How to Tell A Story Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction

  ONE IDEAS

  TWO UNDERSTANDING GENRES

  THREE HOOKS

  FOUR PLOTTING

  FIVE CHARACTERS

  SIX GOALS

  SEVEN WRITING IN SCENES

  EIGHT SYSTEMS AND THE STATUS QUO

  NINE CONFLICT

  TEN THEME AND SUBPLOT

  ELEVEN PACE

  TWELVE STRUCTURE AND REWRITING

  THIRTEEN FOURTEEN STEPS TO WRITING YOUR STORY

  APPENDIX WRITING A BOOK PROPOSAL

  FOREWORD

  Gary Provost, one of the great teachers of creative writing in the United States, was in the process of turning his notes and lectures on story sense into a book when he died unexpectedly at the age of fifty. Knowing that he and I were not only friends but shared similar philosophies and ideas about teaching writing, his wife, Gail, and agent, Jeff Herman, asked me to write what is, alas, Gary's last book.

  As a result, How to Tell a Story, inevitably, is not all in Gary's voice, nor does it contain ideas that are exclusively his. Instead, it is a synthesis of our ideas and is in part the product of many conversations we shared about writing fiction.

  Gary was a writer of deceptively simple and crystalline prose and a gifted, empathic teacher with an understanding not only of the process of writing, but of the psychology of the novice writer. His death has left us all the poorer. However, we have his books and his tapes, and we should be thankful that at least this shadow of his excellence can still be shared both by those of us who knew him and those who did not who may still benefit from his legacy.

  INTRODUCTION

  What is it about some books that makes them compelling— un-put-downable?

  You know the ones I mean: that novel you decided you'd start just before going to sleep and ended up finishing at 6:00 the next morning just when you had to get up for work.

  A friend told me (rather irately) of the first night of a much needed vacation with her husband in a French hotel. He wanted to read the new book by a best-selling author so badly that, rather than keep her awake with the reading light on, he spent all night with the book in the bathroom.

  What we wouldn't give as writers to be able to have that hold over our readers.

  So why is it that one person can tell you about his flight from an erupting volcano and bore you to death, while someone else can tell you why she had to do the same laundry three times last Thursday and have you hanging on every word? How is it that two people can tell the same joke and one of them has you rolling in the aisles while the other makes you squirm in your seat? The answer is the storyteller's grasp of dramatic structure and its role in unleashing the story's emotional power.

  Almost every time my friend Gary Provost and I got together and talked about teaching writing, the conversation would eventually get around to whether it was possible to teach students this sense of dramatic structure, or "story sense."

  We would discuss why it was that students can write well and yet what they write is boring. It gradually became apparent to us that understanding how language works and putting words on the page is not enough.

  There is a second equally important element to the writer's craft that is rarely talked about and rarely written about: an awareness of how to structure material in the most effective way to put across the narrative, that has little to do with the

  ability to use words well. A writer can be way ahead in ability in one skill and way behind in the other.

  The reason that I, and 95 percent of all the other people in the industry, stay in publishing when there are better paying jobs elsewhere is that publishing is a compulsive and obsessive career with which to become involved. In short, we do what we do because we love it passionately and because the vast majority of our colleagues, be they editors, agents, or published writers, are brilliant, witty, interesting people whose company is fun.

  But our love affair is not specifically with books; that is just the outer form. It is with what publishing is, at its heart: a marketplace for ideas.

  I still get a shiver when I stop to consider that I make my living in a marketplace where the best ideas, especially those with the most emotional impact, are powerful and compelling enough that they are eagerly bought and sold. It is a heady thought. We live in a society where, despite its ills and negative elements, we still have enough regard for the product of our best thinkers that we consider their ideas commodities that have definable monetary as well as intellectual value.

  This is why a good idea, whether at the heart of a piece of fiction or nonfiction, can sell when it's not that well written; and material that is wonderfully written will not always sell, because at its heart the idea contained within it is overly familiar or mundane, with little emotional impact.

  In other words, authors whose books sell have a better developed story sense than their unsuccessful competitors. How do you, the novice writer, improve your chances of getting published? The answer is simple: Make sure your idea is told properly—that is, structured to be the most effective presentation of that idea, at its most emotionally gripping.

  DEFINING STORY SENSE

  Story sense is about structure. And the key to effective structure in fiction and narrative nonfiction can be reduced to the writer's ability to create strong, potent characters.

  What we mean by this, in short, arc characters who arc active not passive; characters who are not afraid of conflict; conflict that continues to rise until the narrative's end; writing that is not episodic; story development that is not afraid of playing it big; an appropriate and effective sense of mystery; and opposition to the hero that is formidable enough that it defines and reshapes the hero for the better by story's end without being insurmountable.

  Fixing structural problems is what editors and agents do most when fine-tuning the work of the authors with whom they collaborate. So what is it they know that many writers don't?

  Soon after I signed the contract to write this book, I was cornered at a party by a successful writer friend with an unflinching laserlike perception, who asked me: "So how is this book going to be different from the ones you and Gary have written before?" (And implicitly, other books about writing that are already on the shelves.)

  While I knew the answer, there I was, drink in hand, suddenly grasping for words to form a succinct answer. Kathy's question haunted me for weeks. All nonfiction books should pose a question, and provide an answer before you start writing them.

  What is more important than any "rules" or "dos and don'ts" about writing, what all writers need to keep as keen as a knife blade, is a highly developed sense of dramatic structure—in other words, story sense. The important problems writers must solve are not just what the story is, but how it should be most effectively told.

  Without the ability to understand the difference, you can write words brilliantly and still not ever get published.

  A quick example: The movie The Fugitive is, at its heart, a familiar story with just enough of a modern twist to make it interesting: Executives of a large pharmaceutical company fake data on an ineffective new pill and try to get rid of the one man who can blow the whistle on their fraud, potentially costing them billions of dollars in profits.

  The way the story is told, however, is brilliant; and because more and more of our emotional capital becomes invested in the two main characters, played by Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, the story grips us with a mounting emotional power as it reaches its climax.

  COMPELLING WRITING

  Story sense is about honing your instinct for what is both dramatically appealing and dramatically successful. This is something of a mouthful, I know, but it boils down to this: Co
mpelling writing means involving the reader completely in your narrative. That means finding the best way to tell your story, be it fiction or narrative nonfiction; you must learn how to discover and unleash the emotional power of your narrative.

  What interests readers is not so much what happens, but who things happen to. If they don't care about the characters, readers are not really interested in the outcome of the characters' lives, and a reader certainly won't spend the night sitting in a bathtub in a hotel in Paris engrossed in a writer's world while his spouse is asleep in a comfortable bed in the next room.

  Writing is a compulsive thing, and what separates those who want to write from those who actually are writers is simply this: Writers write, in some form or another, every day. Just to spend time thinking about writing (without thinking specifically about a particular project or problem) and waiting for the muse to pass by is not writing.

  To achieve any level of publishable excellence as writers, we must learn to hone our instincts for what works dramatically. The best way to do this is to practice writing and read, read, read.

  A GOOD QUERY

  Put a group of experienced journalists or writers of fiction in a room, feed them a bunch of ideas for stories, and almost invariably the good ones will pick the same idea and want to do something with it.

  For example: "Dear Sir, I've written a detective story about a PI in LA in the 1940s in the tradition of Raymond Chandler. ..." Ho hum. Read it, been there, got the T-shirt. It's been done already—by Raymond Chandler among others.

  However: "Dear Sir, What if the seventeenth-century English playwright and spy Christopher Marlowe was forced, by circumstances, to become a private eye to save a friend from the executioner's axe? . . ." Now I'm curious. It's potentially fresh and interesting, though you have to know a lot about England of that period to make it convincing.

  In publishing, an industry largely defined by the idiosyncratic taste of editors and agents, everyone "gets" a good idea the first time she hears it or sees it. It is the basis for that much hyped and grossly overused Hollywood catchall: the "high-concept idea.''

  A high-concept idea is one that can be summed up in a sentence or a phrase, and yet has within it enough charisma and excitement that the idea alone provokes an audience to want to read more about it, see how it is developed. The major weakness of high-concept ideas is that too often the summation of the idea is more beguiling than its final development. In other words, the author falls short of the demands of the idea and fails to deliver.

  The high-concept idea should be, ideally, an indication of a story's fierceness of focus. Thus it's not always just an onerous marketing burden forced on writers in order to get themselves published. It can be a useful tool for marketing a book that has a clear focus and deals with an interesting and relevant idea, or juxtaposition of ideas. The final developed version of the idea doesn't have to be trite and obvious. Instead, it can be complex and highly literate, and in general these are qualities most editors and agents seek in contemporary fiction and nonfiction. But the central idea of the book or screenplay should be intriguing and focused firmly enough that it is relatively easily summed up.

  Here are some examples of successful high-concept ideas:

  • A bored housewife meets a visiting photographer, and almost in spite of themselves, they have an affair that rekindles the passions of their youth (The Bridges of Madison County, Robert Waller).

  • A horse healer meets up with a crippled horse and its crippled rider and attempts to heal both (The Horse Whisperer, Nick Evans).

  • A young lawyer straight out of law school gets his dream job and then discovers he has sold his soul to the devil and must find a way to get it back (The Firm, John Grisham).

  In publishing today, what everyone's looking for, in fiction in particular, is a well-written high-concept idea. Analyze almost all published books by previously unknown writers who have "made it" (that is, been published regularly and well), particularly those who hit the best-seller lists, and nine times out of ten, what they have in common is that they are fresh, high-concept ideas. We'll talk more about this in chapter three, "Hooks."

  DEVELOPING STORY SENSE

  So how do you learn this mystical storytelling talent? What makes one aspiring novelist or writer of narrative nonfiction more likely to succeed than another? How do you pick out a great idea for a story from the hundreds of other story ideas you get? And then how do you develop it to its best dramatic-shape? In an increasingly tough publishing market, how do you get that edge that will get you published and keep you getting published?

  This book will answer these and other questions.

  How to Tell a Story is about the dramatic forces that make a story work and how best to unleash the emotional power of your narrative. It is about what creates excitement for the reader, why the reader will get involved with the story and feel compelled to turn the page.

  You can know all there is to know about style, description, viewpoint, etc., but without a way to hook them all together, in other words, without a sense of structure or story sense, your grasp of these elements will be limited. Story sense is about understanding drama and dramatic structure—what actors and stand-up comedians call "timing."

  The aim of this book is to help you recognize and develop a great idea and then turn it into a compelling narrative that will make even jaded publishing professionals sit up and get excited.

  THE RABBIT KNOWS ...

  When Gary graduated from high school, instead of going to college he hitchhiked around the country from city to city, slept on park benches, panhandled in the parks. And around the time he was twenty, he decided he would write the Great American Novel. It was called The Rabbit Knows, and he wrote about five chapters. Not surprisingly, it was about a young man who hitchhiked around the country from city to city, slept on park benches, and panhandled in the parks.

  He once confessed to me: "Thankfully I've forgotten almost everything about this book, except for this one sentence: He was not quite as salubrious as he might have been on such a day, and so he stood torpidly beside the corroded asphalt-pebbled border of the highway making nugatory conjectures, and his thumb sought some sort of concession to his distress.' "

  Gary and I used to joke that may be the worst sentence he ever wrote. I confess that as a junior reporter on a local weekly newspaper, at about the same age as Gary, I wrote a few sentences that were probably worse—and were printed with my byline on them by my editor, no doubt to teach me a lesson for some now-forgotten journalistic transgression.

  I don't know whether you've ever written a sentence that bad, but the point is, both Gary and I wrote that awful way once, yet, since then, we have both made a living from writing—selling books, magazine articles, short stories, columns and so forth. So it's reasonable to assume that from the time

  Gary and I were writing phrases such as "nugatory conjectures" to now, we learned how to write well.

  Pretty obvious thing to say, I suppose.

  A lot of writers give up because they believe the ability to write is somehow "in the genes," that you either "have it" (whatever "it" happens to be) or you don't.

  But writing and storytelling aren't like that. They are crafts, something you must learn to do effectively. And once you get a firm grasp of the craft, you start to see possibilities and get inspiration, and that's where the art of storytelling and writing springs from.

  HOW TO TELL A GOOD STORY

  Developing story sense is really nothing more than learning to find the most interesting way to tell a good story. So, you ask, "What do you mean by 'a good story'?" That's a good question.

  A good story takes readers where they haven't been before in the company of interesting people they learn to care about who are forced to deal with adversity. It is, therefore, best when it is specific about time, place, and task, particularly when it involves unfamiliar and unusual places and activities. The best ideas and the best writing are always simple and direct. You
have to learn to trust your instincts and your judgment and listen to the guiding voice they provide. You learn this by practicing and mastering your craft.

  Don't feel that after you read the material in this book once you should know everything there is to know about writing. What may seem obvious when we point it out is not so obvious when you are in the middle of writing your story. Read this book over and over. Think of it as a toolbox, and the techniques as tools to help you become a better writer. You're reading this book because you want to learn how to write great stories that will sell, because you are trying to get on paper an idea that won't let go of you and insists that it's a story that should be told to others.

  There are many ways to write, and whatever works for you is how you should proceed. Gary was able to analyze the writing process like few others, and yet, as much as this book may seem to be a lot of rules and jargon, he was the first one to point out to students that writing ' isn't a religion." What Gary and I have figured out over many years of hard trial and error does work, and it has taken us from prose of the "nugatory conjectures" variety to satisfying careers in writing and publishing. Paying attention to the "tools" we've come up with to discuss writing narrative prose will steer you in the right direction.

  As you read about the various aspects of storytelling, it will help a lot if you have a particular story in mind that you want to write. You might also find it helpful to jot down notes on the various elements discussed in this book and apply them to the book you're working on. Keep those notes, along with any exercises you do, in a notebook. After you've written part of your book, or your first draft, go back and read through this material again.

  When I studied music, even though I was a guitar player, I was lucky enough to study jazz improvisation with Warne Marsh, one of the great tenor saxophonists. When I first arrived in New York City, he helped me get an apartment. The landlord asked me, in Marsh's company, "Are you a jazz musician, too?" I felt like a fraud saying yes, considering the company I was keeping, and stuttered and hesitated not knowing how to answer when Marsh jumped in and said, somewhat impatiently, "Of course you are." It felt like a weight had been lifted from me, because in truth I realized it is the seriousness of your approach to what you do that defines what you are, not whether or not you made a living at it. I was a jazz musician, and I played and practiced music eight to ten hours a day, seven days a week and performed in public as often as I could. I just wasn't in the same class as my teacher. Big difference.