This is simple. Just write. If, that is, you truly know what you are doing.
Of course it isn’t actually simple. Ever. Trying to make it simple is the Big Lie within the writing conversation I’ve just exposed. That said, adopting a criteria-driven context for both your process—because it empowers any process—and the end product it creates renders whatever complications we encounter much more manageable.
The goal of the criteria-driven approach isn’t to make storytelling easier. It is to make your story better. How? By putting your story development sensibilities on steroids, allowing a quicker and stronger assimilation of context and instinct, fueled with contextual content, within a framework of principle-based knowledge and criteria. If you know what you are looking for as you search for your story, and if you know what criteria to apply to your choices about what to write and where to put it, your odds of choosing well escalate significantly.
Being a criteria-driven author means you are interested in the infrastructure and chemistry of story. You understand that story is built upon a consistent blueprint that defines the path of a story and is fueled by dependable facets of the human reading and learning experience. Very loosely, that blueprint looks like this: story set-up scenes . . . hero’s response to a call to action . . . hero’s proactive attack on the primary problem she is dealing with . . . scenes that bring the story to resolution.
All four blocks of scenes are written within different contexts that are unique to that block, and all four almost always come in this sequential order.
This is not a formulaic path, which refers more to the specificity of your choices rather than the functional mission of those choices. Rather, they prescribe an expected contextual flow of your story, based on best practices and expectations in the commercial market. You might ask, expected by whom? Answer: the genre, for one thing. Agents and editors, for another. Even then, that flow is pretty much identical between all the genres. If you leave one of those four contexts out, your novel might read like a short story that is too long. Just as the contexts are given, so too are the transitional milestones within them. You don’t need to decide whether or not you need a Midpoint twist (you do), but rather, you need to decide what the very best Midpoint story turn will be. One that makes the reader sit back in their chair and say, “Whoa, I didn’t see that coming!” That blueprint is a universal sequential model, one that calls for a Midpoint milestone, while not remotely telling us what it should be, other than prescribing how it shifts the story into a higher gear. This is always a good thing.
Time to insert a principle into this layer of thinking: Evolved writers tell us that at some point along the writing road, we will be asked, if not forced, to let go of things we were originally in love with. This refers to specific ideas, sometimes big ones, that no longer fit into the evolved premise, compared to the original version of the idea. Some writers, though, are hesitant to do this. So they rationalize a way to insert their beloved pet idea—in the form of a scene or a piece of backstory or a situation—into the story that has already moved on from it. I’ve seen this happen frequently among new writers, who say this idea they’re now being asked to toss was what brought them to the story in the first place. It’s like an adult bidding their childhood blankie goodbye. But as a professional who is criteria driven, which means we base our story development on principles and criteria, we must not yield to that overprotective instinct. It can be the thing that makes or breaks the story when it comes time to send it out into the world.
As a principle, this will always keep you on track: Avoid the temptation to take side trips, to expand and expound on peripheral focuses—including overwrought backstory—and in general demand that every scene in your story move the exposition forward through the contribution of something new or expanded.
The examples and sources of the core principles and criteria of fiction are so common, in fact, that they begin to define the essential forms and essences of successful storytelling itself. Again, though, we need to know what we are looking for, and looking at, before those core principles may be recognized as such. If you’ve ever watched a professional athlete, such as a pitcher or a golfer or a tennis player, even a poker player (not really an athlete, I’ll grant you), you’ll notice that the competitors at that level all pretty much appear to be doing the same thing in the same way. Which is to say, to the uninitiated layman, all pitchers look the same, all golf swings seem alike, and so forth. But a true student of the sport notices and cares about the nuanced variances, the subtleties and the biomechanical physics that differentiate them among their competitors. They notice the habits and sensibilities that a winner has developed over time and may even seek to imbue their own game with those same repeatable instincts.
Then along comes cybernetics, which breaks performance statistics into smaller, actionable chunks of information, along with the application of digital video analysis, which does the same for the physicality of the athlete’s role. The criteria that drive the criteria-driven storytelling proposition are the literary version of all that. It won’t appeal to everyone, but it will be the answer to the prayers of analytical, frustrated writers in all genres who are looking for more tools to work with.
As students of story, we should always strive to notice what causes a story to work and why. Which means we should not only be avid readers, we should be reading analytically. We should be on a flaming crusade to discover that treasure. Trouble is, it seems like presenters and bloggers these days are talking about their process without much focus on the core essences of story itself. They get a lot more clicks writing about how to beat the system on Amazon than how to write character backstories that aren’t overplayed.
But just like an avid tennis player watching Serena Williams, you have to know what to look for to benefit from the observation. As writers, we need to hunt down and capture the inherent nature of emotionally resonant narrative effectiveness versus the episodic mediocrity that defines and explains rejection.
While the principles that result in great fiction may at times seem obvious, and while I concede that good work sometimes doesn’t get noticed, I can assure you that writers who truly own the craft are in short supply, especially if process and marketing have been the focus of the author’s apprenticeship. Among those 96 percent of stories that are rejected, even if written with perfectly good sentences (a huge percentage are), there are many who have made impossible, unreasonable, or even questionable choices and glaring omissions within their choice of story and the narrative strategies employed within it. In other words, they were always going to be rejected, criteria or not.
Not just to blend in, not just to sit in the workshop audience and take notes, but to truly become the next Gillian Flynn or John Green. If, as an alternative, you quietly admit you’d settle for simply getting into the game and have your book on the shelf at Barnes & Noble or ranked on a page on Amazon, you need to know that shooting for the middle may not get you there.
The odds are better when you aim for the higher bar, because agents and editors and avid readers are looking for the next home run, not the next base on balls. Being good in this business is the same thing as being average, because the vast majority of pretenders are good. Good books by good writers are rejected as a matter of course. You need to swing for the fences, beginning with the story premise itself, for which there are specific criteria, listed herein.
Bestsellers and break-in books aren’t always better written, but they are often—very often—built around a better idea.
This morning, I was skimming a popular writing blog, one where until recently I was among eight contributing bloggers weighing in on the stuff working writers care about. Today’s post was one of a series of “first-page critiques,” which is just what it sounds like: A writer submits the first page of his work-in-progress, then one of those eight resident authors imparts honest feedback from the front of the room, which is almost always an exercise in this-is-for-your-benefit torture. (I’m not a big fan of first-page critiques because beyond a sense of voice and a more intuitive sense of the writer’s chops, you really can’t tell much about the story as a whole—nor should you—from reading the first page.)
Today’s entry was particularly flog-worthy on the sentences matter front—the writer had seemingly skipped the entirety of high school English Comp 101—which meant the ensuing stream of commentary from other reader-writers would be a pile-on worthy of an episode of American Horror Story, with a dash of writerly empathy. One of those contributing reader-writer-critics said this:
I agree with (today’s critic). But you can’t write a good book without a sloppy first draft. So keep going.
And there it was, the obligatory passive-aggressive writerly encouragement. One writer slapping the back of another through the passing forward of what she believes to be conventional wisdom. A voice from the crowd, without a résumé, utters what seems to be an irrefutable truth, repeating something she’s heard that makes her sound knowledgeable, and the other folks in the crowd nod and move on, adding this to their bank of collective writing wisdom.
Or it may be only half true, half the time, which is almost worse. There are imposters clanking around, watering down the efficacy and value of that knowledge about the form and function of story, as well as the process of getting to one.
You absolutely can write a first draft that isn’t sloppy (assuming the comment wasn’t, in fact, sloppy in its own choice of adjectives). The fact that too many writers misspeak the truth—the list of misnomers is long—says less about expectations than it does about how high the bar is and how many folks out there aren’t ready to compete at that level. You should write a first draft that isn’t sloppy in a “me-write-good” sort of fumbling way. If you can’t achieve that much, if you can’t punctuate, if you don’t understand tense and if you jam thoughts together with the organization of a high-school freshman’s closet, if your dialogue sounds like it been lifted from an elementary school play, then you aren’t ready to submit the work in a professional context.
In the same vein . . . if you can’t yet catch a ball, maybe you shouldn’t attend this year’s local professional tryout. Opt for a year of playing catch first. Value the feedback you receive, and begin your journey toward a higher level of craft at both the line and the story levels.
But too often the memes you may have pasted next to your screen are outdated or were never true in the first place. They may, at some point, have been the belief of someone who is famous enough to walk away from a debate. Sometimes these assertions are issues of process (where truth itself is a moving target), but too often they take confident swings at core issues of the storytelling craft itself. For example, I know of one semi-famous author who swears that writing cannot be taught, in the same breath that he invites you to attend his next writing workshop. Hopefully that workshop is on the topic of irony, if nothing else.
The bestselling keynote speaker (now deceased) at the first writing conference I ever attended spoke for half an hour about his “Ten Rules of Writing,” one of the first of which was to never begin a novel with a prologue. Okay, noted. All the panting acolytes in the hotel conference room were madly taking notes, because this guy was famous with a capital F. Because of that, I believed this ban on prologues to be holy writ for the next few years, until I encountered a prologue in a novel by an author I loved, and who was even more famous than was the by-now dead guy I speak of here. It was explained and confirmed to me by yet another legitimately famous author that this particular rule wasn’t true at all—which I had suspected—not even a little.
Dennis Lehane, Michael Cunningham, Nelson DeMille, and J.K. Rowling, among many other A-listers, regularly use prologues in their work. Prologues are all over the bookstore. It doesn’t matter what the keynote speaker says and it doesn’t matter what your high school writing teacher once told you. That’s all you need to know on this issue. You hear this about semicolons, too, at least within fiction (from me included), but that doesn’t make it universally true. It makes it a suggestion for your consideration. It is a preference voiced by someone behind a podium. Conventional wisdom, even for that famous dead writer, may be true some of the time for some stories, and it may have been true for that guy, but nothing is always and completely true all of the time for all writers.
Here is where a cynic might point out something once said by Pablo Picasso, the essence of which I buy into, at least to the extent that it can be adapted to become a core theme of this book, and maybe your career:
“Obey the rules like a professional, so you can break them like an artist.”
Hear, hear. Exactly. Change a few of these words and we have our truth:
“Honor the principles and criteria of story like a professional, so you can apply and bend them to your will like a story artist.”
Notice the translation doesn’t say or imply the breaking of rules, which in our case refers more to principles. Rather, this refers to the molding of them to suit what your evolved instinct believes to be the best choices in context to the given moment at hand. Knowledge plus instinct, filtered through criteria, is the most efficient path forward in this or any other professional endeavor.
In the next chapter, I’ll direct your focus toward the final piece of the contextual puzzle, one that will clear a path to your introduction to the layers of available criteria that just might turn you into the novelist you always dreamed you could be and already know is eagerly waiting inside you.