by Lisa Cron
The good news is, there are many extremely capable freelance literary consultants out there who can provide objective, professional feedback that can help you not only rewrite your story but also improve your writing skills in the process. The bad news is, you’ll find a gazillion to choose from—some great, some not—just by typing “literary consultant” into Google. My advice is to make sure the person you hire has a background in publishing—either as an agent or as an editor. If you’re a screenwriter, look for someone with genuine development experience. If you’re considering hiring a story analyst, find out what production company or studio they read for, and how long. Experience matters. Because while any intern can (and does) decide whether or not a script or novel works, when it doesn’t, very few can tell you exactly why—and fewer still, what to do about it.
Better Them Than Us, For Now
One way to toughen your hide before you venture into this territory is to start reading reviews—book reviews, movie reviews, reviews of all sorts. Why? For perspective. Think of it as a training course. Imagine you are the author of the book that’s being taken to task. Because, let me tell you, reviewers are merciless—as they should be. Often gleefully so.
For instance, in his review of the movie version of The Da Vinci Code, A. O. Scott of the New York Times manages to take a pretty good swing at both author Dan Brown and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. First calling Brown’s bestseller a “primer on how not to write an English sentence,” he goes on to chide Goldsman for penning “some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own.”11
Ouch. But at least that’s just about the prose rather than the authors themselves. For that, here is Slate’s Dana Stevens on the movie version of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestselling memoir Prozac Nation:
Granted, Prozac Nation is an extremely silly movie, but let’s face it: self-dramatizing middle-class girls who stay up for days on end writing Harvard Crimson articles about Lou Reed (“I feel his cold embrace, his sly caress”) are inherently silly people.… And whenever the film takes Wurtzel’s tragic posing seriously, it flounders.12
Double ouch. In one shot, Stevens slams the book, the movie, and Wurtzel herself. In print. For everyone to see. And given that the Internet is now home to just about everything anyone says about anything, both reviews will be at the world’s fingertips, a mere couple of keystrokes away, 24/7, forever.
Be prepared: regardless of how successful you get, people are going to be analyzing your work, for better or worse, from here on out. Some will come at it with bizarre, idiosyncratic potshots; others will zero in with dead-on accuracy and illuminate massive trouble spots you won’t believe you could have missed.
If you have trouble now hearing it from a friend, in private, imagine how it’ll feel from a stranger, in public. Thus your goal is to toughen up. That’s not to say you won’t feel gut punched at first. There’s no real way around it. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra had this warning for his fellow writers: “No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.”13
It’s Always Darkest Before the Sunshine
Is it worth it to rewrite an entire novel or screenplay two, three, or four times? What about five or six? Just how many times are we talking about? It’s impossible to say. So perhaps an anecdote will suffice—one that highlights just how long the road can be and how sweet the reward at the end.
Back in 1999, Michael Arndt felt he’d paid his dues, having spent ten years in the movie business as a script reader and assistant. So, having accumulated a small nest egg in the process, he quit his job and hunkered down to write a screenplay. He wrote six stories and ditched each one. The seventh—which he wrote in three days—he had a good feeling about.14 So he kept at it. For over a hundred drafts. His motto was No point in doing something if you’re not going to do it right. And he was determined to get it right.15
Which is probably why, six years after he began writing it, he won the Oscar for best original screenplay for Little Miss Sunshine. Why? Because his allegiance wasn’t to himself, or to his first draft, or even to his ninety-ninth. It was to the story itself. And to us. A world full of strangers who he knew would never, ever give him the benefit of the doubt. So his story didn’t ask us to. All it required of us was that we sit back, relax, and give it our undivided attention.
With that kind of care and determination, imagine how far your story can go. You don’t need to be a genius, although you may well be one. What you do need is perseverance. The one thing that makes a person a writer is writing. Butt in chair. Every day. No excuses. Ever. As Jack London famously said, “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club.”16 Hemingway concurred: “Work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite on the nail.”17
It’s only then that the real story you’re telling slowly emerges. Here’s a secret: when you’ve tapped into what it is we’re wired to respond to in a story, what we’re hungry for from the very first sentence, it is your truth we hear. As neuroscientist David Eagleman says, “When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something larger than the sum.… The concept of emergent properties means that something new can be introduced that is not inherent in any of the parts.”18
What emerges is your vision, seen through the eyes of your readers, experienced by your readers. So what are you waiting for? Write! Although they may not know it yet, your public is eager to find out what happens next.
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INTRODUCTION
1. M. Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Your Brain Unique (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 220.
2. J. Tooby and L. Cosmides, 2001. “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts,” SubStance 30, no. 1 (2001): 6–27.
3. Ibid.
4. S. Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997/2009), 539.
5. M. Djikic, K. Oatley, S. Zoeterman, and J. B. Peterson, “On Being Moved by Art: How Reading Fiction Transforms the Self,” Creativity Research Journal 21, no. 1 (2009): 24–29.
6. Common quote based on J. L. Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Ficciones, trans. Emecé Editores (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 22.
7. PhysOrg.com, “Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations of Narrative Situations, Brain Scans Suggest,” January 6, 2009, http://www.physorg.com/print152210728.html.
CHAPTER 1: HOW TO HOOK THE READER
1. T. D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 24.
2. R. Restak, The Naked Brain: How the Emerging Neurosociety Is Changing How We Live, Work, and Love (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 24.
3. D. Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 132.
4. A. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 293.
5. Ibid., 173.
6. Ibid., 296.
7. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 543 (see introduction, n. 4).
8. B. Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 393.
9. J. Lehrer, How We Decide (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 38.
10. R. Montague, Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions (New York: Plume, 2007), 111.
11. C. Leavitt, Girls in Trouble (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005), 1.
12. J. Irving, “Getting Started,” in Writers on Writing, ed. R. Pack and J. Parini (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991), 101.
13. Restak, Naked Brain, 77.
14. D. Devine, “Author’s Attack on Da Vinci Code Best-Seller Brown,” WalesOnline.co.uk, September 16, 2009, http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2009/09/16/author-s-astonishing-attack-on-da-vinci-code-best-seller-brown-91466-24700451.
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CHAPTER 2: HOW TO ZERO IN ON YOUR POINT
1. M. Lindstrom, Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), 199.
2. P. Simpson, Stylistics. London: Routledge, 2004), 115.
3. Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 134 (see ch. 1, n. 8).
4. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves, 28 (see ch. 1, n. 1).
5. Lehrer, How We Decide, 37 (see ch. 1, n. 9).
6. Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 134.
7. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 168 (see chap. 1, n. 4).
8. R. Maxwell and R. Dickman, The Elements of Persuasion: Use Storytelling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster & Win More Business (New York: HarperBusiness, 2007), 4.
9. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 539 (see introduction, n. 4).
10. E. Strout, Olive Kitteridge (New York: Random House, 2008), 281.
11. Ibid., 224.
12. E. Waugh, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. by M. Amory (London: Phoenix, 1995), 574.
13. M. Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York: Simon & Schuster Pocketbooks, 2008), 1453.
14. W. Golding, Lord of the Flies (New York: Perigee Trade 2003), 304.
15. “Gabriel (Jose) García Márquez,” Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2007), http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/chh/bio/marquez_g.htm.
16. Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 1453.
CHAPTER 3: I’LL FEEL WHAT HE’s feeling
1. Lehrer, How We Decide, 13 (see ch. 1, n. 9).
2. A. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin, 1994), 34–50.
3. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 373 (see introduction, n. 4).
4. Gazzaniga, Human, 226 (see introduction, n. 1).
5. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 254 (see ch. 1, n. 4).
6. Gazzaniga, Human, 179.
7. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves, 38 (see ch. 1, n. 1).
8. E. George, Careless in Red (New York: Harper, 2008), 94.
9. A. Shreve, The Pilot’s Wife (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1999), 1.
10. E. Leonard, Freaky Deaky (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2005), 117.
11. George, Careless in Red, 99.
12. Restak, Naked Brain, 65 (see ch. 1, n. 2).
13. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 421.
14. J. W. Goethe, “The Poet’s Year,” in Half-Hours with the Best Authors, vol. IV, ed. C. Knight (New York: John Wiley, 1853), 355.
15. Gazzaniga, Human, 190.
16. C. Heath and D. Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007), 20.
17. Common quotation based on M. Twain, Following the Equator (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1898), 156.
18. W. Grimes, “Donald Windham, 89, New York Memoirist (Obituary),” New York Times, June 4, 2010.
19. J. Franzen, Life and Letters, “Mr. Difficult,” New Yorker, September 30, 2002, 100.
CHAPTER 4: WHAT DOES YOUR PROTAGONIST REALLY WANT?
1. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 188 (see introduction, n. 4).
2. M. Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), 34.
3. Gazzaniga, Human, 179 (see introduction, n. 1).
4. Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 143 (see ch. 1, n. 8).
5. PhysOrg.com, “Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations” (see introduction, n. 7).
6. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 61.
7. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957 (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Service, Federal Register Division, 1958).
8. J. Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (New York: Vintage, 1990), 168.
9. K. Oatley, “A Feeling for Fiction,” Greater Good, The Greater Good Science Center, University of California, Berkeley, Fall/Winter 2005–6, http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/a_feeling_for_fiction.
10. M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott-Montcrieff (New York: Random House, 1934), 559.
11. J. Nash, The Threadbare Heart (New York: Berkley Trade, 2010),
CHAPTER 5: DIGGING UP YOUR PROTAGONIST’S INNER ISSUE
1. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves, 31 (see ch. 1, n. 1).
2. Gazzaniga, Human, 272 (see introduction, n. 1).
3. K. Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (New York: ecco, 2010), 109.
4. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 211 (see ch. 1, n. 4).
5. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Boston: Mariner Books, 1968), 59.
6. B. Forward, “Beast Wars, Part 1,” Transformers: Beast Wars, season 1, episode 1, directed by I. Pearson, aired September 16, 1996.
7. G. Plimpton, “Interview with Robert Frost,” in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd series (New York: Viking, 1965), 32.
8. T. Brick, “Keep the Pots Boiling: Robert B. Parker Spills the Beans on Spenser,” Bostonia, Spring 2005.
9. K. A. Porter, interview by B. T. Davis, The Paris Review 29 (Winter-Spring 1963).
10. J. K. Rowling, interview by Diane Rehm, The Diane Rehm Show, WAMU Radio Washington, DC, transcript by Jimmi Thøgersen, October 20, 1999, http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/1999/1299-wamu-rehm.htm.
11. J. K. Rowling, interview by C. Lydon, The Connection (WBUR Radio), transcript courtesy The Hogwarts Library, October 12, 1999, http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/1999/1099-connectiontransc2.htm; J. K. Rowling, interview, Scholastic, transcript, February 3, 2000, http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/interview-j-k-rowling.
12. Gazzaniga, Human, 190.
13. Ibid., 274.
CHAPTER 6: THE STORY IS IN THE SPECIFICS
1. Pinker, How the Mind Works 285 (see introduction, n. 4).
2. Ibid., 290.
3. Gazzaniga, Human, 286 (see introduction, n. 1).
4. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 188 (see ch. 1. n. 4).
5. V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 242.
6. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 121.
7. Ibid., 46–47.
8. G. Lakoff, “Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In The Dust,” Social Research 62, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 177–214.
9. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 353.
10. J. Geary, “Metaphorically Speaking,” TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, transcript and video, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/james
_geary_metaphorically_speaking.html.
11. Aristotle. Poetics (Witch Books, 2011), 53.
12. E. Brown, The Weird Sisters (New York: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 2011), 71.
13. NPR, “Tony Bennett’s Art of Intimacy,” September 16, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/10/29/141798505/tony-bennetts-art-of-intimacy.
14. Heath and Heath, Made to Stick, 139 (see ch. 3, n. 16).
15. E. Leonard, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing (New York: William Morrow, 2007), 61.
16. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 377.
17. G. G. Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 6.
CHAPTER 7: COURTING CONFLICT, THE AGENT OF CHANGE
1. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 292 (see ch. 1, n. 4).
2. Lehrer, How We Decide, 210 (see ch. 1, n. 9).
3. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves, 155 (see ch. 1, n. 1).
4. B. Patoine, “Desperately Seeking Sensation: Fear, Reward, and the Human Need for Novelty,” The Dana Foundation, http://www.dana.org/media/detail.aspx?id=23620.
5. Restak, The Naked Brain, 216 (see ch. 1, n. 2).
6. E. Kross et al., “Social Rejection Shares Somatosensory Representations with Physical Pain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108, no. 15 (April 12, 2011): 6270–6275. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076808.
7. J. Mercer, “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive (Mister In-Between),” by J. Merce
r and H. Arlen, October 4, 1944, Over the Rainbow, Capitol Records.
8. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 54.
9. Gazzaniga, Human, 188–89 (see introduction, n. 1).
10. D. Rock and J. Schwartz, “The Neuroscience of Leadership with David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz,” Strategy + Business, webinar, November 2, 2006, http://www.strategy-business.com/webinars/webinar/webinar-neuro_lead?gko=37c54.