Every writer, every time, has to find their story before they can hope to get it right. If they stamp “final draft” on a story that hasn’t truly found its highest and best self, something is left on the table that could have made the difference between success and failure.
Sometimes the story is lost at square one. It never stood a chance because you can’t execute a weak idea into a strong story without making it into something else. The writer latches onto it like a conspiracy theory and can’t quite translate his own attraction to it in a way that others will accept with equal clarity or zeal.
This story search-and-discovery mission takes many forms, from brainstorming and test flying to planning and outlining, to organic drafting (in effect, searching as you go). The search is a key part of the story development process—in essence it is the story development process—and yet, framed as a search, it’s taken for granted by some and totally ignored by others. Not every choice we make within our stories is the best possible choice available. As you execute these creative decisions, they will define a path toward what comes next, creating a domino effect of consequences. Choose well, and your path will be prosperous. Make a bad choice or a wrong turn, or make a less than optimal choice for a given story beat, and the rest suffers for it. Such wrong turns can lead you to the precipice of a cliff.
And thus this is how and why manuscripts get rejected.
Before you can succeed in the search for story, however you go about it, you must grasp what’s at stake, either intuitively or in context to something you’ve learned. This is true for story points within the draft itself, and as a critical step in the overall development of your narrative strategy.
Especially the strategy.
Because everything is at stake. Everything. No matter what your creative process. All writing processes, by definition, strive for the same things, and at the end we are left with outcomes that are totally defined by the physics—forces—of storytelling that the author has put into play.
The search for story is the quest for, and the application of, the essence and application of universal story physics—forces that lead to reader perception and response—within the context of your intended narrative sequence. You can optimize these forces by knowing what needs to be put in play within the narrative—and where—so the story can offer its inherent maximum value and impact. Just like a cook selecting the right ingredients and a surgeon selecting the right blade. To embark on a successful search for story, you can’t settle for story elements and moments that could be made more effective and powerful by taking the underlying story physics to a higher level.
It’s like playing a sport. The faster you run, the harder you hit, the more accurate you are—in other words, the physics of athletics—the better you will play the game. This doesn’t negate or otherwise undervalue skill and intuitive in-the-moment judgment, but you can’t argue that optimized physics don’t empower that instinctual sensibility to a higher level. If you or I were to hit a golf ball on the nose, it might put us within a nine iron of a short par four. If a professional hits it on the nose, a birdie putt is the likely outcome. The reason is pure physics: club speed applied with optimal leverage and accuracy. The swing may look the same to the casual observer, but it’s not. The physics are different.
Physics—in sports and in storytelling—are what separate professionals from the aspiring masses.
The optimization of story physics is precisely what successful authors accomplish. Because it’s not a precise science, it’s safer to say that the pros deliver the power of story physics at a consistently higher level, especially relative to dramatic tension and character empathy (the degree to which the reader will root for the hero). Great authors tend to nail those things. Even if they claim not to understand how it’s done and they say that they just sit down and bang it out, draft by draft, they are utilizing physics. For many writers, drafting is their process, their mode of story search empowered by their instincts and story sense, sometimes referred to as talent. An understanding of the depth and nature of the search for story isn’t a ticket to the bestseller list, but the presence of artfully rendered story physics—craft, however rendered—just might be.
The good news is that this doesn’t have to be a guessing game or a blind shot in the dark, or even something that depends on talent. Knowing what to look for, what to land on—the specific essences of story physics, which become the criteria by which you vet the available creative options—is a huge step toward what others, reviewers included, will likely label as talent.
Talent is very much like luck. You get in line for it through craft and perseverance. And craft always leads to what you need to make it happen: story physics.
Too many writers try to write their ideas. This is like trying to make wine out of a grape by simply squeezing the juice into a glass. It doesn’t work, even if the glass is Riedel crystal. They begin with the seed of a story, and that becomes (too soon) the basis for a draft. Sadly, those writers settle for that story without considering better options along the way, without discovering a more compelling concept that arises from the initial idea, and without a contextual standard by which to judge their decisions. These writers fail to evolve their idea into a concept, one that kicks the door to better story physics wide open. A killer concept is a great idea on steroids, complete with facial hair and muscles, because it represents the evolution of an idea into a compelling dramatic story platform. And there are many ways to get it done.
An idea for a love story in a bleak futuristic society? Not bad. Having it play out within the arena of a staged death match to avenge a decades-old political uprising? That’s way better. (If that sounds familiar, you’re gonna like Chapter 24.)
Simply hatching an idea for a story is not the part and parcel of an effective search for story. If you start drafting from an undeveloped idea, you may or may not land on creative choices—story points, milestones, twists, context, and subtext—that deliver optimized story physics. If you do land on them at that level, it’ll be out of context to a whole that is an extension of an empowered concept. It’ll be a chunk of Godiva sitting atop a soft-serve yogurt sugar cone.
When you evolve the idea into a bigger, more compelling concept from the opening bell, using the strength of your story physics as the criteria for your creative choices, then you are in essence building narrative power and nuance into your story before you even write it. Or, if you’re a drafter, as you write it, using that empowered concept as context.
An idea is merely the first step in a long, complex, and evolving creative journey. If that step is less than stellar (optimized), then the whole thing is already in trouble, or at least compromised to some degree, because you’re already trying to make the proverbial sow’s ear, albeit a pretty one, into a literary silk purse. It’s like planning to be a surgeon but deciding to enter the job market after community college—the idea (become a surgeon) was great and noble, but the strategy (skip the medical degree and go to Ghana to practice) was flawed and fatal.
It’s obvious when stated in a simple analogy. But you’d be shocked to see how often well-intended writers do just this. They begin with mediocre (or worse) ideas, to which they attach the tonality and machinations of a this-is-really-important cache and then render it with solid mechanics … and then wonder why it gets sent back to them with a form letter.
It takes but one step to fall off a cliff. And sometimes that step is the first one in this journey.
A story is composed of four major working parts: concept, character, theme, and structure (sequence of exposition), each with a separate and critical narrative context and mission. These specific contexts—you mess with them at your peril—may or may not arise simply from the idea itself, and each is absolutely powered by and ultimately judged according to the effectiveness of the story physics applied.
A story is executed through narrative scenes, which are composed of paragraphs and sentences (one’s writing voice or style). Scenes are where story physics actually manifest on the page, either directly or with veiled cleverness, evolving from intention to execution. If a scene works, it’s due to the level of story physics applied. If it drags, if it contributes little to the story, the physics have been compromised.
Right here at square one, the idea stage itself, is where we are confronting story physics in a meaningful way. Physics drive not only the scenes within a story, but the entire landscape and potential of the story itself at its earliest and highest level. Which is to say—and this is a bubble burster for some—that not all ideas are ripe grist for a robust story, and not all great stories arise from an initially compelling idea. It’s always a dance between those two extremes, with concept playing the music and story physics determining volume and pitch.
If your story doesn’t offer conflict—and some “ideas” are better suited to conflict than others—then it’s not really a story at all. A story about your summer vacation, for example, is an idea that isn’t inherently dramatic. It has no conflict, per se. It’s not a concept yet. You have to add something to it to make it a concept, which is precisely what you should do, and what you must do if the story is ever going to work. On the other hand, a story about a summer vacation in which your hero is kidnapped by crazy Italian tourists seeking to ransom her back to her employer, which is the CIA … now that’s a concept, fraught with potential drama, tension, stakes, and the promise of a terrific vicarious ride. Make one of those tourists a woman who falls in love with you, a KGB agent perhaps, and you have a subplot on your hands, too. Make your hero the lesbian daughter of an ultra right-wing Senator, who got her the job to take her away from a life as a pole dancer, and suddenly you have theme, as well.
It’s a delicious, siren-infested trap. Ideas that involve “the search for self” or the “search for meaning” are often written from this drama-devoid, naturally episodic genesis, without attention to any potentially unfolding dramatic tension that would elevate it into a concept. Character-driven material is good, but what drives the character should be full of conflict and drama and stakes. And that comes from plot … which is entirely driven by story physics.
Great storytelling through the search for story—the search for story physics—is all about avoiding the pursuit of weak ideas, about discovering rich and fertile concepts, characters, themes, and journeys that spring from the original idea to assume center stage. Each of those outcomes is a choice the author makes, and the creative options that make that choice into a story can be explored, vetted, tested, and optimized.
I’ve lived this. My third novel, Serpent’s Dance, began as a baseball story about a guy who had his shot, blew it, went back to real life, discovered himself in a way that illuminated the source of his failures, and then went back to try again. (This was long before The Rookie, a film written by my friend Mike Rich, came out to critical acclaim.) I sent this idea to my editor at Penguin, who wasn’t crazy about it. “Baseball stories don’t work,” he said (an opinion that is continually proven misguided). We worked through the idea, rather than discarding it, adding, shifting, playing “what if?” with it. The story that emerged doesn’t have a baseball anywhere in sight. In fact, the hero is a woman, and the McGuffin is a software scam involving a secret plot by virus protection software companies to actually create and distribute the very viruses their products claim to protect users from.
We searched, we vetted, we trashed some stuff, we found a flow, and a new and better story emerged. What if I had written the baseball story, without this vetting? Hard to say, but I can say for a fact that the novel my editor and I did create from an original idea, one that ended up being a much richer and more relevant concept, was successful, and, in fact, is being republished this year.
We stand on the edge of a cliff, alone with our ideas. When we love them, we have trouble seeing how other people might possibly find them less than engaging. Hey, it was our summer vacation after all, and it was wonderful. We need a tool to elevate our ideas toward concept and story, some benchmarks, to help us search and decide.
Those benchmarks exist … in the form of story physics.