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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lisa Cron
“All literature implies moral standards and criticisms, the less explicit the better.”
Dont preach, dont lecture, let the story direct the compass
Knowing what the focus of your story is allows you to do for your story what your cognitive unconscious does for you: filter out everything extraneous, everything that doesn’t matter. You can use it to test each proposed twist, turn, and character reaction for story relevance.
Isolate the focus of your story and make it the center around which everything revolves.
If the reader can’t feel what matters and what doesn’t, then nothing matters, including finishing the story.
This explains why I drop so many novels a few chapters in; I just don't care what happens.
Your job is not to judge your characters, no matter how despicable or wonderful they may be. Your job is to lay out what happens, as clearly and dispassionately as possible, show how it affects the protagonist, and then get the hell out of the way.
Let the reader make up their own minds about the characters based on how much they identify with them or can relate them to someone they know IRL.
A recent study, in which subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain while reading a short story, revealed that the areas of the brain that lit up when they read about an activity were identical to those that light up when they actually experience it.
The power of immersive identification.
the heart of the story doesn’t lie in what happens; it beats in what those events mean to the protagonist.
The inner desire of the protagonist drives the story, even if that desire is foreign to the reader. But we all understand the need to fulfill a desire.
although the story is written in third person, it’s clear we’re in Deb’s head, viewing everything from her point of view.
Reread the preceding text to show how skillfully this was done. It was a moment of BEING Deb, not just reading about what she was DOING.
Let’s give her a boyfriend, one whose personality tells us something about her inner issue. How about a very nice but dull fiancé who’s pressuring her to get married? And damned if she isn’t considering it. Why? Because he’s “safe.”
This is so trite.
intense social rejection activates the same areas in the brain that physical pain does.
Yikes! That explains a lot. I wonder if the activation decreases as we grow older and begin to care less what people think.
Story arises from the conflict between “this one thing we thought was going to happen” and “what happened instead.”
that in real life there will be a million irrelevant things happening at the same time, whereas in a story there will be nothing that does not in some way affect the cause-and-effect trajectory.
Keep the plot moving forward. Summarize. Don't get mired in minutiae.
What “show” almost always means is, let’s see the event itself unfold.
Do ensure that everything the protagonist does to remedy the situation only makes it worse.
We like to root for the underdog, not the constant winner.
