storytelling

Rule 6.

Fiction writers have a license to lie. Even an obligation to lie, and to lie convincingly. A good liar is somebody with an excellent memory for details, and a good writer is a good liar.

The folks at Viable Paradise (an annual writing workshop for the sci fi crowd) have some great sweatshirts to sell. This one (you can get it through their Cafe Press shop) is my favorite.

If you remembering being a teenager or if you have a kid who is a teenager, you'll be able to come up with examples how how details are crucial to making a fiction work.

Father: And why are you two hours over your curfew?

Son: Um, the dog ate my homework.

This kid may grow up to be a surgeon or a musician, but he's probably not going to write novels for a living.

Father: What's this note from the school that you were an hour late?

Son: Well, cripes, dad, if you had to drive through the city when half the traffic lights were out, you'd be more than an hour late getting where you need to be. Talk about crazy, old ladies driving their El Dorados down the sidewalk and cops screaming at cab drivers. The only people moving were the guys on motorcycles, which reminds me you said we could talk about that--

Father: never mind.

The real trick is learning to hit just the right details, the ones that give you crucial information about the character or the setting. And finally, a good detail does not necessarily entail adjectives or adverbs.

Posted by at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In addition to leaving a comment, you can now rate selected posts anonymously. If you see a Whaddaya Think box at the bottom of an entry you can use it to indicate how useful (or awful) you found a particular post to be. As the system is new, it will take a while for patterns to emerge. In the right hand column just below the "recent comments" section is a list of rated comments with more than three votes.

Now, I really do want to know which kinds of posts are of most interest, but if people start play the Amazon Reviewer Game with the ratings, then I'll just have to give up on the whole idea.

Amazon Reviewer Game: In theory, the reviews are meant to be there so potential readers can decide if the book is something they might like. Person A reads the book and posts a review. Five stars, high praise. Person B comes along. She's read the book too and hated it, but she's too lazy to write her own review. Instead, she decides to review the other reviews. She disagrees with the reader who liked the book, so in response to the question "was this review helpful?" she clicks NO. Comes back twenty times to do it again, just to make her point.

Really, Amazon should just give up and either take away the "Was this review helpful?" bit or add another one: "Did you agree with this review?"

Gosh, I had no idea I was so irritated by that flaw in the Amazon system, but there you see it: ire. I'm going to leave it to make the point that you should only vote once on a given post, okay? Unless you like the idea of me being cranky, which you might.

Posted by at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rule 5.

Somehow your characters must change.

There's a lovely quote in the OED: A ship is the crucible in which morals are put to the test (St.-Pierre's Stud. Nat. 1799), which I found when I was trying to solidify a thought I had about the relationship between the character and the story. So I'll twist this a little: The story is the crucible your character has to survive.

Melodramatic, eh? I'm trying to make a point, and so I hope you'll forgive me. The idea is this: the story you construct with and for the character is something that the character must endure and (usually) survive. The character on page one is not the same person on the last page -- or if she is, if she hasn't changed at all, your story is lacking something very basic.

Change can be small and subtle or very grand. Maybe after the battle with his daughter about the color of her hair Mr. Malone now understands that he's never really been happy as a sign painter; maybe George loses faith not only in the Mariners, but himself; maybe Rose goes on to make a life for herself without connections or money, because she knows now that this is possible; maybe a little girl has a sudden and unhappy understanding of what it means to be betrayed, and is shut off from ever trusting men; maybe Juanita decides to marry Ralph, full knowing that this is the wrong thing to do. Maybe John figures out that of all the things to strive for in life, perfection is the most overrated and least rewarding.

Change can be good or ambiguous or tragic, but change always is.

Posted by at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)