Quantcast
Channel: storytelling | BookBaby Blog
Viewing all 119 articles
Browse latest View live

The Yin And Yang Of Great Fiction

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

You can be the sweetest person possible in real life, but if you want to write great fiction, you need to be the opposite. You must be the cruel overlord of your story.

There is one big writing block that can stop many aspiring authors from writing great fiction: being too nice. You can be the sweetest person possible in real life, but if you want to write gripping fiction, you need to be the opposite. You must be the cruel overlord of your story.

The inability to be cruel enough to characters can hold authors back. Conflict is core to good fiction, as we are repeatedly told. Some authors want to fix and smooth. The best want to break and destroy.

Many authors don’t want to live the misery. The best thrive on it.

Many don’t want to invent ways to torture characters. The best revel in it.

Those hell-bent on destruction are the ones to write fiction. So, how to gain these cruel skills? How to ramp up the despair? Understanding the problem is a key step towards a solution. And there is one great fix if this is your problem.

Love your main character

That’s right. The fix to not being cruel enough is to love your characters. Have such respect that you can justify the suffering. Sounds odd, but it works. This isn’t senseless cruelty, but something much deeper.

Give your character something exceptionally good. This is why they are so likeable in the first place: they embody the best of humanity in some way. It’s about writing characters that have something so special in their life-adventure that you can bear seeing them go through it all. It might be the one-in-a-million love affair. It might be being “the anointed one.”

The point is, it evens out. The best love stories come down to one person being able to give all of themselves to another. The anointed ones always have special talents or inherited privileges. It’s a trade-off that readers accept. In fact, they do a lot more than accept: they expect it.

We can tolerate the worst when it comes to someone we are rooting for if we know she has that special quality that could lead her to victory by the end. This is the pleasure of watching a great character develop. She might have these endearing characteristics at the beginning of the story or acquire them by the end. Sometimes your character has them all along, but it takes time to reveal them – to both the reader and the character.

Most importantly, there is a required, overarching leveling agent in great fiction that rakes characters through the muck. Desperate situations work as long as there is a net win. Tragedy can be suffered by readers if the book has a profound message a reader can find meaningful and relate to.

The message can be as simple as “great love exists.” The message just has to be there. There has to be an end point reason for the journey.

This “best making worst” believable and enjoyable is the yin and yang of great fiction.

 

Find your way to self-publishing success in just 5 easy steps with this 62-page book. Yours absolutely free.

 

Related Posts
One Thing You Absolutely Need In Your Book
The Mokita Of Your Book
Two Stages of Creating A Believable Character
Things I Learned About Storytelling From Stranger Things
Use Sensory Language To Make Your Writing Come Alive

 

This BookBaby blog article The Yin And Yang Of Great Fiction appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .


Rags-to-Riches, Riches-to-Rags, and Roundtrips

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

Two of the classic story shapes are “the fall” or “the rise.” In these story arcs, the main character climbs to a peak of happiness, falls from one, or does a round-trip for maximum emotional impact.

It’s the agony of the “can you imagine?” slide from the top down or whoosh from the bottom up. It’s a fun tale to tell.

In a rags-to-riches story, it is often the literal case of money flowing into hands that makes the story. Yet, many other variations exist.

In love stories, the riches are love. Twilight is a rags-to-riches tale. Bella wins love. Edward too. And after a century of waiting, that feels especially satisfying.

It’s going from nothing to more than you ever dreamed possible. Harry Potter is a rags-to-riches story, emotionally. He goes from sleeping under the stairs to being an extraordinary wizard with true friends.

Most hero stories actually include a rags-to-riches element. You go from a nobody, a loser, the unredeemed, the failed, to having the adventure that everyone knows and loves you for for the rest of your life. You saved the galaxy, after all.

Sometimes a protagonist can live in overflowing, material luxury while wearing emotional rags. The new emotional suit of health that protects against loneliness is cut from the fabric of love, redemption, or reunion.

How many stories are based on the arc of workaholic parents who are finally forced to step off the jet to take care of their child just in time to reconnect with their own inner child?

Sometimes the peak can be a moral one, as in the story of a king abdicating the throne in favor of the love of a commoner. Marrying down for love is an endlessly rich stream of story gold.

Sometimes money itself can be the rags – when money corrupts and poisons the mind and soul. Giving it up then brings redemption and moral justice.

Falls are usually roundtrips, as readers like happy endings. Falls can be from monetary heights, positions of power or the loss of a loved one – whether your Romeo or a family member.

While stories of protagonists who lose and win and lose fortunes abound, a book usually has room enough for one full cycle.

You start on a peak, get knocked off, then rise up like a phoenix. Readers like characters to end on a new peak. There is nothing so stunning as the view from top of the world. This is the classic ending.

Thrillers often take their leads on roundtrips. Plots often document falls from grace that see characters attain much higher heights by the denouement. The wildly successful billionaire, or the respectfully quiet doctor, or other situation-rich character is methodically, maliciously, or randomly stripped of everything.

How many times have you seen a hero starting his journey in a state of complete confusion without a wallet in his pocket? You could lose your status because of anything from a psycho to a jealous ex, a tropical storm that sweeps away your town to a shipwreck that leaves you stranded on a tropical isle.

The point of the story is to show your character’s mettle as he makes the extraordinary climb back up. How often is the prince, magnate, or socialite knocked off a perch so he can prove himself, take revenge, and win back his birth right?

Another classic roundtrip is the journey in which a character realizes she had riches she didn’t know about – a case of not knowing what you have until it’s gone. It could be love, family – something you already have but take for granted.

Dorothy gets sucked away in the tornado to the Land of Oz to unintentionally squash the Witch of the West and save the day. That sounds like a rags-to-riches trajectory, but she’s wildly happy when she finds herself back in Kansas, sans red slippers and celebrity status.

In such a trajectory you go from rags to riches by actually staying exactly the same – just with an understanding of how things could be far worse.

Scrooge has a mental transition of this type. He owns riches but lives in rags – literally and emotionally. After dreams about past, present, and future, he re-evaluates his waking life and learns to share his wealth to win emotional riches – bettering his own life and the lives of those around him.

Roundtrips from the bottom are rarer, yet they exist and make for absolute tearjerkers. In the book Flowers for Algernon, the riches are smarts. We touchingly see Algernon go from low to genius-level IQ, but heartbreakingly, the gain is only temporary.

Any romance in which one of the pair dies is also a roundtrip. The only silver lining of the loss of this incredible love is what remains. What has been gained is a life-changing experience. They are still riches, you just can’t spend them.

 

About BookBaby

 

Related Posts
The Yin And Yang Of Great Fiction
The Mokita Of Your Book
Two Stages of Creating A Believable Character
The simple shapes of stories
Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling

This BookBaby blog article Rags-to-Riches, Riches-to-Rags, and Roundtrips appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Elmore Leonard and Hollywood

0
0

By BookBaby author The Script Lab

Elmore Leonard’s punchy style and compelling characters has Hollywood continually coming back to his work. Some of the many adaptations of his writing are highlighted in this post.

Elmore Leonard’s career spanned more than 60 years, beginning when he sold “Trail of the Apaches” to the magazine Argosy in 1951 for $1,000. He published 45 novels, wrote four original screenplays, and a produced hundreds of short stories and essays throughout his long career. He never gave up writing long-hand with a pen and a yellow legal pad – each full pad equaling 63 pages of a novel.

Leonard’s romantic writing process is almost as romantic as Hollywood’s attachment to his work. Thirty-six times his material has been adapted to moving pictures, from short films to television movies to TV series and feature films. It’s an impressive catalogue for a novelist whose first agent urged him again and again not to “give up his day job.”

In his early years, Leonard’s routine involved writing from 5 am to 7 am before heading to his job as a copywriter, where he wrote ads for Chevrolet. With a focus on supporting his growing family, he wrote Westerns, which were at the peak of their popularity in the ’50s, supplementing his income selling short stories to pulp magazines and dime publications. As the genre waned, he began to write crime fiction.

One his first major influences was Ernest Hemingway, whose economy of words and dialogue-heavy approach appealed to Leonard. But unlike Hemingway, Leonard’s stories soon developed a trademark humor, a trait that continues to draw admirers to his work.

Not unlike most every notable writer, Leonard wasn’t always the sensationally respected author we now know him to be. His novel Mother, This is Jack Ryan was rejected 84 times and his novel Unknown Man #89 got 105 rejections. But he was persistent. After its many rejections, he re-read the manuscript for Mother, This is Jack Ryan and realized he needed a revision that strengthened the story line. His persistence paid off, and Fawcett published the novel under the title The Big Bounce in 1969. The Unknown Man No. 89 was published in 1977 by Delacorte Press.

Motivated by the potential financial payoff, Leonard was explicit about his intentions of selling his work to Hollywood saying, “I want to make money writing. And that’s not my first purpose… but it’s certainly important. If you can’t make a living at it, why do it?”

It was that attitude that led him to write original screenplays in the late ’60s – though he soon abandoned the venture. Screenwriters were tethered to a collaborative process, and Leonard quit the trade frustrated by his loss of control.

Leonard’s style is distinct for many reasons. His novels are driven by characters, the plot almost a secondary notion. He is renowned for his ability to construct characters who are flawed, convincingly human, and capable of walking a fine line between good and bad. His characters are distinctive and unlike conventional heroes, but the key tying Leonard’s work together is his narrative ability. Much has been said about his “sound” and his capacity to create characters with particular voices. Leonard writes from each character’s point of view, switching often throughout, viewing the world as the character sees it. The resulting dialogue is succinct, dry but funny, and unique to each character. Benjamin Cavill, writer for the series Justified (based on Elmore’s short story “Fire in the Hole”), has said the “narration has a sort of Hemingway staccato.” Appropriate, considering Leonard’s admiration for the author.

All this adds up to explain why Hollywood keeps coming back to Elmore Leonard. When Leonard opens a novel, he dives right in, hooking the reader (or viewing audience) immediately. There is no flowery language; he is sparing in his descriptions and soft-handed with exposition, which he delivers in small doses throughout. A compact narrative, delivered from various characters’ points of view, creates a vivid and shifting world. And as these characters are neither saintly nor evil, they are of great appeal to actors. Leonard’s stories move quickly, cutting often, lending themselves to quick and fluid visual scenes. Maybe most importantly, his novels paint a picture, but not so fully that a filmmaker can’t extrapolate and add his own ideas and vision.

Of the many adaptations of his work, some are worth highlighting:

 

3:10 to Yuma
Originally a 4,500-word story, this was the first of Leonard’s material sold for film. He was originally paid $90 when it was published in Dime Western Magazine in 1953. Leonard was a big fan of the 1957 adaptation, calling the casting “perfect.” The 2007 remake, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bales, was a popular and critical success.

 

The Big Bounce
The 1969 adaptation, directed by Alex March and adapted by screenwriter Robert Dozier, had Leonard especially angered with the transformation of Jack Ryan into the “obvious hero type.” Leonard was so irritated, he reportedly walked out of the theater after agreeing with a fellow moviegoer who proclaimed it to be the worst movie she’d ever seen. The 2004 remake didn’t exactly excite critics, either.

 

Stick
Directed by and starring Burt Reynolds, the 1985 film was another adaptation Leonard was not happy with. The film suffers from Reynolds’ overacting, which directly contradicts the typical low key, but confident, Leonard antihero. He was so incensed by the film, he sent a four-page letter to Reynolds with his complaints. As Greg Sutter, Leonard’s trusted researcher, explains, “Reynolds did just about everything as wrong as he possibly could. The thing bears no resemblance to anything Leonard would ever dream of writing.” Leonard went as far as trying to have his screenwriting credit removed.

 

Get Shorty
The first of two films adapted by screenwriter Scott Frank, this is one of the most successful adaptations of Leonard’s material. With director Barry Sonnenfeld at the helm, the film was faithful to Leonard’s story and dialogue and both director and screenwriter were admirably attuned to Leonard’s sense of humor. Sonnenfeld creates the world described in the novel, and spot-on performances from John Travolta and Gene Hackman contributed to its success. The film would garner Frank a Golden Globe nomination for Best Screenplay. After Get Shorty, much of Leonard’s work was optioned, with a slew of films guaranteed to come.

 

Jackie Brown
Quentin Tarantino, an Elmore Leonard super-fan, was just coming off the success of Pulp Fiction, whose quirky style, in part, reflected a reverence for Leonard’s work. After having optioned two other of Leonard’s novels (Freaky Deaky and Killshot), Tarantino decided on Rum Punch. After changing the film title, the location of the story, and the Jackie Brown character to African American, Tarantino was afraid of what Leonard would think. He was thoroughly relieved when Leonard expressed that not only was it one of the best adaptations of his material, but that it was “maybe the best script he’d ever read.” The film is a true amalgamation of Tarantino and Leonard’s styles with quick dialogue, a penchant for cool, and (unlike other Tarantino movies) understated violence.

 

Out of Sight
Three years after his successful adaptation of Get Shorty, screenwriter Scott Frank tackled Leonard’s novel Out of Sight. While considered a box office miss, the adaptation was true to form and highlighted some of the best elements of Leonard’s style. George Clooney’s knack for deadpan delivery, Frank’s care not to overpower the script, and Steven Soderbergh’s gritty style all came together to deliver one of the best films to showcase Leonard’s unconventional humor.

 

Justified
Another superb adaptation of Leonard’s work was the FX series Justified, based on Leonard’s short story, “Fire in the Hole.” The tale marks the reappearance of one of Leonard’s most iconic characters, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens. Since Leonard’s short story is the basis for only the first episode, series’ creator Graham Yost and his team of writers were tasked with filling in what would turn out to be six seasons of material. Yost, a longtime fan, saw “Fire in the Hole” as a melding of Leonard’s earlier work in Westerns with his later career in crime fiction. As an executive producer, Leonard’s presence was felt throughout the series run. Guided by the mantra “What would Elmore do?” Yost and his writing team would often turn to the library of Leonard’s material for inspiration to craft a series that remained faithful to its originator.

 

Written by Michelle Donnell for The Script Lab. Reprinted with permission.

 

Independent Authors Conference: Sharpen your self-publishing skills! November 3rd-5th at the Sonesta Hotel in Philadelphia

 

Related Posts
The opposite writing habits of famous authors [Infographic]
Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Writing
From Book To Film: 10 Great Adaptations
Focalization: Smart Writers Never Ignore It
How much physical description is enough when you create characters?

 

This BookBaby blog article Elmore Leonard and Hollywood appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Use Pacing to Improve Your Storytelling

0
0

By BookBaby author Nancy L. Erickson

When you are able to control the pace of your story, you’ve mastered one of the more important skills in writing. Use pacing to set up key moments, ratchet up the intensity, and improve your storytelling.

Pacing in writing refers to the rate at which your story progresses. Your job as a writer – in fiction or nonfiction – is to move the story along and maintain your audience’s attention. It’s important not to go too fast, and you certainly don’t want to go so slow that you lose a reader’s interest. When you are able to control the pace of your story, you’ve mastered one of the more important skills in writing.

Keep the following lessons in mind when you write, and you’ll be an expert at pacing in no time.

1. Length controls speed

Terse sentences, snappy dialogue, and short scenes and chapters all contribute to a feeling of intensity and speed. This is one easy way to control your pacing. As your story nears the tense scenes, make it a point to condense everything. Limit the length of your scenes (a general word count might be 500-800 words), cut your scenes short at important moments, or even try switching back and forth between different characters’ points of view.

Fragments, spare sentences, and short paragraphs also quicken the pace. Crisp, punchy verbs, especially those with onomatopoeia – sweep, lunge, crash, ram, scavenge, ram, scatter – also add to a quick pace. Invest in suggestive verbs to enliven descriptions, propel action scenes, and build the suspense.

Words with harsh consonant sounds – like crash, claws, quake, kill, and nag – can push the story ahead. Words with unpleasant associations – like grunt, slither, hiss, venomous, slimy, wince, and slaver – can help ratchet up the speed. Energetic, active language is especially effective when building action scenes, increasing suspense, and setting up conflict and drama.

A fast pace means you trim every unnecessary word. Eliminate prepositional phrases where you don’t need them: “the walls of the cathedral” can be written as “the cathedral walls.” Finally, search your story for passive linking verbs and trade them in for active ones.

2. Vary the pacing in your story

As important as the high-tension, race-and-chase scenes are, it’s equally important to vary your pacing with slower, introspective scenes. Without the slow scenes, your characters and your readers won’t have a chance to catch their breaths or recognize the change when you enter the fast-paced action. Even the most exciting scenes lose their effectiveness if they aren’t balanced with moments of deliberate quiet.

3. Use details to slow things down

In a film, a director might play out a scene in slow motion to underscore the drama or importance of the event. One way you can achieve the same effect as a writer is to slow your writing down by piling on the details. Let’s say one of your characters is shot. This is an important moment in the story, and you want your readers to feel its impact. Take your time and describe every detail: the look on the gunman’s face as he fires, the recoil of the pistol, the flash of the barrel, the horror that chokes the victim, the collision of the bullet.

4. Use show and tell to your advantage

Although “showing” your audience the second-by-second details is key to engaging a reader and making him feel the tension, the best way to hurtle readers through a scene is to condense the action into “telling.” Perhaps you want to use that scene where your character is shot differently. You don’t want to linger on it: you want to do a quick fly by, shock your readers, and plunge them into the action after the incident. Instead of taking the time to describe every detail, you can thrust the gunshot upon your readers by telling them it happened and moving on to the next scene.

5. Manipulate sentence structure

One mark of an exceptional writer is the ability to control the ebb and flow of sentence structure. It’s the most subtle way to influence your pacing. The length of words, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs all contribute to the pacing.

When it’s time to write the intense scenes, cut back on the beautiful, long-winded passages and give it to your reader straight. Short sentences and snappy nouns and verbs convey urgency: long, measured sentences offer moments of introspection and build-up.

To write like a professional, you must master the art of pacing. This is critical to the success of your book. Once you perfect this writing technique, you will improve your storytelling and leave your readers eager for more.

Join Nancy and a host of great presenters, speakers, and exhibitors at BookBaby’s Independent Authors Conference, November 3-5 at The Sonesta Hotel in Philadelphia! The Independent Authors Conference is the only writing conference dedicated to helping independent authors publish successfully. Register now! Don’t miss this opportunity to listen and learn from some of today’s leading self-publishing experts!

 

The End

 

Related Posts
A Lesson In Storytelling From The Ultimate Dog Tease
Tightening Your Story’s Cause And Effect Chain With “And So”
Use Sensory Language To Make Your Writing Come Alive
Lead Your Readers With Your Book’s Structure
Choose Words That Convey Your Meaning

 

This BookBaby blog article Use Pacing to Improve Your Storytelling appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Narrative Structure, Part One: What it is and how to use it

0
0

By BookBaby author Scott McCormick

Discussions about structure tend to offer formulas, though formulas often lead to formulaic stories. But an understanding of narrative structure is important: you have to know the rules before you break them.

As a developmental editor, the number one problem I see in manuscripts is a lack of structure. These books feel like they are meandering, rather than driving towards a destination. It’s a common problem because structure, unlike plot, is hard to see. It’s behind the scenes, figuratively holding up your story, and many authors don’t understand it. So, let’s take a look at structure and how to use it to create a novel that keeps readers reading.

Before I begin, let me just head off all of the “yes, but…” This is a two-part essay. Structure is important, but it’s not all-important. My second essay will deal with when, how, and why to stray from structure.

Also, most discussions about structure tend to offer formulas (“You want your ‘Final Push’ to happen on page X”). But formulas don’t actually teach anything, and they lead to (you guessed it) formulaic stories. I don’t want that for you, but an understanding of structure is important. In other words, you have to know the rules before you can break them.

Finally, I’m using movie references, as opposed to books, for two reasons. One: I’m pretty sure everyone has seen these movies, and two: movies tend to have great structure. It’s been refined to a science (for better and worse) over the past hundred years.

Structure vs. plot

According to Wikipedia, narrative structure is the “framework that underlies the order and manner in which a narrative is presented.” Structure deals with generalities; plot deals with specifics. For example, one common structural element is called, in Hollywood lingo, an “inciting incident.” It happens early on in your tale, and it’s something that disrupts your protagonist’s life, creates a new desire, and/or sets them off on their journey. That’s structure. In terms of plot, this is when Luke buys the droids in Star Wars, when Neo is taken to meet Morpheus in The Matrix, or when the tornado whisks Dorothy away in The Wizard of Oz.

Every story has a different plot; many stories have the same structure. The movies Gladiator and Erin Brockovich seem like they couldn’t be more different, but, as you can see in this post on movieoutline.com, they have the exact same structure.

Because structure is so elusive, everyone has different ideas about how many structural elements a story needs (number of acts, number of turning points, etc.). People will even argue about the structural elements that exist in famous stories and movies. (“The ‘inciting incident’ of The Godfather is when Vito Corleone is shot, on page 32.” “No, it’s on page 64 when Michael visits Vito in the hospital.”) I’m not going to go down those paths. But there are some common elements that every theory of structure has, and these are important for you to learn.

Elements of structure

The great director Billy Wilder once said: in Act One, stick your character in a tree. In Act Two, set the tree on fire. In Act Three, they find a way to safety.

Though simplistic, that’s not a bad way to approach your story, and it’s an approach that works whether you are writing a romance, thriller, fantasy, or comedy. So let’s start with this structure and flesh it out a bit.

Act One

Wilder’s example of getting stuck in a tree is really where Act One would end. In Star Wars, this is where Luke leaves his home planet to go save Princess Leia.

But there’s obviously more to Act One than that, otherwise that action would be meaningless to the audience. So in Act One you need to introduce your readers to your character(s) and their desires. In Wilder’s example the character’s desire (or literal goal) is to get down from the tree.

In the best stories – the ones that resonate with readers – characters have emotional goals as well. Back to Star Wars, we see that Luke has been longing to go to space and join the rebel alliance, but he is being kept home by his aunt and uncle.

Then comes the inciting incident I mentioned earlier: He buys the droids. This winds up forcing his hand in two ways. Not only does R2D2 show him Princess Leia’s call for help, but the droids bring the imperial troops to his house, and cause his aunt and uncle to be killed.

Now, given his emotional and literal goals, Luke’s going to space has real meaning, not just for him, but for us as well. He already wanted to go to space. Now he has a specific reason to do so. So in Star Wars, as with many stories (Harry Potter comes to mind) we have a protagonist with an emotional longing, and the story gives them a chance to cure that.

Another approach is to have everything be perfect for your protagonist at the beginning, but then after the inciting incident (a divorce, a death, danger comes to town, the Ring of Power is suddenly given to you, etc.), everything is awful. Now your literal and emotional goals can be tied in to making everything right again.

It’s important that these goals are things your audience can relate to – this is especially true for children’s books.

Even if you’re not writing an action film, you want to give your audience these elements in Act One: a protagonist, their emotional goal, an inciting incident, and a literal goal. You may have the greatest setting or concept in the world, but at its core, if your story doesn’t have a character with a well-defined goal (or goals) your audience will have a hard time caring. And, more importantly, you will have a hard time writing your story. You’ll find yourself wondering where the plot should go.

Act Two

Once you have a solid first act, the rest of your book should follow pretty easily, as long as you keep one thing in mind: Set your tree on fire.

A lot of books/movies drag in the middle because the writer doesn’t make things hard enough for their heroes. You need to throw obstacles in your protagonist’s way. Make it harder and harder for him to achieve his goals.

Another good thing to do in Act Two to keep it from dragging is to raise the stakes. Make it more important for your hero to achieve their goal. In Act Two of Star Wars we see the Death Star destroy a planet. Suddenly Luke’s saving Princess Leia takes on a whole new significance. He’s not just saving a woman in distress, he’s trying to stop a death machine.

But vs. And

There’s another important thing to keep in mind in Act Two, and that is avoiding the “and” problem. You don’t want to throw random obstacles at your hero. You don’t want your story to be “this happens and then this happens and then this happens.” (This is the number one structural problem I see.) You want to replace all those ands with buts.

In Star Wars, they rescue the princess, BUT the stormtroopers come and they can’t escape. This forces Luke and company to find another solution: they shoot a hole in the wall and jump in it. BUT they get stuck in a trash compactor. These buts force your characters’ hands, which ties the action in to the larger goal and also helps to develop your characters.

At the end of Act Two, it should seem like all hope is lost. In Star Wars, yes our heroes escape from the Death Star, BUT Darth Vader has tracked them to the rebel base and it will be only moments before that planet is destroyed. In romance novels this is where the romance seems to totally fall apart. In mysteries, the wrong person (maybe the hero) is arrested. Any time you’ve ever felt “How are they going to fix this?” you know you’ve experienced a strong end to a second act.

Act Three

The important thing for this act is for your hero to be the force of action. If they achieve their goal, it should be through their actions and not a deus ex machina, or luck, or someone else’s actions. What’s more, their victory should satisfy their emotional goal as well. Luke’s use of the Force to blow up the Death Star (spoiler alert!) satisfies both goals at once. Every story won’t be so clean, and that’s OK.

And of course, every story doesn’t have a happy ending. But in those cases, what usually happens is even though the protagonist fails in their literal goal, they achieve their emotional goal and that often feels like a more important victory. Rocky loses his first fight against Apollo Creed, but we don’t care. He went the distance, he got the girl, he’s a winner. In one of my favorite movies, the Bad News Bears lose their big game, but they bonded as a team, each player overcame his or her own obstacles, and they earned the respect of their peers. Losing can also be a wonderful twist, especially in sports stories. After all, we are conditioned to expect our heroes to win in the end. Here is a good moment to upend those expectations and play around with narrative structure. But the audience still needs to feel that there is a satisfying resolution.

This three act structure isn’t just for your novel. It can even work for set-pieces within your novel. Steven Spielberg does this all the time in his movies. This fight scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark is a great example. It’s almost an entire movie in and of itself.

Act One: Getting stuck in tree. Indiana Jones tries to stop the plane from taking the Ark. Inciting incident: Indy gets stopped by a guard.

Act Two: Lighting the tree on fire. Spielberg sets multiple fires. First Indy has to fight the one guard. He beats him and makes his way to the pilot, BUT the muscle man gets into the fight. Then the pilot starts to shoot. Marion knocks out the pilot, BUT that causes the plane to start moving, which also causes gasoline to spill. Reinforcements arrive. Marion shoots at them, BUT that causes an explosion that alerts the rest of the Nazis. Marion is trapped in the cockpit. The gas flows under the plane, raising the stakes: Now Indy has to save her too. The muscle man starts winning the fight. The gas catches on fire. At this point all seems lost.

Act Three: Getting to safety. Indy defeats the muscle man, shoots the lock on the cockpit, and frees Marion. The plane blows up.

An entire story in five minutes. This is what sets Spielberg’s action scenes apart from his peers. You can do the same thing in your stories. And again, it doesn’t have to be just for action. It can be a comedy set-piece. Or suspense. Or a love scene.

Yes, but…

Any time someone says “your story needs this,” people often put their guard up. No one wants a formulaic story. And I’m sure you can name a dozen wonderful books/movies that don’t follow this structure.

To answer some frequently asked questions: Yes, you can combine some of these elements or leave them out. Yes, you can have some of these things happen before the story starts or after it ends. And yes, you can ignore all of this. But this structure is good to know. It’ll help you understand why a good book feels good, or why it doesn’t. And if you encounter a book that beautifully throws traditional structure out the window, it can make it feel like an even more exciting ride.

BUT structure isn’t everything, and it can be suffocating. There are many movies and books that have a terrific structure but fail to resonate with audiences. Next time we’ll look at how and why to stray from structure.

 

BookBaby Editing Services

 

Relted Posts
Your Story Needs A Good Straight Man
Elmore Leonard and Hollywood
From Book To Film: 10 Great Adaptations
Tightening Your Story’s Cause And Effect Chain With “And So”
Things I Learned About Storytelling From Stranger Things

 

This BookBaby blog article Narrative Structure, Part One: What it is and how to use it appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Internal Conflict And Your Characters

0
0

By BookBaby author The Script Lab

In dramatic writing, internal conflict marries the darkest aspects of a character to his or her greatest fears.

Great dramatic characterizations often defy formulas or precedent. In other words, they are a very nuanced proposition. J.J. Gittes in Chinatown, Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire all seem to have stepped into the middle of their respective stories fully formed and unforgettable. You don’t have to have humped a rifle through a rice paddy to share the disillusionment and abject terror of Chris Taylor in Platoon, and you don’t have to be an actor to relate to Michael Dorsey’s desperation in Tootsie. In watching any of these iconic films, you probably experience some combination of empathy and dismay watching these characters navigate their situations.

What you’re actually feeling is internally conflicted. These characters are mesmerizing because they are navigating their own internal conflict in full view. In dramatic writing, internal conflict is basically the darkest aspects of a character married to that individual’s greatest fears. Sometimes these elements are one and the same.

An example of this is the “I-am-becoming-my-mother/father” motif, as characters seem predestined to repeat some grim legacy of dysfunction or abuse passed down through their bloodline. Luke Skywalker in Star Wars is a prominent example of paternal gravitation, but the theme arises in The Judge, There Will Be Blood, The Great Santini, and countless numbers of films and books.

Wild (adapted from Cheryl Strayed’s memoir) presents a fresh twist on the “I-am-becoming” motif. The darkest aspect of Cheryl’s backstory is the self-destructive spiral that resulted in, among other things, a divorce. Cheryl’s external conflict is surviving a thousand-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. Cheryl’s internal conflict is derived from her mother, but it’s not about dysfunction. Rather, Cheryl’s central fear is that she will fail to honor her sainted mother’s legacy, that she will never equal Bobbi’s verve and optimism.

Thrillers and action films often revert to a default chestnut of internal conflict that involves a situation-rich debacle – a lover is killed by one’s wrongdoing; something precious is lost, destroyed, or stolen. In this template, the protagonist’s greatest fear is typically that he or she will miss a chance for redemption, or fail in the attempt.

Clarice Starling, the protagonist of The Silence of the Lambs (adapted from Thomas Harris’ novel), departs from this template, presenting a dark backstory that seems – at first blush – completely unrelated to Clarice’s greatest fear. In the story, Clarice has gotten her dream break: a mere trainee being tapped by her boss and mentor to assist on the hottest serial killer case in the nation. The external conflict is a race against time: to find and rescue a senator’s daughter before the gruesome Buffalo Bill harvests her skin. The darkest aspect of Clarice’s backstory is her late father, a rural sheriff shot dead in the line of duty. Clarice’s greatest fear is not that she’ll also be killed, though that becomes a distinct possibility, but rather that she’ll be tested and found lacking – that all of her rigorous study and dedication can’t compensate for her low-class Appalachian pedigree.

Internal conflict in love stories often turns on a character’s inability to process his or her own feelings: Jerry in Jerry Maguire, John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. In these stories, the external conflict of “the work” or the task at hand serves as both a wedge and an emotional refuge. Running a close second is the canard of unworthiness, as in “I am not worthy of you.” A doomed romance, as depicted in Titanic, is not solely about survival, it’s also about Jack’s interior struggle to be worthy of Rose.

16 noteworthy internal conflicts from the big screen

  • Fergus, in The Crying Game
  • Barton, in Barton Fink
  • Michael/Dorothy in Tootsie
  • Pat in Silver Linings Playbook
  • Aloysius in Doubt
  • Alan in The Imitation Game
  • John Nash in A Beautiful Mind
  • Jerry in Fargo
  • Viola in Shakespeare in Love
  • Cole in The Sixth Sense
  • Jerry in Jerry Maguire
  • Oscar Schindler in Schindler’s List
  • Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
  • Brandon in Boys Don’t Cry
  • Lynn in The Sixth Sense
  • Ada in The Piano

Written by Monty Mickelson for The Script Lab. Reprinted with permission.

 

BookBaby Editing Services

 

Related Posts
Use Pacing to Improve Your Storytelling
The Yin And Yang Of Great Fiction
Writing three-dimensional characters
How much physical description is enough when you create characters?
“Method Writing” Can Help You Create Believable Characters

 

This BookBaby blog article Internal Conflict And Your Characters appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

The engine in your book

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

There’s a powerful engine in your book, it’s just a bit hard to find. It’s in every word, and it drives plot and characters and everything else.

Everybody knows the most important part of a car is the engine. You might like your top-notch speakers for the surround sound, or the air conditioning on a sweltering day, or the incredible shock absorbers, but you can’t say you’d take those over an engine.

So, what’s the engine of your book? Plot? It’s essential if you’re writing a thriller that needs page-turning action. What about characters? Many say a book is nothing without an attention-grabbing character at its center.

Turns out there’s a more powerful engine in your book, it’s just a bit hard to find. It’s in every word, that’s how powerful it is. It drives plot and characters and everything else.

What is it? We can call it “information density.” It’s knowing exactly how much gas to give, and when. It’s a Goldilocks situation: not too little, not too much, but just right. What “just right” is is up to you, your writing style, and the preferences of your readers.

Stories are about conveying information in a pleasing and gripping way. Not enough information yields a big dose of boredom. Too much information can confuse or overwhelm. As readers and writers, we have an intuitive feel for the density of good stuff in a book, but we rarely take the time to quantify it.

Imagine reading your favorite book. By you is a hand-bell. You pick it up and ring it every time you read something you especially liked. How often would it ring? You could ring it louder depending on the heights it reaches in your mind.

A peal could be for anything: a twist; a reveal; a plot point; a beautifully sculpted sentence, poetic phrase, or perfect word. You’d get lots of ringing most likely – that’s why you love that book! It’s like clapping at a performance or during a speech.

What if you did the same for things that failed to impress you? Maybe scratch your nails down a chalkboard? Blow a fog horn if you got to a point so stale you wanted to put the book down? Likely, the reading of your precious book would not be marred by either of those sounds.

What would the soundtrack of your own book sound like? All bells? You want to have a book that gets lots of bell ringing – and only bell ringing. Pealing bells means getting your information, and its density, exactly right.

Pace is one of the literary elements, one of the core facets of all books. The pace of some books is slower than others, and pace all along the continuum can be considered essential. If you slow down the pace of action, you need to up the information elsewhere – perhaps with deep observations of a character, about the world around her, or introspective reveries that say something about the human condition. This is usually the difference between genre thrillers and literary fiction, for example.

Interestingly, pace dictates that you should slow down at the crucial moments. Readers want to linger on the emotional highs of your story and speed through any necessary logistics. Just because a parting kiss between your Romeo and Juliet is over in a flash doesn’t mean you can’t devote pages to it and how it changes the lives of your characters – especially if your plot revolves around it. Your readers want to fill up on all that fraught emotion and have time to wonder about the future before you divulge all.

Pace defines the rate of information flow

Pace impacts everything, from the big picture to the individual words you use. You can have a fast pace of fantastic words, or sentences or ideas – it’s not only action that has pace.

Perfect information density is about having all the parts in the right places working together to create a car that drives, with no extra parts that cause it to slow down, take detours, or crash. The quality of your best information is the difference between a 4- or 8-cylinder engine. The best books are like a 12-cylinder Lamborghini.

There are seemingly infinite layers of information in a great book. Are they all in balance?

The most obvious units are chapters. Do you have any chapters that drag on? Or are too short to fit the flow of your book? What about the sections in chapters? Where are the parts to chop or expand?

Early on in writing, your job is building up information density. You start with just your great idea and build up enough detail to fill a book. Once you have the content you want, you work to balance it, smooth it, and make it consistent.

The best thing about the right level of information density is that this is when readers suspend disbelief. They start to see your story as something real – at least something they are willing to mentally “step into.”

When a story is fully realized, readers see the whole and forget to think about the parts. Launch velocity? Check. Now you just need to keep it until the mission is over and you touch down on the last word of your book. You want readers to exclaim with a gleam in their eye, “How did you ever come up with that?”

 

Free guides to writing, publishing, blogging, and more!

 

Related Posts
Use Pacing to Improve Your Storytelling
Internal Conflict And Your Characters
Tightening Your Story’s Cause And Effect Chain With “And So”
The Yin And Yang Of Great Fiction
Narrative Structure: What it is and how to use it

 

This BookBaby blog article The engine in your book appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Narrative Structure, Part Two: It’s OK To Stray (or: Don’t Forget Your Cockroach Races)

0
0

By BookBaby author Scott McCormick

One way to create a memorable story is to take a minute to let your characters breathe. Build a scene where you exit the narrative structure and allow your readers to bond with the characters.

In “Narrative Structure: What It Is and How To Use It,” we looked at narrative structure and how knowing the classic three-act structure is important for writers.

But structure isn’t everything, and placing too much importance on it can lead to a lifeless book. We see this problem all the time in Hollywood movies and mass-market fiction. Narratively, they are textbook examples: the books keep the pages turning, the movies draw you into their worlds and stories. Yet, at the end of the tale, you’re left feeling kind of empty. A lot happened, but there was nothing of consequence. These are truly forgettable stories. (My wife has, on more than one occasion, started reading one of these books only to realize, several chapters in, that she has read it before.)

So how do you avoid producing a forgettable story? In a word: character. In several words: you’ve got to let your characters breathe. And one way to do this is by pausing the narrative and inserting what I call cockroach races.

What’s a cockroach race?

A cockroach race is an inessential moment in a story where the characters get a chance to just be themselves without necessarily moving the plot forward. It’s a moment where you pause the narrative and let your readers or audience bond with the characters.

These scenes are totally unnecessary in terms of the plot, but completely essential to bringing your characters to life. You’ll find more often than not that the most beloved and iconic moments in books and movies are cockroach races.

Why is it called a cockroach race?

Unsure. My friend calls them that, and he got that term from a friend of his, who probably got it from a friend of hers, etc. I used to call these “Egg Scenes” (you’ll see why in a second), but I’ve come to love calling them cockroach races because it doesn’t appear to be a reference to a specific book or movie.

Let me give some examples to illustrate why these scenes are important and so beloved.

Egg Scenes

The reason I used to call these Egg Scenes is because of the 50 egg scene in Cool Hand Luke, which is kind of the quintessential cockroach race. (I’ve mentioned this scene in an earlier post.)

Structurally, this scene doesn’t need to be in the movie. You could easily remove it and it wouldn’t affect the outcome of the story at all. No one would miss it, other than of course the fact that it’s the most iconic scene in the movie. That’s not to say the scene is totally pointless – it develops Luke’s character and causes the other prisoners to idolize him – but there are other scenes that do that, and in ways that push the story along. The egg scene does nothing other than just exist and be awesome. And I think the reason it’s so beloved is that it’s totally ridiculous and random.

World Series

Another great cockroach race is this scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which McMurphy, after unsuccessfully lobbying to have Nurse Ratched turn on the World Series, begins narrating a pretend moment from the game. Like the 50 eggs scene, it does nothing structurally. I could easily see some network TV exec snipping this scene out of the movie to make the film fit into its allotted time slot. If you hadn’t seen the movie already, you’d never know anything was gone. But how great is this scene? (It’s worth noting is that McMurphy’s narration of the game is not in the book.)

You talkin’ to me?

Where would Taxi Driver be without this iconic moment? It’s totally unnecessary. Cut it out and you have still have a taut psychological masterpiece. (Tauter, even.) But this is the scene everyone quotes. (It’s worth noting, DeNiro ad libbed this dialog.)

Thor’s hammer

To use a more recent example, here is a scene from the Avengers: Age of Ultron. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call this an iconic scene, I would argue that Marvel’s willingness to spend two minutes with what is, narratively speaking, a throwaway scene, is what sets their movies apart from other modern action flicks. It’s funny. It’s cool. And what’s more, by witnessing what feels like a behind-the-scenes-moment, we bond with these characters. (Plus, there’s a nice payoff towards the end of the movie when Vision hands Thor his own hammer.) In these kinds of movie and novels, there is usually so much bombastic action going on, authors and directors seldom take the time to zoom in on the little details. But how great is Thor’s face when Captain America makes the hammer move just the slightest bit? Personally, I want more Marvel cockroach races.

The pressure on writers to trim is strong. Every scene, we are told, must count. Every scene must move the plot forward, heighten the tension, and fit into the narrative. This is especially true in certain genres like thrillers, adventures, mysteries, sci-fi, and fantasy. We are told to develop our characters in quick strokes.

All of this is good advice. But when you do so exclusively, you won’t make a lasting impression on your readers. People want more than “character development.” They want moments. They want cockroach races.

The thing is, readers and audiences don’t know they want cockroach races. They think they want big concepts. People didn’t line up to see Jaws in order to see three drunks sitting in a boat talking to each other. But I would argue that this scene, which starts out with a classic cockroach race (comparing scars), becomes the most gripping moment of the entire film. And there’s not a single shark to been seen.

People love sit-coms because they are, almost by their essence, cockroach races. There’s a reason Friends was so popular. People loved the characters. Viewers tuned in for 30 minutes each week to see their TV friends hang out. The plots in sit-coms are secondary; they are just excuses for the characters to do silly things. Sit-coms are at their best, as Seinfeld put it, when nothing happens.

The good news is cockroach races are fun to write. When beginning a novel, once I’ve sorted out who my characters are and what my story is going to be about, I like to take my characters and throw them into random situations, just to get a feeling of who they are. I send them bowling, have them wait at the dentist’s office, or have them play 20 questions. (I love games as a dramatic setup. It’s a great way to see your characters’ personalities.) Sometimes these are just exercises that help me understand my characters and I never show them to anyone. But sometimes they can provide great fodder for the actual novel. And, typically, I find the further removed from the plot my cockroach race is, the better.

Generally speaking, you don’t want too many cockroach races in your book, otherwise it starts to feel aimless. Then again, picaresques, which are basically novels that consist of nothing but cockroach races, are some of the world’s most beloved books (e.g. Candide, Tom Jones, Huckleberry Finn, and Confederacy of Dunces).

The next time you are writing your book, why not take a break from your structure? Just for a time. Don’t worry about your characters’ inciting incidents. Take them to the grocery store. See what happens. Maybe you’ll create an iconic moment by having your swashbuckling space adventurer and her comrades take a time out from saving the galaxy in order to buy some denture cream.

 

The End

 

Related Posts
Narrative Structure, Part One: What It Is and How To Use It
The engine in your book
Your Story Needs A Good Straight Man
Writing three-dimensional characters
Internal Conflict And Your Characters

 

This BookBaby blog article Narrative Structure, Part Two: It’s OK To Stray (or: Don’t Forget Your Cockroach Races) appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .


Conflate, and Tighten Up Your Story

0
0

By BookBaby author Nancy L. Erickson

When you conflate, you tighten your writing and move your story forward. With practice and persistence, you can make your lessons more powerful, enjoyable, and universal.

Are you familiar with the word “conflate?” Conflate means to combine or bring things together and fuse them into a single entity. In nonfiction writing, it’s a technique where you merge several conversations, events, or relationships and present them as a single conversation, event, or relationship. When you conflate, you efficiently cover a large span of time without boring your readers with the minute details when all they really need are the pertinent points.

Spare us the details

Let’s say you had 30 conversations with your spouse about adopting a child over the course of two years. For a number of months, you may have considered the possibility of adoption and talked about it a handful of times. Then you progressed to where you were more serious and had numerous discussions about foreign versus domestic adoption, the potential age of the child, and same race versus other race adoption. These conversations took another several months. Finally, after two years, you decided to pursue foreign adoption of an older child.

Do you need to drag your readers through every conversation? Perhaps – but maybe not. It depends on the purpose your book serves. Let’s say your book deals with foreign-born children and how to help them feel at home in a family and culture that does not resemble them, and how, as a parent, you can be an advocate to help the child overcome his or her unique obstacles in assimilating.

In this scenario, do your readers need to know about the two years you spent discussing adoption? My guess is they’ll want the fruit of your investigations, not your method of arrival.

So how do you summarize those two years of discussion? Conflate them! Try using dialogue to convey all the pertinent information, but boil it down to two or three conversations.

“It’s time we face the truth. I don’t think we’re going to give birth to our own child. Maybe we’re not supposed to.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to give up on it.”

“I know, it’s hard, but we’ve tried for years and we’re not getting younger. What if we changed course? We can adopt, like the Tremond’s did. The process takes a while, so let’s start taking this seriously. If we really want to raise a child, I think we need to consider this.”

“I know. Maybe you’re right. But finding a baby…”

“What if we considered something else? There are a so many children who need a loving home, maybe we should think about adopting a young child, not searching for an infant.”

“Just the other day, Juliette, from my support group, showed me a picture of orphans in Haiti. They were brought together after the earthquakes, and there just aren’t enough adults to take care of them. One little girl – I think she was seven years old – she had these beautiful eyes. But her smile… It was like she knew she had to smile for the picture, but only her mouth smiled. She looked so sad and lost.”

You can conflate two years of backstory of how this couple arrived at their decision on foreign adoption into a single conversation. You move the action forward quickly while still delivering the essense of the deliberations.

The great teachers were great storytellers

Here’s another example of conflating. Let’s say you are a teacher, and over the years, you have had dozens of students with varying degrees of autism. If your book is about socialization and the classroom, and you’ve learned how to help these special-need students open up and relate to their classmates over time, why not illustrate these lessons through the eyes of one child, not three dozen? Why not give the child a representative name, demonstrate a multitude of experiences through a single set of eyes, and use this character to illustrate your teaching methods?

Does this seem dishonest or insincere? Consider this: all the great teachers were storytellers. Jesus, Aesop, and Buddha all taught valuable lessons through stories. Were the characters in the stories real, or did they conflate numerous people and character traits into one representative character?

I don’t know. Who was the good Samaritan or the prodigal son? Was it just one person? Does it matter? Did you learn somehing about human nature through Aesop’s fables, even though the characters were animals? Are the lessons less valuable because you can’t attach them to a specific person?

When you conflate, you tighten your writing and move your story forward. It takes skill, but with practice and persistence, you will make your lessons more powerful, enjoyable, and universal.

 

Find your way to self-publishing success in just 5 easy steps with this 62-page book. Yours absolutely free.

 

Related Posts
Tightening Your Story’s Cause And Effect Chain With “And So”
Three questions to help you crystallize and focus your message
Use Pacing to Improve Your Storytelling
Lead Your Readers With Your Book’s Structure
To plan out your book or not to plan out your book…There is no question

This BookBaby blog article Conflate, and Tighten Up Your Story appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

A Well-crafted Unfolding Is Your Ticket To A Fabulous Book

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

In any great book, every connection functions perfectly, the margin for error is almost nil. The chain has to be perfected for your story to unfold in a satisfying way.

A great book has a superior “unfolding.” Like a bud opening, readers get a better and better idea of what’s really going on as they read. Eventually, they see a fragrant rose in all its glory.

An unfolding could also be called an “unpacking.” It’s like unwrapping a present. You see it, shake it, wonder what’s inside, and then unwrap it until you find the surprise. Hopefully, it is delectable.

To craft a sequential order of reveals, an author must order and dispense intriguing pieces of information. The trail starts on page one and continues to the end. At each step, the author parlays what has gone before and promises yet more to come. In this way, a murder might unfold to its solution. The meeting of strangers might unfold to a happily ever after.

Think of each piece of information as a layer of an onion. The first scene is one layer of your prosaic vegetable, and by the last page, the reader can see the whole onion. They can even chop it up and cook with it themselves (think book club discussions). Maybe you want your readers crying, as if they’ve just cut an onion, by the end of your book; or perhaps you want them to feel exhilarated. It’s up to you how you manage your unfolding.

Creating an unfolding is very much like pioneering a path up a mountain and sticking in footholds to let future climbers follow. From secure foothold to foothold, the reader smoothly ascends the mountain, dreaming of watching the sunrise from the top.

If a foothold is missing, the climber will be stuck. So, too a reader. This is the last outcome an author wants. Whether it’s at nine feet, the middle of the climb, or five feet from the sunrise peak, progress has ended. You want your unfolding to take your reader to the top of the world.

Make your unfolding as clever as the Honda Cog ad

The award-winning Honda Cog ad is a wonderful and visual illustration of the concept of unfolding. If you haven’t seen this famous ad, or want to enjoy it again, here it is.

It’s an ad for a car, but you don’t see the car until the very end. This is the genius of the ad and why it represents unfolding so beautifully.

The ad is footage of a giant Rube Goldberg machine made up of the car parts. Tires roll into each other, windshield wipers crawl across the floor, the speakers vibrate – energy is transferred, one by one, through all the parts to the end.

You want the scenes in your book to work equally well to deliver your big bang when the car finally rolls forward into view.

The quality of a Rube Goldberg machine depends on the creativity and complexity of 1) a set of moving pieces, 2) their order in the chain, and 3) suitable links that keep transferring energy to the end.

When everything is aligned, it’s a feat of human ingenuity to watch unfold.

The same engineering is going on in great stories through content, order, and links. Designing your unfolding with a focus on content, order, and links makes storytelling look easy, but it’s not. It all about good design.

This is the notion captured in the making of the Honda Cog ad video. Lots of ideas were explored, many thrown away, and only a fraction of them ended up in the video. It took precision, practice, and time to create the entire sequence of events. One misalignment and the flow stopped. In early attempts, tires rolled sideways, parts escaped, links failed, or it just didn’t look as good as it should.

When every connection needs to function perfectly to reach the desired end result, the margin for error is almost nil. Just like the material in a book, extended mayhem has to be tamed. The chain has to be perfected.

Linearity

Unfoldings are a function of the linearity of stories: events happen in time. Both storyteller and reader experience stories in drips that add up to make the ocean of the tale.

For this reason, clever authors spend a lot of thought not only on great content, but on the exact order in which it is revealed to readers. This order can often be ingenious, especially in the case of mysteries and thrillers.

Likewise, savvy authors intuitively know that what really oils up a story and makes it work are beautiful links. Without links between the parts of a Rube Goldberg machine, it’s a waste of time. Your book’s causal chain needs those same deep links: they are the footholds to the top of the mountain.

What a reader feels at any point during a story is a function of what you’ve given them to that point, plus anticipation of what is coming. You must not only be aware of this, but use it to your best advantage.

The whole

The Honda Cog ad is also a wonderful metaphor for the concept of unity in writing.

The Honda Cog ad makers would never have thought to use just one part repeated over and over in the chain. They would have never used parts from another car. It’s the diversity of parts, and the way they perfectly and uniquely make their own contributions, that makes the car.

Each part by itself is just a part. Only when they all come together in exactly the right places does the engineering marvel of a working car emerge. Forget one key part and you might not get out of the showroom. Break one part and you are stuck in the car park. Remove lesser parts, and drivers will be inconvenienced, like not having windshield wipers in the next rainstorm. The quality of the parts can spell the difference between economy and luxury rides.

You want your story to take people places. Give them a ride to remember.

 

Print-On-Demand

 

Related Posts
Is it a love story or a romance novel?
Tightening Your Story’s Cause And Effect Chain With “And So”
Unity In Writing
Use Pacing to Improve Your Storytelling
Lead Your Readers With Your Book’s Structure

 

This BookBaby blog article A Well-crafted Unfolding Is Your Ticket To A Fabulous Book appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Structural Language Is The Foundation Of A Great Story

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

When you compare the pace of the “substantial happenings” in your work to best-selling books, does yours hold up? Analyzing the structural language of a New York Times best seller can give you a whole new view of writing and how great stories are put together.

Writers are wordsmiths. Everyone knows that. Writers pick and choose words, wrap them around each other, and use them to create parallel worlds to the real one we all inhabit.

We also know that words — single thoughts — fit into sentences. And sentences fit next to each other into paragraphs, which mount into sections, chapters, and finally… books.

So, where does the action really happen in this nest of words? Rarely do actions occur with a single word. Verbs need context. Who did it, why, when, to whom, where, and how?

Sometimes it might take a paragraph to dictate action. Often, one action spills over a larger chunk of text and pages of narrative.

How well do you “think” at these higher levels of writing? Your ability to do so will make or break the power of your story. This is where great structure is pivotal.

The “structural language” of a story is similar to a detailed outline. A character gets married, then divorced, then married again. The villain captures the hero, steals the gold, and gets caught for a satisfying ending.

See the world of writing in a new way

The next time you read a great book, jot down the main action points every time you feel something substantial happens. In a runaway best seller, you’ll find the action is thick. Each page will have something big, and often more than one.

As you do this, you might see the world of writing in a new way. Many new authors spend entirely too much of their budgeted creative time thinking at the word level when what they really need to do is put some excellent structural language in place.

Pick up another book and do it again, or pick up your own work and compare the pace. Some books have more exposition and backstory, but look for the big reveals embedded when done right.

When you compare the pace of your substantial happenings to great or best-selling books, does yours compare? Does it take you three pages to say what a seasoned author presents to the reader in three paragraphs – or even three extremely well-chosen words?

Or are you The Flash? Do you run through so much content so quickly that your reader’s head spins? That key details are lost in the rush? That there is no sensory fabric that draws the reader into the story?

Great structural language has its own pace and rhythm that a reader can follow and enjoy. Here’s an example taken from a New York Times best seller. It’s not the opening page, and it’s not an action book, but a drama.

It’s the story of a loving couple hit with tragedy (if you recognize it, feel free to show off in the comments).

The structural language of this book goes like this:

  • the wife finds out she’s pregnant
  • she wants to write letters to whole family
  • her husband (about whose past she knows little) says not to write to his side
  • the husband remembers going to find his estranged mother whom he hadn’t seen since childhood
  • he arrives at her place and finds she’d been dead three weeks
  • he is crushed, leaves money to pay her overdue rent
  • a tender scene between wife and husband leads to name picking for the baby
  • he wonders where this “baby’s soul was before”
  • he remembers how bad his father was
  • he tells his wife it made it easier for him to go to war knowing no one was waiting for him at home (so sad!)
  • there is a huge storm
  • he stays up all night to keep everything safe
  • the noise is so loud he doesn’t hear her calls
  • she suffers a miscarriage

How many pages do you expect all that action covered? 200, 100, 10, 2? For context, this book is 408 pages long and each page has around 320 words.

The answer proves how much action is packed into books readers enjoy most. These “substantial events” take place in only nine pages. Imagine how much must happen in the other 399 pages!

These events cover a range of exceptional circumstances that are perfect book fodder as they are both highly emotive and universal: conception, loss of a parent, the intimacy of deep love, picking a name for a baby, going off to war, miscarriage, and the death of an unborn. WOW!

These events show how much the couple both want a baby, what a strong couple they are, how tender and caring the husband is even though he’s had such a difficult past himself, how brave he is, and how tragic life can sometimes be: precisely while he is away helping others, she needs him most. The passage in which he ponders where the baby’s soul came from is deeply profound.

These few words are doing major heavy lifting.

If you have the patience, do this for a whole book. It’ll give you a whole new view of writing, what makes a book compelling, and how great stories are put together.

How does your book compare?

 

The End

 

Related Posts
What writing rules do you live by (and which ones do you break)?
Conflate, and Tighten Up Your Story
Tightening Your Story’s Cause And Effect Chain With “And So”
How much physical description is enough when you create characters?
The Importance of Setting In Your Story

 

This BookBaby blog article Structural Language Is The Foundation Of A Great Story appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

“Context, Context, Context” is like “Location, Location, Location”

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

Words take on their full meaning in the context of sentences, paragraphs, and your entire story. It starts with the first line of your book, as each bit of information sets the stage for what follows.

Have you ever polished a sentence to find it still sounds wrong when you read it again from the top of the page or paragraph?

It’s all about context. No words stand in isolation: meanings are always flavored by — and relate to — the words that precede them.

Consider this sentence: “I have two cats, one is gray and the other black.”

You can judge this sentence by itself and give it a “score,” but it’ll drop if you read it in this context: “My cats’ names are Mousy and Hops. I have two cats, one is gray and the other black.”

Now the sentence jars. We know there are two cats. Generic information follows specific information (names) and it is unbalanced. It’s wrong now, so we edit.

“I have two cats, one is gray and the other black. The gray cat is named Mousy and the other is Hops.”

This is a simplistic example of how even great sentences can be significantly diminished by context and highlights the type of bond that exists between all sentences – and how it can be broken.

Sentences polish up into final form only when abutted correctly, like puzzle pieces, into the big picture. In this way, every sentence, and each word in it, is dependent on the one before, right back to the first sentence of your book. The contextual flow of information and sentence structures runs from start to finish, like a river.

In flawed books, contextual fabric is tattered, or its absence makes for boring reading. Content impacts every dimension of the reading experience, so its importance cannot be overstressed.

We forget, when we read a book straight through, how much our experience is based on context. We already have a lot of context just from the title and the information on the back cover when we start in on page one.

It begins at the beginning

One of the most important lessons about context is found in opening lines. Endless discussions are had about how to write opening lines and which stand as best in history. Yes, they have merit in isolation, but their true laurels rest on context. Without the context of the rest of Moby-Dick, would “Call me Ishmael” really be such a memorable opening line?

Titles work in a similar fashion. Who knows or cares what Moby Dick is before reading the book? This title acts to draw one in with curiosity, not meaning. The title is wholly context dependent. Once you know it’s the name of the white whale, it takes on a completely different aura. Context thus governs every level of writing, from the order of words and how they sit next to each other to opening sentences and titles.

Genre, also, is about context. Genre sets expectations for content and style and, in the end, these all serve as context. Genre means you know what you are getting – you are getting a contextual promise. If you like Westerns, you’ll pick another title from this genre. If you love romance, you’ll pick the next best one from the genre.

Context also explains why so many readers choose a book by author. Once a fan, reading the next book is a treat because of a very special kind of context: artistic context. That context is explicit when it comes to purchasing the next title in a series. In the next book of a series, you have both the context thread of the story and the art of the author.

Context is to writing what location is to real-estate – a sure thing.

 

BookBaby Editing Services

 

Related Posts
A Well-crafted Unfolding Is Your Ticket To A Fabulous Book
Tightening Your Story’s Cause And Effect Chain With “And So”
Use Pacing to Improve Your Storytelling
Lead Your Readers With Your Book’s Structure
Completing A Novel: A Look At Various Writing Methods

 

This BookBaby blog article “Context, Context, Context” is like “Location, Location, Location” appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Five Ways to Distill and Heighten Your Writing

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

Whether you are working on draft material or devising a story in your mind, one element of great writing is cranking up the extraordinary to pack in information, meaning, and creativity.

What’s the key to great writing? Making all of it great. Take out slow, confusing or tangential parts. Even better, don’t even pen them in the first place. Learn to distinguish. All your words should gleam and hang together like the many parts that make a classic car or a Ferrari. All writers are told to cut, or “murder your darlings” as the famous quote goes. Editing is the key to great writing, many say. The key to editing is to distill and heighten your writing to pack in information, meaning, and creativity.

You can edit on paper, first getting it all out and then sifting through for the nuggets to keep. But editing can also be done in your head, using logic, common sense, and a huge dose of creativity. Whether you are working on draft material or devising a story in your head, keep these thoughts in mind.

1. Think of a biography

A biography (or autobiography) is a life story. Clearly, you can’t pack in every detail of a lived life in a volume that fits on a normal bookshelf. Authors have to be highly selective in what they include, distilling constantly.

What to include? Clearly, the most interesting, exciting, and meaningful parts of the much longer life story. This is the most exaggerated example of distillation — like a keg of non-alcoholic beer versus a shot of vodka you can set on fire.

Second, biographies are written only about the most unusual of lives – heroes, survivors, the super rich, super talented, or otherwise larger-than-life.

Moreover, a well-written biography is not just a list of facts, it’s a true story. All the ideas form a single, tightly woven rope pulling the reader through the book from the opening words to the last page.

2. Think of a memoir

Now we are talking about one slice of a life, a further distillation. A person can write more than one memoir, like the wonderful Stephen Fry, because a memoir is about one event or phase in a life. Now, the content is even more distilled and purposefully interwoven into a theme. While a biography tells you “everything” about a person and the reasons they are who they are, a memoir has an even more specific takeaway message.

A memoir is meant to instruct in some way – by good or bad example. A life well-lived or a life best steered clear of. A famous opera singer or a drug addict. The point is, the whole story revolves around a single idea: a rise to fame; redemption; overcoming impossible odds; or inventing a game changer, like the light bulb, the Polio vaccine, or Facebook.

3. Think of fiction

In fiction, the sky is the limit because everything can be made up. So, make up good stuff and pack it in. Consciously skip the bland stuff. This should be obvious, but sometimes it takes practice.

Don’t talk about meals, or showers, or walks to the mailbox unless they are critical to the plot. If you include a dinner scene, it should have a justifiably deeper meaning: you poisoned your hero or fed him magic beans.

Why have a common scenario in the background when you could big it up? Instead of a fallback dinner scene for an “important talk,” why not put your characters on a roller coaster ride, or bungee jumping, or talking at the exact moment your heroine finds out there really is a monster under the bed? Skip past the everyday things and your reader will fill in the obvious missing bits with no problem — and thank you for it.

4. Heighten

Once you are sure everything has a place in your story, you can focus on heightening. Everyone knows how the fish story grows over time. A dad and son catch a foot-long fish. As the story is repeated, and the tendency to exaggerate for effect and pride grows, the size of the fish lengthens and lengthens. This is the art of showboating and great storytelling. Who wants to hear about a foot-long fish compared to a four-footer that fought so hard it almost capsized the boat?

Look for fish in your writing. Heightening means going that extra stretch and adding the extraordinary. The love in Twilight is not “normal” or “everyday” love: it’s once-in-a-century love. It’s a one-in-a-billion love. And it’s not between two “normal people.” It’s between a human outsider and a vampire who’s been waiting his whole life just for her.

Can you crank up the extraordinary in your story?

At the level of individual paragraphs and sentences, think about how to ramp up your verbal imagery. Increase the numbers and types of images formed in the reader’s brain. It’s the mental imagery that helps those words jump off the page and into reader’s minds in a memorable way.

5. Synergize

The biggest and best impact in terms of distilling and heightening your content is when the sum is more than the parts.

You want all the parts of your story to not only hang together, like pearls on a necklace, but to mean more to the reader because they are together and in that particular order. Would you rather have 20 pearls in your hand, or ordered by size, the biggest in the middle, on a necklace? Your book should be a fine pearl necklace – or that Ferrari. Really, whatever you chose.

Sometimes you can look at your story and crank up the juxtapositions or “opposites attract” nature of things. For example, if you have two characters working together, make one the foil of the other – good cop, bad cop. Can you ramp up the differences to highlight the nature of both?

 

The End

 

Related Posts
The Key To Great Writing
The engine in your book
Rags-to-Riches, Riches-to-Rags, and Roundtrips
The Micro-Memoir: Start Your Memoir With A Moment
Four things to decide before you write your memoir

 

This BookBaby blog article Five Ways to Distill and Heighten Your Writing appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

5 Ways To Improve Your Verbal Imagery

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

Humans are highly visual creatures, and this holds true when we are reading. We don’t see the images in the book, we form them in our minds. Pack in brilliant verbal imagery and your readers will enjoy and remember your book.

Drawing powerful verbal imagery is a skill that defines natural-born writers, but it can also be learned. Here are five things to think about with respect to using the power of the pen to draw images.

1. Be aware of visual imagery

The first step is heightening your awareness of verbal imagery and how it works. When you read a new book, or write, take note.

We think of words as words – black ink on a white page. But they are more: they paint colorful pictures from the action, people, and settings of a story world. Check it out for yourself. Take a paragraph from any book you are reading and do an image “density test.” Count all the images that form in your mind as you read along. Is it a large and diverse number?

It depends on what you are reading, but in many books, it’ll be each sentence, or even each phrase — e.g. “Silent, he nodded and looked out the window at the windmill by the still lake.” That sentence evokes four images – a man nodding, a window, a windmill, and a lake scene.

Here’s the opening sentence of Ransom Riggs’ Library of Souls:
The monster stood not a tongue’s length away, eyes fixed on our throats, shriveled brain crowded with fantasies of murder.

How many images do you get from that? Almost every word is a new one. How does the image density of your writing compare?

2. Actively write in images

Many authors say they see events unfold in their own minds and then they write them down. This is a great way to get visual writing. You can heighten this by purposefully engineering memorable images into your work.

Whether or not you remember the details of any of the Godzilla movies, you know what Godzilla looks like. What’s the single most memorable image from the Jurassic Park movie franchise? Is it the T. Rex sniffing out the kids in the car?

Often, it’s a useful technique to render an abstract idea into symbolic imagery to give it punch or make it easily understood and memorable. The scar on Harry Potter’s forehead is a brilliant example. It represents his past, his link with Voldemort, and his fate. Harry just has to show it or touch it in pain for readers to know something big is about to happen.

3. Keep the quality of your visual imagery in mind when you edit

If you can’t form an image about what is being described, likelihood is you probably don’t know exactly what is going on. So how would a reader know?

Have you ever tried editing expressly for visual content? Doing so can bring surprising rewards. You might find new ways to express abstract ideas. You might clean up some fluffy or confusing text. You might be inspired to add creative details.

If you read a phrase or sentence and fail to clock an image, you might find that it wasn’t fully imagined. Editing to improve visual interest is often about making abstract things more concrete. This is ubiquitously thought of as a good thing in terms of writing advice. Why say “his car got keyed,” when you can say “his usually pristine black Porsche 911 had an ugly, uneven scar that stretched from the driver’s side mirror to the tail light.” The second one is not only a stronger image, you wince harder. Why say “I fell in love” when you can give a few examples of blushing, tripping because you’re distracted, and sitting with your head in your hands daydreaming and get your “show don’t tell” out of the way too?

Great writing is about giving a reader enough detail to let them see the world you are presenting – without overdoing it. At best, they need some wiggle room to see your story world as they want to.

4. Understand why key types of information work better as a picture

Some things just work better visually. This is because they depend on having all the knowledge at once, on some form of complex structure in space or time, or the linkages between entities. Such information clusters are hard to render in words – no matter how many you use or how artfully you arrange them on the page.

Think about a map or a family tree. These are common images printed in books – words just can’t do them justice – or fit into equal space. If you do need to describe difficult images, it’s about getting out the most important information first – the structure and the types of connection. Then come the relevant details, which a reader can now map onto a visual framework they are holding in their head.

On a map, it’s about how features are related to each other in space that matters. A mountain pass leads to a valley with a river that flows to the sea upon which sits City A, and between that and City B lies a desert. Same with dynastic or familial relationships, and the whys and wheres different characters appear in the timeline can be critical to your story.

5. Use imagery to your best advantage

We all know the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” The trick of images is that they present all their information simultaneously. You might want to linger over The Mona Lisa to take in her finer details and soak in the mood, but it’s all there as you lay eyes on her.

Now imagine the many words it would take to describe The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile to give detail equivalent to seeing her in person. It’s likely not possible, no matter how meticulously you picked your words, how artfully you ordered them, or how many you allowed yourself.

So, flip this and use the power of visual imagery to your advantage. Humans have a huge range of cultural images. Save 1,000 words every time you use an apt image. Think of a man who builds his wife somewhere to live. If you say, “he built her a Taj Mahal,” you have an image that cost only two words and you’ll know loads about their lifestyle and tastes: opulent and privileged and over the top. It’s 1,000 words of worth for only two – using an image. “She smiled as enigmatically as the Mona Lisa.”

Purposefully pack your writing with attention-grabbing visuals and your writing will be memorable. There won’t be any incomplete ideas or passages full of filler. It will be more fully realized and accessible to the reader.

 

Win book marketing sweeps

 

Related Posts
Mind Mapping Can Help Organize Your Writing Process
Plotting the emotional map of your book
Sensory Language IS The Detail In Your Writing
Use Sensory Language To Make Your Writing Come Alive
Use All Five Senses To Enrich Your Writing

 

This BookBaby blog article 5 Ways To Improve Your Verbal Imagery appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Write By Accident, Refine By Design

0
0

By BookBaby author Michael Gallant

Writing enough prose to fill a book is one thing, but weaving it all together into a story with a strong arc, purpose, and impact is another. Here are some lessons that might help you in your writing process — whether your own book is an “accident” or not.

In “The Accidental Novelist: How Stolen Moments Can Make a Book,” I wrote about an unorthodox writing technique I discovered — and the novel I’ve been “accidentally” creating as a result.

That process includes thumb-typing chunks of text on my phone whenever and wherever I have a minute and an idea, and building my story piecemeal. One reader, Anonymole, commented that if writers create this way, they will need to step back at some point and consolidate their written fragments, no matter how inspired, into a cohesive and consistent story. I recently hit such a point, with roughly 64,000 words written.

Writing that much prose is one thing, but weaving it all together into a story with a strong arc, purpose, and impact is another entirely. Here are some lessons I’m learning along the way that might help you in your writing process — whether your own writing is an “accident” or not.

Consolidate

When I made the decision to pause my preliminary writing and start stitching the pieces together, I had a total of twelve files that I had emailed to myself from my phone as backup, each containing between 2,000 and 12,000 words. First, I copied and pasted everything into a single word processor document, in the best narrative order I could determine at the time. Having all of my prose in one place felt like an important milestone — my work seemed more like a cohesive novel-in-progress and less like a collection of fragments, scenes, and vignettes.

Edit at will

As with the initial drafting of my novel, I use what minutes I can find in between other activities to clarify the language, put pieces together, or review something I wrote months ago. Sometimes that means searching for a particular scene that’s been caught in my memory and reexamining how it fits into the overall story. Other times, it means scrolling randomly through the document and working on whatever paragraph my eyes and mouse fall on. I focus my time on what I can do right now to get myself closer to the finish line, knowing I’ll get to it all eventually.

Label and shuffle

With tens of thousands of words and dozens of narrative episodes, keeping track of everything can be a challenge. To help, I started labeling significant portions of my story with unsexy and utilitarian titles like, “Argument about green vs. black tea” and “Weird surveillance grocery store encounter.”

Will the chunks I’m currently defining end up as chapter partitions in the final novel? Probably not. But for now, functional titles help me know, quickly and efficiently, what the landscape of my work-in-progress looks like.

Having well-labeled portions of text also helps me put things in the best order for my narrative. Does a certain scene play better in the second third of the book? Does a character’s backstory suddenly become more resonant when presented after a traumatic incident involving an ex-lover? Cut-and-paste is a wonderful thing, and I use it to experiment with all sorts of structures and event orders.

Save versions-in-progress

After significant editing sessions, I save a new version of my document with a title like “Draft_v2.0,” Draft _v2.1,” and so on. This way, I can always go back and see previous manifestations of my ideas, as well as what I originally wrote on my phone. Having copious backups makes me more comfortable experimenting — I always know I can revert to a previous version if a creative risk I take doesn’t work in the end.

Fill in the gaps

If I discover that additional text is needed to make the story flow (and this has been happening quite often), it’s always fun to return to writing mode. Either on the spot with my laptop or on my phone the next time I have a free minute, I add the words, sentences, or paragraphs the story needs to smoothly flow and then go right back to editing mode.

Be patient and stay focused

It can be overwhelming to look at a 60,000-plus-word document, completely unedited, and realize it’s up to you alone to get it all in order. I try to stay micro-focused as I work, polishing only whatever sections are in front of my eyes at the moment and losing myself in the task at hand. Just as the crafting of the original text happened gradually and organically, so too will the acts of compiling, editing, and revising.

Keep the big picture in mind

At this point, I know where my characters begin, the struggles and triumphs they go through, and where they will end up physically, circumstantially, and emotionally when the story concludes. I keep this whole arc in mind as I’m editing, compiling, and reordering. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the big picture influences everything from word choice to plot adjustments and acts like glue, helping to stick the entire story together as a cohesive narrative.

Do you have any tips for turning inspired chunks of text into a cohesive narrative? Tell us in the comments below.

 

The End

 

Related Posts
The Accidental Novelist – How Stolen Moments Can Make A Book
Conflate, and Tighten Up Your Story
Tightening Your Story’s Cause And Effect Chain With “And So”
[Bracket] shorthand helps you draft with lightning speed
The Five Emotional Stages of Publishing A Book

 

This BookBaby blog article Write By Accident, Refine By Design appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .


The Delights And Dangers Of First-Person Narration

0
0

By BookBaby author Scott McCormick

First-person narration lets you pack every moment with personality and explore your writer’s voice to the max, but it can be a tricky point-of-view to pull off for the course of an entire book.

First-person narration can launch us into another world — and into another person’s mind — in a deeper and more efficient manner than third-person narration. Consider some of the most famous opening sentences in literature:

 

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

 

“What’s it going to be then, eh?”

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

 

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

 

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

 

In each of these examples, we are plunged into the world of our narrator and engulfed in their unmistakable voices right from the start.

I love first-person narration. I love the ability it gives writers to pack every sentence, every moment, with personality.

 

The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greek words μετα (which means from one place to another) and φερειν (which means to carry), and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn’t. This means that the word metaphor is a metaphor.

I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon

 

First-person narration can lend an air of veritas to a story, for example, think of the tales of Sherlock Holmes as told by Doctor Watson. But also — because while Watson is our narrator, he is not our protagonist — there remains an air of mystery.

 

“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.

“How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

“How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.

“Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself.

A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle

 

What makes first-person narration so interesting is no matter how reliable you may think your narrator is, there is always the lingering possibility that he may be misleading you, even if unintentionally.

 

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.

Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk

 

I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey

 

Don’t lies eventually lead to the truth? And don’t all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don’t they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

The Fall, Albert Camus

 

Perhaps my favorite thing about first-person narration is how it allows the writer to fully explore voice.

 

You know, the way love can change a fellow is really frightful to contemplate. This chappie before me, who spoke in that absolutely careless way of macaroons and limado, was the man I had seen in happier days telling the head-waiter at Claridge’s exactly how he wanted the chef to prepare the sole frite au gourmet au champignons, and saying he would jolly well sling it back if it wasn’t just right. Ghastly! Ghastly!

A roll and butter and a small coffee seemed the only things on the list that hadn’t been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against, so I chose them, and Mabel hopped it.

— “Jeeves in the Springtime,” P. G. Wodehouse

 

Those are some of the reasons to choose a first-person narrative for your mode of storytelling. But first-person can be a tricky point-of-view to pull off.

Telling not showing

First of all, it can lead to too much exposition. It never fails to astonish me, but as great as first-person is for quickly establishing your novel’s voice/tone/setting/world, it seems to bring out the need for authors to have their narrator drone on about their backstory. Sprinkle essential info throughout your narrative, but it’s best to take a page out of Salinger’s book and skip all that David Copperfield crap.

One point of view

First-person can be limiting: after all, your narrator has to be in every scene. This makes it challenging-to-impossible to describe events in which your narrator doesn’t participate, which is why first-person can be an inelegant choice for action/thriller/epic novels.

OMG, get over yourself

Your narrator can be too self-indulgent. No matter how many people love Holden Caulfield’s profanity-laden tangents, there are just as many people who find him insufferable and whiny. And not everyone has Salinger’s or Wodehouse’s talent. As much as I love the fact that a stroll out to the mailbox can provide a perfect launchpad for a narrator’s rant, at some point you need to get on with your story. One way to avoid this is to populate your book with interesting secondary characters. In fact, as we see with the Sherlock Holmes stories, sometimes the best approach is to have your most interesting character be someone other than your narrator.

Who’s speaking?

It’s hard to physically describe your narrator. Personally, this has never bothered me, but readers may want to know what your narrator looks like. Don’t have them stand in front of a mirror and describe what they see. Instead, throw in the occasional comment from other characters, like “Stop fussing with your dreadlocks, already! She’s going to be too turned off by your improper teeth-to-tattoo ratio to notice your natty hair.”

Zzzzz…

People can get bored with your narrator and their voice. Your readers are going to be stuck with your narrator for the duration, so this is a relationship that has to endure. If your narrator has an accent or speaks in a peculiar way, or has strong opinions, or a powerful personality, those can all be great, but make sure you dole this out carefully. It can tire your readers out. I love the voice of Damon Runyan, for example, but only in small doses. After about three short stories, I’m over it.

 

Off and on I know Feet Samuels a matter of eight or ten years, up and down Broadway, and in and out, but I never have much truck with him because he is a guy I consider no dice. In fact, he does not mean a thing.

In the first place, Feet Samuels is generally broke, and there is no percentage in hanging around brokers. The way I look at it, you are not going to get anything off a guy who has not got anything. So while I am very sorry for brokers, and am always willing to hope that they get hold of something, I do not like to be around them.

— “A Very Honorable Guy,” Damon Runyan

Watching someone watch

First-person can lead to passive action: “I saw the door open and heard an unearthly scream.” In this example, the reader is watching the narrator experience these things, which puts too much distance between the reader and the action. To avoid this, eliminate filter words (“I saw,” “I heard,” “I noticed,” etc.). “The door opened. An unearthly scream pierced the room,” is much more effective.

I and I

Don’t start every sentence with “I.” It gets old. In fact, try to eliminate the word as much as possible, because, after all, “I” is implied by the fact that this is a first-person narrative.

As much as first-person narration can be limiting and challenging, there’s one last point I wanted to list in the “pro” column: it’s a device that is unique to writing. Movies are notoriously inelegant at delivering this perspective, having to resort to the use of voice-overs or breaking the fourth wall, which seldom works well (Alfie, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off being notable exceptions).

If you haven’t tried writing in first-person, I encourage you to do so. After all, no other medium can deliver the dizzying flights of fancy quite like first-person narration, perhaps best exemplified by the last lines of Ulysses by James Joyce.

 

…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

 

The End

 

Related Posts
Developing a Distinctive Voice in Writing
Finding Your Voice As A Writer
Create a villain your readers will loathe
Narrative Structure, Part One: What It Is and How To Use It
Narrative Structure, Part Two: It’s OK To Stray (or: Don’t Forget Your Cockroach Races)

 

This BookBaby blog article The Delights And Dangers Of First-Person Narration appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Unknown Unknowns in Writing

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

Choosing what to let readers know, and when, is key to telling a great story. A good reveal will drive your story forward — the best unknown unknowns will completely upend your narrative and add more meaning for your reader.

We all know what we know. The smartest among us also know what they don’t know. These are the classic “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” in life.

What does this matter for writing? Books are full of unknowns. You are keeping your readers in the dark from page one until the big reveal and the climax and the tying up of all loose ends.

You, the author, know every detail, but your reader is in the dark, except for what you purposely share or what a reader has surmised.

How you breadcrumb the path is key to the enjoyment of the story. What you withhold, equally, helps carry the story forward. People flip pages to find out what they want to know. Curiosity drives readers. This is, of course, especially true for mysteries! But it’s the same for a romance. Even though there is always a happy ending, readers love to guess how it could possibly come about. Really, it’s true of all books. Readers are waiting to figure out “what it’s all about.”

In great books, information is purposefully doled out. Pieces of information, even ones that seem wholly unrelated, eventually fit together into satisfying patterns that unlock new meaning. How you hand out information can make or break the success of your “unfolding.”

The feeling of being on a treasure hunt when reading means you want to sate this craving for good information. Because readers know this is how books work, they weigh every detail that comes their way to consider if it has profound meaning.

Anton Chekov wrote, “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

The act of reading is anything but passive. If you hang that rifle, you have to use it – if readers spin thoughts and you never answer their speculations, you have seriously let them down.

Readers will be on the hunt for knowns and tirelessly attempt to fill in the unknowns. This means you can get readers to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Usually, even if you only give a few details about a character, like “he wore well-fitted, sporty clothes,” readers will form a far more detailed picture in their head. Each reader will have their own picture, filled in with their own preferences and life experiences. This is often why it’s such a shock to see your favorite books rendered on screen – they don’t look like that or sound like that or move that way!

Tell a reader your lead character wears glasses, baggy clothes, and is a librarian and they’ll get her “type.” They’ll fill in the details of her being mousy, quiet, nerdy, unattached — or attached to a guy with a pocket protector — maybe socially awkward, etc.

When you reveal she’s a spy after-hours, it’ll be all the more surprising and exciting. Everyone knows the attributes of a spy — you won’t have to say much about how clever, adventurous, brave, and trustworthy she is. For your two well-picked words, “librarian” and “spy,” readers might fill in hundreds of their own. Combining two already weighty words multiplies the effect, and it also conjures the known unknown.

Reveals, can be used to confound, inspire, frighten, or otherwise push all the emotional buttons of your readers. A murder mystery is a classic example. The unknown unknown is the murder, which, as soon as the body is found is a known unknown, which teasingly, frustratingly and nail-bitingly transmogrifies to a known – through as many clever twists and turns as possible.

Shaping and popping unknowns in stories is a large part of the art of being a writer. The best unknown unknowns upend much of what characters and readers think is known.

If there is a family in your book, with three siblings, they might never think to question who their parents are. Perhaps the book starts with them focusing on rebuilding the family restaurant, which they lived above, after a bout of arson. Searching through the wreckage, they find a safe and in it are adoption papers for the oldest sister. Won’t it be a huge shock to find out they never suspected their sister had a different father? That was certainly an unknown unknown.

Often authors work actively to make readers think they know something so that the presence of an unknown hits even harder. In this case, perhaps the author stresses how much the daughter looks like the father, same black curly hair, good white teeth, and tan-ready skin. This can work beautifully, for example, if the unknown father turns out to be the brother of the man everyone believes is her father.

Often the knowns are the tip of an iceberg: the other 90% is still below the water line. The mother confesses that her first love was the girl’s real father and they were together since childhood. They got married but he had to leave the next day for WW2 and was killed. His brother, who had to stay home due to poor eye-sight, took pity, and married her, adopting the baby. He also abandoned the love of his life, a young teacher, and both parents have been nursing broken hearts ever since.

The best unknowns totally change a story. Take, for example, the huge unknown unknown in the Star Wars franchise. Few lines are better than Darth Vader telling Luke, “I am your father.”

 

Free BookBaby Catalog - Your path to publishing

 

Related Posts
A Well-crafted Unfolding Is Your Ticket To A Fabulous Book
Lead Your Readers With Your Book’s Structure
How much physical description is enough when you create characters?
The Drama Is In The Details (the humor, horror, and suspense are too)
“Context, Context, Context” is like “Location, Location, Location”

 

This BookBaby blog article Unknown Unknowns in Writing appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

The Three-act Structure: Formulaic or Foundational?

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

Focusing on the three-act structure and your nine plot points can help you construct a vibrant and meaningful narrative structure and bring your story to life.

If you ask book editors what’s most often missing from the manuscripts they review, a likely answer is, “great structure.” Structure is not dry, boring stuff — it’s the substance of your story. It’s the meaning and the purpose. The detail you add brings it to life.

Narrative structure is only difficult because writing books is a complex process. If you have a great story, you’ll have great structure from the get-go. Structure is substance.

Examining structure can help when it comes time to diagnose problems with a manuscript, but it can also help immensely when brainstorming it in the first place. Or when deciding what should happen next and when the “big moments” should occur. In the end, everything needs to be in place.

Readers are more knowledgeable about narrative structure than we realize. Books and movies have the beat of a three-act structure, and when it’s not there, audiences know. They feel it, or more correctly, they sense when it’s lacking. Without it, things seem odd or off, perhaps too slow, too fast, jarring, or unchanging. With a three-act structure in place, the story flows as expected.

Three-act structure

If you read widely and have a good feel for the way stories unfold, you’ll be using three-act structure naturally: a clear beginning, middle, and end, with big moments that push the story through the acts.

Stanford researchers studied New York Time’s best sellers and confirm, among other things, the the centrality of three-act structure. Here is a quote from a Publishers Weekly article about the book, The Bestseller Code: “Among the features the algorithm touted as being most essential to the success of a novel is that its three-to-four central themes occupy about 30% of its entirety. The authors also found that a significant number of the biggest bestsellers in the last 30 years ‘share a plot shape with a regular beating rhythm.’ They said that their data shows popular books have ‘symmetry in [their] plotline, and a clear three-act structure.'”

Movies stick to three-act structure even more diligently than books. Almost down to the minute, certain events occur, and this is for good purpose. It maximizes the amount of change that occurs, but in a logical way that works for the story.

Some might disparage three-act structure as formulaic, but it exists to maximize the interesting things that happen in a story. It’s about turning points and key decisions and huge changes.

In fact, it’s not formula, it’s derived from the analysis of the shared features of many books going right back to the Greek plays analyzed by Aristotle. So, it can better be thought of as the highlights of successful stories.

You don’t need to think about it when you write, but you’d best produce it by the time you are finished.

Getting around the wheel of the acts takes some big pushes – huge things that propel the story forward.

The biggest stretch to get through is Act Two. It’s double the length of the first and third acts – it’s half of your story. This means a lot has to transpire to keep audiences hooked. The midpoint is what gets us through Act Two – imagine it’s the moment the curtains fall in a play and you sit on the edge of your seat wondering how the story will continue.

Because the midpoint and other major plot points come at key places and are spaced rhythmically, their presence ensures something big has just happened or is around the corner. Plot points ensure no boring stretches mar an otherwise riveting story.

The nine plot points

A plot needs to be a series of causally related happenings that keep a reader continually asking “and then?” Not all happenings are equal. The climax is the whole purpose of the story, so it could be considered the single most important plot point. It is the obligatory scene, paired with the inciting event scene that launches the action of the story.

The inciting incident should happen early in Act One and the climax is the purpose of Act Three. What about all the other happenings? Gustav Freytag originally recognized the inciting incident and the climax and added the dénouement in his famous pyramid theory of storytelling.

Many talk today of five major plot points, plus the midpoint (where the curtain falls and intermission starts). Also included are the “point of no return,” at which the lead character must enter the adventure, or new world of Act Two, and the “black moment,” when the hero is at the lowest point right before the climax. This video offers a great rundown of the five major plot points, along with examples from many major movies.

Here’s where confusion starts: the five plot points excludes Freytag’s dénouement. Other analyses include other plot points and even use different names to describe them. Even the experts can’t agree! Some of you may feel like giving up on structure at this point, but these differences are only surface level.

In his article, “The Magnificent 7 Plot Points,” David Trottier adds a back story. Veronica Sicoe adds “pinch points” in the middle of each half of Act Two. Yes, variations in names and plot point combinations don’t help, but it all adds up in the end.

In this amalgam, we’ve reached our own plateau of nine plot points:

  1. Back Story
  2. Exposition
  3. Inciting Incident
  4. Rising Action
  5. Pinch Point #1/Point of No Return
  6. Falling Action
  7. Pinch Point #2/Black Moment
  8. Climax/Resolution
  9. Dénouement

If you want to explore plot-point breakdowns for various popular books and movies, browse the Story Structure Database (which recognizes eight plot points, omitting “back story”). While you’ll have to interpolate the back story yourself, it’s a great resource to examine three-act structures in works you’re familiar with.

 

Find your way to self-publishing success in just 5 easy steps with this 62-page book. Yours absolutely free.

 

Related Posts
Narrative Structure: What It Is and How To Use It
A Well-crafted Unfolding Is Your Ticket To A Fabulous Book
Tightening Your Story’s Cause And Effect Chain With “And So”
A Lesson In Storytelling From The Ultimate Dog Tease
The simple shapes of stories

 

This BookBaby blog article The Three-act Structure: Formulaic or Foundational? appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Words That Carry Maximum Weight: Tropes In Storytelling

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

Tropes — cultural references or recurrent themes imbued with shared meaning — can be a staple of storytelling (and a potential path to cliché).

Sometimes the exact right word is weighty enough to stand in for hundreds of words. These are words that invoke shared cultural references. If an author says, “our hero built his love a mansion to equal the Taj Mahal,” we already know a lot about him. “Taj Mahal” is a synonym for “big,” “expensive,” “ornate,” etc. It’s all of those descriptors combined and then some.

A special type of weighty word that is used all the time is a trope. Tropes draw on concepts we hear again and again in stories, whether in books, on TV, or in movies. Just the mention of “jock,” “princess,” or “mad scientist” is enough to trigger recognition of images, behaviors, and expectations.

The literary definition of a trope is any turn of phrase that isn’t literal. This can include things like metaphors, irony, and exaggeration, among the many ways to spice up how you say something. The more colloquial meaning is of a “common story element.”

Tropes are a staple of storytelling. They are the elements we sometimes love, sometimes hate. They are often specific to our culture, but universal ones exist and go all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Aristotle named the first ones in his book Poetics.

If modern culture had a ruling class of talking bees who were wizards and who pollinated flowers by means of transporter magic, we’d certainly have stories about them and lots of magic-talking-bee tropes.

You know a rich set of tropes if you read books, watch TV or see movies. All creative words draw on cultural tropes. Combined, tropes provide a narrative lens through which we observe the world, factual and fictional. New tropes are always being created and others retired.

If you’ve seen some story element used more than once, likely thing is it has a name and a description and is cataloged in the database of TV Tropes. (The “TV” in the names doesn’t really matter, it just started there in 2004 with an analysis of the TV series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

So, why are tropes used so heavily? Entertainment consumers expect them and even crave the juiciest ones. Think of the fleet of romance readers. Genre romance is built on tropes of love, chivalry, and rivalry. Writers use shared tropes to do a lot of the heavy lifting. It reduces the need to do additional explaining. Readers just get it. The love at first sight trope is just one in a vast library of love tropes.

Tropes pack a punch: What a Scrooge! Tropes describe stereotypic characters we encounter all the time. How often does a book or movie use a dumb jock, or jerk jock, especially at a school? There are Superhero and classic princess tropes, as well as tropes for pretty much any other type of typical character.

Tropes cycle with the times. They go stale or they don’t match changing cultural mores and expectations anymore, so authors actively provide alternatives. The damsel in distress is going out of fashion and is often replaced with the more modern concept of strong, ingenious, self-sufficient women, the damsel out of distress.

As much as you can strengthen your story with beloved tropes, you can screw up by getting your recipe wrong. You can mix a bad batch or do a botch job, getting one partially right or oddly half-in/half-out of normal expectations: like a wicked witch who isn’t very wicked. This character will fall flat if you cast her as wicked but never show her doing any act of wickedness. Or she could be realized as a clever anti-trope if you make her kind, against audience expectations, scaring bad kids and rewarding good kids who listen to their parents and try hard at school.

Audiences love it when you dip into expectations as much as when you shake them up. You just have to do it right.

Creative works can live or die by their handling of tropes and you should know the trope selection for your genre. Here are five classic tropes that we will apparently never tire of. Here are 10 tropes for science fiction. Here are world building tropes you may want to avoid.

The more you avoid tropes, the more literary your style of writing is. Indie books defy the rules, leave tropes in the dust and forge new ground. If you chose to live by your creative merits, you’ll have to craft story elements from scratch. This means putting in the time to fully describe and show rather than tell. It’s a harder path but can be extremely rewarding, especially if you craft a new trope – one that sticks in public imagination and keeps getting re-used.

 

12 Ideas to get Holiday Book Sales

 

Related Posts
The Three-act Structure: Formulaic or Foundational?
Jewel words, crux and flavor words, and everything in between
Narrative Structure, Part One: What It Is and How To Use It
Narrative Structure, Part Two: It’s OK To Stray (or: Don’t Forget Your Cockroach Races)
Literal And Figurative Language In Your Writing

 

This BookBaby blog article Words That Carry Maximum Weight: Tropes In Storytelling appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Truth and Narrative: The Two Timelines Of Your Story

0
0

By BookBaby author Dawn Field

The truth and narrative of your story — also known as fabula and syuzhet — amplify each other to produce a satisfying read.

All stories have a “true” chronology of events and the one that is presented in the narrative created by the author. These two versions of your story are the “truth” and the “narrative.”

These two independent but inseparable features of every story were named by Russian formalists Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky and go by the beautiful names of “fabula” and “syuzhet” [syuu‐zhet].

The truth is called the fabula and the narrative the syuzhet. We will use these terms for the rest of the article for “truth” and “narrative.” Some describe these as “story” versus “plot.”

Fabula and Syuzhet

How you craft your truth and your narrative is up to you as the author. Both need to be airtight for your story to have substance.

The truth is only the truth, but you have endless ways to play with the narrative! You can have an unreliable narrator who messes with the facts — perhaps they are a guilty party, insane, or wildly jealous of the heroine. You can have more than one character tell their version of the “facts.” You can play out the story but be creative about how you order the events — perhaps leaving out a crucial scene at the beginning that leads to a fantastic plot twist for your climax. Something you thought was true all the way through is suddenly turned on its head. The fabula you thought you knew was an untruth. The trick of nailing a plot twist is that the fabula must be the most satisfying explanation of events.

When you are crafting your book, you need to be keenly aware of both, engineer them separately, and understand exactly how they match and how they don’t — and why.

Ask yourself:
1. What is the fabula?
2. Is the syuzhet crafted in the best way to convey that fabula?

Once they are wonderfully matched — the syuzhet channeling and amplifying the fabula — the book is ready.

Fabula

To grip readers, the underlying fabula must be rich and strong enough to incite interest and the syuzhet must be crafted in a readable way to keep readers focused on trying to discover the fabula while not tripping over any of the mechanics of the syuzhet.

Authors need to watch that readers are satisfied by the fabula when it is revealed. Sometimes this is when the floor falls out of a story. Perhaps the ending is not believable. Perhaps it is too shallow. Perhaps it doesn’t match the lead-up. The syuzhet must be true to the fabula in the end.

Differences in how readers see the world, and the fabulae that resonate with them, is what leads people to different genres, tropes, and endings. Perhaps you always want a happy ending. Then you’ll be disappointed by fabulae that deny the lead character an ending with catharsis and positive resolution. If you like certainty, you’ll be unsettled by an ambiguous fabula that leaves alternatives equally possible at the end of a story (was it a dream, or not?).

Syuzhet

The syuzhet must be crafted so the fabula isn’t predictable. You hope for readers to be surprised by your ending. If you can guess who the murderer is right when the body is found, there is little chance you will read to the end — unless to confirm your suspicions. In the best type of mystery, readers will suspect every possible character before the truth is finally inevitable and revealed. This is the skill of an author in using the power of the syuzhet to shine the spotlight and focus reader attention at will — often precisely in the opposite direction of the fabula.

The syuzhet is successful when it conveys the fabula to the reader by the end. Of course, the fabula can sometimes come across as ambiguous or be open to interpretation by readers. This explains why readers can often have very different reactions to the same book. This is the beauty of books: the fabula can be spelled out as explicitly as needed. Authors can leave the reader to fill in aspects of it.

The more the syuzhet makes us search for the fabula, the better. This is why we are sitting on the edge of our seats or turning pages at a furious pace: to find out what happens.

Your two timelines

It is possible to write a book with a technically stellar syuzhet and an awful fabula. It is also possible for a fantastic fabula to save a lackluster syuzhet. This is why “high-concept” is so revered. It the power of the fabula that truly matters in the end — and why so many drafts undergo so many revisions and rehashings.

One can draw two lines on a piece of paper and write out the timelines of events for both. Certainly, it should be possible to do after the story is complete, but this can help with brainstorming and getting past sections where you’re stuck. The fabula will be linear — time A to time B. The syuzhet will dip in and out of that time, mix it up in non-linear ways if it likes, tell multiple versions of the story as needed, or mix subplots with the primary story, bringing everything together in the end for the climax.

Can you draw these two timelines for your book? How detailed and solid are the chronologies? Are there missing parts? What are each of the characters doing “off-page” and why? Why are you choosing to reveal certain events and not others? How are you playing with time in your narrative and why? Both need to be rock solid for readers to buy the story you present on the page.

 

BookBaby Editing Services

 

Related Posts
Narrative Structure, Part One: What It Is and How To Use It
Narrative Structure, Part Two: It’s OK To Stray (or: Don’t Forget Your Cockroach Races)
The Three-act Structure: Formulaic or Foundational?
Words That Carry Maximum Weight: Tropes In Storytelling
Literal And Figurative Language In Your Writing

 

This BookBaby blog article Truth and Narrative: The Two Timelines Of Your Story appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .

Viewing all 119 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images