Story Fix

by Larry Brooks

  If you’re a pantser and believe story planning is impossible—because it’s impossible for you—then you’ve just come face to face with a limiting belief, one that will evolve, by the way, as you increase your knowledge about how stories work. If this is you, staring down the barrel of an impending revision, perhaps another look at that belief will serve you well.

  Almost every proud pantser with a track record will admit, under oath perhaps, that they do a good amount of story planning as they go. Only for them it happens in their mind rather than in an outline, which means it is only a technicality that they don’t outline, because in truth they did. In your head or on a flowchart, or on a wall full of yellow sticky notes, story planning by any other name is useful to all writers.

  Trust me, Stephen King and Nora Roberts and Diana Gabaldon and other famous pantsers really do know where their stories are going when they finally set out to write the draft that ends up being published. Those prior “search” drafts are the equivalent of notes. Those notes have now become the plan itself.

  Chapter 10

  Is Your Story Worth Saving?

  Did he really just ask that?

  This chapter is for those of you who, even after exploring all the principles and criteria and analogies, still nurse a sneaking suspicion that your story may be just fine as is.

  Indeed it might be. Then again, change is always hard, and sometimes we are immune to that realization because we are the ones who need to change. After nine bulging chapters on craft, you may be equipped to view your original story idea, and the concept and premise that evolved from it, with a more evolved story sensibility. Things might look different to you now.

  Rejection ... Let Us Count the Ways

  Agents and editors have infinite ways and means to justify and defend as they reject the stories submitted to them. Most are polite, even more are concise, and a few are rendered with an iciness that bumps up against outright cruelty. But very few will tell you, as part of the rejection litany, that your story may, indeed, not be worth saving at all.

  And yet, that may very well be the case.

  If it is, the scope of your rejection takes on a new dimension. For it to work, you may need to revise your story at its most fundamental levels, until the thing actually becomes a different story altogether. When feedback leads to changing the very core of the idea itself, and touches virtually all levels, core competencies, and means of evoking a reader response, something else is actually afoot, an unspoken inevitability that needs to be acknowledged.

  In that case, you may simply need to start over with a different, better story idea.

  You won’t hear this advice at a writing conference.

  The prevailing context at writing retreats and conferences, sung to the melody of “Kumbaya,” is that any story can be spun into gold with enough time, effort, and craft. What’s missing is the fine print that says a deeper level of understanding will actually turn the current story into another story altogether. How so? Because more powerful criteria will then be applied, most likely at the source and level of dramatic tension, which is the sweet spot of a story’s inherent potential.

  If your computer is too underpowered to run new software, and you replace the key components that deliver speed, graphics, and memory to the extent that none of the original parts remain, is the end product still the same computer? To people who understand that world, it’s not, even if the screen and the keyboard and the logo on the monitor look the same as before.

  When you first faced the blank page, you chose your story for reasons that made sense to you at the time. Think, for instance, of a young child who, while riding in the car on the road to a family vacation, announced that she wanted to be a fire engine when she grew up. She just didn’t know that this wasn’t such a great plan. And so you tell the child that, while perhaps a sweet sentiment, becoming a fire engine won’t work. Not ever. The next day, you ask the child what she wants to be when she grows up, expecting a revised answer that will work. But how can that happen if the child isn’t basing the revision of her answer on a richer life experience seasoned with mentoring and patience? Without mentoring within the learning moment? No, on the next day, instead of a fire engine, the child will proudly announce she wants to be a soccer ball, because soccer is fun.

  That analogy is more apt than you might think. I know this after years of reviewing the story intentions of perfectly sane and mature adults, each of whom thought they had landed on a winner.

  Too often we choose too quickly.

  “Of course my story is worth saving.”

  It’s mine. Nobody can, or should, tell me it’s not worth the time to try to save it. This is what we tell ourselves. Indeed, it is worth saving, if the question of its worth is posed within a noble this-is-art context.

  Think of it this way: A guy in your neighborhood might choose to paint his house in a red plaid pattern and tell everyone to just deal with it. You can’t do anything about this; he’s Scottish, he thinks it looks great, and it’s his house. Nobody says anything, and everyone just drives by a plaid house every day on the way home from work. But if that guy aspires to be a professional designer, then his tastes and belief system relative to what works and what doesn’t in that neighborhood become the problem, because despite what he thinks, it just isn’t working.

  Millions of rejected writers belong to the red-plaid club. Read the case studies in Part Four of this book, and you’ll see this truth manifest before your eyes. You’ll also gain an explanation for why it doesn’t work.

  You get to decide. The trick is to empower yourself by making better choices. Use the criteria and benchmarks for what constitutes a compelling and effective story in today’s market. Take a look at the feasibility and scope of a target readership that might share your enthusiasm, and then plant your story flag. Make an enlightened decision about the viability of your story, instead of an emotional one. Don’t cling to something you, as an author, have evolved beyond.

  Story sensibility is everything. And it first shows up when the writer declares what the story will be.

  The First Decision Point of Revision

  A story needs to be worth saving, and we need to understand the criteria for making that decision. If finding a readership isn’t the goal, if the writer needs to write this story for personal, cathartic reasons, then it absolutely is worth saving. There is more than one reason to write a novel. But if getting published and building a writing career is the goal, then a higher standard applies.

  A story is built from a compelling concept, even when that concept wasn’t the starting point. Not all concepts are created equal. Great concepts meet certain criteria, separating them from lesser concepts.

  For some, revision is the means of finding that concept or raising it (by evolving it) to meet the criteria that were unmet in the earlier draft.

  Now that you are on the other side of wondering, now that you know, let’s return to square one and review what works and what doesn’t. See if it all looks a little different to you.

  Vetting the Feedback That Brought You Here

  If the issue of story worthiness confronts you, it’s because somebody has suggested that the story is weak at some point, perhaps at its very core, irrespective of execution and the crystalline brilliance of your sentences (though your sentences and execution may have been the target of criticism, too). It’s all just opinion, of course, so you confront a crossroads at the moment an opinion arrives. Who is telling you this, and why might you want to pay attention? A story about a serial killer might not appeal to your very religious sibling, who says, “Your story just doesn’t work for me, but your writing is really terrific!” Pay attention at this point, because you are alone in deciding how to proceed. And everything depends on your decision.

  A story about trying to make it to Walmart before closing time (that one crossed my desk a while ago, intended as a metaphor for living a chaotic, modern life) will likely never become the iconic literature of self-actu
alization you first imagined it would be.

  Really, though, sometimes such an assessment in the harshest degree—even when it’s fair and accurate—is more an issue of semantics than it is a pronouncement of death. Even when the feedback is intended to kill your story.

  Anything can be revised.

  Revision isn’t as simple as showing up. You have to do more than show up. You have to stand out when you get there.

  It’s not uncommon for a writer to realize that absolutely everything in the proposed story must be rethought and rebooted. But at a certain point, a hammer melted down and recast to look like a screwdriver has become a screwdriver. So don’t let the semantics of revision versus replacement fool you—if the story is weak at its core, you probably need another story.

  When you realize this, you aren’t defying the agent or publisher or story coach who thought your story wasn’t worth saving. Actually, when you decide the story must change to the extent that it’s suddenly another story altogether, you’re in agreement. This is common, and it’s good. The natural marketplace is at work, applying the reader-driven forces of story to the draft. Your story didn’t line up with those forces before. Now, post revision, it does.

  Like people with a pulse, stories require certain minimum elements, essences, and chemistry to work. Within the realm of storytelling, deciding whether your piece has met those minimums is a matter of opinion—someone’s opinion, and yours included. The idea of revision, the goal of it, is to arm yourself with the ability to refine that opinion into a more enlightening and empowering one than the belief you held when you wrote the criticized draft.

  Even doctors in the ER have to make that call on dying patients. It’s the point at which they look up at the clock, “call it,” and then put away the paddles.

  It doesn’t matter what label you assign to the reboot process—first aid, polish, or resurrection from the dead. What matters is understanding when and why this discussion applies to you and what you need to do about it.

  Sometimes the news that your story isn’t good enough is the best news of all. Before, you probably thought it was good enough. The dispenser of that verdict has just, in some combination, given you new hope and a new future, and has saved you several months of pain and additional work. This pivotal moment of decision, and what you do about it, is a call that makes or breaks your writing dream.

  The Bearer of Bad News

  As a story coach I stare down the throat of stories that need help every day. It’s the nature of the story-coaching beast; if someone’s writing didn’t require coaching, it wouldn’t be on my screen. Sometimes story coaching is like trying to turn a ninety-eight-pound weakling into the proud parent’s vision of a first-round draft choice after only a few pushups and protein bars.

  And yet, the only way to transform such a project is to whip up a Captain America level of resurrection. You’ll recall that Captain America was once a ninety-eight-pound weakling named Steve Rogers who was given a super-soldier serum and transformed into a warrior with a new body, a new persona, and a new mission. Rogers wasn't “saved”; he was essentially replaced.

  Should you save your story? Try to breathe life into it by medicating the symptoms instead of the cause?

  Or should you reinvent it? That’s the real question, and your make-or-break opportunity.

  Sometimes it’s a thumbs down.

  More often than I care to say (and you really don’t want to know), the degree of help required to make a story viable falls within the same realm as what the aforementioned Walmart novel would have needed. This was a story so lacking in weight (while at the same time burdened with the misguided thematic hubris of its creator) that it was like a newborn brought into the world without bones, muscle, blood, or even a brain.

  Bones, muscle, blood, and a functioning brain are the minimum criteria of human life. Storytelling has a similar set of minimum criteria: a compelling premise, someone to root for, dramatic tension stemming from stakes, a vicarious experience, a sense of emotional engagement. Often they are too weak or missing altogether.

  Skip one and you’re dead in the water. Maybe that’s what happened to your story. Maybe that list can swing open the curtains of your awareness about what went wrong and what you need to focus on in a revision cycle.

  You've heard of beer goggles? It means that someone who looked attractive after a few beers at midnight doesn't look so lovely in the clear light of morning. Same thing with our stories: We need to view them in the clear light of our own heightened awareness about storytelling.

  The problem is this: The writer has what he believes to be a cool notion for a story, but it’s challenging, complicated, “out there.” The writer isn’t aware of that little checklist of bare minimum requirements. So he makes some leaps, asks the reader to suspend logic and disbelief, and inserts more stretches and concoctions just to connect dots that don’t logically lead to each other. Before long, the writer has a story in which the CIA is coming to a shy fourteen-year-old math whiz with an alcoholic parent to save the world because, gosh darn it, there just aren’t enough smart and capable trained adults sitting in windowless rooms in a CIA facility who can actually do that work and save the world themselves. Yeah, a kid with a laptop and a winning record in Call of Duty is clearly what we need.

  If your wimpy teenage hero has to hack into National Security Agency servers to get the information required to save the world—because, of course, all fourteen-year-olds have that level of technical skill—then odds are your story is dead on arrival. It’s been stretched and bent and contrived to death. It’s absurd. You can’t make it anything other than absurd. It’s a house built on sand in a windstorm.

  Clinging to a story like this one is like lying. You tell one gigantic lie, and then you need to heap lie after lie on top of the original whopper to hold the whole teetering tower together. But, oh, that first lie … it was so beautiful. If only it were true. Maybe people will overlook the absurdity of it all and accept it as true. And so you bend all logic and reason to make it assumptively logical in your story world.

  How you think, as much as what you think, has just tanked your story.

  But here’s the deal: You can’t turn a poor story idea into an excellent story, and you can’t transform your nonheroic, sad-sack protagonist with a pathetic backstory into someone readers will gladly root for, without replacing that idea and that backstory with a stronger concept that inspires less head-scratching.

  Bend all you want, but bending and stretching the prevailing logic kills your story as much as a premise that makes people roll their eyes. And that’s not on the story—it’s on you. Logic bending is the Great Abyss of pantsing, because in the moment you can’t see the story-consuming forest for the illogical trees you’ve planted.

  The trouble with the business of writing publishable fiction is that we’re often reaching for a moving, imprecise, often invisible bar. This is why some good writers who try don’t actually succeed. And it’s why some writers—the professional storytellers who have earned the name tag, not because of track record but because of their level of craft—eventually do.

  Returning to Your Dramatic Question

  The story’s dramatic question works when it is compelling without the need to bend it into something else entirely, something that makes absolutely no sense (like a normal fourteen-year-old kid hacking into CIA servers). The trick is to imbue your story with the kind of DNA that gives it a shot. It needs to make sense, even if your entire story world doesn’t. Too many writers have deluded themselves into believing they’ve succeeded, when in fact their ship is taking on water and won’t make it out of the harbor into the open ocean. When a dramatic question is primarily thematic rather than dramatic, the reader is left wondering what to root for within the narrative itself.

  When you write a story, you own the conceit that you know what readers will find compelling. Think about that for a moment … and then look in a mirror and ask yourself if you really do know wh
at readers want.

  Impossibility vs. Absurdity

  It is a fatal mistake to attempt to breathe life into a story by bending and stretching the reader’s capacity to believe. Readers want to believe, but in your passion for the story you can stretch that belief too far. You ask them to accept the absurd or to stick around while you show them a bunch of nonessential backstory and character building and sideshows before getting back to the pursuit of an answer to that all-important dramatic question.

  It’s fine to ask them to accept the impossible—bookstores and movie theaters are full of those stories, and they work because the leap you suggest shines a light on something very real. As a career-saving rule, writers need to draw a line between the impossible and the absurd, and stick to the artistically viable and transparent side of that line.

  It boils down to a simple question: Is your core story landscape and the premise that you set upon it cool and provocative, even if it is actually impossible? Let me answer that with another question: Did Star Trek work? Were the concept and premise of the television show and blockbuster films impossible in the real world?