Story Fix

by Larry Brooks

  Even when this happens to a small degree, success becomes elusive.

  Your art, in this case, wrapped in the limiting paradox of your process, often becomes your excuse for not finding an agent, or not selling when you do. “They just don’t get me” is the graveside plea of the unpublished, unprofessional writer. While, in the meantime, the professional writer stays in the trenches to learn what went wrong and how to fix it.

  Chapter 12

  Choosing to Succeed

  Ever notice how, at writing conferences that present lots of choices for sessions and presenters, there is rarely a session on how to know if your story idea is good enough? I’ve been to hundreds of these things, and I’ve never seen this one. Instead they ask you to bring your story with you—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and listen to feedback relative to its execution rather than its core conceptual substance.

  It’s all craft, craft, craft. And on one level, that’s how it should be.

  But on another level, conceptual appeal is at least half of the whole ballgame. It’s the half that can wreck you before you even throw the first pitch. We’ve spent several chapters pounding that home, and here it resurfaces as context for the bigger picture of story fixing.

  Let me be clear: I’m a huge proponent of craft. I hope that much is obvious by now. Much of my website and both of my prior writing books offer a focus on all of the various facets of the storytelling craft. But we’re missing the boat if that’s where the knowledge begins and ends, because craft is only half of the available rationale for rejecting a story.

  The Truth Hurts

  When we don’t dare to speak about the very real possibility that a story idea, your idea, may be dull as dirt, that it might be dead on arrival, we are stepping over the body to examine the crime scene. This is the epitome of what publishers mean when they say, It’s too familiar … it didn’t bowl me over … it’s lacking X, Y, and Z. They’re criticizing your story, not your writing.

  They’re saying the story isn’t strong enough. And when that’s the case—because high craft cannot save a weak story—your execution skills are rendered moot. Good writing is always a good thing, but it’s rarely the thing that will get you published.

  It’s like being told your kid is too ugly to be a model, even though she knows how to walk a runway. Or that she’s too slow and uncoordinated to be an athlete, even though she knows the rules of the game.

  Story is a qualitative assessment. You can’t measure it. It is always an opinion, beginning with yours at the moment of its creation. And so the best you can do is try to contextualize the nature and scope of the ways in which stories appeal to, or don’t appeal to, target readerships.

  As a professional, it’s no longer about you. It’s about your readers. Grasping that flip in context can save your writing dream. It is that suffering, unpublished, unread writer who continues to cry out that writing is art, her art, and she writes what pleases her. Meanwhile, the successful writer finds his pleasure in writing stories that touch other lives and gain a spreading readership.

  But that dirty little secret remains. At the edge of frustration, possibly explaining why your novel was rejected, is this: Your story idea may not be good enough.

  But nobody will tell you that.

  It’s too … unspeakable. And you don’t want to hear it. How dare they? It’s opinion, nothing more. It’s nobody’s business to tell you what your story should be about. That’s your choice, and it’s personal. There are no rules; you can and should write about any damn thing you want. This is art, for goodness sake.

  Thus goes the lament of the rejected writer still clinging to his art.

  I know why, too. Because I’ve been the guy who actually says it, face to suddenly pale face. I’ve sat across from writers in one-on-one situations at workshops after reading their synopsis in some form and told them in as clear and kind a manner as possible that their story is weak, that it won’t fly.

  I hate that moment. The look I get is more confusion than pain, because nobody has told them anything like this before. As if nobody should tell them. As if it just cannot be true. And yet, my job as a story coach is to identify and work on what will hold a story back, and often it’s right there in the pitch, logline, or statement of premise.

  The story just isn’t there.

  What happens next is all over the board. Usually they listen, or pretend to listen, then search for a contrary opinion, or at least for someone who can tell them how to make their sack-of-potatoes story into a bag of gold.

  I could tell them that, too, and often do. It can be done. Using the criteria for a good story, one needs to let go of the old story and allow it to evolve into something stronger. Instead they usually try to explain why their pitch or synopsis doesn’t sound good and assure me that if I read the entire manuscript I would see that it works.

  Some just tune me out and move on. Time wasted, they think. He just didn’t get it. That could be true. It’s just opinion, after all. But after years of doing this, I have a pretty good nose for a story that stinks.

  What Story Is, and What It Isn’t

  Writers who don’t know what a story is tend to simply write about something. That’s a recipe for disaster. Rather, they need to write about something happening. To find out if you fall into this camp, go through your story and assess what really happens—versus all the things you simply show and write about, all the things you are asking your reader to observe as opposed to root for, all the things your character experiences without an attachment to a dramatic core story question and an ensuing arc. If you struggle on these issues, you may be on to a major source of weakness. Diagnose that early, and your revision will be empowered in a significant and very necessary way.

  A writer who doesn’t know the true definition of a story can only hope to stumble upon, however intuitively, the complex sequence and forces of story in a way that really works.

  And so I’ve developed a few iterations of questionnaires I use for stories in development, which I send to clients to dig into their stories and their knowledge of them. Filling out this questionnaire and then consulting with me is far more economical than hiring someone to read and evaluate an entire manuscript, and it shines a light on the very elements that will make a story compelling and emotionally resonant.

  As I’ve said, I’ve done many hundreds of these story evaluations in the last few years, as well as dozens of full-manuscript evaluations. The numbers tell a story: Less than 10 percent of writers, even experienced writers, can answer the questions adequately. Many butcher the answers, transposing concept with premise, stating theme in the place of a core dramatic question, and mangling the intricacies of story structure to an extent that the available story physics don’t stand a chance.

  These writers may or may not have a solid story idea. But when it comes to the depth of understanding required, they just don’t know. They either have to stick with it for years until their inner story sensibilities come to life … or until someone can show it to them.

  I’ve included some of these answered questionnaires in the case studies in Part Four. There’s a lot to notice, especially after you’ve been introduced to the empowering forces and structures of storytelling.

  So when I say that writers just don’t know, I say it with experienced authority. When agents tell you that ninety-five out of every one hundred stories that cross their desks aren’t even close to the publishable level, they are saying the exact same thing.

  What Jack Nicholson’s character shouted in A Few Good Men—“You can’t handle the truth!”—applies all too often.

  Don’t let that be you.

  Begin with accepting the truth about your story, and then be honest about how much of it is alive in your writing mind.

  That is the determining factor for everything you write. You can fake it once, you can get lucky once, but the odds of that are astronomically low, and next to zero if your goal is building a career.

  You have to know w
hat a story is.

  Let me show you what that means.

  When an Author Doesn’t Get It

  I recently sent the following response to answers to the questionnaire I use in my coaching work, and it was generic enough to be of value to any writer whose work has been rejected.

  Read and learn from one author’s feedback (used with permission), minus the pain of being that guy.

  To the author:

  This entire storytelling proposition consists of two realms of “raw material.” One is the actual story premise itself; the other is execution. In both realms, the “outcome” is always determined by someone’s opinion, though for execution this opinion is less negotiable and more easily predictable.

  It is on the first point where the room divides. One person’s great story idea is another’s yawn.

  Some love literary novels, others can’t read them and prefer cozy mysteries or graphic horror stories or even erotica. Which of them is “wrong”? That’s not the proper question, of course, but it seems to be such when a writer pitches a story, something she thinks is absolutely fascinating and rich in potential, and the responders (agent, editor, story coach, and ultimately readers) say, “Not my cup of tea,” or “It didn’t really grab me,” or whatever.

  And thus, stories are accepted or rejected, successful or forgotten. Agents and editors “accept” stories all the time that they think will be appealing, and readers will stay away in droves because they don’t agree. We haven’t broken that code.

  In my case, in my role, I try not to gauge anything by “how I like it.” Rather, I evaluate more like an engineer assessing a blueprint or a worksite for the raw beams of a structure and, ultimately, the viability of a finished structure.

  The engineer doesn’t have to “like” a house or a building to deem it finished or worthy in terms of viability. That’s not the job. It’s not my job either. I’m here to look inside the story, at the core bones of it, and assess the nature of those building blocks. But in doing so, I can look at the specific, separate items and assess their strength, both alone and in relation to the others (when they become a sum seeking to be a whole in excess of the parts).

  Your story obviously really appeals to you.

  I’m betting you’ve told others about it—“I want to tell the story of my hero and what happened to him during the war when the Russians took over his country, and there are some cool elements there, like a sailor picked up at sea, an affair, some nasty, paranoid Russians …” Your listener goes, “Wow, that sounds like a great story! It’d make a great novel!”

  The thing is, a great novel requires much more than a pile of cool elements.

  From what I remember, your story is basically a true story, which immediately can be problematic because you feel the need to tell it “like it happened.”

  Yes, you certainly can write “what happened.” And what happened is interesting, to some extent. But in a competitive market, other benchmarks and criteria apply. And that’s where your story, as conceived and assembled, becomes suspect.

  In my opinion, the story lacks the “physics” required to compete for a publisher. Those physics include:

  a compelling premise that becomes a story landscape for a hero’s journey

  an escalating sense of dramatic tension arising from conflict

  strategic pacing

  an empathetic journey for a hero/protagonist that will cause the reader to root for his or her desired outcome (or problem solving), with an antagonist (villain or negative force) blocking the path

  a vicarious journey for readers (something they can’t experience for themselves, which all historical novels seek to create)

  an effective narrative strategy

  In other words, in summary, you lack a compelling plot.

  The thing is, you can include all of these story physics and still come up short. But it is the sum that matters, and even though the parts may look good at first, when they combine they are not as compelling as they need to be.

  It would be like someone writing a novel about the childhood of someone like, say, Cher. Cher is famous. Cher’s fans will care. Nobody else will—unless and until the writer leverages the above list to generate a story they respond to emotionally.

  In your case, your story has basic flaws, even prior to square one.

  You lack a compelling hero. The hero isn’t heroic (and even if he is heroic in the past, that doesn’t matter, not a bit, in the foreground story). In fact, he’s by nature not someone we root for, or even like (not a necessity by any means, but it can help if called for). This is because you don’t give him a quest with a specific goal, something that has stakes.

  He’s trying to find the guy … but why? Toward what end? You never tell us.

  “But,” you might say, “he does have a goal. He’s trying to find MacGuffin (a character who becomes “the prize” and the source of stakes in the story; in The Da Vinci Code the MacGuffin was the Holy Grail, which turned out to be … well, you already know that surprise ending)!”

  Sure, but who is MacGuffin? We don’t know. He’s just a guy he picks up at sea. Then he disappears.

  The bottom line: Nothing is riding on the hero finding him.

  What if he does find him? What then? Nothing. The hero isn’t going to save him; the hero isn’t going to change everything. So there are no stakes attached to the hero finding MacGuffin.

  Which boils your story down to: a guy finds a guy, and then loses the guy. We watch all that happen, without ever really knowing or, more importantly, feeling what this means, and thus, why we should care.

  Everything depends on stakes.

  Without them, a story becomes a “chronicle” or a documentary of a character’s journey within the historical framework. It becomes a frame without a picture. Which is the case here: This story is about “the stuff that happens to the hero and the hero’s wife,” set on a tapestry of this political stage at that point in history.

  But nothing happens that compels the reader to care. Your characters aren’t known figures from history. And frankly, they aren’t sympathetic in any way. So, if what they’re doing isn’t important, and who they are doesn’t touch our hearts, why will we care?

  Part of the problem, as I said, is how the book is written, as it sits now.

  Your Part One needs a complete redesign, because you aren’t setting up a compelling core story that launches at the First Plot Point.

  You may argue with that. You may say you are setting up a core story, and that it is compelling. But we disagree on that point. It’s not compelling because the hero has no skin in the MacGuffin game, and then when the Russians suspect he’s somehow a spy, that’s thin, hard to see or believe, and becomes a chase without a prize.

  Because the hero isn’t a spy. And the Russians’ suspicion that he is has no basis other than paranoia.

  In your synopsis you describe an ending in which neither the hero nor the hero’s wife is actively, heroically involved. The hero never solves his problem, and the problem he has is, again, without depth or real meaning. The political stage becomes scenery. It is never about the hero seeking to save someone, or change something, or improve anything at all.

  It’s like a diary come to life. But the diary isn’t dramatic enough, and has no substantive stakes, to become a novel that works.

  Let me put it this way: The story of one guy who saves another guy, neither of whom made a lick of difference in the war, is not enough of a story. Thus, whatever happens to them (affairs, unfair pursuit, etc.) doesn’t matter enough to get readers invested.

  If, however, the hero is a guy who saves a very important guy—someone who ends up making a meaningful difference, or plays a key role in the outcome of what happened in those days in that place—then that is a story worth telling, from a commercial perspective.

  You never position either player in the story relative to stakes. That’s a deal killer.

  Even then, though, the story is still about the her
o’s quest and heroism, not about his wife’s affair and his abusive nature and his alcoholism, and his blind quest to find a guy about whom he knows nothing, with no noble intentions or vision for an outcome that will change anything, and then, doesn’t end up achieving any of it, or anything at all.

  That, in a nutshell, is what is wrong at the story premise level.

  There is a long list of things that are wrong at the execution level, to the extent I think you need to come at this story—a better story—from a completely new and fresh narrative strategy. This will result in a much richer, faster, compelling Part One quartile that is not driven by backstory and meaningless character chit-chat and descriptions of setting and random memories and such.

  All of this is despite your significant prose skills. You do write very well.

  That said, you need a lot of work and practice on scene writing, which begins with a clear mission for each scene that connects to a compelling core story arc. If I’m correct when I suggest that the core story arc (what your Part One scenes seek to set up) is, in fact, less than compelling, then the scenes are already doomed. This is complicated by the fact that you overwrite them—and many of them don’t serve the core story; they are side trips with the “diary” you are creating. The sum becomes something that calls for a closer look, with a view toward improving the core story (which means you need to change it), and finding a narrative strategy that better serves it, but focusing on the drama instead of the backstory or the subplots, which in the current version completely smother the intended “plot” itself.