by How to Tell A Story- The Secrets of Writing Captivating Tale (mobi)
the story—whether for a piece of fiction or narrative nonfiction—will help resolve many writing-related problems, such as what to cut and what to keep, what viewpoint to use, etc.
Writing is about grace and clarity of vision. It's about making sure the image in your head is on the page exactly as you imagine it. It's about rewriting—and rewriting is not easy, but it can be fun.
Some people overwrite on the first draft, getting down masses of words and images, and then they begin to pare away the garbage from the gold until the image shines through. Others put down mere skeletons of their ideas, and then having gotten down on the page some suggestions of what they want, they return to them and start to put muscle and then flesh on those skeletons until the images in the scenes stand firm and clear. Whatever works for you is what you should do.
Everything you learn about writing, whether it's from tapes, courses or books such as this, doesn't have to be applied in the first draft. In fact, it's unlikely you'll get it down in the first draft. Those initial words on the page are just a starting point. Now the work begins. Two drafts, three drafts, four, five, it doesn't matter. Write as much as it takes. Just remember it all has to be done by the time the manuscript is ready to be shipped to an agent or an editor. All the rules and suggestions in this book and elsewhere are just aids to help you figure out whether you've missed something important in creating your book, something that might get in the way of getting you published.
When you begin to write the first draft, don't question yourself, don't judge yourself, don't have this little guy on your shoulder passing comment as you work. Let it all come out as it will. Sure, some of it will look stupid afterward. So what? No one else will see what you've written. If you judge yourself too harshly too early on, you're going to miss out on some good creative stuff.
As you become more experienced, you'll learn to look for things in the creation of your drama, and the more you prepare ahead of time, the easier some of this will become. Try and recall what it was like the first time you sat behind the wheel of a car and started to drive on the streets. Remember all the things you seemed to have to do at once? Look ahead, look behind, check the sides, watch your speed, watch the road, watch the other cars, watch the rear mirror—it was endless, or so it seemed. Now you drive and do these things and don't think twice about them. They are things you do instinctively. Writing habits are the same.
One of the problems authors of both fiction and nonfiction face is that they struggle to be original, thinking that being original means flouting the guidelines of what readers expect when they go into a store and buy a book. (We discussed this a little in the chapter on genres.) This mistake, more than almost any other, marks the unpublished writer from the professional.
Remember the example we used of the romance novel with the title Slasher From Hell? Authors do the same kind of thing more often than many realize. They mix third person with first person, violate point of view or unity of time and place and so forth. However, they don't often read successful books that do that—for a reason. It's hard to pull off. What these inexperienced writers are doing is confusing what the story is with how you tell it. The story is not what happens, but to whom it happens.
DEVELOPING YOUR STYLE
One of the primary things you should look for when reviewing your first draft is appropriateness of style.
Style isn't strictly a structural thing, so we haven't spent a lot of time on it in this book. The best style comes from reading and absorbing the work of strong writers. Who is a strong writer? There are plenty of books, writing courses and book reviews that will give you suggestions about who would qualify.
Writers are like actors. Different actors can play the same character and yet bring to the role an individual interpretation that is distinctive. What's more, while that actor's voice and style singles him out in a role, both may well vary from character to character and role to role as needs fit. In your case, as a writer, your voice on the page, your style, may well vary a little from story to story. Not only is that good, it is probably worth striving for in a subtle way. Try to fit the voice to the story if you can.
The most important place to start is to make sure you're using active words saying things in a positive way. Ask yourself, Is this sentence as powerful as it can be? Does every word carry its own weight? Am I saying what I mean simply and clearly? Can what I wrote be misunderstood? Does it have a literal meaning that is mocking the sense of what I'm trying to convey? Reread the early chapter on genre, where I talked about making sure your book has an appropriate title, one that fits in the book's genre, and that it uses language appropriate to that genre. The best way to know what's appropriate is to be intimately familiar with the genre you're writing in.
The rewriting process is where you will start to check for those sorts of thing.
Look at the beginning of the book particularly. Ask yourself, Have I begun with a character in a situation? Not with a lot of background or setup or description, but by plunging straight into the story and the situation. Remember, your audience reads to see how the main character gets out of the situation she finds herself in, how she solves the problem or the dilemma she is faced with. That's what catches readers and makes them care, forces them to turn the page.
You have to grab your reader from the outset. Editors want to find something good in what they read, but they don't have the time to spend wading through fifty or sixty pages of setup before the story begins. Compel readers to go on this journey with you by making them care about the people in your story and the situations they get themselves into and out of.
Beginning and End
Once you look at the beginning of the book and make sure it grabs readers' attention, check the ending. What's resolved?
A lot of writers say, "I don't know how to end my book."
That's what all that early planning is for. But if you're still in trouble, go back and look at those first pages. Nearly every storys has the seed of its ending planted within the first chapter or so. If you're not sure what I mean by that, check out the movie The Fugitive. Almost everything you need to know about the solution to the puzzle in that movie is shown before the opening credits are finished.
In your first pages, you should create a problem, show something coming into a system and upsetting a status quo, and that's exactly what you try to undo by the end of the book.
Look at your book's last chapter and ask yourself, Does this resolve something that was begun way back at the beginning of the book?
If it resolves something that was begun in a chapter or two before the end, you're probably writing in an episodic way. Make sure the ending of the book relates to the beginning of the book.
When you look at the scenes you've created in your narrative, make sure there is something happening. You don't want a bunch of talking heads and no action. Make your characters do, not say, as much as possible. Is there an inciting incident for the scene? Does it have a goal, in terms of the overall movement of the narrative? Is there a reason for the scene at all? Where does the opposition come from? There should always be some conflict, an obstacle, a problem that has to be overcome.
Gary's mantra to his students was, "Conflict, conflict, conflict." It's the best advice.
Description and Viewpoint
Look at your description. Ask yourself, Have I written three paragraphs of description that just sit there like lumps in gravy? If so, get rid of them. Remember, delete the bits everyone skips to get to the next piece of the story movement. Ideally, the description should be active, it should move the story along in some way. It should always be seen through a character's eyes, not the author's.
Check your viewpoint. Did you switch viewpoint in the middle of a scene? Ask yourself, Have I switched viewpoint too often? Have I used more viewpoints than I need?
Keep your transitions short. All you need is one or two passages to get you from A to B: "Meanwhile, back at the ranch ..." "Later that day ..." Keep it simple.
As you go through your manuscript, make sure that on every page there is conflict, people at odds with each other, with the world around them, with themselves. If there's no conflict, the reader's attention starts to drift from the page and the passage is not working.
Look for all these things during the rewrite. Don't worry about having them all present in the first draft. The important thing is to get it all right by the last draft. Keep in mind that words, like clay, are malleable. You can destroy them, erase them, rework your images and scenes until they look exactly the way you want them to look and sound and feel. The key, of course, is to have a clear idea of where you are going and what you want from your creation.
Writing is not a science, it's a craft, and you work at it and work at it until it starts to make sense. You push it and prod it and pull it and tweak it and polish it, until finally, almost miraculously, what is going on in your head starts to take shape on the page for all to see and read.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
When we're indoors, we know the roof is not going to fall on our heads because we know the place was constructed carefully. Unfortunately, because of poor planning, sometimes the roof falls in on the beginning writer's head, metaphorically anyway, because he didn't construct his book with enough care and forethought, and he ends up sitting in the middle of a pile of rubble.
Of course, that's not going to happen to you because you're going to learn how to do it correctly. The building blocks— beams, bricks and mortar, walls, shingles—for your book are scenes, exposition, half scenes, bridging passages, sequences, chapters, sections, actions, and so forth.
Chapters deserve a special mention. That's because they really don't have the same kind of rules about what is dramatically correct as some of the other components. Drama, action and exposition have specific definitions. Chapters, on the other hand, are whatever the heck you say they are.
Gary once wrote a proposal for a novel for which the publishers wanted the first two chapters as a sample of the rest of the book. But he had written a thirty-page chapter. He didn't feel like doing any more, so he went back to page 15 and broke the chapter in the middle.
Now this, in fact, works better for the reader than one long chapter, so far from being an act of sloth on Gary's part, it was an instinctive recognition that the pacing of the book could be picked up, if only by a little judicious restructuring of how the material was presented. It worked, because in our fast-moving, MTV-music-video-oriented, thirty-second-soundbite, TV-advert-influenced world, readers like to know there are places to take a breather before plunging back into your imagined world, even if they don't use them all. Think of the fifteen- to twenty-page chapter length as the equivalent of rest stops along a parkway.
A chapter can be anything. The narrative itself can't be anything. What your narrative is begins with your synopsis and plot list. How it's put together is concerned with the kinds of drama you invent for your scenes, the action you put in them, the kind of language you use, the tone of the piece and so on.
Without all of these elements working together and in deliberate harmony, your narrative will not have structure.
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
Sequence
The sequence is the basic level of narrative structure. A sequence is just a series of related scenes. Often, two or three scenes will make up a chapter. So a sequence is not a chapter because, remember, a chapter can be anything you want it to be. But, a chapter can be a sequence. Confused?
Here's an example: In a romance, you may have a "falling in love" sequence. This may extend over a couple of chapters or just one.
Woman meets man. Woman has nice romantic dinner with man. Woman goes to man's cottage on the beach for late night wine. Romance blossoms.
This is followed by the "disappointment" sequence. Woman finds out man is a suspected murderer. Woman finds out man has an ex-wife who still wants him. Man tells woman he's taken a job in Brazil with the World Wildlife Fund.
The point about being aware of structure is not so much that you should think analytically when you're writing your first draft, but that when you come to revise that first draft, you have the tools at your command to see the overall shape of how the narrative is building and how it should be shaped, shored up and polished.
Go through your draft and look at each scene. Ask yourself, Is this in a sequence? Do these scenes relate to each other, or does this particular scene actually relate to a sequence I've put earlier or later in the book?
You'll discover that you may well have written some scenes that either are out of place and should be moved around or can be discarded.
Exposition
Exposition is information. It's all the other "stuff" in your book that does not move the story along, but explains it. And because it explains or editorializes, exposition does work in the narrative similar to how adjectives and adverbs work in sentences: It enhances and clarifies. The right piece of exposition, like the correctly chosen adjective, can be powerful and effective. Used poorly, it becomes a crutch to the writer, preventing him from developing an otherwise imaginative way of delivering this information—if it's needed at all—an anchor retarding the forward momentum of the narrative and something that dilutes the emotional power of the story.
Some information, such as the background of characters and so forth, which we can define as information we need to know but isn't exciting, has to be in your narrative somewhere.
There are a couple of things to remember about exposition. First of all, don't give expository material, that is, information, until it is needed. For example, if, in scene three in your book, Julia meets Louise and you tell something about Louise's background, say that she used to be a policewoman but had to leave the force because she had an affair with the chief of police, wait until readers get into that scene with Louise before you give the information about her that's needed to fully understand the nuances of what is happening in that scene.
Second, as much as possible, try to get the exposition into scenes, or begin the scene before you give the exposition. What do we mean by that? Well, instead of saying, "Emily was a short Italian woman with long black hair, and on Monday she went to the personnel office to get a job as an assistant," do it this way: "On Monday, Emily arrived at the personnel office. She was a short Italian woman with long black hair."
The distinction is that by putting her in the personnel office first, that is, by setting a time and place, you frame the picture and the scene and make it easier to see Emily as a short Italian woman in a personnel office. Otherwise readers see her floating around, somewhat amorphously in space.
An even better way of tackling this information is to try and introduce it naturally into the scene through some piece of dramatic action. For example: "On Monday, Emily arrived at the personnel office. She took a chair in the corner and waited for her name to be called, and was rather embarrassed to realize that sitting down, her feet did not quite touch the floor. She began to feel like a midget. Unconsciously she used one hand to constantly sweep back her long black hair as it fell over her shoulders."
Note that we haven't mentioned she's Italian yet. Why? Because readers don't need to know that until something in the scene happens that will make it important. Then we'll figure out a way of introducing that important piece of information, just before we need it.
Half Scenes
A half scene is something that's midway between a scene and exposition. There comes a time in your narrative when you want to give some exposition but you also want to give the flavor of a time or a place and so you mix the two.
It's most commonly used when you have something that's important for the reader to know but not important enough to devote a whole scene to. Here's an example: In Gary's novel Baffled in Boston, Scotty, the protagonist, goes to the police to check out the accident report on his friend Molly's hit-and-run death because he suspects she's been murdered. But it wasn't important enough to write a whole scene about. So, while Scot
ty is waiting to meet another character, Gary wrote this half-scene:
The morning after my talk with Wayne, I had crowned myself sleuth and had driven into Boston to meet with the police officer who was investigating the hit-and-run case. He was an eager young fellow, Norman McCallow or McGowran or some such name, and he told me what I already knew: There was virtually no chance of catching the driver.
' 'They don't leave calling cards,'' he said. When I told him about the message on my answering machine he pulled out the accident report again to see if there was something that he had missed. Nothing.
"As you know," he said, "we can't start a homicide investigation on something like that." He said, "As you know, " a number of times and it was obvious he knew who I was—or more accurately, who I had been, and still thought of me as a writer of true crime books. I left the police station that day with no new information except the names of four witnesses to the incident. One
witness had been hypnotized by a police psychiatrist but the hypnosis had unlocked no forgotten memories.
It's a half scene because it's basically Scotty telling us a memory. But there's a little bit of dialogue, and the scene is made to come alive a little bit through dramatization.
Action
The next level of structure is action. Action is simply what movement occurs in a sentence. "He walked into the room" is an action. "He sat down in the chair," is an action. "He folded his hands" is an action. "He said, 'I really don't care if you like me or not,' " is an action.
The point is to keep these actions happening and make sure there is a new action in every sentence. We discussed this in some detail in the chapter on pacing, so if you're still unsure, reread that chapter.
EXERCISE
1. Take out some of your writing and find a scene, find a sequence, find an action, find each of the elements we've discussed in this chapter. Identify them, make a list and start becoming aware of the elements that make your narrative sound in form and forward moving in motion.