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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