Your writing process is infused with and defined by what you believe and what you know to be true, just as it is limited by what you don’t know. Both calculations contribute to the outcome of your efforts.
I get it. We have to start somewhere. When you open a file for a new story, you probably don’t know a fraction of what you need to know about the story in order for it to work, even if you do understand the criteria that will render a specific story beat effective. In fact, it is that understanding that will lead you to your best story. That’s what your process is for: to search for, discover, and develop what you need to know about the story, which is best done within a context of understanding why.
This whole notion of criteria-driven story development goes to the question of knowing what to write, where to put it, and why. It may or may not be a function of innate talent—most often it isn’t. It may be the product of learning and experience. This is the universal question nonwriters pose to working writers with a strange look in their eyes, as if there is something mystical about cobbling together sentences and paragraphs into scenes that fill chapters which unfold in a sequence that makes sense. It is the question that plagues all writers, and all stories, from the moment of a declared intention to write. And yet, while most writers can’t really answer the question, an answer does, in fact, exist. It resides in the contextual whole of the set of criteria you are about to encounter here.
Hopefully, the process we apply to our work embraces things we know and understand about the principles of storytelling. But when one’s particular frame of reference is thin ice for a writer—either because of lack of experience or an absence of learned knowledge—then the story emerges from within a vacuum in that regard, in much the same way someone called to the cockpit in an emergency would be operating blindly as they try to land the airplane in a snowstorm using only the context of their experience as a passenger. Let us hope someone is on the radio speaking instructions into their headset, if they could even find the headset in that dire situation. If that ever happens to you, pray that whoever goes forward to help has at least been through ground school.
The key variable in story efficacy is not, by default, our choice of process, of how we prepare and plan and execute our stories. Lawyers and accountants and athletes and actors would agree, because once we put on the uniform and step onto the field or enter a courtroom or sit in front of our keyboards, we have, in fact, signed up for something in terms of the end product. To say you hope to sell your fiction is to declare that you seek to become a professional writer. Certain standards apply. No one in the audience cares how we got there, they only care about how well it works on the page.
And wherever there are standards, there are criteria that frame access to them.
Below you will find six true statements about writing fiction today. Some of them will be familiar, some may challenge what you believe. Ignoring any of these might explain the failure of a project to reach its highest potential, including why it keeps getting rejected. These truths frame your work as an aspiring or even a working novelist. They also inform the development and state of your story instincts. These aren’t hard-and-fast rules, per se, but they are realities. Exceptions can be found, but aiming to become an exception is not a good path for a newer writer. These aren’t principles, per se (which touch on the specific craft of narrative exposition), yet they become context for the application of principles.
This is what smart writers have discovered as contradictions to what some consider and apply as conventional wisdom. Even if—especially if—you’ve never attempted to write a work of fiction before, this is the landscape into which you are about to venture forth.
NOT ALL STORY IDEAS ARE VIABLE AS THE BASIS FOR A NOVEL.
You really can’t sit down and write anything you want without meeting certain criteria (which you may or may not know) and expect it to be saved by your brilliant prose. Rather, what might save the idea—by making it stronger—is the premise, to which you can apply significant criteria. While there is no data on this, it is the opinion of many folks who do what I do (write and coach fiction) that as much as half of the collective body of rejected stories owe their downfall to a weakness in the story idea itself as well as the premise that flows from it. As my colleague Art Holcomb recently said to me, “We need to find a way to help these people land on better story ideas.” That statement, which I agree with wholeheartedly, was part of the impetus for this book.
Nobody is going to stop you from pursuing a weak idea. You are largely on your own to recognize the truth about the idea, which is challenging because in all likelihood you love the idea. It bears repeating: The purpose of an idea is to inform a premise, which has defined criteria to apply. Sometimes one of those criteria might be accessible from within the idea, sometimes not. In either case, those criteria become a vetting tool that can be applied at the idea level, helping to shape it toward a higher level of narrative appeal.
Among the common pieces of advice from the front of the workshop room is this: Write what you’d like to read. Write what you know. Write for you. It’s hard to argue these points, until you realize that what you like to read or what you know might only reside within a small demographic. Perhaps really small. The enlightened commercial author knows that you need to write for others, for the marketplace. If writing for others is not your highest motivation, then it should at least tie for first place.
A MANUSCRIPT CAN’T FULLY WORK UNTIL THE ENTIRE STORY IS KNOWN TO THE AUTHOR.
When a writer begins a draft without an ending in mind—even as a temporary placeholder—that draft is merely an extension of the search for story. In fact, it is just that, because an ending discovered mid-draft is destined for a major, if not complete, rewrite. Everything that has been written prior to that moment in which an ending crystalizes requires careful analysis, which almost always involves massive, necessary rewriting. Because we cannot foreshadow a story in which the ending remains unknown, nor can we set up that ending. And because new writers may not recognize this disconnect (a case of not knowing what they do not know) or choose to cut a corner because rewriting is what they signed up for, this becomes a common explanation for story weakness and failure.
GENRE FICTION IS NOT ALL ABOUT THE CHARACTERS.
Writers and gurus who say this—and they are legion—are at best only partially right. For literary fiction, this is certainly true. But genre stories are about how a character responds to a calling, to the solving of a problem, via actions taken and opposition encountered, thus creating dramatic tension that shows us the truest nature of who they are. Genre fiction uses plot to illuminate character, while literary fiction turns that inside out, with the primary dramatic tension coming from within the characters.
IT ISN’T A STORY UNTIL SOMETHING GOES WRONG.
Carve this into the hard plastic that surrounds your computer monitor. Dramatic tension stemming from something gone wrong is the lifeblood of fiction, in any genre, including literary works (which tend to be driven by internal conflict versus the external focus of genre-based stories). Conflict is essential to fiction, to an extent you could argue that it is the most critical element of a story among a short list of other critical elements, all with available criteria to help us assess and optimize.
A STORY ISN’T A SNAPSHOT. IT IS A MOVIE IN THE READER’S HEAD.
This is critical context, and it speaks to one of the most common mistakes newer writers tend to make. Theme and setting and history and character backstory—all of which are common sparks for the original story idea—need to be framed within the unspooling forward motion of the narrative along a dramatic spine (drama stemming from conflict), in pursuit of a dramatic question, facing obstacles along the way, driven by things that happen—to, and because of, your protagonist—rather than a static snapshot of what is, which too quickly can become an essay or a manifesto about a specific condition or belief.
STRUCTURE IS OMNIPRESENT IN A STORY THAT WORKS.
Structure is, for the most part, a given flow of unspooling information rather than a unique invention. It is too often linear and episodic, to fit the story you are telling. Nor is it a formula, because you are free to do what you’d like within this given flow. The game of golf requires that you play specific holes in a specific order. There is no rule about which clubs you use at any point along the hole, though there are expectations and best practices that show you the common wisdom. As a professional, you concede that nobody has won a championship putting with a fairway wedge.
Structure is the most often challenged tenant of fiction, and yet the most enduring and provable. Exceptions are as rare as true geniuses. People who argue against structure are actually talking about process, suggesting that stories are best developed without consideration of structure, which at some point will become a necessity that must be retrofitted into the results of such a process. And because, even more than applying criteria to the blank page, revising toward a standard is highly difficult. It is something newer writers often struggle with or skip altogether, only to find that they’ve just sabotaged their story for this reason alone. When a professional advises you to write your story however you feel the story should be written, this may be a write-it-now-fix-it-later proposition. The fixing, in that context, is inevitable, but it won’t be as extensive if a proper understanding of structure had been applied as a form of criteria earlier in the process. Most professionals know that before the story will work at a professional standard for genre fiction, it will align with a specific flow, one that unfolds in four contextual parts (which we will examine closely very soon). And if they don’t, they recognize that this may be the problem when they realize something isn’t working.
There are as many structure-driven authors who enjoy a high degree of success as there are writers who believe structure should not be a consideration in early drafts, at least within the framework of process (the latter may or may not understand that story is structure regardless of the process employed). The real question is: Does the structure you’ve ultimately used work? In genre fiction there is very little latitude in this regard. Because when you finally get it right, whether through your own instinctually fueled evolution of the story as you apply criteria or through outside feedback, it’ll most likely fall in close alignment with the principles of structure that are omnipresent within the genres—which we’ll examine closely later in this book—which are there not because of a rule of engagement, but because this is the way stories work best.
Armed with these understandings as context for your initial story formulation efforts (the focus of Part 2), you are ready to delve deeper into the power of criteria-driven storytelling in the coming chapters, beginning with a hard look at where all the confusion comes from in the first place.