Mistakes and weaknesses in our work, the stuff of revision and the raw grist of improvement, are almost always a product of the way we think colluding and colliding with what we believe to be true about writing stories.
Success, however, isn’t necessarily a product of what a writer thinks and believes about writing. This is certainly not always the case for writers of bestsellers and breakout successes, or even for those who finally receive an acceptance letter after years of submitting their work. Often those joyous outcomes are the product of a revision process done well, applied to a powerful origin premise, all rendered by a capable writer and, lurking unnamed and underappreciated behind the scenes, a stellar story editor. But success stories don’t always come with truisms and models, other than the observation that sometimes they cannot be explained. On occasion—and paradoxically, as this is the case with many breakout bestsellers from unknown names—success can be largely attributed to timing and pure luck, and less to artful craft and literary genius.
Need an example? Four words: Fifty Shades of Grey.
Even that story, as controversial and critically hounded as it is, must be recognized for its compelling idea. The novel and subsequent movie are pure strategy wearing the leather mask of creativity, tapping into a dark little corner of the psyche and speaking the unspeakable. Millions of women have flocked to it. Millions of men secretly hung on every word and were first in line on the movie’s opening day. The strategic genius here, if not a shining example of literary art, is in grounding the story within a conceptual arena that has proven to be a sure thing.
Story execution—check. For better or worse, it was sufficient. But the story itself was brilliantly conceived from a strategic point of view, and that made all the difference.
Welcome to the Crazy House of Writing Fiction, where anything can happen and where what does happen may not make complete sense. Either way, when lightning strikes or when darkness falls, it always has our name and the state of our craft hidden somewhere in the explanation.
One of the challenges I frequently sense in newer writers, or unpublished veterans, is that they don’t shoot high enough or strategically enough at the story level. They aren’t aspiring to greatness. Rather, they are seeking to write small stories, generic stories, with the goal of somehow making them great. Big difference there. They aren’t seeking to blow the reader out of her chair with a story that hasn’t been written before. It’s as if they just want to see their name on a book cover, to simply join the midlist club, and they believe that piling on is the way to get it done. Another vampire story. Another dystopian tale. Yet another Da Vinci Code rip-off. One more love story straight off the assembly line at the romance factory. Another thrice-divorced detective with alcohol problems and a grouchy lieutenant. These writers seem to think they have to work up to a groundbreaking story by starting at a lower degree of difficulty, treading familiar turf, cutting their teeth on something less risky and compelling.
But if the goal is to get published and reach an audience, this mind-set is exactly backwards. Stories from new authors land agents, get published, and earn market buzz precisely because they take chances and fearlessly plow new and provocative ground. The bookstore shelf is already full. Publishers aren’t looking for mediocrity; they’re looking for home runs. Gillian Flynn’s mega-bestseller Gone Girl is a case in point. It’s a character-driven thriller, and at a glance it contains nothing more conceptual than the rocky terrain of a middle-class marriage. But Flynn didn’t settle—the novel is the antithesis of an American-dream slice-of-life story. Instead she delivered a deep dive into the darkest corner of domestic dysfunction, couching a highly thematic statement about the culture of media within a love story gone terribly wrong.
That story was big. It was huge. And what made it huge was the way she elevated the concept to infuse its premise with something we’ve never seen before.
Sometimes the risky bet is the best bet of all.
That effort begins, by the way, before a word of the manuscript has been written, at the idea-concept-premise stage of development. (If that’s not the case, then you’ve just discovered a likely source of rejection and a subsequent need for revision.) In seeking to understand why your work has been rejected, this scope of ambition is a great place to begin looking.
What we write in context to informs the whole process of story development, and if there is no vision for the story and no box to put it into, then the writing can easily become a rambling search for meaning. Indeed, many early drafts are a search for the story rather than the execution of one. This single perspective explains why so much rejection and failure occurs among writers who don’t yet understand what story development actually means.
To show how this looks in real life, at the end of this book I’ve assembled some case studies from my story-coaching work that demonstrate just how easy it is for a project to veer off the tracks at the level of concept and premise. What you’ll read there shows the intentions of the writers—which too often reveal that they intentionally choose a story that is as stale as week-old bread or as full of holes as a block of Swiss cheese—followed by my analysis of how those intentions will play out in a manuscript.
Reading these after your indoctrination to the principles that make a story soar, and thus empower the story-fixing process itself, will greatly accelerate your ability to recognize your own level of understanding of the storytelling craft.
That level of understanding may not be what you think it is. If you start to sense this is true for you—if you are surprised by what you encounter—good things are likely to follow.
This happened at a workshop for romance writers, who are among the most astute practitioners of craft in the business. Yet it is a genre full of writers depending almost entirely on their story sensibilities to get published.
I was lecturing about story concept, asserting that we must bring something conceptual to the story arena as the basis for a premise, something that is inherently compelling, and use it as the stage upon which the rest of the story presents itself. A story doesn’t solely depend on skill and structure to work. The raw material of the story itself—the intrinsic, conceptual grist of it—is a huge factor.
A boring, normal, slice-of-life story told well will still be boring, unless that life is interesting … which by definition makes it conceptual. But a meaty conceptual framework—now that’s something to work with.
So there I was, doing my whole concept-premise dance, giving examples, defining and comparing and contrasting, asking for the audience’s concepts and analyzing them as a group. I’d just presented my favorite case study for concept: the vast oeuvre of the Superman franchise. Not exactly a romance, I’ll grant you, but it’s the poster child for the notion of concept as king.
That singular concept, the one that resides at the very center of the Superman franchise, has hatched ten films, hundreds of comic books, and two major television series. The lesson is this: Every single movie and comic and episode has its own premise. Ten movies, ten different premises. But each story is framed by—and arises from a landscape defined by—the central concept itself, which is the same for every story.
The conceptual notion is Superman in the context of being someone who is very different than the rest of us. That difference is the concept; it is what makes Superman unique and therefore fascinating. Not Clark Kent the character, but his alter ego as the embodiment of something outside of what we consider normal. Without Superman, Clark Kent is inherently not all that conceptual. With him, though, the entire story landscape becomes astoundingly conceptual.
But notice, right here at the concept level, there is no story yet. You still need to add a premise—a villain and something specific for the hero to do, with something at stake—before this concept elevates to the level of story.
That seemed to work for my romance-writing listeners. Either that, or the principle wasn’t yet clear enough to inspire pushback. We moved on to other issues with that principle in place.
On the second day, though, as we were diving into the writers’ own stories and vetting them against all the requisite elements and criteria, one woman’s hand shot into the air. I’d noticed her body language during the course of the workshop—squirming is telling, and facial tics speak volumes—so I knew what was coming.
Her voice was shaky, her tone challenging.
“I write romances. They’re love stories about real people in the real world. I don’t write about superheroes or murders or conspiracies or paranormal powers or schemes or whatever the hell you mean by something conceptual.” She held up both hands and made sarcastic little quotation marks with her fingers. “So I don’t really know what this has to do with me. Or with any of us.”
If you’ve ever been in that moment, when someone calls you out in front of a group, when they have a legitimate point (one that was the result of my own failure to clarify colliding with her limiting beliefs that were squirming within a narrow paradigm), you know what that was like for me.
You could have heard a dangling participle drop in that room.
Leveraging concept within a romance is one of the best ways to elevate a story within a very crowded field.
But you have to dig for it. Falling in love isn’t inherently conceptual, which means it’s the writer's job to infuse the story with a conceptual proposition.
One of the writers in the room was enjoying huge success—as in, hundreds of thousands of copies sold in the past few months—with her latest romance, and I used that story as an example. The story (One Lavender Ribbon by Heather Burch, named by Amazon.com as one of the top one hundred best-selling e-books of 2014) had a killer concept, and it fit perfectly within what the group accepted as the confining conceptual tropes of the romance genre. And yet her concept—which didn’t rely on superheroes or the paranormal in any way—was the context-establishing catalyst that made the novel work.
In her story a recently single woman buys an old house. As she begins to remodel it, she finds a stack of old letters hidden in the attic that tells a story—a love story—from half a century ago. Both the letters and the real-time story deal with war and tragedy, and evolve toward the mending of a broken heart as much as the discovery of new love.
Boom. There’s a concept. No capes or ghosts or superpowers in sight—just some letters hidden for five decades in an attic. That’s not a premise—it doesn’t include characters or plot—but rather, it’s a concept. And it’s a good one.
The heroine in Burch’s novel becomes fascinated by these letters. In seeking to heal herself, she decides to track down the author of the letters and return them to him (this is the premise—the letters become the catalyst that launches the heroine into action), and in doing so her path crosses not only with a handsome stranger, who happens to be the letter writer’s adult son, but with an entire family dynamic that links to the letters and refreshes their recollection of war and their fear of loss.
This is a compelling fusion of concept and premise, with a heavy dose of theme as well. The concept stands alone before we meet anyone (because the house and the letters were there). It fuels the premise itself. It becomes the primary catalyst for the story.
The workshop ended well. The troubled writer now understood what I was talking about and later claimed it as a major epiphany. Her instincts had served her in the creation of a story arc, but the power of the story itself was the issue. Her instincts told her to avoid the conceptual, when in fact her approach should have been the opposite.
This is no doubt true for more than half of the stories rejected at the professional level. The writer is just fine as a creator of characters and scenes and sentences, but the story—the journey or quest you ask the hero to take—is unremarkable. Maybe even less than credible, possibly absurdly contrived. And thus, revision takes on a much deeper context than mere nips and tucks and tweaks, which are efforts to breathe life into the already terminally ill. Sometimes a better story, at the core level, is the best revision of all.
Writing stories can seem so simple, at least at a naïve glance, until one tries to do it in earnest. Many writers come to that first blank page after experiencing enrichment as readers, and they use that experience as the context for their version of how to write a story. It’s no different than riding in the backseat of your family car as a child and then getting behind the wheel at age sixteen: Things are a little more complex when you’re the one sitting in the driver’s seat.
Often, lurking quietly in the back of these writers’ heads is the smug sense that they can produce stories as good as those they read on a regular basis. This is a limiting belief—a delusion, actually—and the type of thing your inner writer sometimes needs to discard the hard way. Newer writers often bring a truckload of limiting beliefs to the process, many of them products of their experience as readers rather than their schooling as writers. We will try to dismantle them here.
We need to get schooled on the craft of writing to the extent that it trumps our untested instincts—before it schools us.
In any story, there is always something that could be stronger and more functional. In that sense the old writer’s lament is true: Stories aren’t ever really finished, just deemed sufficient. Or, in some cases, tossed into the marketplace, come what may.
To reach a truly adequate point of sufficiency, we need to examine the major pieces of the storytelling proposition from several angles. Overlap is inevitable—and valuable. After two decades of teaching this stuff at conferences and workshops, I can assure you that a significant percentage of writers don’t “get it” the first time they encounter it and, if they truly want to move forward, they must immerse themselves in the discussion from several perspectives before an inevitable epiphany descends upon them.
Such an epiphany is an “angels choir” moment: The curtains part, and the writer finally grasps what she’s been missing. The revision process then becomes a magical resurrection, taking the story and the writer to new heights that weren’t even visible in the earlier draft.
And so we fill it up with what we have to offer, arising from the pool of what we know, handicapped by what we don’t know, and fueled by dreams we dare not utter aloud. Sometimes these intentions are soured by what we’ve chosen to ignore, or poisoned by things we have been taught that aren’t true or applicable, either through ignorance or arrogance or simple haste.
Because, in spite of all the books and workshops and websites and analogy-loving writing gurus out there (I admit, I’m that guy), writers cling to the limiting belief that there are no rules. (That’s semantics, by the way; the line separating rules and principles tends to blur.) The mere mention of that word—rules—causes us to rebel, perhaps even to conclude that principles and standards are really rules couched within softer verbiage. From there we decide we can write our stories any damn way we please.
Because this is art, damn it.
And that is a fatal mistake.
Professionals often do write their stories any damn way they please, and they do so because what pleases them is driven by those same principles that scare lesser writers away. The fact that they know what will make a story work, even before writing a single word, is the very hallmark of the word professional on their name tag. We must know what “doing it right” means before we can do it any damn way we please.
Often we don’t discover that our work isn’t strong enough until the rejection letter arrives. Or the critique group pounces like Fox News on the latest White House decision. Or the story coach doesn’t tell you what you want to hear.
As part of the story-coaching guild, my job involves telling writers that their stories are coming up short, and why. Often I tell them that the wheels fell off at the conceptual starting gate. It’s the why part that allows me to sleep at night, because I’ve been on the receiving end of the sharp pokes this business delivers plenty of times, and I know the value of why. Like a doctor giving a screaming kid a vaccination shot, I take solace in the hope that once the sting subsides the writer will see the pit into which he has blindly tumbled and will find his way out of it.
The thing is, you can’t write your way out of the pit unless you know your story’s weaknesses and how to strengthen and repair them. Such a statement creates a paradox of sorts, because if you knew what was wrong and how to fix it before you started writing, you wouldn’t have written it with those weaknesses in the first place.
For starters, we all do revision work, even before the book goes out to an agent or an editor. Even “polishing” is, in the truest sense, a form of revision, and as such we should subject it to the same rigorous standards that a criticized story must endure.
Revision assumes you now know what you didn’t know before. It assumes you understand whether your rejection was the outcome of unaligned taste or bad market timing (which may not require revision), or due to a story that is broken at its core, or has been poorly executed (which absolutely does require revision). When you don’t know the difference, your stories will continue to fail. And it won’t just be the story’s fault. It will be yours.