Thank you…for taking this ride with me and for continually pushing to write better books.
By working on your craft, nurturing your art, you literally help the entire genre fiction community. The more beauty you create, the better your genre gets, the more fans will flock toward you and your colleagues. One book at a time, you write your success and rewrite the future.
What you do is more important than you may realize. You’ll never know the sentence that helps someone through chemo or a divorce or depression. At a minimum, stories help people survive and grow through the concrete of their lives like sidewalk grass. At their best, books stand and shine like lighthouses on a dark, stormy shore…helping weary travelers navigate strange seas and bringing them home safe and loaded with treasure.
As we’re wrapping up, I’d like to recap the entire book and distill the process of verbalization into a single run-on sentence just to remind you what we’ve covered.
Writers and readers in search of meaning pay attention via alignment to characters with significance that suggests patterns created by contrast that causes friction and escalation during events in order to generate energy expressed through a void that inspires action in pursuit of an objective through relationships that require tactics to handle objects in an arc varying directions to maximize transformation to reach the kind of emotional experience fans crave.
Here’s the deal: Verbalization works. It improves stories and eases their creation for writers of all types and stripes. All you have to do is pay attention and let words tell your story. They want to, if you’ll give them a chance.
• ATTENTION: Decide why and who and what deserves attention from your audience, then create something deserving of that attention.
• EMOTION: Distinguish the range and types of emotion expected (and avoided) by readers within your genre.
• SIGNIFICANCE: Know what matters and make decisions that support the meaningful details that make your story worth telling.
• ESCALATION: Keep raising the stakes and increasing the risk so that each moment tops and transforms the last.
• RIDE: Devise an emotional rollercoaster for your reader so you meet and exceed their expectations, then bring them back safely.
• ALIGNMENT: Center all your efforts, specifics, and choices on the energy that drives your character.
• PATTERN: Use closure, causality, and tension to pull your reader inexorably through your story.
• CONTRAST: Seek the extremes of differentiation that attract attention and amplify stakes on the page via obstacles and opponents.
• EVENTS: Place your characters in meaningful, intentional collisions that require high-stakes choices and unleash energy.
• VOID: Anchor your character in the need, lack, or injury that creates predicaments for them in every context.
• ACTION: Cast each character with a single, dynamic, transitive verb that summarizes all their efforts in every moment of the story.
• OBJECTIVE: Identify the story goal that pulls each character through the story against overwhelming odds.
• RELATIONSHIPS: Force your characters to have intense, unexpected impact on each other as often as possible so they connect meaningfully.
• TACTICS: Express your character’s action via a series of strategic re-actions specific to each scene based on their experience and decisions.
• OBJECTS: Focus your characters on tangible, challenging targets in each scene so that their tactics remain specific, external, and dynamic.
• ARC: Organize those tactics and objects in a rising crest, transforming characters by varying direction to beat the odds and reach an emotionally satisfying resolution.
I hope that you find these methods and exercises useful in your process. Thank you for taking the craft seriously and aiming for art when you can. Thank you for being a brave magpie who refuses to settle for scraps.
The secret of life is paying attention.
Whenever I teach a class, I feel so grateful that I got to spend that time with my colleagues. I learn more from fellow genre fictioneers than they’ll ever learn from me. The questions they ask, the comments they make, the unexpected insights and sidebars and gauntlets they throw down make me a stronger writer and a better person.
Writing about my process has been such a freaky, funny, fascinating experience…verbalizing my ideas taught me so much about what I thought I knew and what I needed to know better, so thank you for that too.
Go write! Write hard. Write great books, because the rest of us need them.
Damon Suede,
New York City, 2017
“There’s magic in the world. There is. People will tell you there isn’t—they just want you to get back to work and be quiet and not ask questions. These are people who don’t know where to look or who were not blessed with eyes that could see magic. Magical eyes. If you have them, develop them.”
Tennessee Williams94