Story Fix

by Larry Brooks

  We need to get schooled on the craft of writing to the extent that it trumps our untested instincts—before it schools us.

  Boot camp is in session.

  In any story, there is always something that could be stronger and more functional. In that sense the old writer’s lament is true: Stories aren’t ever really finished, just deemed sufficient. Or, in some cases, tossed into the marketplace, come what may.

  To reach a truly adequate point of sufficiency, we need to examine the major pieces of the storytelling proposition from several angles. Overlap is inevitable—and valuable. After two decades of teaching this stuff at conferences and workshops, I can assure you that a significant percentage of writers don’t “get it” the first time they encounter it and, if they truly want to move forward, they must immerse themselves in the discussion from several perspectives before an inevitable epiphany descends upon them.

  Such an epiphany is an “angels choir” moment: The curtains part, and the writer finally grasps what she’s been missing. The revision process then becomes a magical resurrection, taking the story and the writer to new heights that weren’t even visible in the earlier draft.

  The blank page at once calls to us and mocks us.

  And so we fill it up with what we have to offer, arising from the pool of what we know, handicapped by what we don’t know, and fueled by dreams we dare not utter aloud. Sometimes these intentions are soured by what we’ve chosen to ignore, or poisoned by things we have been taught that aren’t true or applicable, either through ignorance or arrogance or simple haste.

  Because, in spite of all the books and workshops and websites and analogy-loving writing gurus out there (I admit, I’m that guy), writers cling to the limiting belief that there are no rules. (That’s semantics, by the way; the line separating rules and principles tends to blur.) The mere mention of that word—rules—causes us to rebel, perhaps even to conclude that principles and standards are really rules couched within softer verbiage. From there we decide we can write our stories any damn way we please.

  Because this is art, damn it.

  And that is a fatal mistake.

  Professionals often do write their stories any damn way they please, and they do so because what pleases them is driven by those same principles that scare lesser writers away. The fact that they know what will make a story work, even before writing a single word, is the very hallmark of the word professional on their name tag. We must know what “doing it right” means before we can do it any damn way we please.

  Often we don’t discover that our work isn’t strong enough until the rejection letter arrives. Or the critique group pounces like Fox News on the latest White House decision. Or the story coach doesn’t tell you what you want to hear.

  As part of the story-coaching guild, my job involves telling writers that their stories are coming up short, and why. Often I tell them that the wheels fell off at the conceptual starting gate. It’s the why part that allows me to sleep at night, because I’ve been on the receiving end of the sharp pokes this business delivers plenty of times, and I know the value of why. Like a doctor giving a screaming kid a vaccination shot, I take solace in the hope that once the sting subsides the writer will see the pit into which he has blindly tumbled and will find his way out of it.

  The thing is, you can’t write your way out of the pit unless you know your story’s weaknesses and how to strengthen and repair them. Such a statement creates a paradox of sorts, because if you knew what was wrong and how to fix it before you started writing, you wouldn’t have written it with those weaknesses in the first place.

  This is why revision is so critical.

  For starters, we all do revision work, even before the book goes out to an agent or an editor. Even “polishing” is, in the truest sense, a form of revision, and as such we should subject it to the same rigorous standards that a criticized story must endure.

  Revision assumes you now know what you didn’t know before. It assumes you understand whether your rejection was the outcome of unaligned taste or bad market timing (which may not require revision), or due to a story that is broken at its core, or has been poorly executed (which absolutely does require revision). When you don’t know the difference, your stories will continue to fail. And it won’t just be the story’s fault. It will be yours.

  Chapter 3

  What Went Wrong

  The entire notion of fixing your story manifests within several contexts. While they are slightly different goals, the unifying objective is nothing less than rehabilitation.

  Like any rehab program, this book focuses on the core values, techniques, and proactivity that were lacking when the original version was written. These weaknesses in the initial draft resulted in the need for repair and upgrade. From this perspective, during the revision process we are examining the touchstones and goals that we should have established from the outset.

  It’s easy to just sit down and write something. It’s just as easy to simply change something. In this way, writing and revising can be fun, addictive even. But like any addiction rehabilitation program, fiction rehab requires courage, honesty, transparency, vulnerability, support, guidance, and a vision for what is possible. And most of all, it challenges us to stay away from the toxic behaviors that put us in rehab in the first place.

  Because writing a great story, one that works on all counts, is anything but easy.

  Acknowledgment Is Always the First Step

  The addicted have no chance of recovery unless, and until, they claim their demons.

  With failed manuscripts, we’re talking about conceptual and narrative flaws. Misdirected approaches. The undervalued and ignored. The unseized dramatic opportunity. An unenlightened process. As stated earlier, an agent or editor will rarely clarify any of this when he rejects you, and it might not even show up in the catalytic critique that brought you face to face with the revision phase.

  Successful rehabilitation is never a simple, linear process. “Just put your butt in a chair and write” is as naïve a cure as “Just stop drinking, damn it.”

  If, for example, the story is deemed “too slow” or “nothing special, been there, read that,” there may be several causal factors buried within that critique. It’s like going to the doctor and saying, “I don’t have enough energy lately.” Your complaint could mean just about anything short of having fallen off a roof. Before the ailment can be diagnosed and the healing can proceed, we need more information, perspective, and principle-based modeling.

  The goal of this chapter is to introduce you to tools that will help you begin to self-assess your novel, using any specific feedback you have received to point you toward possible suspects.

  Maybe You’re One of the Lucky Ones

  Maybe you know precisely what needs improvement in your current novel or screenplay. Maybe you can account for why it was rejected or the target of someone’s soul-crushing criticism, or even why the soft voice in your head keeps whispering that it’s not yet good enough.

  But you probably have no idea whatsoever, which puts you in the middle of a crowded demographic. You’re mystified because your beta readers all loved your story.

  Either way, in order to fix the thing, you’ll need to target specific issues of a conceptual, structural, and narrative nature rather than simply polish the manuscript, which only works after you’ve plugged all the leaks.

  If you only did the polish, hoping to hit the sweet spot of agents’ and editors’ expectations, then you’d be guessing. But guessing may have been what got you in this mess in the first place. You need a reliable process to fix what needs fixing.

  To complicate matters, the criticism you receive about your story is often unhelpfully vague. It can sound like this: “The story is too slow. I never really liked your hero. I was confused. Nothing grabbed me. I lost interest. It’s too familiar. It’s bland and flat. You lost me in the second half. I didn’t like the ending. We have something just like this on our list. It was too far ou
t there; this could never happen, and I never bought it. You must have been high when you wrote this. I hate stories like this. It’s too dark. It’s not funny. The writing is too purple. It’s too violent. Too sexual. Too on-the-nose. Too preachy.”

  Or the most useless and dreaded feedback of all: “I dunno—it just doesn’t work for me.”

  All of these things may be true.

  But how, then, do we fix our stories when we hear this kind of feedback? These are perceptions; they are qualitative, imprecise, and immeasurable. Like someone citing a “rough childhood” to explain a troubled life, these criticisms are vague ways to describe issues with one or multiple story elements and essences, perhaps rendered by the hand of a fellow writer in waiting. You may have underplayed some things, overplayed others, or completely ignored or fumbled some of what a story needs in order for it to work.

  The good news is that there is a dependable starting point to get to the root causes of these and other perceived story weaknesses. The weak link may be hard to find, but it’s always there, hidden among the interdependent chain of these twelve graded story competency issues. Success resides in knowing where to look for that weakness and, when you find it, how to connect the cause to the effect and upgrade accordingly.

  But even that is problematic if you don’t understand or accept what the story criteria and elements are, or what they even mean. Chances are nobody will tell you that.

  Selling a story is an all-or-nothing proposition.

  Publishers don’t take on a “promising” story, and they aren’t willing to help you bring it up to their standards. It’s not like they’re a college recruiting an up-and-coming scholar or athlete; they’re looking for performers who are ready—right now—to step onto center stage. Your story has to work, completely and powerfully, without a hitch, in order to be published. Which means that one single weakness, even nestled among other stellar story elements and essences (the former being what you wrote; the latter referring to the contextually informed meaning of what you wrote), may take you out of the game altogether.

  It’s a scary prospect. But you need to be within spitting distance of perfect for the genre and reader niche you are targeting.

  Evaluating the Twelve Specific Story Elements and Essences

  Your challenge in this chapter is to grade yourself on each benchmark. Assign a grade based on what is currently on your pages, using the familiar scholastic report card grading scale, letters A through F. Writing isn’t a pass-fail proposition, at least in this context. But it is a pass-fail proposition when you submit your work to an agent or a publisher; you either land the deal, or you don’t. But at the story-fixing level, we will be dealing with increments of effectiveness, the sum of which results in that pass-fail outcome.

  That outcome is a qualitative assessment, with infinite gradations between “It’s great” and “It sucks.” To get into this school—the Academy of Being Published—you’ll need a GPA above 3.00, with no Ds or Fs in the bunch. A 3.50 is even better, but lesser novels get published all the time. If you’ve been rejected, it may not mean you are currently below a B average (3.00), but it may mean that one or two of your C grades are deal killers—like a great singer who can’t hit the high notes—which can’t be offset by an A in other categories.

  In my book Story Engineering, I cautioned that all six of the core competencies of successful storytelling need to be executed at a professional level. Mastering five of them could result in a stellar story, but that one instance of mediocrity will get you rejected. This is the scary, rarely spoken truth of writing for publication (which includes self-publishing with the intent to gather a readership, as well as selling your screenplay). Essentially, and almost completely without exception, you have to nail all of it.

  And even then, to break in, one or two of these story elements or essences need to be A-plus stellar. This home run mentality among publishers is complicated by the fact that established A-list authors actually can get away with writing stories devoid of glow-in-the-dark elements and essences. But don’t be fooled, and don’t be tempted to point to a novel by a familiar name to make this statement false. A-listers do have something stellar going for them, and it’s often a home run—it’s their name, their brand in the marketplace, which sells books even when the story isn’t particularly fresh or powerful. Publishers value the name brand as much as the next great story idea. We are actually trying to break in to that exclusive club of A-list names, but the only way to do it is to be better than those famous authors by giving readers something brilliant.

  Grade yourself as follows using these benchmarks:

  An “A” (4 points) when the story element or essence in question is a fresh and compelling asset rather than a handicap. The element or essence should be something you’d find in a bestseller, something worthy of mention in a stellar review.

  A “B” (3 points) when the story element or essence in question is fine but not particularly remarkable. You get to check it off as present and accounted for, but it’s not what a critic would consider the strongest aspect of the story, and possibly she’s seen it before.

  A “C” (2 points) when you have to think hard about how your story meets this benchmark and you honestly realize that there’s a chance nobody will notice or remember it. It’s generic, vanilla, cliché, like the detective with a drinking problem. It’s just there: not broken, but not remarkable either.

  A “D” (1 point) applies when you think the particular element or essence is there, but you’re pretty sure it comes up short against the given benchmark criteria. It’s just not doing what it is supposed to do for the story.

  An “F” (0 points) when the element or essence in question is missing entirely.

  Feel free to add a plus or a minus if you’re stuck between grades (because sometimes you’re just a tweak away from something special). The point is to know where you are so you can know where you need to go next with the revision.

  Either way, you need to know where you stand, element by element and essence by essence, across all twelve story criteria.

  The real value here is in the definitions and benchmarks shown for each individual element or essence. (These benchmarks can be found in the chapters in Part Two.) Often when a writer comes up short in any of these areas it’s because she simply doesn’t know enough about it, which you may soon realize.

  For example, the most frequent story-level misstep is confusing concept and premise, which are different elements, though they are inextricably connected to the point where confusion is common. This one, in particular, can sink your story.

  We need look no further than the bestseller lists to see this truth in action.

  Bestsellers arrive in one of two categories: books by established A-list authors, and new authors with extraordinarily compelling novels. Notice that within this latter category, nearly every entry is a “high-concept” story (as opposed to a character-driven, trope-dependent premise), while those from established authors are more premise-driven, or at least the extension of a conceptual notion they’ve established in earlier works (Harry Potter, for example). Branded A-list writers like Nora Roberts don’t always need a killer concept, because their name and talent can drive a concept-light premise into the end zone. But for the rest of us, a premise empowered by something highly conceptual—thus requiring that we understand the difference—is an immediate attention-getter, taking the place of the brand equity that established authors can leverage.

  If you simply can’t recognize what will compel agents, editors, and readers—because you are only applying your own opinion in this regard—then you are stuck in a paradox of your own creation. An evolved story sensibility is not just your opinion; it’s something a professional will assess in considering what will work. And it is your story sensibility that allows you to distinguish between a high concept and a concept that is harder to isolate within a premise.

  Think of it this way: Your novel is like a business, which means that what the cus
tomer wants is critical. It is the product; you are the proprietor. You may like mustard on your peanut butter sandwiches, but if you open a restaurant with this particular concept, you’re gonna be upside down in no time. A massive percentage of rejected stories can be explained by the author writing what he thought was compelling—that’s what all of us do, every time, relying on the keenness of our story sensibility to make the right choices—only to find himself on a tiny island of minority opinion in that particular regard. And there are very few potential customers on a tiny island.

  Confused? Congratulations! Here is your first story-fixing opportunity.

  To nail your novel you need to be crystal clear about the differences between concept, premise, theme, and idea (in addition to several dozen other points of craft), and how those will play in the commercial marketplace. And because these terms—concept, premise, theme, and idea—are merely labels given for completely independent yet requisite story elements, the vocabulary itself is rendered arbitrary. In the real world these terms are interchanged regularly among agents, editors, and especially reviewers, thus muddying the waters for writers attempting to navigate them. In Part Two of this book, you will receive definitions that will serve you in the quiet of your own writing space. You should also check out the case studies offered in Part Four to see how this misunderstanding compromises a story at square one.