Let’s try to understand why that ratio—96 percent rejected, 4 percent successful—is what it is. My hypothesis is this: Too many writers aren’t doing the work from an instinct, a storytelling muscle, that is strong enough. Which means that not all of the part-specific applicable criteria are being considered. While some claim to be born with the storytelling gene, I believe it’s more an outcome of the learning the writer has absorbed, or not, that has led them to where they are.
In athletics, where DNA actually does become a factor, competence is something that is developed over time by applying certain principles with consistency. Over time that application meets a higher standard, which can be defined by criteria. The same is true of writers who get it.
In this book, I frequently reference new writers and frustrated writers who haven’t broken in, who likely haven’t yet conquered the learning curve. Those are overlapping yet separate circles of demography. My point of reference isn’t a casual assumption, but rather the outcome of many years of working as a writing coach and workshop facilitator, both of which find me reading full and partial submissions and listening to story pitches from new writers.
The difference between a new writer and someone who has been at this a while is quickly discernable. I read and listen to these with great empathy, remembering my own earliest story ideas, which were all ideas in need of more depth. It was only after studying screenwriting that I realized there are given standards available—not just for films, but for any story—and that truth has remained at the core of my work as a writing coach and a practicing author of novels.
If this were a keynote, I could regale you for many pages with the story ideas I’ve heard from the enthusiastic mouths of new writers, including that lost ashes concept from the last chapter. Literally thousands of them. Too many were dead on arrival, no matter how well they might have been written. Slice-of-life stories. Theme-pounding pontification. Thinly veiled this is based on my life novels. (Quick note: Eat, Pray, Love was a memoir, not a novel, which means different forms and criteria apply.) These are well-intended, smart people who, nonetheless, do not know what they do not know.
Any agent or story coach will tell you that the reason so many of the manuscripts they read aren’t strong enough to take forward has to do with the lack of a nose for story on the part of the author. Some of those manuscripts are well written, if you are referring exclusively to sentences and paragraphs. Good writing, in that particular context, is a commodity. But—this being a newsflash for many—solid prose is merely an entry-level prerequisite to getting into the audition room. Among that collective whole, it is the outstanding story that will be noticed. The industry is looking for the next home run told by a first-round draft choice storytelling prospect.
The great separator and distinguishing attribute of writers who sell their stories, compared to those who don’t, is the ability to conceive and execute stories that glow in the dark. Too often the conceive end of that goal is undervalued. Agents, publishers, and readers want stories that are ambitious, that work at a high level within their genre. Stories that tap into hearts and minds, that are fresh and provocative and lovely and disturbing.
They are less interested in a novelization of the year you spent hiking in Chile after grad school. That’s the province of memoir, not fiction.
Both factors are always in play, and both are essential. You can be talented in one but not the other. In fact, it explains why some authors never fulfill their writing dream: They aren’t executing stories from both contexts.
The world is full of karaoke bars that are full of singers who can stand alongside many of the recording artists who have big careers and match them note for glorious note. But truly great songwriters are a rarer breed. As authors, we face the exact same paradox, asking us to be the same, yet different, with every story we tell.
New writers tend to look at known published authors and compare themselves and their work to that level of skill and talent. But doing so can be a seductive illusion. Because success begets success in this business, and it is more difficult to break in than it is to sell your next novel once you’ve done so at some level of success. Even then, after you’ve sold a handful of novels, your publisher will expect a home-run novel, and for that you’ll need a home-run story idea. Two of the best examples of that are the careers of Dennis Lehane and Dan Brown, both of whom published perfectly respectable genre novels that sold fairly well and then rose to a higher level—the top of the mountain, actually—with mega-bestselling breakout novels (Mystic River and The Da Vinci Code, respectively).
They were already terrific writers. But their breakout novels were built upon the DNA of a story idea that was truly special.
To break into the business, or write a breakout novel from your less-than-notorious position on the mid-list, a story has to be even better than books that fill the shelves at Barnes & Noble, but haven’t been seen in the front window yet. The X-factor that makes that happen is the power of the originating story idea as it translates to a compelling and complete premise. Those authors could write all along. But it was a Big Idea that moved them into a better neighborhood.
And so the question becomes this: How do we nurture and grow our story instincts, beginning at the idea level, so that we might begin to write stories on a level that demands attention and response? What criteria are applied to ideas and premises at that level?
This isn’t brain surgery. Which is true, but it’s not a valid comparison.
Unless it’s a surgeon, or a pilot, or a scientist who is making it. Which is exactly who I’ve heard from when they undertake the study of story in preparation of dusting off the dream of writing a novel. They are shocked when they learn how complex it is. Too many writers don’t acknowledge this as they simply dive into the deep end of the pool without yet knowing how to swim.
It is much more challenging, and rarer, to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse than it is to hone and polish and frame a diamond in the rough.
Our stories are emotional tsunamis and chemical cocktails as much as they are assemblies of thoughts and ideas. The manipulation of a reader’s emotions—let’s be honest, that’s what this is—becomes a multifaceted and subtle undertaking, one that transcends story and embraces principles of human thought, biochemistry, and social engineering, all in the context of history.
If you’re thinking there is an advanced degree for this—the venerable Master of Fine Arts, or MFA—you need to understand that an MFA is to an aspiring commercial author of fiction what a law degree is to a politician. Valuable, absolutely worth pursuing. Everything about it will contribute to your success in any genre, especially literary fiction. But the story craft learned in an MFA program is a different contextual breed than what a commercial author working in the genres needs to understand.
The necessary foundation of knowledge comes from an immersion into the study of the craft that defines commercial storytelling. Studying it, experiencing it, questioning it, practicing it. There are a multitude of resources that include books and workshops and mentoring programs and blogs and conferences and, most importantly to all of this, the continued analytical reading of commercial fiction for the express purpose of recognizing and internalizing the principles of craft that those resources and experiences will show you. You will know it when you see it.
But it is important to understand this: You may not see it until you know it.
It’s like looking at an MRI. You and I see contrasting shadows that look like someone spilled coffee onto the film. We really can’t tell a thing about the health of the patient. A trained radiologist, however, as well as most doctors, see life and death. They see where problems reside and where danger awaits, and they know what needs to be done about it. They know. Just as we need to know our way around a story, good or bad, sometimes with as little as a glance.
The craft informs your instincts about how a story should be conceived, assembled, sequenced, set up, layered, escalated, twisted, imbued with shock and awe, drenched with emotion and a microcosm of the human experience, laced with empathy, and driven forward by tapping into centuries-old theory and practice on how stories are absorbed and remembered. This, if nothing else, enables the ability to take that great idea and actually turn it into a novel that works. While coming up with a decent story idea (for which there are specific criteria) is fairly common, the ability and nuanced touch required to successfully spool it out over 400 blank pages is quite rare. In my experience, I’d say that failure, in the form of rejection, distributes across these two explanations—premise versus execution—at a fifty-fifty rate, some being deficient at both.
As does persistence and faith substantiated by informed study. But sooner or later a sort of natural selection kicks in, because failure and frustration wear us down. It is the hope of finding a pathway to success, in the form of a keen understanding of principles and craft (versus a blinder faith in an evolving story instinct), that becomes the highest-odds bet we can wager.
Simply honoring the principles of craft is not the exclusive domain of the criteria-driven author. Because all of us share the mission to write a good story. It’s the driven part that sets some authors apart. It’s how they view and apply the craft that empowers their work in an exciting and effective way.
It is the degree to which the criteria for story find their way into your process that defines the opportunity at hand.
If our instincts remain underdeveloped—if our narrative choices have no relationship to what the principles tell us will be the responses they evoke in a reader—we’ll remain among the unnamed masses who write their stories in an almost identical fashion, both in terms of process and product. This process is really nothing other than regurgitating our ideas onto the page without being filtered by something other than ourselves. In other words, to just write. Rather, we need to insert something between our brains, where the ideas form, and the page, where they end up. Because, as the data suggests, more than 96 percent of the time in the aggregate our uninformed instinct is wrong, or at least not right enough.
If you’ve ever been inside a cockpit of an airliner prior to takeoff, or (more likely) seen this in a movie or YouTube video, you know that the pilot and copilot undertake a very serious and repetitive regimen of going through a robust checklist that covers the entire spectrum of what must be done to ready the aircraft for safe flight. Safe being the key word here. Every item on that checklist exists because someone in the past has literally (in most cases) died for it. Every time an airplane goes down, the accident is studied in great detail. Much is learned from those post-mortem engineering dissections—just as an informed analysis of a work-in-progress shines a light on the role that principles and criteria play in the storytelling—and it translates to procedures and settings and criteria for the state of the airplane and its instruments that must be checked and checked off (met, without compromise) before anything else can happen.
Stay with me here.
Pilots operate the aircraft, which is no small feat. But even more intricate and complex is the design and building of the flying machine, which is more analogously true to our role as designers and builders of stories. There, too, for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of parts and programs that come together within the skin of the airplane to become an airworthy vehicle, there are checklists that are applied, checked, and rechecked to make sure the part is worthy and sound, that it has been properly installed, that it is wired properly, and that it interfaces with countless other systems on the airplane, all of which have checklists of their own.
Consider that for each and every critical factor and facet, there is a set of criteria to be applied. Criteria that is reflected in the checklist and for which there can be no compromise. Criteria that are applied over and over by different sets of eyes and in different contexts of operation, maintenance, and repair. It reflects the very best thinking, the very best minds of aviation and design professionals over decades of technological innovation, leading to best practices.
Those folks—pilots, avionics designers, aerospace engineers, quality control auditors, and National Transportation Safey Board accident investigators, who are collectively the authors of the checklists they apply—are all criteria driven. As opposed to the old school barnstorming pilot who slides into the open cockpit and just flies, without the slightest knowledge of Bernoulli’s principle, which explains why 400,000-pound airplanes can lift into the air. They create the designs and the parts in context to something external to themselves, certainly far beyond their gut instinct. And yet, at the point of installation and inspection, the instinct of those professionals still plays a role. It is the combination of knowledge, instinct, and criteria that empowers the entire design, build, and operations processes, resulting in a product that has produced a stellar record of safety, productivity, and benefit. A pilot, as precise as the checklist is, still depends on her “gut,” a sense of the moment, especially in the detection of something being slightly off-kilter. All the instruments may report normal readings, but when the plane begins a takeoff roll, the pilot has a window measured in seconds to decide to proceed or abort. That decision, after consulting the data, is pure instinct.
And yet, sitting in coach there is a writer putting the finishing touches to her novel on a laptop, without knowing there are criteria that can be applied to every part and parcel, every nuance and essence, of the story she has just written. She’s alone with what she’s written, empowered only by her instincts as a writer, by the opinions of what her friends in her writing groups claim to be true, and by her own tastes and opinions. Sometimes even just guessing, too often without anything to compare it to other than her own gut feeling, and soon, that of others, few of which will apply any specific criteria to their own analytical evaluation, either.
Whether at the level of instinct or through an actual checklist of criteria that pertain to specific parts of his novel, the criteria-driven author is always conjuring ideas and developing stories in context to something . . . something bigger and more proven than themselves or the personal opinion of someone else. They juxtapose ideas and scenes and drafts against criteria that become a checklist that ensures specific areas of intention and function, that it is all in the ideal and optimal place within the story, that the pacing is right and the emotional experience intended for the reader has the benefit of everything we know about how human beings respond to storytelling at its best.
Many writers are driven by the lesser mission of simply finishing. But when you write toward a target that exists in the context of criteria, you can’t help but experience a qualitative upgrade, because that’s the entire function of criteria in the first place. You’ll more quickly and easily be able to discern whether a given creative choice you’ve made relative to a specific story point is fair, good, or amazing, because you’ll know the context of that moment both before and after it appears. If a better choice is available, you won’t have to blow up the story to put it into play, because other criteria have ensured that the surrounding contexts are solid.
This is how being criteria driven helps writers who adopt that context for their work, no matter what their process. It allows them to see the big picture as a target, rather than an outcome over which they aren’t sure or don’t feel they have full control.
The criteria the writer sitting in coach could apply if she were more aware await you in the forthcoming chapters: first with a focus on story idea and premise (Part 2), and then across the entire arc of the story that expands them (Part 3).