Story Fix

by Larry Brooks

  The scene is out of sync with the context of the quartile in which it appears. The beauty of the story structure model is that it assigns four very separate contexts to the scenes within them: Setup—wherein we meet the hero, establish the setting and stakes, and create a path toward the First Plot Point moment.

  Response—to the launch of the quest, via the First Plot Point.

  Attack—based on new information imparted at the midpoint.

  Resolution—wherein the hero becomes the primary catalyst in the quest toward a goal, however that concludes. If you are writing Setup scenes beyond the first setup quartile, you are compromising dramatic tension. If you are writing Resolution scenes in the third quartile, you are short-changing your ending.

  The scene is setting the wrong expectations. There are many types and categories of scenes, meaning all scenes need to align with the expectations of their designated function. Transitional scenes need to change the story, often in terms of setting, time, and point of view. Introductory scenes, especially in the Setup, have a different mission than action scenes. Then there are key structural milestone scenes (the First Plot Point scene being perhaps the most important scene in the entire story), where the narrative depends on the rendering of a specific dramatic moment. Make sure your story utilizes all of these flavors of scenes, and that they do their job rather than trying to be something they are not. Many revision opportunities may present themselves from this advanced subtlety alone.

  If your story sensibility is solid, chances are you’re on firm ground with regard to your scenes. You will intuitively place your scenes where they should contextually appear (using the four-part model as a guideline), and when that happens you’ll notice that you’ve implemented the story model, even if you don’t want to admit this to your pantser writing friends. Otherwise you’re at risk of having a story without an optimal flow.

  How is your story sensibility at this point? I’m betting it’s better than when you wrote the draft you are trying to fix. Keep going—the more you work with these principles, the more they become second nature.

  Writing Voice

  In the end, the task of writing a story boils down to simply writing sentences, all of them appearing within scenes. Not amazing sentences—those are best kept to a brilliantly placed minimum. And not poetic sentences—opt for brilliant irony and transparency over dazzling alliteration.

  So far we’ve been discussing the content of those sentences, as well as their context. In other words, how they contribute to the entirety of exposition. How they connect to what came before, and how they transition to what comes after.

  Writers often come to the avocation of storytelling precisely because they believe that they write excellent sentences. Often they are right. They can indeed produce glowing strings of intricate beauty and render piercing truth with vivid imagery.

  And sometimes that very belief is what gets them in hot water.

  Writing Voice Defined

  Voice is the outcome—the effect on a reader—elicited by the words you choose and the sentences you assemble using them. Voice is your style. It is often unique but sometimes generic in nature. The highest goal of voice is clarity, to not write sentences that call undue attention to themselves in the absence of expositional value. Sometimes voice adds the perfect nuance to your expositional content. “Less is more” is a useful touchstone, since overwriting is easily noticed and never appreciated. Bad prose, unduly distracting prose, rendered in an effort to imbue the narrative with emotion and texture (known as purple prose) has been the cause of many a rejected manuscript.

  Issues with Voice

  It’s obvious why less-than-clean writing will get you rejected: It simply isn’t at a professional level when it absolutely must be. What causes this lack of professionalism is less clear; it’s easier to identify writing that is not professional than to define what the professional level is. In general, though, you need to cull the weeds from your narrative so that what remains is a clean, smooth, and inviting landscape of words. As a rule, unprofessional writing is often the result of the author trying too hard, putting too much into the sentences in an effort to be colorful, ironic, or clever. The prose becomes purple instead of colorful. Less is usually more when it comes to solid writing.

  How do we fix writing voice? It involves an investment of time rather than studying a manual. It’s voice, and therefore it’s a sensibility. It’s like telling someone she needs to sing better or to look less clumsy when she walks. The best strategy is to begin noticing how your writing voice compares to the voice of published, successful authors you admire. Try to categorize their voices and observe how they use language. If you can’t see the difference between their sentences and yours, then this road will be a long one. If you can, then three words apply:

  Practice. Practice. Practice.

  And then get feedback. Find someone who cares enough about you to be honest and is also qualified to differentiate between a professional and an amateur writing voice.

  In addition to overwriting (purple prose), the writer may be guilty of being clumsy. Perhaps the story is void of whimsy, or the sentences don’t create a rhythm or betray the author’s lack of experience by coming off as sophomoric. Again, this is an ear thing, a sensibility thing. It is something that can be learned over time. Revising your draft for voice boils down to this: Do the best you can with it. Get feedback on the line level rather than just at the story level. Remember that less is more. Have someone mark up the pages, focusing on sentences that aren’t strong enough. Get help making them better. Create a crash course in evolving your voice as part of your revision, if someone has told you this is the problem.

  You don’t have to write like Joyce Carol Oates or John Updike to get published. Indeed, the perhaps subconscious attempt to sound like an author you admire can be the source of awkwardness, rendered ironic if you actually succeed in mimicking that author. More writers than you can count have parroted the voice of John Steinbeck, and there isn’t a professional editor out there who, upon noticing, will consider it a good thing.

  Incidentally, issues of voice might be the only item of feedback you receive from agents and editors. These folks aren’t shy about offering their opinions on voice because they don’t have to explain it. “Well, it just didn’t work for me” or another vague comment might be all that you get from them where voice is concerned.

  Dialogue Speaks for Itself

  Writing dialogue is its own art form. Even writers who have a smooth narrative voice occasionally write dialogue that sounds like something from a middle school play.

  Match dialogue with the nature and worldview of the character speaking it. If the character is really smart, give him layered, sophisticated dialogue, which is not necessarily overly eloquent dialogue. Don’t try too hard, as doing so implies bluster rather than intelligence. If the character isn’t so bright, reflect this in how he speaks.

  There are many tools to help imbue your dialogue with personality. Humor and sarcasm are a few of the most common flavors within dialogue. Also consider the length of dialogue, line by line: Some people speak in short bullets, and others meander through a conversation. Dialect, too, can inform the cultural background of a character and inject personality at the same time.

  Here are two versions of the same fictional dialogue. The first sounds like something a grade-school teacher would write in a children’s book, while the second is imbued with a casual street sensibility.

  The Bad

  “Hi, Steve, how are you doing?”

  “Good. And you?”

  “Fine, thanks. It has been a while since we’ve run into each other.”

  “It has. It’s been too long. We should have lunch sometime.”

  A Better Version

  “Hey, Steve, what’s up with you?”

  “It’s all good. You?”

  “Dude, still livin’ the dream, man, livin’ the dream. It’s been too long.”

  “True that. We shoul
d grab a bite, catch up.”

  Both versions portray character. The first version shows two people without the slightest hint of personality (and if that is your intent, write it that way). But people in the real world just don’t talk this way. In the second version, these speakers land squarely in an easily perceived demographic. The point of either isn’t to make the reader like them or relate to them but to create a context for the exchange that lends meaning beyond the words they use. In that second version you can almost see the skateboard tucked under the arm of one guy and the backpack slung across the shoulder of the other. Two women greeting each other at the country club would sound quite different, as would two guys in suits running into each other outside of a courtroom.

  Rules of grammar, including writing in complete sentences and using on-the-nose wording, go out the window when writing dialogue. The rule of thumb is simple: Write dialogue to reflect how real people speak, and customize it to who your character is, where he comes from culturally, and his state of mind as he speaks.

  Once again, this is totally a sensibility issue. The same solutions apply: Get feedback, study dialogue from authors with credibility, and practice, practice, practice.

  Then … repeat.

  That’s how you fix your writing voice. How long that process takes is on you. Here’s hoping it clicks once you head down that path. If that voice doesn’t add value, or, worse, if it detracts by being too on-the-nose and flat, your good story might just get sent back to you for this reason alone.

  The fix is to evolve your dialogue ear. Try to imagine specific people in your life, or even celebrities, who align with the character being written, and hear the dialogue coming from their mouths. Clint Eastwood is likely to say something in a completely different way than LeBron James, even if the meaning of their words is exactly the same.

  Narrative Strategy

  It can be easy to assume that you’ve automatically adopted the best way to write your book. Often you come to this decision based on your comfort level with a certain approach or style, or maybe you remember your high school composition teacher advising you to never write in first person.

  Times have changed. The narrative playing field is wide open. You have choices that can make your story better by virtue of a deeper dive into character and an edgier context for dramatic tension.

  Narrative Strategy Defined

  Your narrative strategy is how you choose to render voice, tense, and point of view. It also addresses issues of chapterization, dialogue, and even the use of italics and punctuation. It is the narrative form of the novel, chosen from or perhaps blending a short list of options in that regard.

  What used to be the default approach in point of view (third-person omniscient) and tense (past) is being challenged by a highly effective wave of first-person hero narrators and present-tense exposition, which until not long ago were the sole province of screenplays.

  Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones was written in first-person present tense from the point of view of a murdered fourteen-year-old girl speaking directly to the reader … from heaven. That was not only the narrative strategy, and a whopper of an original one, but it also constituted the concept of the novel, which served to easily differentiate it from other stories in the mystery genre.

  The first time I read a book that toggled between first-person hero-narrated chapters and third-person behind-the-curtain point of view from the villain—and yes, you absolutely can do that—I thought I’d been transported to another dimension. This particular book was by Nelson DeMille (The Lion’s Game), and I liked the approach so much that I’ve written my last two novels in this way. I’m also seeing it used in novels from all genres to great effect.

  It isn’t just a choice—it’s a strategic call.

  Does the interior monologue inside the head of your hero scream to be heard? If not, making the character more accessible may be a great strategy for revision. First person might have been your best approach—and it’s available again now, as you revise—because it creates more intimacy between the protagonist and the reader and allows for the inclusion of seamless backstory as the hero relates present-day moments via thoughts of past experiences.

  If you’re looking to really shake up the narrative perspective in your story, consider this: Your first-person narrator doesn’t have to be the hero at all. The Great Gatsby, for example, is narrated by Gatsby’s neighbor, Nick Carraway, played by Tobey Maguire in the recent film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby. The choice is a strategic one—both for F. Scott Fitzgerald and for you—and could be the means for taking what is perceived to be a vanilla draft to a higher level, something dripping with taste and color.

  How do you make this call?

  Let the story physics be your guide. If your comfort level turns you away from a choice, realize you may be doing your story a disservice. It’s actually easier for you to ramp up your skills in a particular tense or point of view than it is to make up for the sacrifice of tension and intimacy afforded by the options available. Because you’ve already written the story, revision is the ideal place to test a strategy. The first line of perception is your own story sensibility, but if you can find trusted readers to help you assess a new approach as a revision strategy, be assured they will notice these devices right away.

  Look at your story and look at the feedback. Maybe something will click that moves another tense, another point of view, another mixture of modes to the head of the line of candidates for your narrative strategy. If you have been told that your hero is too flat and/or difficult to relate to, consider a rewrite in first person. That alone might bring your hero closer to the reader and thus solve your problem.

  An Invitation to Determine What Has Sunk In

  You are cordially invited to return to those twelve grading points from chapter three and take another pass at evaluating them. Maybe some of those As and Bs are, in reality, and in context to all you’ve learned, more aptly graded at the C level. And maybe a few low grades are actually stronger than you thought.

  To make this exercise even richer, if you’ve already devised some better story points and execution strategies, plug them into your story and then reassess your novel or screenplay against these benchmarks. Grade the story you now intend to write, as the product of a revision, instead of the one that someone else didn’t think passed the test.

  Doing so will prove the veracity of these principles, which may have already elevated your story. Or it may indicate you are still too close to your work after all. That, too, is something you should know.

  A Word of Caution from the Locker Room

  Having just reviewed all twelve of the story elements and essences you graded earlier, you may be feeling that your revision is more work than you want to commit to. Certainly revising a story from a new narrative strategy is much more than a tweak—it’s a rewrite. But maybe a rewrite is what you need to evolve your story into its highest form, because a rewrite is the best way to embrace all twelve realms (as listed herein) of possible revision at once. Just as you would do in a period of story planning for a first draft, study your story with a view toward making changes within your impending revision, and realize how many battlefronts that will entail. A page-one rewrite will be hard, but it can be blissful work, too, because you now know what you originally started with and how that story ended up, and hopefully you’re much more aware of why it was rejected. Using that information, you can raise your story to a professional, publishable, salable standard, and perhaps beyond into the realm of excellence, by leveraging the tools and story physics at your disposal. A writer who experienced this best-case outcome might say, “Dang, I wish I’d known all this stuff when I wrote that earlier draft!”

  May that be the outcome that awaits you.

  If you don’t know yet, keep hunting for the culprit in your narrative, and in your skills and belief systems about storytelling. Often a combination of these factors conspires to take your story down, and only with a holistic, empow
ered perspective that fuses story intentions and a heightened knowledge of craft can you survive and conquer those old tapes.

  The single most dangerous thing you can do at this point is to fear the revision process itself. If you do, you must ask yourself this question: Is the story really worth it?

  It very well might not be. You know so much more at this point than you did when you wrote your draft and perhaps when you started reading this book. Had you applied this level of criteria and standards to your original passion for your story, you might now feel differently about it. Maybe your story would have waited while you worked with it, strengthened it, and driven it toward something better using your broadened story sensibilities. I’ve written an entire chapter on this notion, which you’ll encounter in the next section.

  Either way, you win. Because if you are no longer in love with your story—not so much the story you wrote but the story you are going to write via the revision process—then your best call is to move on. Apply your enhanced awareness and skills to a new project that calls to you and won’t leave you alone until you explore the possibilities.

  At a recent writing conference, a keynote speaker, an agent out of New York, advised us to walk away from all of our story ideas. At least at first. When they tap your shoulder again, don’t walk away, run away. Only when a story pursues you, tries to possess you, will it prove to be something worthy of your time and talents.