from the beginning. You’re not writing about your characters’ worst nightmares, you’re writing about your fantasies, sometimes at mind-numbing length. And readers have their own fantasies. Truly, they’re not all that interested in ours.
Write toward your climax. Keep your sights on the greatest possible challenge to your protagonist’s needs. Force them to face their biggest demons, squeeze blood from their stone.
How that all shakes down in the end is so important and profound you can’t possible predict what it will be until you’ve seen how your characters cope with this nightmare. You’re writing your novel to learn for yourself what happens to someone who’s had blood squeezed from their internal stone.
And you can’t teach your reader something you haven’t learned yet.
I slept in my own bed again last night after a whole week knocking around out in the real world, and even though we stayed in a lovely resort up on the Columbia River Gorge, were wined and dined by smart, fun, interesting people, and got the chance to succumb to completely uncontrollable book-buying in Powell’s Books of Portland (I came home with three bulging bags of vintage mysteries to add to the mountains I got for my birthday just a few weeks ago), still. . .
it’s good to be home.
What is it that makes home home? And why do we return to our writing time and again, over the years, to find those same qualities in the imaginary universes alive in our heads?
Familiarity
Of course. Home is you. That’s why you’re there.
And that’s why you keep going back to your fiction—in spite of the frustration of never quite being able to bring that wonderful, multifaceted plane of inspiration here into the tangible daily world, in spite of loneliness and failure and exhaustion and conflicting demands upon your time.
Because it’s you. It’s where you live.
Context
In that familiar sphere, you find the framework you develop throughout your life for understanding the trials of living. Newborn babies have no such frameworks—they spend most of their time crying out in anguish. Growing up is developing the frame of reference you need to stay sane for the rest of your life.
When you read great books, you’re building framework for understanding life. When you learn from great writing and spiritual mentors, you’re building framework. And when you go into your fictional landscape and live alongside the characters there, meticulously noting and writing down the details of their experiences, you are applying your framework of understanding to the very real ’slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ with which we all constantly contend, from cradle to grave.
Storytelling keeps us sane.
Emotion
Because writing allows you to feel what goes on inside you, your physical, emotional, gut-wrenching reactions to those ’slings and arrows,’ without simply disintegrating into a pile of shattered rubble. Newborn babies cry and are comforted—babies who are not comforted die.
When you use your words, the details of observed and felt life, to record what it’s like to be alive, you give yourself that comfort. “Someone else has lived through these hard times,” you are saying to yourself and to others. “We can transcend our suffering.”
Safety
And the aftermath of those emotions—the devastation of cities, countrysides, relationships, lives—can be caught and named and held up to the mirror so it serves not to destroy you but to temper you, not to compound the darkness but to illuminate the strengths that keep you on your feet, year after year, helping everyone you touch stay on their feet, too.
We need to confront that aftermath, to break through the terror of the darkness that rings our lives.
Companionship
All those others are here with you—your characters (whom of course you love, “not always,” as Emily Bronte so candidly pointed out 160 years ago, “as a pleasure any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being”) as well as your writing friends.
This is what the blogosphere has given writers of this generation that writers have never had before: the companionship of thousands. Do not underestimate the power of tribe in your life. You are a writer among writers. You have family.
Epiphany
And finally all that exploration, all that suffering, all that tempering and reaching the depths and reaching out and sharing your experience, culminates in those brief, iridescent moments that make all that survival worthwhile: the epiphanies that convince you there’s more going on than any of us know.
There is something intangible beyond what we see and do and say every day, even though the only way to find it and illuminate it is through showing tangible characters, with tangible problems, seeing and doing and saying.
It’s the ultimate paradox, the paradox of living: that the transcendence of the niggling, harrowing, incessant ills of life—the breaking through the familiar to the intangible beyond—is coming home.
Remember when I asked you guys whom you’d like to see in the Top 10 Blogs for Writers of 2010/2011 at Write to Done? And some of you said, “Justin Bieber”?
Just kidding. I don’t even know who Justin Bieber is (only that his name crops up everywhere).
No—many of you, with a graciousness and golden heart to inspire awe, hied yourselves on over there and made your nominations. And I thank you. I actually copied the nominations you made for me so I could read them every morning while I’m pulling myself together for the new workday, to remind me exactly what I love about this job—how it’s the best job I’ve ever had in my life, better even than running the children’s room of an indie bookstore, the job of my dreams.
A week or so later, Write to Done brought out the list of finalists, the Top 20 Blogs for Writers, and you guys had put me on it. You did! I was absolutely touched and honored. This is heavy-hitting company. You’ll recognize a lot of the names.
I’m speechless. (Almost.) I want to tell you all how much your kind words mean to me. Thank you so much for your support, your comments, your enthusiasm for this amazing craft. I love fiction, I love working in it and living through it, I love talking about everything that goes on here. The truth is if I got paid to write these darn blog posts I would never shut up.
Which is fortunate because, as soon as I heard the news, I was asked to write a guest post for Write to Done. And it’s up now: The 7 Secrets of an Indie Editor.
I got carried away and confessed everything—in my profound gratitude to all the aspiring writers out there.
Short story author Scott Warrender is a Mentoring Program client. I have done full Copy, Line, & Developmental Editing on a number of short stories for him, the first of which was his poignant fictional memoir of Africa, ''The Boy With the Newsprint Kite,'' now published in the Foundling Review.
Clients’ Books
Bhaichand Patel is the author of two nonfiction books: Chasing the Good Life (Penguin Books India, October, 2006), and Happy Hours (Penguin Books India, October, 2009). I edited Patel's debut novel, When the Streets Were Cold and Dark.
I've edited a number of nonfictionessays for my friend Lucia Orth. (Many years ago, my contribution to Baby Jesus Pawn Shop was simply a peer critique and participation in a standing ovation.)
The poet Chris Ryan is the author of The Bible of Animal Feet (Farfalla Press, 2007). He has recent stories in Pank, Anemone Sidecar, and A Cappella Zoo. I edited Ryan's novel The Ishmael Blade and worked with him on his debut novel Heliophobia and WIP Pogue.
