by Larry Brooks
When revision becomes your next and perhaps only remaining option, you will benefit greatly from understanding how you may have cherry-picked through that massive bucket of conventional wisdom without actually distilling it into a truth—your own truth—that ignites and empowers the entire storytelling proposition.
You get to choose what knowledge you apply to your writing process. And your writing lives or dies by those choices. In the end, luck and instinct have very little to do with it, because both are expressions of what you truly understand—or don’t—about storytelling. When that knowledge works for you, it’s called instinct. When it doesn’t, it’s too often called bad luck in a tough business based solely on perception.
Certainly nobody knows everything there is to know about writing great stories. One of the most respected modern masters of this craft, William Goldman, assured us of this when he said, “Nobody knows anything.” We can strive to know our craft, but we also have to listen to our inner storyteller and hope it has something good to say.
Sometimes we even get it right.
The Power of Instinct
The power of pounding away at a story, driven by your instincts until it is forged into something precious, is not to be underestimated, but neither is it something you can count on. Relying on your gut or your heart only works when instinct is informed rather than blind. Otherwise it is similar to believing you can build a bridge because you’ve been driving across bridges for years. The writing guru who tells you that instinct is the only real means of writing a story and advises you to avoid anything that smacks of structure and craft might as well suggest that you go ahead and build that bridge based on your instincts alone, without any knowledge of the physics involved. Sometimes that works, but more often than not, in the hands of a newer writer especially, that splash you hear is the sound of the bridge collapsing under its own weight.
Story doesn’t supercede structure: Story is structure.
Many famous authors, speaking in interviews that seek to illuminate their process, claim to have no idea where their story is going. What they fail to say, though, is that—based on the principles of craft—they do understand where the story should go, relative to the flow of dramatic structure and character arc. This partial picture of process suggests that you should (as opposed to might) just write, just trust your gut, and let the story tell you what it needs. For the folks in the workshop audience, many of whom are sucking up this guidance like Holy Writ, this is also among the worst writing advice ever given.
What these authors are talking about is their process. Don’t be fooled into thinking they are advising you to chuck all the available principles of fiction and just wing it. They know those principles as well as they know how to boil water without consulting a manual.
Given that you’re reading a book about fixing your story, odds are you are already aware of this well-intentioned sleight of hand.
It’s always better to know.
Salvation—in the form of your next draft—awaits in a side-by-side comparison of what you understand about the craft, juxtaposed against how and where your failed draft (or simply an unpolished, less-than-final draft) came up short. In this context, the fix isn’t merely a rewrite but rather, in a majority of instances, a rethinking of your story.
Knowledge swirls around us, waiting to be discovered.
Knowledge is like water, the stuff of life itself. It doesn’t care what you call it, and it doesn’t care if you recognize it; it’s simply there. Consequences ensue when you take liberties with it, like diving too deep or long or failing to take in enough of it. It can even kill you if your instincts are off.
And so, to begin a quest for the rescue, resurrection, and redemption of our stories, we must first look within: at what we know and don’t know, at what we’re guessing, and at what we’re missing altogether. Knowledge is there, where the seeds of our literary discontent have been sowed. Through its power, the fundamental tenets of storytelling craft, and a clean slate of opportunity, await.
This book is as much about rebuilding you as a writer as it is about rebuilding your story. You’ll come to realize these goals are one and the same. We’ll explore the mind-set required to successfully navigate the story-fixing waters, followed by the hard-core issues of craft that will empower that process toward effectiveness. Then, because a more ethereal discussion falls on deaf ears when the listener is less than fully enlightened, we will return to the philosophical truths about successful story fixing, using those tools and criteria of craft as context.
We don’t just need to know how to win the battle; we also need to know why we are fighting the war. Such is the flow of this book: survival, warfare, and then the post-traumatic reality of encountering it all. Once we are introduced to certain principles, the entire discussion looks different on the second pass.
We don’t send our soldiers into battle fresh out of the recruiter’s office, no matter how badass they are. First we break them down through boot camp, run them through skill-specific training, and then rebuild them into warriors. It’s the same for your story. You must confront who you are as a writer so you can be free to go to the next level in your writing journey.
There are no enemies in this battle, other than your unwillingness to embrace craft at its highest level. When you do so, everybody wins.
Nobody expects you to nail your story in one draft. But if the conceptual narrative idea is strong enough and your level of craft is deep enough, you just might get there in two.
Part One
The Raw Grist of Story Fixing
The blank page is perfect.
Not a single mistake to be found.
Anything that goes wrong from there has your name on it.
Chapter 1
What You Need to Know About Story Fixing Before You Revise
As someone who has evaluated more than six hundred stories in the past three years, I’ve come to a certain realization I’ve not seen proclaimed elsewhere: Often the writing or the mechanics of a story aren’t necessarily what bring it down; rather, it is the focus of the story itself, its level of inherent dramatic tension, thematic weight, and good old-fashioned compelling appeal that renders it unpublishable.
This is so obvious that it may not rock your writing world at first glance, but it should. Because, based on results, very few of those six hundred writers get that nuance. They simply chose the wrong story, or an inadequate story, to write. Their instincts didn’t show them a higher bar to reach for, and their submitted stories bore evidence of that fact.
Chances are that nobody told you that your story was weak. Even with stellar writing and textbook execution, the story you chose just wasn’t strong enough. Nobody at the writing conference will tell you this, or will even give you benchmarks or guidelines for determining whether your story idea is strong enough. This leaves you alone in determining how your story stacks up to the competition.
And that’s the problem. At least half the stories I’ve read as a story coach—and, I’d wager, half the manuscripts rejected by publishers—are less about the writer and the execution than about the inherent appeal and strength of the story itself.
Writing publishable fiction, however you publish it, is a lofty goal when viewed from a qualitative perspective. Sure, you can publish anything you want these days, without vetting it (though rigorous editorial vetting is still the staple of traditional publishing venues and nearly any agent worth her smelling salts). I sometimes get nailed for saying this bluntly, but some writing groups favor a kumbaya approach to writing, in which any story is worthy and any writer can make it if he really, really tries.
This absolutely cannot be true. Not every story idea is worth pursuing, even in the skilled hands of the world’s finest authors, and not every story written by a well-intentioned, even skilled, writer should be published.
I’m not seeking to discourage. I have no agenda in that direction. On the contrary, I seek to illuminate a realistic and achievable path
toward helping solid writers create publishable stories, with a focus on turning pieces that aren’t currently working into ones that are. And, as a bonus morsel of truth, all this stuff applies with equal validity and power to both rejected and newly conceived projects as well.
If you’ve been rejected after your best and highest effort, then you already know how challenging writing a great story, a publishable story, really is. I’m hoping you’re ready to do the hard work—the real work and the proven work—that will take your story to the next level.
For the record, I agree with the kumbaya-humming groups about the part on trying. But it’s the definition of what trying really means that’s up for debate. This book is my take on that issue, with solid principles, logic, and proven experience to back me up.
Two Major Reasons Why a Story Doesn’t Work
I believe that there are two major reasons why a story doesn’t work, or doesn’t work well enough, which in the realm of professional storytelling is the same thing as failing. These two categories are the very things a writer should strive to conquer, not just in the revision phase but from the story’s inception.
If there are two reasons for why a story doesn’t work, it follows that there are two reasons why it does, and that the first set is the antithesis of the latter set. Like an airplane must have both power and lift, an athlete must have both timing and speed, and a song must have both melody and lyrics to achieve their purposes, effective stories need two separate dimensions of energy.
Just two.
Either (1) your story proposition isn’t strong enough, or (2) its execution isn’t effective enough. The flip side, then, says that when a story does work, it is because the story proposition is strong enough and its execution is indeed effective. In either case, two coins are spinning in the air, and how they land determines the fate of your story. Mining the gold of this truth requires that you understand what strong means and what effective entails. Not everyone agrees, so whom you listen to becomes a factor in your success.
While this seems simplistic at a glance, the fine print attached to either area of weakness is not. There is a long list of criteria and common missteps within both of these categories, and because both are products of imagination and choice on the part of the writer (which are nothing other than your story sensibilities calling the shots), the remedy becomes as imprecise as the explanation of the problem.
Stories are like beauty.
Beauty is a perception, and perception is everything in certain fields of endeavor, including writing. The criteria for the beauty of both levels of story effectiveness vary widely and reside very much in the mind, if not the eye, of the beholder. In other words, one reader’s masterpiece is another’s waste of time and money.
This is why stories are usually rejected by one or more agents or publishers before finding a home. You’d think professionals would be on the same page about what works and what doesn’t, but that’s hardly the case. The eyes of those beholders have different tastes and personal preferences (which become their favored criteria) and thus different lenses through which they view a story. Writers are the first to determine (and are quite alone in doing so) what is beautiful and functional within their stories, and when agents and editors and readers don’t agree—we’ve all heard tales of famous authors being rejected by dozens of agents—writers can always fall back on their hubris, reassuring themselves that those agents, editors, and readers just don’t get it.
But your readers may very well have gotten it. They just didn’t like it.
If you’re in this business to actually sell your fiction, hubris will destroy you. Because those agents, editors, and readers have to get it. And if they don’t, then it’s on you to understand why not, rather than, as a reflex or an uninformed response, attempting to breathe life into something that others perceive as comatose or flat or just less than compelling. It’s up to you to realize that you aren’t necessarily the arbiter of what is worthy and what is not.
You get a rejection, so in your state of denial you then decide to send it out to someone else. Not always the best approach. Then again, it may be the best choice available. You get to make that choice, and you have only your story sensibilities to guide you.
After a while, as more and more rejections pile up, we must consider the possibility that, at its core, the problem is with the author rather than those who have read and rejected the work.
You can revise anything.
It is always a question of degree, and sometimes revision is just another word for starting over.
If a story’s weakness resides in both the story-strength realm and the craft-execution realm, then revision becomes nothing short of a complete reboot on multiple levels. In turn, this says something about the state of the writer’s story sensibilities—the sum of instinct, knowledge, and experience, completely eradicated of ego—and becomes the first place to look for cause and effect as the revision process begins.
Story strength and craft execution provide an overarching context for the entire revision conversation. Determining in which of those two neighborhoods your work awaits is the first step in the revision process.
You have to decide. Which means, in order to do so with true confidence of your success, you have to know.
But how can we know?
Or better put … what should we know, specifically?
There’s a good—if not scientifically precise—answer to that: The perception (and thus the fate) of a story is in its measurement across several standards, which include simple opinion and personal taste. We have a proven set of principles, criteria, and outcomes to use as benchmarks to help us decide. You’ll see lists of those in both realms soon enough, but for now, a higher-level view of story definition and storytelling craft is required.
We first need to tear into this story strength vs. craft execution issue and make sure our story sensibilities aren’t out there on a thin limb, very much alone.
Story and Execution
Revision isn’t always a black-and-white proposition. In fact it rarely is. The two realms of revision—story and execution—are not mutually exclusive, but more often than not they act in tandem to sabotage the writer’s best intentions. They remain separate in the sense that you need completely different literary sensibilities to master them. Conversely—and inevitably—if you come up short in either realm, the whole story will be perceived as highly rejectable.
A quick analogy might help you understand this. Two students try out for the college tennis team. This is Division 1, a high level of tennis by any standard. Everyone at the tryout can beat anyone at the country club, including the club pro. Here, at the aspiring-professional level, greater-than-average talent and instinct are required. One player is well trained but weak and sluggish. Her strokes are pretty, but her shots are cream puffs in a game that often depends on spin and velocity. Good enough for high school, but not for the tryout. The other player demonstrates great natural speed and racquet control; she can hit the crap out of the ball but makes bad choices under pressure. She lacks an evolved sense of judgment or patience to go for winning shots, and her double faults and unforced ground stroke errors are too frequent. Experience counts, and the lack of it can get you cut from the team.
In this case, neither player makes the team. The first player is told that her game is good but not great, not strong enough to compete. She’s not quick enough, can’t cover the court well enough, and her serve comes in fat, ripe for the opponent to rip a winning return. The raw material of her game isn’t up to the level of the competition. Her game is generic. Other players who tried out brought a better game overall.
In this analogy, she is like the writer lacking in the story realm. This writer can write, but what she is writing is problematic. It’s just too weak, and too generic; it doesn’t stand out in a field of tough competition.
The other player, the one with the natural gifts, is told she needs to play the game at a higher level. She’s a big hitter, bu
t her instincts and timing are off. She’ll get killed by a more schooled player, even if that player isn’t as strong. It doesn’t matter how hard you hit the ball if the opponent simply waits for you to get out of position to deliver a winning shot you can’t reach. Everyone hits big at this level (which is why the first player was cut), and a sense of touch and anticipation is required to compete.
In this analogy, she is like the writer lacking in the execution realm. This writer’s story rambles and includes side trips and diversions and lacks a sense of flow and structure. She makes bad choices at bad times, which is why in her career she consistently loses to authors with less raw talent.
Many of the other kids fail to make the team because they lack in both areas—they have a solid game but no differentiating abilities or skills, or a big game with no subtleties or touch. The two players described above define the scope of the specific improvements that might be required, and they fall into one of two realms: the raw strength and hunger that make a player powerful, or the timing and variable pace and patience that make a player formidable in all situations, at all levels.
Raw strength and athleticism (story) plus skill, timing, and intuitive sensibilities within the rules of the game (execution): The entire combination has to be stellar to make the team.