Writers in the Storm

Lisa Cron

Great questions this month – so much to say, so let’s get started!

Laura Drake asks: I have a question – I’ve read (no, studied) the first half of Story Genius, and it’s changed the way I write. My weakness is plotting (I don’t). So the second half of the book is lost to me – putting together critical scenes, etc. Any suggestions for using Story Genius for pantsers who get hives at the mention of the ‘P’ word?

Here’s something that may come as a surprise: the second half of Story Genius isn’t about Plotting. It’s about exactly what you’re asking here: how to create critical scenes that move your story forward.

I firmly believe that Pansters can do this work, even if you don’t do it in exactly the way I lay out in Story Genius. I created Story Genius as a tool that writers can use to make every story better, with methods that are adaptable to one’s own familiar writing process. It’s not a formula, or a rigid set of rules you have to follow or else. My goal was to identify what it is that readers are actually responding to in every story they hear – to wit: how the protagonist navigates a hard-fought internal change the plot forces them to go through – and offer guidance on how to create that internal struggle, and then make sure it’s not only on the page, but driving the external action.

Here are 5 tips for Pansters that might come in handy to be sure that your story logic holds from the first page to the last:

1. Post a sticky with your story’s point, your protagonist’s overarching agenda, and her misbelief near where you write, and always look at it before you start writing. Use it as a yardstick for what she does, and why. Refer to it when you work — and keep referring to it. This might sound strange, but the physical act of looking at it – seeing it written out in black and white – can really help focus your mind on what matters most.
2. Since the plot revolves around one single external problem that grows, escalates and complicates from the first scene to the last, write your scenes in order -- even if at first blush they’re thin, skating along on the surface, or feel clunky. Resist the urge to skip ahead.
3. Once you’ve written a scene, stop. I know that this is the hard part for Pantsers, but it’s SO powerful! Pull out a Story Genius Scene Card and test it. That way you’ll discover:

• If the scene is, indeed, a critical part of the cause-and-effect trajectory.
• If every character in the scene is acting in accordance with their agenda.
• If the scene itself arcs – that is, if something changes externally.
• If everything in the scene matters to the protagonist, given her story-long agenda.
• If what happens in the scene causes your protagonist internal conflict, forcing her struggle internally with what action to take.
• If your protagonist has a small “realization” at the end of the scene that changes how she sees things, affecting her ongoing plan in some way.
• What must happen next in the story.

4. If, in creating your Scene Card, you discovered that there were still things that you need to know in order to really understand why your protagonist is doing what she does in this scene, let yourself dive into her past again to ferret out the info you’ve realized is missing. Resist the urge to race ahead. (Do you see a pattern here? I’m trying to get you to slow down just a tiny bit. Writing forward is fun; I get that. But writing 300 pages that go nowhere? Not so fun. Make sure your pages go somewhere.)
5. For every scene you write, allow yourself a few minutes to brainstorm worst case scenarios for your protagonist based on what she wants/fears and keep a running list of anything that leaps to mind – for the scene you’re working on, and for future scenes. Remember, though, that these worst-case-scenarios must be an organic part of the plot’s overarching cause-and-effect trajectory, rather than some random externally dramatic thing that happens. That’s what will make your novel an actual story rather than a bunch of things that happen.

I hope that helps and doesn’t result in another case of hives -- I’m itching to find out (sorry, couldn’t resist ;-). That said, perhaps you might want to keep a bottle of Calamine lotion at hand, just in case?

The next question allows me to address what some of you, whether Pantser or Plotter, may now be wondering: “Just why the heck is it so important to understand – in an in depth, story specific way – why my protagonist is doing what they do before I write it? Can’t I just figure it out later, in the next draft, maybe?” There are many answers to that question. The following is one of them.

LittleMissW asks:  I’ve just been told that my protagonist is unlikable at times. When he’s angry he can say very hurtful things to the people he loves. He can also think derogatory things about people (for example, he describes an over-weight woman as being big enough to have her own gravitational pull). For me, this is what makes him real. We all lash out when we’re hurt or angry. We all have the potential to be judgmental and catty. But the impression I get is that it’s not okay to be unlikable. When does a character cross the line between being realistic and being irredeemable?

I wrote about what “likeable” means right here a couple of months back, but this is such a great question that I want to answer it. If I can sum up, this what I hear you asking: How can you have a character say or do things that, on the surface, appear ugly or mean, without making the character unsympathetic -- which is why people would see him as unlikeable?

In a fabulous bit of synchronicity, the same day I was going to tackle this question, fate – in the form of an article by writer George Saunders in The Guardian  -- provided a spot on example of exactly how a writer can solve the problem you’re struggling with. Here’s Saunders laying out, step-by-step, how a writer can dive beneath the surface of an unlikable act, to discover the reason for it, so said act then telegraphs a very different meaning. In other words, here is how you allow a character to do something mean, and yet remain likeable:

“I write, “Bob was an asshole,” and then, feeling this perhaps somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, “Bob snapped impatiently at the barista,” then ask myself, seeking yet more specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to, “Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife,” and then pause and add, “who he missed so much, especially now, at Christmas,” – I didn’t make that series of changes because I wanted the story to be more compassionate. I did it because I wanted it to be less lame.

But it is more compassionate. Bob has gone from “pure asshole” to “grieving widower, so overcome with grief that he has behaved ungraciously to a young person, to whom, normally, he would have been nice”. Bob has changed. He started out a cartoon, on which we could heap scorn, but now he is closer to “me, on a different day”.

How was this done? Via pursuit of specificity.”

The takeaway is this: we don’t come to story to find out what someone did – Bob snapping at the barista; your protagonist making fat jokes – we come to find out why they’re doing it. What drove them? What in their lives taught them that that was all right? What inner conflict drives their choices, their action? Give us that and we don’t need characters to be redeemable, or even likeable at all.

Which, of course, means that Saunders’ Bob didn’t have to have a bittersweet “likeable” reason to snap at the barista in order to rivet us, so long as he had a deliciously revealing one.

And now, I’m once again open for questions for my next column – leave them here in the comments, or shoot me an email at: lisa@wiredforstory

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Lisa Cron is the author of Wired for Story and Story Genius. Her video tutorial Writing Fundamentals: The Craft of Story can be found at Lynda.com, and her TEDx talk, Wired for Story, opened Furman University’s 2014 TEDx conference, Stories: The Common Thread of Our Humanity.

Lisa has worked in publishing at W.W. Norton, as an agent at the Angela Rinaldi Literary Agency, as a producer on shows for Showtime and Court TV, and as a story consultant for Warner Brothers and the William Morris Agency. Since 2006, she’s been an instructor in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, and she is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts MFA program in Visual Narrative in New York City. In her work as a story coach, Lisa helps writers, nonprofits, educators, and journalists wrangle the story they’re telling onto the page. She can be reached at wiredforstory.com

I thought I was going to make a blob-like paperweight, until Nate, our teacher, showed me a gorgeous straight-sided largish vase. He asked what color I'd like to make the glass, but I was so stunned by the piece he held in his hand, I couldn't answer. "Or you could make it a different shape." He pointed to other vases in the studio. Amazing, fluted-top shapes, round-bottomed dishes, traditional vases with a round base and narrow straight sides—nothing like the blob of translucent material I'd envisioned carting home and cherishing like a piece of kindergarten art.

Maybe this is how you began your writing career; it's how mine began. I couldn't get this story out of my head. The characters would talk to me before I fell asleep. An English teacher friend suggested that I write the story. I did, intending it to be just for me, like a secret treasure. Like that kindergarten artwork.

Before you begin a glass piece, you decide how large it will be, the color, and its shape. That determines the number of gathers (times you add molten glass from the 2000° crucible; three for all of us). You also prepare your tools. I'm holding newspaper that I wet with water from a nozzled plastic bottle. When that hot glass touched onto that thin layer of wet paper, I was tense. I felt no heat, but the paper steamed and tiny bits charred and drifted into the air.  Kind of the same feeling I got the first time I sat down and started writing Keeping Athena.

When you begin a new writing project, you decide the general length, the genre, and, even if you're a pantster like me, you have an idea about the characters or the beginning scene. Unless you stick to an outline, the shape of your story may take you somewhere you hadn't thought of when you started.

Next I moved to a metal table where I had arranged the small bits of color into a large rectangle. I rolled the glass oval through the middle of the mostly emerald green with a sprinkling of cobalt blue, then rolled back, angling to catch the leftover color on the top and bottom of the glass before it cooled. 

In writing, this is where you begin fleshing out your characters, adding color and details to their goals, motivation and conflict. Oh, and those idiosyncrasies that endear the people living in your mind to your readers. You need to have an idea of the kind of character you're creating, because you can't change colors after this step. At least, not when you're a beginner. The beauty of your piece is going to be in how you shape and use those bits of color to show character arc.

You can change your mind about the shape as you go. The glass goes back into the 1000° furnace every 2-3 minutes to keep it molten, pliable. During this time it is important to make sure your blob, with the tiny starter bubble in the center of the molten glass, stays centered on the hollow-tubed rod. This is similar to centering your clay and keeping it centered if you've ever thrown a ceramic pot.

I do this all the time in my writing, and so do you. Sometimes I think something is going to happen on a planet, and it doesn't. Sometimes I'm surprised by a razorfish attack. But all the while, I have to stay centered, make sure the story is proceeding with a good pace, that everything I add is important to the plot or the character arc to show the motivation, goal and conflict. My story is pliable as I reread and revise it. I can talk to my critique partners if I have a question, just like I talked to Nate, my glass-blowing teacher, while I worked.

Now you blow and enlarge the air bubble, to open up your piece. Your artwork is constantly moving, to keep it from slumping and falling off the rod. You're turning the rod all the time, even when you're blowing, so that you don't end up with a thinner wall on one side of your piece.

If you haven't seen the similarities to writing yet, you've heard "just keep writing" often enough that you can equate that to "keep turning the rod." If you set aside a project for awhile, when you come back to it, you'll have to put it back into the fire of your creativity, and spin it around with your craft to get it back on track. And revising, looking at how your character arcs, plot arcs, and GMC all work together, keeps your writing from becoming thin on the side of motivation or character growth.

It's time to open up the glass into a vase. How much I open up the bubble will determine the shape of my finished piece. It might have straight sides or slanted sides, depending on how I hold the forceps-like tool. Picture huge metal tweezers. Once I open the neck, you guessed right, back into the 1000° furnace to keep it molten-enough for the next step.

My novel's dark moment is at this point. I have to decide how to drive the dialogue, the setting, the conflict, and the stakes to mold my story into something memorable. By this point my reader should have an idea, a worry, of what might happen. I have to deliver that crisis in a way that delivers the initial promise of the book. I have to commit to how wide I want to  open the neck.

Back to the glass-blowing studio. I have another decision to make. Am I ready to remove my vase from the rod, or do I want to put it into the fire to flute the rim? My piece went back into the fire. Nate showed me how to make the top edges have that free-form ripple. It was easier than I thought it would be.

At the end of my novel, I can wrap things up quickly or take just a bit longer to tie up loose ends. No matter my choice, it is my responsibility to deliver a solid, satisfying ending for my reader. That doesn't mean long and drawn out, it means focused and clear. Big on emotion. If I've done my job in the first 95% of the book, the resolution of the black moment should be easy to write. I say this from experience. When the ending of the book didn't gel, I had to go back and find out why. I hadn't motivated the actions and emotions of my characters to get them where they needed to be for the ending I'd planned. Back into the fire.

The last step is to remove the glasswork from the rod. Once that's done, the bottom needs to be polished or finished so there are no rough spots. I used a small blow torch to smooth out the rough bottom of my piece. 

In my writing, working with an editor and completing final revisions is that polishing step. Just as polishing makes a glass piece not scratch the table or shelf what will become its home, revisions polish your manuscript to allow it to find a place in your readers' hearts. It's an important part in the process.

What part of the glass-blowing process do you identify most with in your own writing process? What task gives you the most trouble?

 

If you're ever in the vicinity of Harmony, California on the central California coast, just south of Cambria, drop in to Harmony Glassworks. You might be able to watch someone blowing glass. If you're lucky, you could be the person someone else is watching. My thanks to my teacher, Nate.

 

ABOUT FAE

Fae Rowen discovered the romance genre after years as a science fiction freak.   Writing futuristics and medieval paranormals, she jokes  that she can live anywhere but the present.  As a mathematician, she knows life’s a lot more fun when you get to define your world and its rules.

Punished, oh-no, that’s published as a co-author of a math textbook, she yearns to hear personal stories about finding love from those who read her books, rather than the horrors of calculus lessons gone wrong.  She is grateful for good friends who remind her to do the practical things in life like grocery shop, show up at the airport for a flight and pay bills.

A “hard” scientist who avoided writing classes like the plague, she now shares her brain with characters who demand that their stories be told.  Amazing, gifted critique partners keep her on the straight and narrow. Feedback from readers keeps her fingers on the keyboard.

When she’s not hanging out at Writers in the Storm, you can visit Fae at http://faerowen.com  or www.facebook.com/fae.rowen.

 

 Piper Bayard

Writers have only two motives—we write to say something, or we write to be heard. One is all about us. The other is all about the reader. In a perfect world, good writers combine both the desire to convey information and the desire to serve the reader by “speaking the readers’ language,” giving the readers what they seek, and making the material easy for them to absorb.

In this mission, we must remember that even before our words, the reader sees the page. If the page is not inviting and suited to the information being conveyed, the reader will go no further. We will have satisfied our own desire to speak, but we will not have satisfied our readers’ desire to hear. This is especially true in expository writing.

I can hear you now . . . Wait! Expository writing? But I’m a fiction writer. What does that mean to me?

Notice who writes these non-fiction posts? We fiction writers inevitably write some form of non-fiction, whether it is our own biographies, blog posts, or freelance articles for popular web sites. Some few, like my writing partner and I, write both fiction and non-fiction books. The fact is that almost every fiction writer will write a non-fiction post for the internet at some point in their career.

What the Reader Sees

The first thing a reader sees of any non-fiction post is the overall page. It’s important to design a page that invites readers to linger long enough to glean the information that is on it. Several factors play into this design.

• Colors
• Content Density
• Font
• Pitch
• Titles
• Paragraph length
• Article length

Readers may or may not have short attention spans, but they definitely are busy people. If information isn’t easy to look at and sort through, they simply won’t bother. Add to that the fact that many people read internet posts on their mobile devices, which have their own restrictions on page presentation. That means now more than ever before in history, we writers must construct our visual delivery of information mindfully in order to serve our readers.

Colors

The internet gives us unlimited design capacity, and with that comes colors...Woot! Woot! Right?...Not necessarily.

Bright colors are like sex and violence. If they are essential to the "story," that's one thing. However, if the colors are only the product of our daydreams or an attempt to mask a lack of substance, they are gratuitous.

Nothing gratuitous serves our readers. Let me show you why.

 

That being said, dark colors on a white background make nice accents for titles, lists, links, or sentences that we want to emphasize, such as this one.

Content Density

The reader is busy; the page shouldn't be. If a page is too busy, it will visually overwhelm readers. Readers will not sort through a barrage of visuals to find the information they want. They will click out and move on. That means simple text arrangements are more efficient than complicated ones, and accent pictures are better than collages for everyone except professional photographers.

Font

Use basic, visually friendly fonts such as Helvetica, Times New Roman, or other standard fonts. SIMPLE variations, such as Comic Sans MS or an unadorned script, are also easy on the eyes. However, stay away from more elaborate variations.

Pitch

Pitch is the size of the print. Vary it with titles to make them stand out. This will break up the page and help the reader hone in on what matters to them. However, keep in mind that pitch variations can also be like sex and violence, as in they do not serve the reader if they are gratuitous.

Titles

Titles help our readers quickly locate what is most important to them. They also serve to break up large blocks of information into smaller focuses that are both easily digested and visually friendly.

Paragraph Structure

We've all been there...English 101. Five sentence topic paragraph with an opening, three supporting points, and a thesis statement. Then on to three paragraphs, each with a topic sentence, three supporting sentences, and a conclusion, followed by a conclusion paragraph with a topic sentence, three supporting sentences, and the grand finale that is usually a simple restatement of the original thesis statement. This structure is one of the most difficult things for non-fiction writers to take to the next level. Do we need a theme or thesis for every non-fiction piece we write? Absolutely. We should retain the English 101 element of focus that is the basis of all good non-fiction writing. However, what we must abandon is the five-sentence/five-paragraph structure if we are to convey information to the modern internet reader. For the modern digital reader, we need to condense our points. We live in a sound bite world where even our president converses in 140 characters or less. While five sentences or more are necessary to make a point at times, if we are able to make that same point in two or three sentences, that's okay. No one will be looking for the rest of the paragraph.

Which brings me to another reason why it's okay to take liberties with the English 101 Bible...

Paragraph Length

Long paragraphs cause readers to throw mobile devices against the wall. Example A above. Wasn't that annoying? Did anyone really read every word before skipping to this part? If you did, was it a chore? I'll consider my point made.

Article Length

Article length should be adjusted for the audience. If the audience is medical students, we can count on readers with longer attention spans. However, if the audience is the average Facebook or Twitter surfer, they are more likely to read and pass on articles of 500 words or less.

The topic will also help determine the appropriate article length. If the topic is a recipe for lemonade, the article should be short and sweet...so to speak. If the topic is an aspect of national security, like the posts my writing partner and I publish, 500 words would leave more questions with the reader than answers. As a loose rule, 1000 words is about all most readers can tolerate from one internet article, and then only if the article is full of substance.

Bottom Line

Keep in mind the audience and the topic and give the reader every opportunity to glean the information as efficiently as possible. By doing that, we can not only say our piece, but we can be heard, as well.

What keeps your attention on a page? What are your pet peeves? What ways do you make reading easier for your audience?

All the best to all of you, and may your muses be generous.

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ABOUT PIPER

Piper Bayard is an author, a recovering attorney, and the managing editor of the Social In Worldwide network. Her writing partner, Jay Holmes, is an anonymous senior member of the intelligence community and a field veteran from the Cold War through the current Global War on Terror. Together, they are the bestselling authors of the international spy thriller, THE SPY BRIDE. You can find Piper at BayardandHolmes.com.