by Larry Brooks
Malcolm Gladwell says in his bestseller Outliers that it takes ten thousand hours of apprenticeship to finally master a professional endeavor at the level required to compete with other professionals. If you’ve ever wondered what is going on during those ten thousand hours, this is it: the discovery, exploration, and practice of the craft itself: submitting to it, embracing it, and owning it … rather than trying to invent unique structures and principles outside of an awareness of what has been established and in play for thousands of years.
6. You’ve resorted to episodic storytelling.
Your hero and his friend go to Italy after graduating from college. One guy loses his passport, and the American embassy must intervene. Then they go to France, where they get in a bar fight. Then they go to London and get laid. Then they go to Spain and lie on a beach for a month, drinking too much. Then they come home and find real jobs. The end.
That’s one heckuva story if you lived it. But as a novel, it’s a complete bust. There is zero dramatic tension. The trip has no stakes. Nothing blocks the characters’ path toward a goal, because they have no goal. It is a collection of memories and short stories, which do not a novel make. Ever.
The fix is to create a central issue—a problem to solve, an opportunity to seek, or some other milestone the hero needs to pursue and achieve to avoid dark consequences or achieve something wonderful. Place that central event amidst the sequence of other episodes you long to share in the story, or use some of those as backstory. Don’t confuse a travelogue, a memoir, or a documentary with a novel—they are different things. Episodic tales without that central dramatic spine—the hero needing or wanting something and setting out to get it—are documentaries, except that they aren’t true.
Again, this is an example of a novel written before its time, by a writer who has rushed his learning curve, committing to a flawed story premise before he understands how the work is actually done, how stories are best told at a professional level.
It’s sad but simple: Many manuscripts fail because their authors don’t fully know what they’re doing yet. They don’t know the difference between a concept and a premise. They don’t understand the role of dramatic tension in a story. They don’t grasp the role of character within a story, believing that character is everything and that plot is optional.
The fix is to keep hiking up the learning curve by immersing yourself in the realm of craft. If you’re reading this, you’re on that path already. Keep going. The true key to fixing your story awaits on this journey, by finally wrapping your head around the core principles and their execution.
7. You’ve attempted to feature more than one protagonist.
Trying to include more than one hero may be your undoing. There are exceptions to this, but your own sagging manuscript may be a case of biting off more than you can chew. Ensemble stories call for very advanced storytelling craft, with an underlying sense of meaning and ultimate stakes. Those stories are out there, and if you’ve encountered them and found yourself seduced, then this might explain your intention to write one yourself. But know that you’re diving into the deep end of the pool, taking on one of the most challenging forms in fiction, and you need significant experience and chops to pull it off. If you’ve failed, the simple explanation might be that you’re not ready for it. Again, the fix is to make yourself ready by immersing yourself in craft and studying successful stories that do manage to pull this off.
A more immediate fix is to reduce the focus of the story to a single protagonist, perhaps with sidekicks and lesser characters who are attached to and have roles within that main dramatic spine. This brings you back into the realm of classic structure and expositional principles, all of which are available for your consumption and adoption.
At most you should consider using two main characters. And if you try it, don’t simply unspool their stories in parallel, without having them develop a meaningful connection that becomes ironic and changes everything. Make sure each character engages in a singular plot. One way to make this work is to have the two main characters end up as lovers, or partners of some type, both seeking the same thing as they face the same antagonists and situations. Complications ensue when their unified goals begin to differ, or if they are at odds in other aspects of their relationship. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is such a novel, with two main characters who occupy the position of protagonists in the story, but they’re also dueling magicians who end up falling in love. The possibilities are numerous, and Morgenstern explores many of them with a master’s touch. Reading stories that demonstrate how complex narratives work is one of the more powerful and efficient ways to internalize the forms and functions required to make it all run elegantly and effectively, with emotional resonance and compelling drama.
Remember, this rogue’s gallery of story killers assumes you had a workable premise in the first place.
The key word is workable. Sure, a premise that calls for, say, six protagonists on a shared journey into darkness to save their entire village seems like a good idea at the time, but when you commit to such a proposition, you are making a promise to deliver. But you might just be writing checks you can’t cash at this point in your writing journey, and your story sensibility isn’t yet at the level to stop it before it becomes a train wreck on the page.
Again, it all comes back to story sensibility. It drives what you conceive as a premise, and it defines your ability to flesh it out across the arc of the novel. Too often the fix is simply to ramp up your skills and your experience, leading to an evolved sense of story that allows you to create stronger premises and provides the know-how to pull them off. If you’re staring at a rejection slip, or if you sense your novel isn’t working well enough, it’s good to sniff out the specifics of what is causing that verdict … but it’s better to become the writer who knows enough to avoid those same mistakes.
This is where rejection, or the need to revise a story you want to save, becomes a blessing in disguise. Because it initiates an opportunity not only to save the story but also to build your skills and sensibilities in the process, leading toward a more intuitive access to creative intentions and decisions that are doable and real rather than residing above your pay grade as a new or less than fully enlightened writer.
These examples may have all begun as solid premises. Or not. Maybe the story was terminal at the premise stage, and nothing you could do via execution could save it. These stories failed to live up to the promise of their premises, or they died trying.
But there are many ways a story can fail at the premise level when the key criteria of an effective premise is missing or misplayed. The story may have little or no inherent potential for dramatic tension. It may lack a compelling plot, because it lacks a natural antagonist or villain. Perhaps the story relies on “real life” to present obstacles to the hero’s quest, which often leads to episodic narrative without a central spine. Or there may be nothing much at stake other than the hero’s happiness, redemption, or the restoration of self-confidence.
In genre fiction especially, you need a plot.
These loose threads may indeed be presented as premises, but they are weak premises, almost impossible to pull off without the narrative skills of Joyce Carol Oates (which means, either by intention or default, you are working within the literary fiction genre) and a floor full of story editors chipping in on multiple drafts.
That isn’t an option these days. Rather, you’ll simply get rejected and be forced to move on. Where you go from there—another fruitless submission, or a revision that strengthens the story—is totally your call.
Broken is broken, no matter how many times you submit the work. The better bet, almost always, is to look for ways to revise the story before another submission. If you have credible feedback to work from, then this is your only rational choice.
As I’ve said before, the only stories that succeed in finding an agent or a publisher after an initial rejection or a wave of criticism are ones that simply didn�
�t appeal to that particular reader (the one doing the rejecting). Agents are readers, and all readers have preferences. Your story simply may not have been one they preferred.
Poor execution, however, will always get you rejected.
Or it could be that your story doesn’t fit with their current roster of clients, projects, and publishing slots. There is a jungle full of reasons writers get rejected, and sometimes it’s simply a matter of “the wrong place at the wrong time.”
And then there are the ravenous predators lurking in that jungle, waiting to devour your story whole and spit it back to you in shreds. Those are the story killers you’ve just encountered, and they are creations of your own making.
Maybe you recognize these toxic choices in the work you are on the cusp of revising. If you do, you’re one of the lucky ones; it bodes well for the state of your story sensibilities, especially if that awareness has dawned here, within the embrace of this book. Because now you know. What you didn’t recognize as risky is now clearly something you understand and can recognize, which is the first and best step toward repair. You have tools—definitions, target criteria, benchmarks, and comparative examples—that can elevate you to a higher level, beginning at the point at which you conceive a concept and land on a premise. You can then execute that story across a dramatic arc lasting about four hundred pages or so.
Allow me to bottom-line this for you.
You need to know your core story. Not a bunch of threads leading to something unclear and irresolvable. You need to unspool that story along a core dramatic spine, a linear sequence of setup, twist, response, and revelation, more twists, proactive response, and yet more revelation. You need an antagonistic force (usually a villain) seeking to block your hero’s path, then another major twist that sets the hero toward an inevitable confrontation, perhaps with a final shocking twist that allows the hero to confront the villain and resolve the goal, one way or another.
And here’s the kicker: All of this concerns a singular core story. The one you promised in your premise. The one that met all those criteria for effectiveness. The one empowered by an underlying conceptual context.
No slice-of-life stories. No “adventures of …” stories. No episodic ramblings. No plotless character profiles, especially life stories of fictional protagonists. No life-sucks-then-you-die diaries of miserable people.
Of course, to avoid all of these pitfalls you need to understand what they are. Perhaps you didn’t before. So be grateful that your rejected or doubted story has led you here, because now you know. Or at least you are on the cusp of knowing.
Your readers want hope. They want to be engaged, and they want to be emotionally involved. They want to empathize, to root for something. They want to be scared, and they want to root against something. They want a vicarious ride, to feel as if they are in the story. They want to feel the weight of the story’s stakes and the urgency of the pursuit of resolution. They want to relate to it, even if they can’t. They want to feel, to laugh and to cry and to lose themselves. To be entertained, moved, changed, enraged, terrified, turned on, and seduced. They want to fall in love again. They want to live within your pages.
Does your story accomplish these feats? Does your premise create a vehicle that can deliver all of this? Only your story sensibility can tell you, or at least make an educated guess. Which makes your sense of story the most fertile ground to access a higher level of storytelling acumen.
If you’re not there yet, if you can’t recognize what went wrong and where to take the story next, then you aren’t done. Maybe it isn’t a lack of storytelling chops; maybe the story itself isn’t strong enough to house all of these elements and essences. Story conception and story execution are two different facets of your story sensibility, and maybe one of them is stronger than the other. Maybe you haven’t found your best story yet. You need to go deeper and wider, think outside of your box, and take some risks. And yet, you need to play within the lines of the genre and adhere to the highest principles of fiction.
Those highest principles can be boiled down to this: Drama and conflict are everything. In a field in which we hear that character is everything, this is actually not a contradiction. Drama and conflict give your character something to do. They are the catalysts that allow character to emerge. They are the forces of story, the things that put story into motion. Without them your story dies. It’s that simple.
In the next two chapters we’ll look at those other ten story elements and essences you graded earlier. But keep in mind that they totally depend on the strength and viability of the premise they are executing, as empowered by whatever conceptual energy you’ve imparted to it.
We’re about to move from story-level viability into the realm of expositional narrative craft. Of execution. And believe me, the realm of craft is another jungle full of story killers. They are mistakes and miscues of a different species, ones that can surreptitiously tear the heart out of your story, or, at the very least, cause it to underachieve.
If you don’t know.
Let’s make sure you do.
Chapter 7
Narrative Bodybuilding Part One
I love the analogy of bodybuilding in context to story fixing.
In the human body, the process of building strength involves working the muscle to the point where it begins to break down; connective tissue actually tears when you lift weights. These torn muscles quickly repair, only now they are slightly stronger than before to handle what the body perceives to be a demand for increased strength.
That’s just what we’re doing here: breaking your existing draft down with the goal of growing it back even stronger. Only it won’t be slightly stronger—more like “on steroids” stronger.
It’s All in Your Head
The brain can continue to live when the body is rendered dysfunctional. This analogy teaches us that even a story with a solid concept and premise can be rendered incapable of movement and full life due to poor execution.
But, other than by artificial means, the body cannot live when the brain goes dark. Everything dies. As I’ve said before, premise is essentially the brain of your story, driven by concept. When the concept and premise don’t work, no amount of genius, including your stellar prose, applied to the other core competencies and realms of story physics can save it.
In this chapter and the next, we will examine the definitions and criteria for the major story elements. The goal is recognition and acknowledgment in context to the story revision process. These two chapters will allow you to see, perhaps for the first time, how your execution has compromised the promise of your premise. Or, on the flip side, how even your best swing at it failed to breathe life into a premise that was stumbling out of the starting gate.
The previous three chapters were a seminar on concept and premise, together becoming the brain trust of your story, the core source of its potential relative to a reader’s perception of intrigue, drama, and vicarious experience within your story world. If that hasn’t jelled, I encourage you to return to those chapters and stay there until it finally clicks, because everything depends on it. The source of your story’s weakness, and, thus, the focus of your revision, may be rooted in problems with concept, premise, or both. You may not have found your best story yet.
If concept and premise aren’t the problem, if both stand up to their respective criteria and are judged as commercially viable by those who possess a proven story sensibility, then these next chapters may hold the key to fixing your story. You may need to open yourself to the possibility—the probability—that despite a great story idea, your execution could be better.
Dramatic Tension
As a story coach I see this all the time, especially with genre-centered stories: The concept is compelling, the premise promises a great ride … and then the writer seems to step over the heart of the premise to focus on character almost exclusively, dwelling too much on backstory, marching the protagonist through an episodic sequence of life experiences t
hat do not clearly connect to a dramatic spine, the one promised by that killer premise. Sure, we get to know that character intimately, but until your hero is doing something in pursuit of a goal, the picture isn’t complete.
The engine of fiction is not character. You’ll hear that it is, but this doesn’t clarify a deeper truth. Character is critical, but it isn’t the main source of energy within a story.
Conflict fuels a story. In any genre other than literary fiction, conflict is the source of character. You need to give your character a challenge, a need, something to do, something with a purpose, something with stakes, and then layer in an antagonistic force—a villain—who seeks to block the quest or path of your hero. Without that quest your story becomes a biographical, diary-like episodic sequence. And without conflict you have overlooked the most important element in any story, including literary fiction: dramatic tension.
Dramatic Tension Defined
It’s simple, really. Your story poses a question. One answer serves your hero’s goals, while others thwart it. Whatever threatens the hero’s goals, the object of his quest, is an antagonistic force. That force—usually a villain—proactively blocks the hero’s path in any way possible. (Some stories use nonhuman antagonists, like weather or disease or government oppression, but the dynamics are the same.) When the hero fights back against the antagonist, heroically finding a way to overcome the obstacles, that confrontation is fraught with conflict that creates dramatic tension, because the reader is rooting for and caring about the hero’s overall goal and the outcome of any specific threat, confrontational moment, doubt, or lurking danger.