7 Step-by-Step Writing Lessons
By Kathryn Craft | June 13, 2024 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Early reading influences can have a powerful effect on a future writer. In her May post, In Praise of Passionate Persistence, WU contributor Kristin Hacken South shared an early influence of hers, The Phantom Tollbooth. Her post inspired such nostalgia in me that I wanted to play, too.
When I thought it through, though, the story that offered up the most useful and practical lessons wasn’t one of my favorites. Yet its impact was memorable, and only in retrospect have I appreciated its lessons about story and the writing life.
It began:
In the old days, no one but a king could have a dog for a pet.
Published in 1958, written by Benjamin Elkin, and illustrated by Katherine Evans, it was called The Big Jump. If you’re interested, Grandpa Brian will flip the pages and read it aloud to you at this link. The following plot summary contains spoilers.
When the king walked his dogs, all the boys and girls came out to watch. One day a pup ran away from the king and straight toward a boy named Ben. He told it to go back—he didn’t want to get in trouble—but the pup licked his hand. The king took note.
Ben wanted the dog badly, but alas, he was not a king. Until the king told him, he didn’t even know that to be a king, one had to be able to do The Big Jump. Ben asked what The Big Jump was but the King was gone—and reappeared on top of his palace. If Ben could jump that high he couldn’t be a king, but he could have the dog. For now, he could keep the pup for one day.
At home, Ben stacked wooden crates and practiced jumping. They were nowhere near as high as the palace, and yet he failed, over and over. Then he had the idea to vault with a stick, and was able to jump to the top of four boxes—but no more.
The pup jumped onto the first box, then the second, then the third, and then sat on top of the stack. Ben knew how to jump to the top of the palace. After he demonstrated for the King, the other children mocked him, saying that they could all do it that way. But the King pointed out that they could only do it now because Ben had showed them how. He won the pup.
Here are 8 of this story’s metaphorical lessons for writers.
- To grow your writing skills, you’ll need to practice. It may be a good long while until you perceive noticeable improvement. I’ve heard two statistics bandied about: 10 years or 1 million words written. But it isn’t all math. There are intangibles involved as well—a dramatic flair, attention to detail, fortitude, and an ability to think outside the box, for instance—but in my experience, the math held up. My offer of representation came 11 years after I started writing fiction.
- You’ll have to get creative to see how you learn the best. It’s called creative writing, after all. If you start your journey with a critique group and you sense they’re holding you back, you need to leave them behind, no matter how much you like them. I was lucky enough to get this permission from Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Diane Johnson, who told me my first sixty pages were overwritten. I switched to full manuscript swaps and never looked back. As Diane put it, “No novel can hold up to being read one chapter per month.”
- Your teachers are everywhere, and can come in unusual guises. In the story, the pup becomes Ben’s teacher. I collected a plethora of pet craft books. I received spot-on feedback from my 9th grade son, who would come home from school, hug his knees atop one of our deep country windowsills, and ask me what happened in my novel that day. Some join writing organizations, get MFAs, take online classes, hire a book coach, go to conferences—or all of the above. One of my most accomplished literary clients had never met another writer and belonged to no organizations. He learned by breaking down all of his favorite novels page-by-page, and then applying the skills he noted to his own work.
- Failure can be your best teacher. “This isn’t working.” If you hear these words from more than one reader, consider them a gift. Let them inspire you to analyze why and take corrective action. Right before I signed with my first agent, I got a 2-1/2 page editorial letter from an editor at Penguin Putnam. She had requested my pages a year earlier at a conference pitch and truly owed me nothing—this publisher doesn’t even work with unrepresented authors. Two comments overwhelmed me. One said, “Make sure your character’s food issues are on the page.” I thought they were on the page. How else could she know the character had food issues? This forced me to wrestle with this editorial shorthand for “show don’t tell.” The other comment was, “Either make her father more important or cut him.” I sensed he was needed but had no idea how to make him more important to the novel’s premise. So I googled “father’s role in daughter’s eating disorder,” expecting the usual dozens upon dozens of result pages. There was one. One research abstract out of Tulane University, but it gave me what I needed.
- Getting to the top of Novel Mountain is a big undertaking; best take it one step at a time. This advice works at every stage of the skill acquisition and writing process, but is especially ignored in the revision stage. Wanting to be done, many new writers expect to polish up their manuscripts in one read-through. That can’t work. Changes in concision can impact the results of the consistency edit you were trying to do at the same time—but once your prose tightens and grows in power, you can find yourself sucked into the story, only to emerge chapters later, having forgotten to check if your protagonist is still driving the same car.
- Do it for love. One lick from a puppy’s hand was all it took for Ben to work hard for his goal. Passion for story is a fire that will replenish with each page written, each book consumed. One time, a man called saying he wanted me to be his developmental editor and asked how much it would cost. I told him to back up a minute and asked what he had written. “A medical mystery,” he said. I said he must be a fan of Robin Cook. Who else has he read? “Oh I don’t read.” This answer was so insulting I felt like I’d been slapped. “But my sister gave me a Robin Cook mystery for Christmas and I think I could do that too.” Suspecting he had dollar signs in his eyes when learning that Cook’s novels have sold 400 million copies worldwide, I filled him in on the hard work part and set him straight: “No you can’t.” Turns out the only thing he’d done right to this point was to contact me with plenty of lead time—he hadn’t even started writing yet.
- A staircase is a useful metaphor for incremental character change. Just as a writer must be highly motivated to make The Big Jump, a character will need to be highly motivated to change. But readers know that lasting change is hard, and cannot be achieved in one grand gesture. An alcoholic who sank his family into debt, quit drinking yesterday, and then shows he’s changed by bringing his wife a huge bouquet of expensive roses has missed the point. He’d be better off staying dry a second day, and a third, a month, years. Change is only believable if you tackle one incremental step at a time.
For those of you who write children’s books, you have the added challenge of creating believable change in a remarkably short word count. But if you succeed in doing so, you may just be forming the minds of future writers. How awesome is that?
What is the nature of the incremental character change in your WIP? In what other aspects of life have you had to employ this one-step-at-a-time mentality? How did you learn this approach?
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
[coffee]
Hello Kathryn. Thank you for your post. I want to focus on point 7. You’re so right to comment on the importance of how writers approach change in developing their characters. I think how they go about it is fundamental, most obviously in realistic fiction. In an early draft of my WIP, my POV character is skeptical about many things. He imagines a “cosmic delete key,” by which he is able to eliminate overused ideas and words. One of them is the idea that people change. He’s a retired journalist, and thinks/writes the following:
“There’s another hard truth for you, he thinks. Nobody changes. Not really. Being forced to adapt is something else, that’s just knuckling under. In Ritz’s view, the whole idea of change should get the Delete treatment, along with feelings and hurt.”
What comes next is a quote from something he wrote:
“In life, Big Change comes from outside forces beyond your control, like lightning bolts, or Mack trucks. I am not Michael Jordan, nor was meant to be. I was never going to slam-dunk any lay-ups, or ace a three-pointer at the buzzer. This I am sure was made certain when I myself was nothing but a microscopic basketball waiting for cell division.”
But Mack trucks come in many forms. The character does change, but not in a conventional way. Although he resists displays of feeling, the reader sees him as perfectly capable of kindness. What needs to happen are a set of circumstances (the puppy that licks the boy’s hand). This draws from him what is already part of his character waiting to be let loose–compassion. Once that happens, the character is capable of understanding others, capable of asking for forgiveness, and of forgiving.
Good morning Barry! I love that your character has a quality inside that’s waiting to be let loose—that’s very smart. And I’m sure many of us would love to have a go at a cosmic delete key for life events—but with such huge changes afoot all at once, we couldn’t possibly adapt (interesting that he thinks of this as a weakness rather than a survival technique—he’s quite the character). We’d probably all keel over from shock.
Your point about resistance to change reminds me of my first Parents Without Partners support group meeting after my first husband’s death. The group leader posed the question, “What would you change if you partnered up again, given your experience with your last relationship?” As we went around the circle, answering, we came to a man who said, “Everything fell apart when my wife went back for a master’s degree. I just don’t understand why women feel like they have to change! I’m the same man she met back in the 1970s.” I believed him—it was 1999 and he was wearing a leisure suit.
If my WIP sees the light of day, and you read it, you’ll know why I seized on “the puppy that licks the boy’s hand.” I would say that in our time the Mack truck or bolt of lightning that has changed everyone is the cell phone. Like me, my fictional character hates them.
I just checked my office bookshelf and there, in the back of a double row, sits my copy of The Big Jump. Thanks for the reminder of a childhood favorite that can still play a role in my life as I begin the second draft of my first novel.
OMG Dawn that’s amazing! I don’t think any of my friends had that book.
Mine was in the same room with me. :)
Hi Kathryn, do work gaps count? I was just in California for a family event, and will soon be looking at sections of my work with fresh eyes. LIVING is how we begin to write…that idea scribbled on the edge of the newspaper or entered into a phone. I guess I LIVE with my novel. But soon I hope to see it in print. That’s always the plan.
You’ve certainly been working the steps, Beth. Here’s to imminent success!
Hi, Kathryn. As your post points out, the most satisfying stories are ones in which the main character experiences transformative change by overcoming serious obstacles to achieve a difficult goal. In my work-in-progress, the main character realizes halfway through the story that he is chasing the wrong goal. Prior to that, he wanted to run for Congress to right the wrongs done to working people like his father. But, he realizes that what he really wants is the family life he had prior to his mom’s death from cancer when he was a teen-ager. It takes a lot to bring him to that realization. I love the stairs analogy in your post. It was good to see you again at the conference in Salem. I hope you are doing well.
Nice to hear from you Chris, and glad you have another novel in the works! Switching up the goal often happens in life—I know one ambitious young woman who went to law school and passed the bar, decided not to be a lawyer, then went to med school and after finishing, decided she didn’t want that either! I only mention this because in one way or another, there may be a cost to your character for switching up his goal—something he must surrender in order to get what he really wants. Enjoy!
Hi Kathryn. Great post and I really liked #6 “Do it for love.” Love of story, of words, of what those words can become when strung together is the true magic of writing and of reading. I once had a writer friend who said she didn’t read fiction, and I was aghast. I asked her how she was able to write a book – Regency Romance – and she said she took a class. Okay, classes are great – necessary – but so is reading fiction if one is going to write fiction.
Even though I teach novel writing, I can’t imagine teaching it literally from scratch. Most of the craft I teach is applying name and reason to what an avid reader has already intuited, but didn’t see as a tool to use. So much of what we learn is absorbed directly from reading, right down to how to format dialogue. But there’s also the question of karma. I think we should always support the industry that we hope will support us!
Agreed, Kathryn. The few classes I’ve taught have been easier with attendees who come already with a love of books and story.
Kathryn, you’ve introduced me to a classic. Thank you. Wonderful lessons too. I feel like a novice right now when it comes to fiction writing because for some reason almost everything I wrote was NF for the past several years. Couple that with music taking over my life…and how quickly one forgets how to craft good fiction. So I’m taking baby steps. Writing a single scene. Revising an old short story that’s all summary. Practicing with more intention. But the struggle is real. When you’ve already achieved a certain level of proficiency, it’s hard to see how much you’ve lost. It’s like with my piano playing–I mostly use it as a crutch for my singing. I can’t play Chopin waltzes anymore… But I’m determined and persistent to a fault, so like the little boy, I will win. After all, my name means victory.
I guess you’ve found the truth in the saying, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” The thing is, our lives expand to include so many skills as we age—it’s impossible to keep them all up! I find it a real shame when people lose their birth language—but language is a skill that must also be kept up. I took Russian for 7 years in school and I probably wouldn’t make it through a class or two now without getting lost. I’ve been studying French for years now but if I want to keep the most basic proficiency for communicating with my daughter-in-law and her family, I really can’t afford to stop daily lessons! But the steps you are taking are all valuable, and will no doubt get you back up to the top of the palace. I love that your name means victory!
What is the nature of the incremental character change in your WIP?
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The Pride’s Children story came to me as one giant What If – how could I get from very unpromising beginnings to a mostly happy ending for someone considered by society not to even be in the running for it, including herself?
The circumstances would have to be extraordinary – what would it take? I had been reading about Elle Lothlorien and writing The Frog Prince. But even that was too easy – young healthy characters may find the meet part tricky, but readers grant them the possibility of the outcome without much of a fight. And the Romance/Romantic Comedy tropes are well recognized.
But I don’t read or write Romance, and I had a very different kind of heroine in mind, and I wanted mainstream and realistic and believable – not fairy tale.
The year was 2000. All I had written at that point were small stories, and the beginning of a mystery series (I may go back to it some day) which I was not being successful at selling the traditional way. The ebook revolution was half a decade into the future.
But I SAW how I could get from where I wanted to start to the ending I wanted – by a series of extremely small steps, each of which would have to be justified. So that I could believe it might actually happen.
Except the characters I wanted to start with had a lot of changing to do to get where I wanted to send them.
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How did you learn this approach?
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At the time I was learning Dramatica, a screenwriting program. Because something about the logical way it went at getting from beginning to end in a story resonated with my own academic, engineering, and computer background. After all, it promised that if you answered a huge number of questions you would end up with a SINGLE storyform out of 32768 possibilities – and showed how you could create the story from that. Let me rephrase that: it asked you to make 2 to the 15th decisions (fortunately, some of those were made as a byproduct of making others).
I figured even a highly improbable (but not impossible) story could be found among that many possibilities, and I set about finding mine.
I did.
Then I had to learn to write that story, to find that possibility in the implausibility. The rest is, so far, twenty-four years of my life, two published volumes in the trilogy (all those steps didn’t fit in a single volume, nor could Amazon print it), and wrestling with the toughest part now in the final book, LIMBO.
It has been quite a ride for another improbable character: a disabled writer with no energy. Not a Mary Sue – heaven forbid! – but a traveler on a parallel path?
Hi Alicia, thanks so much for walking us through your process. I loved how your engineering mind made sense of it! Back when you started, I do think you had an advantage over some new writers in that while they might have an absolute belief in a Big Jump (hey, it’s fiction!), you had to make yourself believe in the possibility of each incremental change. Not that I’m equating ease with writing speed of course—a novel that long has a lot of moving parts. But you were aware that suspension of disbelief was a trick you’d have to master way before others know that’s even a thing. Sounds like you benefited.