Story Fix

by Larry Brooks

  The rare player who brings this combination of talent to the tryout is like the writer who gets published. (And believe me when I say, when you submit a story to an agent or editor, you are very much trying out for a team, competing with other skilled writers against the same applied criteria.) If you display weakness in either the story or execution realms, you’ll be like the rejected player walking home alone, bag in hand, wondering what went wrong and perhaps thinking, They just don’t get me.

  In fact, it is you who just isn’t getting it. You showed up with only half of what you need to reach your goal, to compete at the next level.

  The good news is that both areas of weakness can be strengthened, fortified, and fixed. But the writer needs to know where to focus the work of fixing her game in each area, because each requires the other. We need to bring the whole game to the tryout. If you continue to practice without changing your ability to achieve a higher level of play—and do the work necessary to execute it—nothing will change.

  We need to know more about what causes stories to be effective in order to make it happen.

  Once again, the two highest realms of story weakness are:

  Poor conceptual basis or story idea. Your concept should lend itself to a dramatic premise and a thematic stage upon which your characters will show themselves. Without a strong initial idea, the story itself just won’t be compelling enough at its core, no matter who is writing it. It may be too familiar. It may lack dramatic tension. It may feature a character who is flat and lacks a fresh edge. It may focus too much on character, without giving him or her something compelling to do. Or the story might simply be absurd, the leaps in credibility too vast. Revisions from this realm are challenging because you have to go deep into what you began with and change it. You can’t tweak your way out of this problem. Revisions to these weak premises often fail because the writer attempts to polish the execution, when in fact the raw potential of the story itself—the inherent nature of the story—is not rich and compelling enough. It’s like polishing a Volkswagen to prepare for a NASCAR race. Shiny isn’t the point. Maybe you thought you had a great story idea, but based on results, nobody else agrees.

  Poor execution of the story. The arc of your story’s structure and the substance of its narrative are flawed. The story may indeed be conceptually strong enough, but the storytelling craft of the writer behind the wheel isn’t. At least not yet. The writer isn’t up to it, even if the original idea is. (See the case study in chapter sixteen for an example.) The narrative may be too slow, too laden with backstory, too one-dimensional. The character may be an archetype rather than an individual we are interested in taking the journey with. There is too little to root for, too little at stake. The story changes lanes. The pacing is off. The list goes on. Maybe the story proposition really is on fire. But perhaps you and your current story sensibilities don’t match up. Your story is bigger than you, relative to your ability to unspool the core narrative across an optimized dramatic arc. To nail that, you have to manage about eight dozen variables, which is like trying to juggle a ping-pong ball, a feather, and a bowling ball in a stiff wind.

  Both weaknesses are fixable.

  Nobody said this would be easy. It looks easy when you read a tightly written story, and that’s the whole problem for many writers. It looks easy.

  Here’s a sobering and rarely spoken perspective: If 990 out of 1,000 manuscripts are rejected, why do we then believe that the percentage of acceptance will go up after revision when the same rejected writers are doing the revising?

  Some stories will indeed be accepted after revision. Most won’t. It is the reason that most won’t that we need to embrace—and avoid.

  Of those 990 rejected stories, about half will be dismissed because the story idea, concept, or premise just isn’t good enough, even if the writing is perfectly fine. The other half will be tossed because the execution of a workable story just isn’t good enough. And, in overlaying those two groups, a majority of the stories rejected will have issues in both realms. The rejection slip you receive, or the feedback given by a critique group or a beta reader, may or may not be clear about the underlying issues that led to this outcome. And few will actually go so far as to tell you that your story idea isn’t strong enough, when in fact that may actually be the reason for its rejection.

  To solve this paradox—that’s what it is, and one of our own creation—we must dive deep into the reasons and origins behind the flaws that cause rejection in the first place. The more often rejection occurs—because the first response to rejection is usually to send the story to a different agent or publisher, sometimes that very day, without a thought about revision—the more valuable is this insight.

  Story … or craft? Which realm of revision awaits you, and how can you know?

  Chapter 2

  The Story-Fixing Mind-Set

  Mistakes and weaknesses in our work, the stuff of revision and the raw grist of improvement, are almost always a product of the way we think colluding and colliding with what we believe to be true about writing stories.

  Success, however, isn’t necessarily a product of what a writer thinks and believes about writing. This is certainly not always the case for writers of bestsellers and breakout successes, or even for those who finally receive an acceptance letter after years of submitting their work. Often those joyous outcomes are the product of a revision process done well, applied to a powerful origin premise, all rendered by a capable writer and, lurking unnamed and underappreciated behind the scenes, a stellar story editor. But success stories don’t always come with truisms and models, other than the observation that sometimes they cannot be explained. On occasion—and paradoxically, as this is the case with many breakout bestsellers from unknown names—success can be largely attributed to timing and pure luck, and less to artful craft and literary genius.

  Need an example? Four words: Fifty Shades of Grey.

  Even that story, as controversial and critically hounded as it is, must be recognized for its compelling idea. The novel and subsequent movie are pure strategy wearing the leather mask of creativity, tapping into a dark little corner of the psyche and speaking the unspeakable. Millions of women have flocked to it. Millions of men secretly hung on every word and were first in line on the movie’s opening day. The strategic genius here, if not a shining example of literary art, is in grounding the story within a conceptual arena that has proven to be a sure thing.

  Story execution—check. For better or worse, it was sufficient. But the story itself was brilliantly conceived from a strategic point of view, and that made all the difference.

  The Virtue of Aiming High

  Welcome to the Crazy House of Writing Fiction, where anything can happen and where what does happen may not make complete sense. Either way, when lightning strikes or when darkness falls, it always has our name and the state of our craft hidden somewhere in the explanation.

  One of the challenges I frequently sense in newer writers, or unpublished veterans, is that they don’t shoot high enough or strategically enough at the story level. They aren’t aspiring to greatness. Rather, they are seeking to write small stories, generic stories, with the goal of somehow making them great. Big difference there. They aren’t seeking to blow the reader out of her chair with a story that hasn’t been written before. It’s as if they just want to see their name on a book cover, to simply join the midlist club, and they believe that piling on is the way to get it done. Another vampire story. Another dystopian tale. Yet another Da Vinci Code rip-off. One more love story straight off the assembly line at the romance factory. Another thrice-divorced detective with alcohol problems and a grouchy lieutenant. These writers seem to think they have to work up to a groundbreaking story by starting at a lower degree of difficulty, treading familiar turf, cutting their teeth on something less risky and compelling.

  But if the goal is to get published and reach an audience, this mind-set is exactly backwards. Stories from new authors land agents, get
published, and earn market buzz precisely because they take chances and fearlessly plow new and provocative ground. The bookstore shelf is already full. Publishers aren’t looking for mediocrity; they’re looking for home runs. Gillian Flynn’s mega-bestseller Gone Girl is a case in point. It’s a character-driven thriller, and at a glance it contains nothing more conceptual than the rocky terrain of a middle-class marriage. But Flynn didn’t settle—the novel is the antithesis of an American-dream slice-of-life story. Instead she delivered a deep dive into the darkest corner of domestic dysfunction, couching a highly thematic statement about the culture of media within a love story gone terribly wrong.

  That story was big. It was huge. And what made it huge was the way she elevated the concept to infuse its premise with something we’ve never seen before.

  Sometimes the risky bet is the best bet of all.

  That effort begins, by the way, before a word of the manuscript has been written, at the idea-concept-premise stage of development. (If that’s not the case, then you’ve just discovered a likely source of rejection and a subsequent need for revision.) In seeking to understand why your work has been rejected, this scope of ambition is a great place to begin looking.

  What we write in context to informs the whole process of story development, and if there is no vision for the story and no box to put it into, then the writing can easily become a rambling search for meaning. Indeed, many early drafts are a search for the story rather than the execution of one. This single perspective explains why so much rejection and failure occurs among writers who don’t yet understand what story development actually means.

  To show how this looks in real life, at the end of this book I’ve assembled some case studies from my story-coaching work that demonstrate just how easy it is for a project to veer off the tracks at the level of concept and premise. What you’ll read there shows the intentions of the writers—which too often reveal that they intentionally choose a story that is as stale as week-old bread or as full of holes as a block of Swiss cheese—followed by my analysis of how those intentions will play out in a manuscript.

  Reading these after your indoctrination to the principles that make a story soar, and thus empower the story-fixing process itself, will greatly accelerate your ability to recognize your own level of understanding of the storytelling craft.

  That level of understanding may not be what you think it is. If you start to sense this is true for you—if you are surprised by what you encounter—good things are likely to follow.

  Here’s a quick case study to tide you over.

  This happened at a workshop for romance writers, who are among the most astute practitioners of craft in the business. Yet it is a genre full of writers depending almost entirely on their story sensibilities to get published.

  I was lecturing about story concept, asserting that we must bring something conceptual to the story arena as the basis for a premise, something that is inherently compelling, and use it as the stage upon which the rest of the story presents itself. A story doesn’t solely depend on skill and structure to work. The raw material of the story itself—the intrinsic, conceptual grist of it—is a huge factor.

  A boring, normal, slice-of-life story told well will still be boring, unless that life is interesting … which by definition makes it conceptual. But a meaty conceptual framework—now that’s something to work with.

  So there I was, doing my whole concept-premise dance, giving examples, defining and comparing and contrasting, asking for the audience’s concepts and analyzing them as a group. I’d just presented my favorite case study for concept: the vast oeuvre of the Superman franchise. Not exactly a romance, I’ll grant you, but it’s the poster child for the notion of concept as king.

  That singular concept, the one that resides at the very center of the Superman franchise, has hatched ten films, hundreds of comic books, and two major television series. The lesson is this: Every single movie and comic and episode has its own premise. Ten movies, ten different premises. But each story is framed by—and arises from a landscape defined by—the central concept itself, which is the same for every story.

  The conceptual notion is Superman in the context of being someone who is very different than the rest of us. That difference is the concept; it is what makes Superman unique and therefore fascinating. Not Clark Kent the character, but his alter ego as the embodiment of something outside of what we consider normal. Without Superman, Clark Kent is inherently not all that conceptual. With him, though, the entire story landscape becomes astoundingly conceptual.

  But notice, right here at the concept level, there is no story yet. You still need to add a premise—a villain and something specific for the hero to do, with something at stake—before this concept elevates to the level of story.

  That seemed to work for my romance-writing listeners. Either that, or the principle wasn’t yet clear enough to inspire pushback. We moved on to other issues with that principle in place.

  On the second day, though, as we were diving into the writers’ own stories and vetting them against all the requisite elements and criteria, one woman’s hand shot into the air. I’d noticed her body language during the course of the workshop—squirming is telling, and facial tics speak volumes—so I knew what was coming.

  Her voice was shaky, her tone challenging.

  “I write romances. They’re love stories about real people in the real world. I don’t write about superheroes or murders or conspiracies or paranormal powers or schemes or whatever the hell you mean by something conceptual.” She held up both hands and made sarcastic little quotation marks with her fingers. “So I don’t really know what this has to do with me. Or with any of us.”

  If you’ve ever been in that moment, when someone calls you out in front of a group, when they have a legitimate point (one that was the result of my own failure to clarify colliding with her limiting beliefs that were squirming within a narrow paradigm), you know what that was like for me.

  You could have heard a dangling participle drop in that room.

  Romance stories present ripe opportunities for leveraging concept.

  Leveraging concept within a romance is one of the best ways to elevate a story within a very crowded field.

  But you have to dig for it. Falling in love isn’t inherently conceptual, which means it’s the writer's job to infuse the story with a conceptual proposition.

  One of the writers in the room was enjoying huge success—as in, hundreds of thousands of copies sold in the past few months—with her latest romance, and I used that story as an example. The story (One Lavender Ribbon by Heather Burch, named by Amazon.com as one of the top one hundred best-selling e-books of 2014) had a killer concept, and it fit perfectly within what the group accepted as the confining conceptual tropes of the romance genre. And yet her concept—which didn’t rely on superheroes or the paranormal in any way—was the context-establishing catalyst that made the novel work.

  In her story a recently single woman buys an old house. As she begins to remodel it, she finds a stack of old letters hidden in the attic that tells a story—a love story—from half a century ago. Both the letters and the real-time story deal with war and tragedy, and evolve toward the mending of a broken heart as much as the discovery of new love.

  Boom. There’s a concept. No capes or ghosts or superpowers in sight—just some letters hidden for five decades in an attic. That’s not a premise—it doesn’t include characters or plot—but rather, it’s a concept. And it’s a good one.

  The heroine in Burch’s novel becomes fascinated by these letters. In seeking to heal herself, she decides to track down the author of the letters and return them to him (this is the premise—the letters become the catalyst that launches the heroine into action), and in doing so her path crosses not only with a handsome stranger, who happens to be the letter writer’s adult son, but with an entire family dynamic that links to the letters and refreshes their recollection of war and their fear of loss.

&n
bsp; This is a compelling fusion of concept and premise, with a heavy dose of theme as well. The concept stands alone before we meet anyone (because the house and the letters were there). It fuels the premise itself. It becomes the primary catalyst for the story.

  The workshop ended well. The troubled writer now understood what I was talking about and later claimed it as a major epiphany. Her instincts had served her in the creation of a story arc, but the power of the story itself was the issue. Her instincts told her to avoid the conceptual, when in fact her approach should have been the opposite.

  This is no doubt true for more than half of the stories rejected at the professional level. The writer is just fine as a creator of characters and scenes and sentences, but the story—the journey or quest you ask the hero to take—is unremarkable. Maybe even less than credible, possibly absurdly contrived. And thus, revision takes on a much deeper context than mere nips and tucks and tweaks, which are efforts to breathe life into the already terminally ill. Sometimes a better story, at the core level, is the best revision of all.

  The Challenge of Embracing Greatness

  Writing stories can seem so simple, at least at a naïve glance, until one tries to do it in earnest. Many writers come to that first blank page after experiencing enrichment as readers, and they use that experience as the context for their version of how to write a story. It’s no different than riding in the backseat of your family car as a child and then getting behind the wheel at age sixteen: Things are a little more complex when you’re the one sitting in the driver’s seat.

  Often, lurking quietly in the back of these writers’ heads is the smug sense that they can produce stories as good as those they read on a regular basis. This is a limiting belief—a delusion, actually—and the type of thing your inner writer sometimes needs to discard the hard way. Newer writers often bring a truckload of limiting beliefs to the process, many of them products of their experience as readers rather than their schooling as writers. We will try to dismantle them here.