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.
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