WRITING ADVICE – Lisa Cron #14: Everything In the Story Is “NEED-To-Know”

In 2008, I discovered how little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, Lin Oliver speak at a convention hosted by the Minnesota Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. To learn more – and to satisfy my natural tendency to “teach stuff”, I started a series of essays taking the wisdom of published writers and then applying each “nugget of wisdom” to my own writing. During the six years that followed, I used the advice of a number of published writers (with their permission) and then applied the writing wisdom of Lin Oliver, Jack McDevitt, Nathan Bransford, Mike Duran, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, SL Veihl, Bruce Bethke, and Julie Czerneda to an analysis of my own writing. Together these people write in genres broad and deep, and have acted as agents, editors, publishers, columnists, and teachers. Today I add to that list, Lisa Cron who has worked as a literary agent, TV producer, and story consultant for Warner Brothers, the William Morris Agency, and others. She is a frequent speaker at writers’ conferences, and a story coach for writers, educators, and journalists. Again, with permission, I am using her article, “A Reader’s Manifesto: 15 Hardwired Expectations Every Reader Has for Every Story” (2/16/18 http://blog.creativelive.com/essential-storytelling-techniques/)
14. The reader expects that “As readers we assume that everything the writer tells us is integral to the story, and without it, the story won’t make sense. After all, if we didn’t need to know it, why would the writer waste her time telling us?
“The problem is that when writers tell us things we don’t need to know, we assign them a story meaning anyway, and we’re inherently going to be wrong. It’s like throwing rocks into an otherwise well-oiled machine. Once they get caught in the gears, it’s not long before everything comes to a grinding halt.
“Ask yourself: Is everything in my story integral to it? Have I thrown in things that sound nice, but do not affect the story itself? Hint: this is where the lure of beautiful writing can creep in. It sounds so lovely, do I really have to delete it? Yep!
OUCH!
This is my struggle with the story I’m working on now – that I was working on for my last WRITING ADVICE post on December 8…
I don’t usually struggle so much with writing a story. The problem here is that among other things, it’s a “sort of” continuation of another story; a “triptych” that focuses on the growth of the main character as he faces life without his wife, without his job of 30 years, and acting as a “representative Human”. There’s so much going on in the story that at first, while I know kinda-sorta where I wanted to go, there wasn’t any clear direction.
I wrote until I almost reached the end…and then didn’t know how to end it all and until yesterday, the story just stopped rather then ending. By chance, I got a newsletter I subscribe to, called Working Writer (for a free subscription, go here! http://www.workingwriter1.com/).
I read the first article of the January/February 2020 issue, and came across this quote from Edgar Allen Poe and an observation by the newsletter’s editor and the article’s author, Maggie Frisch: “‘Nothing is more clear than that every plot . . . must be elaborated to its More than “the ending”, the French word “dénouement” carries even more meaning. The French origin of the word is oddly opposite of what you’d expect: “from French, literally: an untying, from dénouer to untie, from Old French desnoer, from des- de- + noer to tie, knot, from Latin nōdāre, from nōdus a knot; see node”.
Possibly in other words, the ending of the story should untie all of the strands that led up to that ending so that the reader can nod and say, “Ah! I had it figured out a long time ago!”
The less complicated definition is that the ending of a story should be “the final resolution of the intricacies of a plot, as of a drama or novel; the place in the plot at which this occurs; the outcome or resolution of a doubtful series of occurrences.”
Because I hadn’t ended “Hermit”, I had gotten lost in the details of the story – I didn’t have a map to show me how to get to where I wanted to be…because I didn’t know where I was going. I had everything else – readable in one sitting, reaction, tone, theme, climax, and setting…
So, I figured out the ending yesterday and now I’m going through the story and pruning it – I’m trying to figure out what’s important and what’s not. What’s “need-to-know” and what is me indulging myself in world building? Cron says it this way: “…when writers tell us things we don’t need to know, we assign them a story meaning anyway, and we’re inherently going to be wrong.”
Readers don’t read in order to reinforce the idea that they’re stupid – which is something I think many “literary” writers mistake for being “profound”. What I write had better be integral to the structure of the story. More than that, what I write should be essential to the ending of the story. There was so much “junk” in “Hermit”, that I couldn’t see a way to end the story – there were so many threads to it that when I tried to untie it all, I got a total mess. Worse than tennis shoe laces knotted and wet and muddy; my fingernails gnawed down to the quick; and an injured back, that’s how my story had grown, unwieldy and impossible to follow.
Now that I know where I’m going, I can look at where I started and backtrack. I’ll let you know if I was successful.
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