Story Fix

by Larry Brooks

  This makes total sense to me, and hopefully it will help explain your story issues if you jumped at an idea too soon. You have to love it back to make it work, to devote the time and courage and attention to detail—more detail than is humanly possible if you ascribe to thoughts that tumble helter skelter out of your head onto the page—before it becomes part of you in the way it needs to. You need to love it with not only your whole heart but your whole head. There is no such thing as “love at first sight” when it comes to story ideas. Allow the courtship to play out, vetting the idea on all fronts, including its staying power. Sometimes situations don’t look as attractive the morning after a one-night stand.

  Remember back in the beginning when I pounded on the very real possibility that your story, not your skill level, is the problem? Maybe now you can see this. Maybe you’re already better than the story you set out to write.

  Now you have the tools to make that call. Because the criteria for concept and premise become the benchmarks for a story idea that works … or doesn’t.

  Or maybe your story remains a challenging quest for you. It meets all of those criteria and is screaming to be written, ready to reward you in proportion to the focus and time you invest in it.

  Like I said, either way, you win.

  Part Three

  Resurrection

  Seeking simplicity on the other side of complexity:

  Once you know, you know.

  The work isn’t easier, but the path is clearer.

  Chapter 9

  Welcome to the Suck

  So here we are, grades in hand, definitions in place, criteria met, applications and stronger ideas ready to be implemented, concepts and premises re-examined and shored up. Maybe you feel that you now know what you didn’t know before.

  So let’s talk.

  Back when you wrote the draft you now realize needs fixing, you thought you were ready—to send it out into the world, to get it published. Revision will be difficult but perhaps more accessible now that you have tools, standards, and targeted benchmarks to work with.

  But to make sure you’re ready, let’s look at what all this really means.

  Nobody Likes to Talk About Revision

  But that’s why we’re here, and already we’re well down a contrarian path. But to fully embrace the revision process, we need to get your mind in the right place, myopically focusing on the formidable task of making your story better using a new and upgraded set of storytelling skills, tools, and principles.

  I’ve given you several lists so far: six core competencies, six realms of story physics, three phases of story creation, two primary reasons your story isn’t working, twelve elements to grade, and twelve opportunities for improvement.

  I’m not done. And neither are you.

  Here’s another short list for you.

  This one identifies criteria from the reader’s side of the page and defines the things readers are looking for in a story, grouped into three categories. Readers don’t care about plot points and realms of story physics as technical features; they care about the effect, the reading experience created by these tools. They are looking primarily for these three experiences, hoping for them from the moment they lay eyes on the first page of your book or screenplay.

  The degree to which your story works is dependent on the degree to which your reader …

  perceives intrigue (becomes captivated) …

  and emotional resonance (feels the weight of the stakes and is motivated to root for your hero with empathy) …

  within a vicarious experience (is transported into the story world).

  Read those three items again, because the key to your revision may be hiding within them. While I’m betting that’s the case, I’m also betting you’ve never heard those criteria grouped in this manner. You may notice that these are a subset of the six realms of story physics, but these are actually the goals. The other ingredients of story physics are the means of getting to them. By working with these goals to produce the desired reader outcome, you may avoid extensive revisions in the future.

  Now you have a new and powerful context against which to evaluate all your choices as you consider what to fix in your story and how. Everything else, from character to structure to how you write sentences, is merely the pursuit of these three outcomes: intrigue, emotional resonance, vicarious experience. Both story selection and story execution rely on these target reader perceptions in order for them to become functional opportunities for the writer.

  To paraphrase the iconic American novelist James Michener, he didn’t believe he was a great writer but felt confident he was a really good rewriter. With this statement Michener was shining a light on how important revision is within the whole of the writing proposition. And as far as credibility is concerned, it doesn’t get any better than James Michener.

  He wasn’t talking about proofreading, which is the correction of typos and punctuation and grammatical missteps. Rather, he was reflecting on the revision of story and the major tenets of craft that put that revised version onto the page. He was talking about moving things around, cutting sections, upgrading the core ideas, and adding depth and resonance where needed.

  Revision requires two focuses in terms of process, both of which apply to the story level and execution level of viability:

  the identification and repair of that which is broken within a story, either at the story level or the narrative arc level

  the elevation of that which has yet to reach its highest dramatic strength and character potential

  In other words, we are looking for what’s broken and what’s just plain weak.

  Here’s an analogy: Two singers go to a vocal coach. One can’t carry a tune but can really belt it out. The other has perfect pitch but no emotional depth or performance style. If you could combine them you’d have a star of Celine Dion proportions, but in reality both are faced with compromises. Both require correction if they aspire to sing professionally.

  The first singer must fix what is broken. The second must improve to a professional level of artful performance.

  For writers, both shortcomings are common. The repair and elevation required, once achieved, are equally valuable, to an extent that the story depends on them to work. The former gets you onto the concert stage; the latter can plaster your name across the Billboard 200. But a failure in either keeps you stuck in the corner pub singing karaoke.

  Repair or elevation?

  The first order of revision is to accurately assess which of those two opportunities for upgrade are on the table. Most revisions entail something from both realms. Are you revising the story (one or more of the six core competencies), or are you beefing up something that is holding the story back (one or more of the six realms of story physics)? Knowing the difference creates an empowered context for your revision efforts.

  As discussed in chapter one, the line blurs between fixing what is broken and jacking up what could simply be stronger. This challenges us to take care not to screw up something that is already working by tinkering with something that isn’t.

  When I wrote this chapter, the 2014 World Series had just ended. The MVP pitcher for the Giants, Madison Bumgarner, began his career with raw potential, but as soon as he arrived in camp as a young rookie, the coaches tried to change everything about his delivery. This was a big deal, because for pitchers the physics of delivery is everything. They sent him to the low minor leagues, where he got lit up like a Vegas casino sign. It didn’t work, raw potential be damned. Every ballplayer, at every level of professional baseball, has some degree of raw potential. So, in the face of disappointing results, he decided to go back to who he was, to do his thing his way. The rest is history: He’s become one of the premier pitchers in all of baseball.

  Be sure to glean the right point from this analogy. He didn’t mess with the underlying physics of what generates power in his pitches, or with what works for any pitcher. In fact, those physics were strengthened through this growth pr
ocess. Those principles—finding the throwing slot, balance, reach, lower-body power—are untouchable. He simply found a way to make them work for him in a business that offers conventional wisdom from all angles. Just like you might be doing with your story, he tweaked his delivery to fall more solidly within the confines of his craft, in the way that best suited him, rather than trying to reinvent it according to the wishes of his well-meaning coaches.

  Not all professionals do things the same way. There are story planners, outliners, drafters, organic writers, writers who listen to plants, whatever. But at the end of the writing day, when they succeed, they will have all observed the same fundamental principles of their craft.

  A great story is like a house of cards.

  Each level bears weight and demands artful balance, and when you swap out one card for another the whole thing teeters for a while, until you make it work. The principles of gravity and balance are the only forces available to make revising that house of cards successful.

  Revision Is an Inevitability

  And for many, revision is as unpleasant as it is necessary. We prefer to think of it as editing, a polite and imprecise word that, without keener context, focuses more on grammar and punctuation. We actually should be calling it by other names: damage control, repair, resurrection. Make no mistake—the goal is simply to fix the thing, whether that means stitching open wounds or building muscle.

  Revision and copyediting—the latter being editing in its most common context—require vastly different skill sets. Confuse the two during your story-fixing efforts and you will be, in the words of my son, toast. Copyediting should usually be farmed out to specialists; most writers stink up the copyediting phase when they try to save a buck and do it themselves. But story-level revision remains squarely in your lap as the author, even with seemingly precise input to work from. The issues it addresses are of your creation, and now you get to correct and/or improve them.

  One of the best things you can do is pay a professional to tell you, without flinching, how your story could be better. If you can’t sense it yourself—which is a very tall order for the newer writer—I highly recommend consulting a professional. Your critique group or your fellow unpublished writing buddies may not have the evolved story sensibilities required to accurately peg what needs improvement, and they may provide opinions that aren’t as easily perceived or understood as a professional diagnosis. For example, if they say, “It just never got off the ground for me. You never captured my imagination,” you have no real clue if the problem was that the story itself was flat, or that you bungled the execution relative to pacing via structure. A pro, however, would nail down that issue for you.

  To revise the story successfully, you’ll need to know.

  Within the public context of the writing conversation—conferences, workshops, craft books, critique groups, writers’ groups, or even the caffeine gang at Starbucks—we regard the revision process as a means of closure, the simple finishing of a job. We can compare it to cleaning up paint or (perhaps more apropos) mopping up blood after surgery. The cleanup process itself is part of, identical to, or simply an extension of the process by which the original version was created in the first place.

  Tell that to the nurse scrubbing the operating room floor after the doctor has departed to make his tee time.

  And yet it isn’t the same. Your process—the way you think and the beliefs you hold—contributed to the draft that now requires fixing, so doing the same thing to repair and upgrade it can be an exercise in frustration leading to another level of failure. Revision at the story level has to summon more craft—or even a unique flavor of craft—that stems from a keener story awareness than the process that created the original version now lying on the operating table.

  Why is this true?

  Because at the point of revision we know more about the story, which is the patient in this diagnosis and curing process. It is now a whole-cloth, front-to-back version of itself, which allows both strengths and weaknesses to shine in a way they couldn’t while dwelling in the clutter and confusion of original construction. As you write, you are immersed in a forest of options. Only when you move away from that forest can you see its trees, including the ones that are about to tumble over.

  Here’s a fact, something writers don’t want to embrace until their story takes a critical hit: You can’t successfully execute a story arc, you can’t foreshadow and build tension and creative deception and conflict, until you know as much about the story as there is to know. And the most important aspect of that is knowing how the story will end.

  You know that now. You may not have known it as you wrote, because you may not have been writing in context to an ending you were intimately familiar with or confident about. Which may very well have been the problem.

  That ending is now your new beginning.

  Any draft written without the context of a defined, targeted ending will be less than adequate. This happens all the time with professional writers who develop their stories using drafting (rather than planning), but rest assured, when they finish a draft that works, it will have a clear vision for the ending in place from page 1. The draft that didn’t have an ending in mind was written, in part, for that express purpose: to find the best possible way and means to resolve the story.

  Maybe intuitive story arc geniuses like Stephen King and Nora Roberts can do it—and you could, too, after you’ve written a garage full of completed novels—but the truth is, this isn’t normal or easy. Nor is it likely. It isn’t the case for you or me. And because we don’t really know how many hands touch those best-selling, A-list stories, or how many drafts it took to get there, it may not be normal or easy for them either.

  A great many story issues arise from drafts in which the ending wasn’t clear until the writer got to it. That’s why the retrospective ten thousand-foot view, the one that shows the weak spots from a draft already in place, is supremely illuminating.

  And yet, there are writers who begin a draft not knowing how the story will end. That is their process and their prerogative. No one knows how many of those drafts lead to an ending that works, with a path that requires little tinkering. That insight never makes it into the interviews with writers who work this way, which means that we learn little from those writers about the process itself.

  The odds could be low for you, too. This could explain what’s not working in your story. Did you discover your ending mid-draft? Does your story initially push forward without the context of a specific ending seeping between the lines, allowing for foreshadowing, the building of the optimal story beats and nuances that support that eventual ending? When you do finally know how it ends, does the exposition suddenly come alive with that context, at the point in the story where you finally figured it out? And, if that’s the case, is the narrative less alive up until that epiphany?

  If so, you probably need another draft.

  And if you didn’t write that new draft, if you submitted the draft in which the ending came to you somewhere in the middle, then that explains why it isn’t working as a whole front-to-back story. It was your process as much as your manuscript.

  This can be the easiest revision of all.

  With a head full of fresh new craft, just start over, line by line, using your complete contextual awareness of the ending as context for evaluating what you see. Ask what could be better within that higher context. You can now imbue your story with foreshadowing, irony, and deeper stakes, all of which were impossible within a draft that didn’t know where it was headed.

  It can be as simple as this. Compare an operation, a surgery, performed by someone who has not gone to medical school with a procedure done by someone who has. Or, even better, a surgery performed by a recent graduate compared to the same surgery undertaken by someone with thirty years of experience.

  Knowledge and an evolved story sensibility are precisely what it takes to write stories that work over the course of a career. Wrestling with both elements is
what it takes to make a story work at the early stages of a career.

  Be clear: This isn’t an indictment of how you got there. Using a draft to find your story—including how it ends—is viable and very common. Just don’t label that draft final in any way, shape, or form, because the legitimately final draft needs to have the ending in mind from square one.

  Or you could just plan it out ahead of time.

  It’s hard to argue with writers who claim they can’t plan a story until they are in the midst of writing it. That’s their claim—who are we to argue? But rare is the writer who can successfully revise a story with the same level of well-intended blindness by simply going through the pages without a clear mission in mind.

  Many writers have discovered that you don’t have to actually write a draft to ascertain the terrain of your story, ending included. And here, on the cusp of revision, you should take a page from their handbook and do the same. Plan your revision. Revise in context to what you know is wrong or weak in your story. Target those weaknesses with specificity and with the context of the principles that will help you diagnose the problem and solve it. A process of in-depth story planning works just as well for many writers at the story origin stage, and even when the writer generated the revisable draft organically. Story planning, applied as a process of revision, is often the ticket out of that fog.

  Story planning is nothing other than coming up with and vetting options for story beats in a linear fashion across the arc of the story. It’s literally making up and playing out the story in your head, then taking notes on how it goes down. This is exactly what pantsers (organic writers) do when they use drafting as the chosen process of searching for and landing upon the story, except the vetting is rarely included. Instead they trust their story instincts in that moment of decision and plow forward from there, writing directly from their head. The two processes are more alike than advocates of either are sometimes willing to admit.