by Lisa Cron
Do we know the answer to our original premise: what happens when a woman about to turn forty meets the young actor she has a secret crush on, and they fall madly in love? Nope. We know something even more important. Turns out that’s not what our story is about. It’s really about whether Rae can overcome her fear and risk showing her paintings, knowing that, regardless of the reaction, she’ll be okay. It’s about facing who you are and taking the consequences, not to mention the perks, one of which just might be finding your true love. Just saying.
Have we set the stage to find out? Yep. So you see, outlining doesn’t have to take the spontaneity out of writing. You don’t need to know exactly how the story is going to end, but you do need to know what the protagonist will have to learn along the way—that is, what her “aha!” moment will be. And even if you do have a precise scene-by-scene outline? As we discussed in chapter 2, there’s no law that you have to stick to it. Sometimes the excitement of writing is discovering those places where the story suddenly careens into new territory on its own—and you realize its new direction makes even more sense than the one in which it was headed. Of course, in this as in most things in life, luck tends to favor the prepared.
And the best preparation for writing any story is to know with clarity what your protagonists’ worldview is, and more to the point, where and why it’s off base. Thus you have a clear view of the world as your protagonist sees it and insight into how she therefore interprets, and reacts to, everything that happens to her. It’s what allows you to construct a plot that forces her to reevaluate what she was so damn sure was true when the story began. That is what your story is really about, and what readers stay up long past their bedtime to find out.
CHAPTER 5: CHECKPOINT
Do you know why your story begins when it does? What clock has started ticking? What is forcing your protagonist to take action, whether she wants to or not?
Have you uncovered the roots of your protagonist’s specific fears and desires? Do you know what her inner issue is? Can you trace it all back to specific events in her past? Do you know how her inner issue then thwarted her desire right up to the moment the story begins?
Have you made your characters reveal their deepest, darkest secrets to you? I don’t want to go all Big Brother on you, but if you let your characters hold back, we’ll know. Trust me.
When writing character bios, are you being specific enough? When you close your eyes, can you envision what happens, or is it still conceptual? If you can’t see it, there will be no yardstick to measure your protagonist’s progress. You can’t have an after without a before.
Do you know where the story is going? This isn’t to say you need to know how it ends when you write word one (although it’s not a bad idea), but unless you have some clue where it’s headed, how can you be sure you’ve sown the seeds of the future there on page one?
WAIT, I HEAR YOU SAYING. Some people think in the abstract. Scientists, mathematicians, braniacs like Albert Einstein, for instance. He didn’t arrive at things like E = mc2 by channeling Jane Austen. No, he came up with it after remembering how, as a child, he’d imagined riding through space on a beam of light. And relativity theory? By imagining what it would be like to plummet down an elevator shaft, then take a coin out of his pocket and try to drop it—without, I’m assuming, passing out or throwing up first. Here’s how Einstein explained his own mental process: “My particular ability does not lie in mathematical calculation, but rather in visualizing effects, possibilities, and consequences.”1
Sounds exactly like a story to me. And the key word here is visualizing. If we can’t see it, we can’t feel it. “Images drive the emotions as well as the intellect,” says Steven Pinker, who goes on to call images “thumpingly concrete.”2
Abstract concepts, generalities, and conceptual notions have a hard time engaging us. Because we can’t see them, feel them, or otherwise experience them, we have to focus on them really, really hard, consciously—and even then our brain is not happy about it. We tend to find abstract concepts thumpingly boring. Michael Gazzaniga puts it this way: “Although attention may be present, it may not be enough for a stimulus to make it to consciousness. You are reading an article about string theory, your eyes are focused, you are mouthing the words to yourself, and none of it is making it to your conscious brain, and maybe it never will.”3
Story, on the other hand, takes mind-numbing generalities and makes them specific so we can try them on for size. Remember, we’re hardwired to instantly evaluate everything in life on the basis of is it safe or not? Thus the whole point of a story is to translate the general into a specific, so we can see what it really means, just in case we ever come face to face with it in a dark alley.
And the only way we can see it, is if we can, well, see it. As Antonio Damasio says, “The entire fabric of a conscious mind is created from the same cloth—images.”4 Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran agrees: “Humans excel at visual imagery. Our brains evolved this ability to create an internal mental picture or model of the world in which we can rehearse forthcoming actions, without the risks or penalties of doing them in the real world.”5 What this all boils down to is, as I’m inordinately fond of saying, the story is in the specifics.
Yet writers often tell entire stories in general, as if concepts alone are captivating or, worse, because they’ve fallen prey to the misconceived notion that it’s the reader’s job to fill in the specifics. That’s why in this chapter we’ll explore the difference between the specific and the general; why the specific often turns up missing; where writers often inadvertently drop the ball; and why giving too many details is just as bad as not giving enough. Finally, we’ll tackle the myth that sensory details inherently bring a story to life.
The General Versus the Specific
In October 2006, nearly six thousand people worldwide perished in hurricane-induced floods.
Quick, what do you feel after reading that sentence? My guess is, you feel a little confused by the question. Now imagine a wall of water coming straight toward a small boy, who clings desperately to his frantic mother. Trying to soothe him, she whispers, “Don’t worry baby, I’m here, I won’t let you go.” She feels him relax in the moment of deafening calm just before the water rips him from her arms. The sound of his cry above the cacophony of destruction—trees ripped from the ground, houses smashed to splinters—will haunt her for the rest of her life. That, and his look of utter surprise as he was swept away. I trusted you, it seemed to say, and you let me go.
Now how do you feel? This time, the question is clear. Watching the flood claim that one little boy is far more gut-wrenching than hearing about six thousand anonymous people perishing in various floods, isn’t it? I’m not suggesting your heart doesn’t go out to all the flood victims and their families. But chances are, when you read that opening sentence, you didn’t feel much of anything.
Don’t worry. This isn’t a psychological test to reveal your deep-seated pathological tendencies; rather, it highlights how we humans process information. As counterintuitive as it may seem, even the most massive, horrendous event, when presented in general, doesn’t have much direct emotional impact, so it’s easy to sail right by it almost as if it wasn’t there. Why? Because we’d have to stop and think about it in order to “manually” do what a story would have done: make it specific enough to have an emotional impact. And why would you do that? As Damasio says, “Smart brains are also extremely lazy. Anytime they can do less instead of more, they will, a minimalist philosophy they follow religiously.”6 Since your brain’s probably much more interested in thinking about something that matters, like why your spouse is late again tonight, it’s probably not going to work at envisioning—wait, what was that again? A terrible flood somewhere years ago? Especially because hey, there’s nothing you can do about it, and besides, it would just make you feel bad, and god knows you have enough on your plate with your knucklehead spouse, who your mother warned you about, but did you listen? Huh? Flood?
You talking to me?
The point is, if I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention. Feeling is a reaction; our feelings let us know what matters to us, and our thoughts have no choice but to follow.7 Facts that don’t affect us—either directly or because we can’t imagine how the facts affect someone else—don’t matter to us. And that explains why one personalized story has infinitely more impact than an impersonal generalization, even though the scope of the generalization is a thousand times greater. In fact, it is only via a specific personalization that the point of a generalization is shot home. Otherwise, as Scarlett said, we can think about it tomorrow—which, given how much brain energy it takes to think about something that hasn’t grabbed us emotionally, usually translates to a week from never.
Feel first. Think second. That’s the magic of story. Story takes a general situation, idea, or premise and personifies it via the very specific. Story takes the horror of a huge, monstrous event—the Holocaust—and illustrates its effect through a single personal dilemma—Sophie’s Choice. Thus the massive, unwieldy, unbearable vastness of its otherwise incomprehensible inhumanity is filtered through its effect on one person, a mother who must decide which of her two beloved children to spare. And because we are in Sophie’s skin, we feel the ineffable magnitude of all of it: the Holocaust, the unspeakable cruelty, her ultimate decision. We are not just being told about its effect; we are experiencing it.
The Specifics About Specifics
But to unearth the generalities that can undermine a story, we need to know what they look like. The answer is simple: a generic doesn’t look like anything at all, which is the point. A generic is a general idea, emotion, reaction, or event that does not refer to anything specific. For instance, telling us “Trevor had a great time,” without telling us what Trevor actually did, or what he considers to be a great time, is generic. Telling us, “Gertrude always wanted to start her own business,” without telling us what that business is, why it’s interesting to her, and why she hasn’t, in fact, started it already, is generic. Generic concepts are crafty devils. They leap in front of your story and pull the blinds down, shutting the reader out. Here’s a specific example of how maddening generics can be when they sneak into a story and take hold:
JAKE
Kate, we’ve been working together a long time.
KATE
Eons.
JAKE
And I’ve come to expect a certain, oh, how shall I say it? je ne sais quoi in your work.
KATE
Thank you Jake. I think.
JAKE
Unfortunately, your work on this project has been subpar.
KATE
But I put everything I’ve got into it.
JAKE
I’m not questioning how hard you’ve worked. I question your technique and lack of progress. Have you forgotten this is the firm’s most prestigious project? Everything’s riding on it. I’ll give you a few days, but if you don’t produce, I’ll have to transfer you back to your old job.
KATE
I can’t believe you’d even consider that, given what happened last April.
JAKE
My point exactly! Now, get back to work before I regret my decision.
Clearly, as far as the writer is concerned, these two characters are in the midst of an intense, conflict-driven turning point. It’s easy to picture the writer as her fingers fly over the keys, sure she’s giving voice to Kate’s growing anxiety and Jake’s measured frustration. And sure enough, we feel anxiety and frustration, too, because we have absolutely no idea whatsoever what Kate and Jake are actually talking about.
CASE STUDY: WALLY AND JANE
Let’s deconstruct a similarly vague sentence to give us an even better idea of what, specifically, vague looks like:
Jane knew Wally had a reputation for doing horrid things, so when he commented on her appearance in front of everyone, she refrained from smacking him.
On the surface this sounds like a perfectly reasonable sentence, that is, as long as the next sentence goes on to answer the questions this one raises. Unfortunately, what tends to follow is usually another sentence just as full of vague generalities. With that in mind, let’s take a good hard look at what that sentence doesn’t tell us:
Not only don’t we know what kind of horrid things Wally has done, we don’t know what Jane would see as horrid. For instance, perhaps Wally sets stray cats on fire. That would be pretty horrid. And it would tell us something about Wally. Or maybe Wally hangs out with poor kids from across the tracks, which Jane and her stuck-up posse think is absolutely unforgivably horrid. That would tell us something about both Wally and Jane.
And given that this happened in front of “everyone,” how did they react? Well, that depends on who they are. Are they steel workers? High school students? Strangers in the subway? And even if we knew exactly who they are, we couldn’t so much as guess how they’d react to Wally’s comment, because we have no idea what the comment was.
But before we get to what Wally said, there’s that word, “comment.” Wally “commented” on her appearance. Comment as in diss? Comment as in a come-on? We don’t know. All we know is that Jane had a strong reaction to it. Did he ask if she put on weight? Did he tell her that if she doesn’t want him staring at her breasts, she shouldn’t wear a skin-tight, low-cut baby T-shirt that says “Juicy” in rhinestones across the front? Or maybe her desire to smack him stems from the fact that he talked to her at all, given that she’s the senior homecoming queen and he’s a geeky grease monkey. We don’t know what the truth is, so even if we try to make an educated guess, we have no way of knowing whether we’re right. So, regardless of what we come up with, it’ll feel like picking a number out of a hat—and be just about as satisfying.
The same confusion comes up around the smack. Did Jane refrain from smacking Wally hard across the chops? Or would it have been a playful pat on the butt? Or is smack slang for kiss, ’cause what he actually said was, “Babe, you look gorgeous,” which was music to her ears because she’s had a crush on him from the moment she heard he sets cats on fire, since as it turns out, that’s her secret hobby, too? The possibilities, as Buzz Lightyear would say, go to infinity and beyond. Which puts chances at next to nil that the reader would come up with the right answer:
Jane knew Wally liked to eat worms so he could gross everyone out by barfing them up during show and tell, so when he called her a sissy in front of the whole kindergarten class, she decided not to punch him in the stomach and give him the pleasure.
The problem with generalities is that because they’re utterly ambiguous, they don’t have legs. Because they don’t tell us specifically what is happening now, we can’t anticipate, specifically, what might happen next. So much for the delicious dopamine rush of curiosity that keeps us reading.
The point is, generalities are not capable of producing specific consequences, and so the story has nowhere to go. Instead, more vague things happen, compounding the confusion, until the reader realizes that she has far more questions than the story will ever answer and heads to the refrigerator for a snack.
Why Would a Writer Be Vague?
Writers are rarely aware they’re being vague, although as we’ll see in the following list, sometimes they actually do it on purpose. They tend to entrust their story to generics for three main reasons:
1. The writer knows the story so well, she doesn’t recognize when a concept that’s very clear to her will come across as utterly opaque to the reader. So when she writes, “Renee looked at Osgood in his tight jeans, tousled hair, and ratty Converse high tops, and smiled knowingly,” she has absolutely no idea that it leaves us thinking, What do you mean, knowingly? What’s behind that smile? Her knowledge that Osgood’s really a pretentious poser rather than the guileless hipster he pretends to be? That he’s her dream guy and tonight’s the night she’s going to tell him? That she’s pregnant with Axel’s baby
, but Osgood will never be the wiser? It doesn’t even occur to the writer to tell us; because she knows exactly what “smiled knowingly” refers to, she assumes we do, too.
2. The writer doesn’t know the story well enough, so when Renee tosses her head and gives Osgood that knowing grin, it’s because the plot needs her to. If asked about it, the writer might look at you quizzically and say, “Wait, you mean she needs more of a reason than that?”
3. The writer knows her story very well and is quite aware she hasn’t told the reader what’s behind Renee’s knowing smile, because she’s afraid if she does, she’ll “give too much away.” This oft-misguided fear is something we’ll be talking about in depth in chapter 7 when we discuss “reveals”—and so, uh, I don’t want to give too much away here.
Whether it stems from the writer knowing too much or too little, or actually doing it on purpose, being vague is never a good idea. So to help you zero in on wherever vagueness may have crept into your story, here’s a rundown of where the usual suspects tend to lurk.