Sooner or later you’re going to find yourself face to face with an agent. It’s an important meeting, but an odd one. You have only a couple minutes to achieve your goal.
A couple minutes? Aren’t most agent appointments (at conferences) more like 10 minutes? Yes, but the most important part of that interview (by far) is the first few minutes.
It’s in the first couple of minutes that you’ll demonstrate your grasp of story. Read More
Some people get all the breaks. Like rich people and household-name authors. Sometimes it seems that you have to have money to make money and you have to be successful to succeed. That is, if you have certain advantages, all your efforts are disproportionately rewarded.
It reminds me of the oft repeated lament of authors that only those who don’t need more sales actually sell books at signings.
The rich–in whatever field–really do play by different roles than the rest of us. It’s not fair, and it hardly seems American. The myth of the land of the opportunity dies hard. We’re not all starting from the same place of visibility, contacts, appeal and privilege.
No one hates this more than I do, so for those of you who are getting in touch with resentment, I share your pain.
But given the truth of my post title, there are a couple of lessons that we can take away, and they are doosies. Read More
This year, we’re finally going to do it.
We’re going to buckle down and write more. If you haven’t started your dream project, you’re going to. If you’re stalled on the novel, you’re going to plow ahead. If you are mid-career and writing so very slowly, you are going to trust your fingers and type faster.
We’re going to pin our ears back and go straight down the middle to the goal posts.
Because if you’re not on the field, you’re not going to have the ball (pardon all the football talk, but ’tis the season) and if you’re not going to do it this year, then when?
The thing is, you’re going to have to write a lot to have a career. It really won’t do to be a one-book wonder or a v-e-r-y s-l-o-w writer. The reasons for this are many, but generally have to do with visibility, dependability, building a base of readers, giving publishers something to sink their teeth into, promote and have faith in.
That being the case, it’s time to hustle, people. Read More
Every December I find myself waxing philosophical about myself, the writing life, storytelling and the perfect lasagna recipe.
No, I’m not going to share my current lasagna recipe (some things are just too personal for blogging) but I am willing to share my articles of faith about writing. None of the following can be proven, but:
1. – the world is becoming a better place for writers.
2. – the writing life is the most rigorous program in the world for self-knowledge, inspiration and personal growth. And yes, I Have tried Buddhism.
3. – no matter how good a writer you are, you can always improve. And need to.
4. – the marketplace disciplines us, if we will only listen.
5. – to keep my writing fresh I need to move out of/beyond what I’ve done before.
6. – fine stories are much more important than fine writing.
7. – the most inexplicable part of writing is where stories come from. I build novels up carefully, but where the glittering story kernel comes from in the first place remains an astonishing mystery. But if asked, I will always say: A PO Box in Spokane.
8 – despite my thwarted desire for a year on the NYT best seller list, I am mightily compensated in this work by my friendships with, and the company of, the people I’ve met in publishing.
9. – this story (whatever the current work in progress) is the best I’ve ever done. When I stop believing that, it won’t be fun any more.
10. – if I’m not giving back to aspiring writers and the writing community, my lasagna will turn watery and the top strip will be too crunchy.
This week I’m so pleased to have a guest blog from Brian McDonald. You can hear more from Brian at his blog and website.
Brian McDonald
—————————————-
Notice that in the title for this piece, I said storyteller rather than writer. That is because it is my belief that we use the wrong verb to describe what we do. Because we use the same word – writing – to describe both the physical action and the mental process, we are often confused about what our jobs are.
Many of us take our job to mean wordsmithing – the carefully crafted order and poetry of the words themselves. When people speak of “good writing” this is often what they mean.
But what about those who crafted stories before the written word? We know that stories existed long before anyone learned to write them down. We know that those cultures that were late in adopting written language had a long tradition of storytelling. Would you call people with no concept of writing “writers”?
In relatively recent times, silent movies made use of visual communication – early filmmakers told stories with pictures. Even today some storytellers who work in the medium of comic books sometimes discard words from their panels. On the subject of silent films, many of them were made up on the spot – Charlie Chaplin worked this way. Was he a writer? I would call him a storyteller.
Okay, so what, you may ask. Writer, storyteller, what’s the difference? The difference is that calling yourself a writer does not tell you what to do; calling yourself a storyteller gives you a direction – a mission.
I meet people everyday who are writers but don’t know what to write. They write pages upon pages of beautiful sentences about colorful characters. Or they write descriptions of exotic places. And they may do these things masterfully. Yet somehow they can never finish that novel or screenplay or whatever. Or, if they do finish, the material just lies flat somehow – it fails to move readers (or agents or publishers). Why? No story.
As a child I was interested in storytelling, but was a poor speller. What I found out was that teachers cared very little about the content of my writing, but a great deal about my misspellings. I became very familiar with red pen markings on my papers. I could have written, “It was the best of tymes it was the wusrt of tymes…” And out the red pen would have come with no mention at all of the content.
What I did not know was that I was dyslexic. In those days I was seen, at best, as “not applying myself.” At worst, and most often, I was understood as just not being very bright. The students who could spell were the golden children. It did not matter that they had no knack for telling interesting stories.
James L. Brooks, winner of 9 Emmys, who created the classic Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, and others, is a terrible speller. The late Stephen J. Cannell, creator of more than 40 shows including the hit The Rockford Files, author of several best-selling novels, had terrible dyslexia.
I could mention more writers with such cognitive issues, but my point is that these guys were much better storytellers than spellers or wordsmiths. Storytelling is a noble craft that has been with us since before we had an alphabet. We should embrace it.
Now the world seems populated by folks who can “write well” but were never taught the first thing about how to tell a story. In fact, plot and storytelling are often seen as a lesser form of writing. Those writers who sell millions of books are often called bad writers by the wordsmiths. But what these best-selling people are often good at is getting folks to turn pages, or tune into their television shows, or buy movie tickets.
Often when I ask students or other writers to define for me what a story is they have no definition at all. They sometimes fumble for one, since they have never been asked to think about it. But if you don’t know what a story is how can you set down to write one?
A story is the telling of a series of connected events leading to a conclusion.
The Golden Theme: How to Make Writing Appeal to the Highest Common Denominator
So? But that simple sentence tells you what to do. It says that your story must have a reason to be told – a theme. That’s what the conclusion is. In its most simple form, it is the moral of an Aesop fable. Every piece of the story is leading to that conclusion. All elements are there to support the author’s point.
This may sound elementary, but most people who call themselves writers act as if they do not know this. They try to put their colorful characters into interesting situations in the hope that a story will emerge. If that doesn’t happen, the manuscripts sits in a drawer or hard drive, unfinished and abandoned.
Why is having a point or theme important? Because only when you have something to say do people bother to listen.
In my book The Golden Theme I explore the idea of why human beings tell stories. Why does every culture on earth tell stories? Because stories teach us to survive. This is why stories need conflict – because conflict is what we need to learn how to survive. No one needs to learn how to survive the good times.
Survival can take many forms. It can mean actual physical survival: This is why people went in droves to see 127 Hours — a film about a young man trapped alone for days under rock and how he eventually severed his arm to escape.
But stories can turn on cultural or spiritual or emotional survival: Stories can tell us how to find love. We need stories to live. I don’t mean this in an artsy way. I mean in a practical way. We could not live without stories.
You are a storyteller. This is a noble and important job – treat it as such. Know what stores are and know what you want to say. If you are a wordsmith, all the better. It will only help. But be a storyteller first.
–Brian McDonald
What stands in your main character’s way?
Maybe it’s a person whose goals clash with those of your protagonist. But sometimes it’s a situation. What we can call the force of antagonism.
It may be a societal restriction, a collapse of order, or a natural disaster. Many powerful stories rely on a force instead of a person. As you build your plot listen to the needs of your story. You shouldn’t force a villain into the mix.
Think of the great stories, and your personal favorites, that never offer an antagonist. Gone With the Wind is an example. No one specifically operates against Scarlett’s desire for mastery of her fate. You might say that Melanie is in the way of Scarlett’s romantic goal of Ashley Wilkes. But Melanie is merely a passive obstacle, forever married to the man of Scarlett’s dreams. The real dramatic question of Gone With the Wind is, Will Scarlett escape the ravages of war and find her place in the world? What stands in her way? It is the collapse of the South and the civil war. These are the forces of antagonism.
In The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the opposition to Caesar (the protagonist) is actually humanity. A nice trick, that! Humanity’s subjugation of chimps stands in Caesar’s way.
Even a force must grow in power. But the force shouldn’t be static; it must change, or the plot can’t thicken. How do the forces of antagonism escalate in their impact? How does society push back against the protagonist when he tries to overcome prejudice, skepticism, or injustice? The more your hero grows in his willingness to confront, the more society will push back. If it is a story of the collapse of society, the downward spiral of the social order must grow precipitous. In Gone With the Wind, the civil war is at first a distant threat. By the midpoint we have the siege of Atlanta, and finally the decimation of the South through carpetbagging and economic collapse.
A force should be personalized. For a short segment of the film about Caesar the chimp, humanity’s evil role is personalized by the caretaker at the animal refuge. This focuses the general force of opposition and allows Caesar to interact with a specific enemy, at least for a time. In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett kills the union soldier intent on rape. It is a brief scene. But consider the power of it: He climbs the stairs of the ruined mansion at Tara (union soldiers have ravaged it), and Scarlett shoots him full in the face.
In Dan Simmons’s The Terror, the story of a disastrous nineteenth century sailing expedition in the arctic, the force of opposition is the cold and ice. Through starvation, exposure and animal predation, almost everyone on board the ship will die. Meanwhile we hope in vain for the northwest passage to thaw so that they can sail home. Simmons personalizes the extreme landscape in the shape of a monster, the essence of the wild landscape.
Or, digging deeper, we might say that the antagonist of this story is actually the hubris of the British navy and the false ambition to conquer the land. In these terms, we can better understand the final stand-off with the monster, in which the hero bows down to creature’s rightful rule.
Sometimes the force of antagonism is not overcome in any conventional way. This kind of story is not necessarily a tragedy. Sometimes the force of nature passes by, having wreaked its damage. We have endured, with lessons learned. And sometimes, it is a tragedy with an upbeat ending, if that is possible. An example is the apocolyptic tale where civilization is destroyed. But a few remain to start again.
The important thing to remember, as we use the writer’s toolkit (which contains the antagonist), is that such tools are strategies for creating drama. Modify them and let them suit your story.
© 2010 by Kay Kenyon · Website by Apt Design
