Larry Brooks's Blog, page 2

Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 16

A few flash tutorials today.

Not all songwriters are professional level singers. Just as not all singers are songwriters. As authors of fiction, we need to be both when it comes to the music of our storytelling.

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That singular misplaced belief—that you can write about your idea — a story world, a character, a belief system, a super power, a moment in history — rather that apply that idea as context that stages a fully-vested, premise leading to a plot that arises from it—is responsible for more derailed dreams than perhaps any other.

Because an idea is not always a premise upon arrival. Some writers require years to fully understand this truth.

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If, when asked about your story, your answer is, “Well, it’s kind of complicated,” and then you can’t un-complicate it quickly and clearly, then you may indeed have a context problem. Your vision for the story may not be working as well as it needs to. Because your vision for the story is clouded, very probably because of the delicious toxic fumes of the original idea and its shiny object that started the whole thing.

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Depending on the degree to which the writer commands the core principles, telling a new author to just write may be like telling a medical student to just cut. Just write is half of the answer, for half of the question, applying to half of the writers who hear it, sometimes long before they should even consider it.

Because just write is advice about process, not product. And process is always fueled by what you know, even when just write seems to be the solution when you know very little. A paradox, indeed.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves,” with the addition of some framing new content here. Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

The post Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 16 appeared first on Storyfix.com.

Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 15

Today’s excerpts are from Chapter 5: Realities, Odds, and Other Inconveniences

It’s true, we sometimes must kill our darlings.

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. While others are blindly unaware of what an evolved premise means. (Hint: there are criteria for that… stay with us here.)

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 upon 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 single scene in your story move the exposition forward through the contribution of something new or expanded.

If you are over-the-moon about your story world, that’s great.

Just don’t write 400 pages about your story world. Story world, important as it is, always ends up being the stage upon which your dramatic tale will unspool. The goal of story world is for it to become context to the story you are telling.

As strong as your story world seems to you, avoid writing a travelogue about it, where the only thing your hero does is traverse the landscape. Even the protagonist in Andy Weir’s smash hit, The Martian (originally self-published, but went on to land a 7-figure pub deal and became a hit movie starring Matt Damon), who must deal with a story world that is as deadly and fascinating as any you can think of, ends up being about how the guy ultimately gets off the planet.

What happens within your story world is far more important to the reader — even if they came for the story world — than the environment and its backstory will ever be.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves,” with the addition of some framing new content here. Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

The post Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 15 appeared first on Storyfix.com.

Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 14

Today’s excerpts are from Chapter 5: Realities, Odds, and Other Inconveniences

I’m assuming you want to be great at this work.

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 or Robert Jordan (real name James Oliver Rigney, Jr., an elite sci-fi/fantasy writer). 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.com, you need to know that shooting for the middle may not get you there.

Whether your goal is to self-publish or land a Big Five contract, the odds are better when you aim for the higher bar, qualitatively-speaking, because agents and editors and avid readers are looking for the next home run, not the next base on balls, or even the next ground ball single. Being good in this business is the same thing as being average, because the vast majority of pretenders are good. Look around the room at your next critique group meeting and I’ll bet you’d agree.

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.

There is an entire discipline of principles and reliable criteria that can help you diffentiate between a great story idea and an idea that is contrived, thin, over-used or better suited to a specific scene or short story. But to avail yourself of this higher wisdom — which means you may recognize that the idea you are laboring over is actually more DOA than MIA — you first have to submit to the fact that not all story ideas are good ideas, and this first-base truth is often the thing that takes manuscripts and their authors off the table before a reader — an agent, an editor or a book buyer skimming for their next read… because in that case, the idea is really all that matters — reaches page 10.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves,” with the addition of some framing new content here. Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

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Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 13

Be careful about your sources of writing wisdom.

Laugh at their jokes, marvel at their Amazon rankings, enjoy their work and the movies made from it. Just don’t buy into their writing world view without a thorough vetting… because you may already know more about how a novel should be built and fueled than they do. Who knows… that novel that put them behind a microphone might have taken twelve years, sixteen rewrites and a floor full of editors who will never get the credit they deserve.

Most famous authors, when speaking to an audience, truly mean well. Even when what they say only (or at least best) applies to them — to their preferred process — yet comes off as battle-proven advice that all prospective authors, this famous author would have you believe should emulate.

Here’s another cautionary tale lifted straight out of the collective writing conversation. It’s my favorite famous author story, really, because it shines light on both sides of the story-development proposition, which is an issue of precision and pain tolerance.

Like that bestselling keynote guy from a couple of posts ago, whose advice about process is about as universally wise as is the advice to inject Lysol into your bloodstream to cleanse yourself of any circulating viruses. Some advice is toxic, even when the name seems authoritative.

Then again, some famous authors are all too eager to tell you they don’t really know how they do what they do… which can also be toxic if you believe that to mean there is nothing out there to be learned, or there is nothing to actually know about this craft.

Ignorance can kill you as quickly as a Clorox enema.

This is one of those stories.

In a recent author profile appearing in Writers Digest magazine, an 11-million-copy best-selling author confessed she has no idea how she does what she does. Those were her words, which at a glance sounds humble and mysterious and perhaps romantic. But in any case, such a claim by someone with that level of success translates to this: I just go with my gut.

Clearly, after a hit movie adaptation and a few screenplay credits on top of her considerable book sales, the numbers prove her wrong, because what is a validated instinct if not knowing what to do?

Claiming to not know how she got there isn’t saying she doesn’t know what her story-craft needs to look like when she does. That is a critical differentiation, one you should strive to wrap your head around.

Her numbers prove that, as well. And thus, the paradox is reinforced.

Her contention that she doesn’t know is simply proof that, as it is in many forms of art and athletics and academics, doing and teaching exist as different core competencies, only rarely shared within one practitioner. My guess is she’d make a terrific keynote speaker.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves,” with the addition of some framing new content here. Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

The post Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 13 appeared first on Storyfix.com.

Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 12

There is an A-list product, rather than an A-list process.

I submit to you that the latter doesn’t exist. Because A-listers across the board, in equal measure, create their bestsellers using both sides of the proposition — organic pantsing and/or plotting leading to an outline — and everything in between, with no clear majority emerging.

I’ve seen this prove itself in more than a few keynote addresses by famous authors with bestsellers to back them up.

Not long ago, one of them told hundreds of serious writers at a major conference that he composes a 100,000-word character biography before tackling a draft of his work-in-progress, just to “find the voice of the character.” He contended we should all do the same. That finding your voice always requires pain and suffering.

Such a contention from the mouth of an A-list author proves nothing other than the circle I’ve just completed here: How they write their books doesn’t matter. What matters, from a learning perspective, is being able to recognize what it is about their work—the end product—that succeeds.

Better to cull value from their product rather than their choice of process. And yet to acknowledge, at least for that writer, that this circuitous route was what it took to get him there.

That doesn’t have to be you, by the way.

Here’s the footnote to that story: That 100K character sketch the author wrote? He intended it to be the novel. It wasn’t ever a strategy or a tool; it wasn’t even a story-development exercise. He thought it was the novel. He admitted as much. He sent it to his agent as such. The agent returned it forthwith, riddled with, well, ridicule.

Because it wasn’t just a bad novel, it wasn’t a novel at all. It was hundreds of pages of character sketch and uneven backstory, with no dramatic tension (plot), no theme, no structure, and nothing to root for. Nothing happened in those pages. Which means this successful author, standing behind a podium at a major writing conference in front of many hundreds of other authors who are, for the most part also working or at least aspiring professionals, couldn’t tell the difference as he typed.

This is
what happens when you write your novel without reference to criteria, or even
actually knowing the difference between a novel and 100,000 words of
brainstorming.

This is not the common wisdom, nor lack thereof, among any category of author. Actually this is the antithesis of wisdom. It’s certainly not a choice that the majority of A-list authors would make. It’s just that guy.

Trouble is, that guy is telling other writers, like you, that this is the conventional wisdom, that this is indeed how it is done. Happily, when I looked around the room full of serious writers in that moment, I joined a sea of rolling eyes and more than few shaking heads.

The only truth in that is this: This is how it’s done … for him.

One of his books sold four million copies and was made into a poorly reviewed movie (hey, I’d take that, no question), so by hook or crook, he got to the finish line on that project. But I’ll risk saying this: You can bet there is an un-credited editor out there somewhere who knows her role in that success story.

Earlier, when I said there has to be a better way… there is.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves.” Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

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Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 11

Below you will find six true statements about writing fiction today.

True, that is, if your intention is to compete for readers, either via traditional publication or through self-publishing.

This is what astute writers — many with buckets of blood lost in pursuit of these truths — have discovered as contradictions to what some consider to be the conventional wisdom.

1. Not all story ideas are viable as the basis for a novel.

Nobody is going to stop you from pursuing a weak story idea. Yet, based on results (from someone who has read and evaluated many hundreds of story idea from newer writers), and 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.

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 (which new writers hardly ever realize) that what you like to read, or what you know, just might reside within a small demographic.

There are specific criteria for a story idea what works. In the same way that there are specific criteria for someone trying out for a job as a sumo wrestler.

2. 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 only 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 crystallizes 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.

Writing a draft without an ending in mind is a consequence of your choice of process (because this is just as true if you are compiling an outline). It may serve you if you understand that you are still in search of an ending, and that the draft will need to be re-evaluated… and it may sink you if you think you can just bolt on the sudden inspiration for story resolution at the end of your early-draft-in-process.

The latter is like someone deciding they want to become a doctor and practice medicine as a career… at the age of 59.

3. 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 often 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.

4. 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 350 page guided tour of the amazing story world that came to you one night in a dream… that just won’t ever work, if that’s all there is.

5. A story isn’t a situational 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.

Two people drive off a bridge, land upside down, and are trapped there. For three horrible days. And then… they die. The end. That’s a story idea that won’t get a call back from an agent or an editor, no matter how well its been written.

6. Structure is omnipresent in a story that works.

Structure is, for the most part, a given flow of unspooling exposition, rather than a unique invention, too often linear and episodic, to fit the story you are telling. It is not something you get to invent, nor is it unique to you or the story you are writing. Rather, like gravity, it is a universal principle of story, heading in only one direction.

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.

That caveat — as a professional — applies to all of these points. Hopefully, it also applies to your writing aspiration. Now you know. There are lines on the playing field, and ingrained expectations from the cheap seats.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves.” Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

The post Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 11 appeared first on Storyfix.com.

Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 10

Pantsers and Planners… we’re all just bozos on this bus.

(If you get this quote then you may be a social trivia genius… this is a paraphrase from the title of a 1971 comedy album by the Firesign Theater.)

Principle-driven, criteria-informed…right there is our opportunity to raise the bar for our work.

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. Maybe there aren’t so-called best practices relative to our chosen process, but there certainly are best practices relative to what ends up on the page.

No one in the audience cares how we got there, they only care about how well it works.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves.” Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

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Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 9

Picking up from yesterday’s post…

Let’s try to understand why that ratio—96 percent of submissions are rejected, while only 4 percent land an agent, and from there, only a fraction those land a publisher—is what it is.

My hypothesis is this: Too many writers aren’t doing the work from an instinct, a storytelling muscle, that is strong enough. They land on an idea, and commit to it as a story — or in some cases, begin plotting the story as they write a draft, working solely from their instincts — from instinct that is uninformed, or at least under-informed. It’s like asking a star high school pitcher to start a game in the major leagues… they can throw, but they aren’t ready yet.

Instincts that work are, in fact, grounded in the same principles that the newer writer has yet to internalize. And often it takes years of practice and study and near misses.

It is good to remember that perhaps we should not try to write like (insert your favorite A-list author here) until you know what (same author) knows.

We all start somewhere.

It isn’t that we shouldn’t try to write a novel when we’re starting out. It is, perhaps, more apt that we shouldn’t expect it to go anywhere. It’s like expecting to shoot par at Augusta when all you’ve played is your neighborhood course. Rather, we should realize where we are on the learning curve and use our early story experiences to learn what we need to learn… perhaps realizing for the first time that there is something out there that we must learn.

An underdeveloped instinct simply means that not all of the part-specific criteria for professional-level storytelling are being considered.

If you aren’t aware of those criteria — or worse, if you reject the notion that they exist — then you are stuck in a paradox of your own creation.

While some claim to be born with the storytelling gene, I believe it’s more an outcome of the learning, or not, that has led them to where they are.

Failure is never unfair. Rather, it is more appropriately viewed as inevitable… until those principles and criteria become the raw grist of your storytelling instinct. ‘

They are learned by doing, and through feedback, and by humbling yourself to the immense tasking of stepping into this learning. Robert Dugoni, for example (who wrote the foreword to my book), had his first novel rejected 42 times by 42 agents. Only when he humbled himself to this outcome, when he stepped back and engaged in an intense study of craft, did he realize why those rejections happened. And when he applied what he’d learned, that book – The Jury Master – became a New York Times Bestseller.

Certainly, an immersion in craft does not automatically – or frequently, for that matter – land you on the NY Times list. But it absolutely can get you published, by becoming the incremental elevation in knowledge that you need, and that everyone must attain to make this dream come true.

Here’s an example of what happens when your instinct comes up short.

Let’s say your story has an amazing story world. Everybody tells you this is the case. But if the writer is so fascinated by that story world that the narrative focuses there, demoting a dramatic arc to an obligatory base to cover down the drafting road… and to an extent that the story’s protagonist is, for better or worse, actually just touring or navigating the story world, without an empathetic quest or an urgent goal driven by stakes, if there is no antagonist getting in your hero’s way… if the story is more about observing the protagonist deal with this story world, rather than striving mightily to achieve something — or defeat something — within the context of that story world… if it’s more documentary than mystery or thriller (which both become the engine of great sci-fi and fantasy, by the way)…

… if that’s your novel, then you may be suffering from an under-development story muscle. A crash course in principle-driven criteria — which includes a heavy dose of the criteria for premise — might be the thing that lifts it, and you, to a higher, requisite level of storytelling command.

In athletics, where DNA actually does become a factor, competence is something that is developed over time, by applying certain principles with consistency. With persistence and diligence, that application may meet a higher standard, which can be defined by criteria.

The same is true of writers who get it.

Athletes develop muscle memory. Writers develop a nose for story. Which is just a different form of the same wonderful human ability to adapt. In either case, this instinct to perform at a higher level is not something we are born with.

If this were a keynote, I could regale you at length with the story ideas I’ve heard from the enthusiastic mouths of new writers, including that lost ashes concept from a few posts ago. Many hundreds of them. Too many were dead on arrival, no matter how well they might have been written, no matter how clever the notion or compelling the story world. Slice-of-life stories. Theme-pounding pontification. Thinly veiled this is based on my life novels.

These ideas come from well-intended, smart people who, nonetheless, do not know what they do not know.

That was me, too. Long before some of you were born, I wrote six novels — all unpublished — based on what I thought were really killer story ideas… but didn’t demonstrate the knowledge or instinct to wring the requisite story criteria — the drama of it — out of them.

It was only after studying screenwriting that I realized there are given standards available—not just for films, but for any story—and that truth has remained at the core of my work as a writing coach and a practicing author of novels. Every published novel I’ve read and every movie I’ve seen bears witness to those principles being honored simply to get into the game, to become part of that 4-percent demographic.

Knowledge is not only power, it becomes the raw grist of the writer’s instinct.

Hope you’ll stay with me here. We are about to do a deep dive into the principles, criteria, standards and best practices that comprise that well of knowledge.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves.” Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

To read prior entries in this series, go to Storyfix.com to the menu (center column) of past posts.

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Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 8

Straight Talk About The Long Odds…

… with the assurance there exists a way to beat, or at least mitigate, those odds.

According to an article in the Huffington Post, 96 percent of manuscripts submitted to literary agencies for representation are rejected by those agencies. They won’t even try to take your novel to market.

That means only 4 percent — a huge slice of which includes revisions and rewrites stemming from those rejections — are getting a shot at traditional publication. The odds are just as long with small publishers who accept manuscripts directly from authors.

There has to be a better way.

Some of those rejections certainly can be explained by bad timing or other non-qualitative factors. But the truth cannot be escaped: most of what new writers, frustrated writers, and even published writers seeking to continue their career are submitting simply isn’t good enough.

Either the story idea isn’t strong enough (newsflash: your brilliant writing alone will not get you published in the genre fiction business), or your execution — which too often includes the writing, but always include your narrative strategy, story structure, scene execution and character substance — isn’t up to a professional standard.

The solution for both — better story ideas, and better execution — resides in an understanding of the criteria that define what those professional standards are.

Meet the criteria and you stand a chance. Don’t… and you don’t. At least until you do.

Self-publishing doesn’t change the math.

It only tears down the barriers to seeing your name on a book cover. In truth, the percentage of self-published authors who reach the sales levels of A-list traditionally published authors is microscopic. Sure, that tiny fraction of the many millions of titles on Amazon can do really well… but the math still isn’t bright and shiny.

The average self-published novel sells about two hundred copies, and that average includes the successful slim percentage that have much higher novel sales numbers. And while those authors may have done well in marketing their work online (a different acumen than the writing itself), it is the actual storytelling, and the degree to which it delivers principle-driven reading experiences, that will bring readers back, again and again. It is the storytelling — because almost all self-published success stories are genre novels — that dictates the attainment of a word-of-mouth tipping point required to propel a novel onto a bestseller list. This is true whether you are aiming for a contract with Hachette or your own series of self-published novels on Amazon.

Your Process isn’t the issue… unless it defines your problem.

In terms of the quality of the end product, it really doesn’t matter how you write (your process), nor does it does matter how anybody else writes (their process). If your process is more like finger-painting that mining the gold in the explosive union of your vision and your skill… if that’s you… then indeed, your process is part of the problem.

And marketing your novel is what it is, whether you are self-published or traditionally published (the main difference being a traditionally published novel will end up in major bookstores, the self-published novel likely will not). Either way, unless your name is David Baldacci, then you’re pretty much on your own.

A great story is the best marketing strategy of all. Thing is… one writer’s great idea may be a reader’s idea of… “meh” (shrugs and moves on).

From idea generation to story visualization to drafting and revision, all of it is writing. At least in the context of the discussion we are having here. Which means, what others say about process may or may not be of value to you, even if it comes from a famous author. Which it often does, because famous authors love to wax lofty about how they do the work.

If you know what that famous writer knows — be very careful in assuming that you do — then you may succeed with the same instinctual, criteria-driven basis of comparison. But if you don’t, if you can’t instinctually recognize what needs to be there upon completion, in what order and to what degree, including what isn’t there, then you will benefit from having an external standard to apply.

Another name for those standards is criteria.

See what one famous writer — Robert Dugoni — says about this HERE.

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These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves.” Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

Scroll down to find the previous posts in this series. If you reading this via email, click HERE to go to Storyfix.com (see the menu of prior posts in the middle column).

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Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 7

The Importance of Square One

Here’s a scary fact of life for fiction writers: Not all story ideas are good story ideas. Not all of them, even when they glow in the dark at the first spark of inspiration, can be made to work on all the levels necessary within a novel or a screenplay, or simply work at a level that is high enough.

It is asking a lot of a story that’s written randomly to not read as if it was, in fact, written randomly. Or read as if it were written by an author who doesn’t yet possess the requisite story instinct, in the form of knowledge about the principles and criteria that apply. Great stories don’t write themselves. (And right there, dear readers, is where my editor at Writers Digest Books found the title of the book from which these excerpts are lifted.)

High-potential ideas can be recognized from
standards of criteria.

Too many new writers commit to ideas that aren’t really stories at all. It may be a good short story idea, or even an idea for a scene from a novel or movie. Like, “What if someone stole your mother’s ashes from your car on the morning of her memorial service?”

That idea was once pitched to me in a workshop, and the feedback was tough to hear and just as tough to give. If your idea is more suited to an episode of The Twilight Zone than it is a multifaceted, criteria-crushing candidate for a novel—it might make for a good scene, but it’s not yet layered enough for an actual story—you need to learn to recognize that difference. You’d need to nurture that particular idea upward, searching for a larger tapestry that might build on the limited scope of that idea.

Do this, and you will instantly find yourself rubbing elbows in the top ten percentile ranks of authors who understand this to be true. Until the idea meets the criteria for a powerful story, which is an issue of both knowledge and instinct, it should remain a work-in-progress.

Here’s the best writing tip I’ve ever heard.

It came from a keynote address at a writing conference. The speaker was a senior New York literary agent with a who’s-who client list, who said this:

When a story idea strikes you … run.

Not run
toward it. Run from it.

Make it chase you. If the idea is fundamentally weaker than it seems at first blush—because certainly, sometimes things strike us in ways we can’t defend or understand—time itself, seasoned by an understanding of applicable criteria and through the filter of your instincts, will be your ally in ultimately seeing it for what it is, and what it isn’t.

Nobody is standing at the gate giving you a user’s manual and a life preserver for your story idea. It’s all on you. Rather, the better approach is to juxtapose your ideas against known criteria. Make sure you go out on a few dates with your story idea before you propose marriage, and make sure you have criteria to apply, informing a sense of knowing what needs to happen, before you do.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves.” Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

Scroll down to find the previous posts in this series. If you reading this via email, click HERE to go to Storyfix.com, to do just that.

The post Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 7 appeared first on Storyfix.com.