Posts by Jim Dempsey
OK, I’ll admit it: I watch Virgin River. But only because my sister lives in the stunningly beautiful Vancouver area where it’s filmed. OK, that’s not the only reason. It’s probably not even the main reason. If I was to think about it, I’m sure I could come up with many reasons why I watch it.
One reason might be that it, a TV show, (as with so many other areas of life) can be a source of inspiration for writers, even Writer Unboxed contributors. For example, in a recent episode, the main character, Mel, was asked whether she was an optimist or a pessimist. She replied, “I would say half-optimist, half-realist. Which means I’m a hopeful control freak. There’s a lot of debate going on,” she circled her finger round her head, “up here.”
At first, it seems like a throwaway line, nothing too complicated, not even relevant for moving the storyline forward and it certainly doesn’t seem very inspirational. And yet, if you really look at it, really analyze it, there’s quite a lot in there.
She could be rejecting the popular binary perception of people being either optimists or pessimists. Or we could consider if a health care professional – even one on TV – should use a term like control freak. We could get into deep discussions on either of those topics.
I was more struck by the debate “going on up there” because that situation is familiar to me too. And I’m sure it’s one many of you can relate to as well. Writers often go back and forth over their stories in their minds long before they ever write them down.
Where ideas come from
The inspiration for those stories really can come from so many areas of life. What seems like a throwaway line to one person can be the seed of a great work to someone else. The line itself is perhaps not the inspiration, it’s more about where it can take the mind. In some people, that line can trigger a thought that leads to another thought that leads to another and so on until you have the beginnings of a story.
These are often the kinds of “what if” scenarios that Stephen King talks about in his memoir On Writing:
What if vampires invaded a small New England village? (Salem’s Lot)
What if a policeman in a remote Nevada town went berserk and started killing everyone in sight? (Desperation)
King adds that, “These were all situations that occurred while showering, while driving, while taking my daily walk.”
Covering all angles
Many of us will recognize these kinds of runaway thoughts, not just in the stories we want to write but in everyday life too. Such people are often referred to as overthinkers. Overthinkers will, for example, look at a likely future situation and go over every possible scenario of how it could play out. This will help them to be prepared if the person they confront says A or B or even Z and then how to react in each situation.
Some people see overthinking as a problem. “Don’t overthink it,” we’re often told. But a 2015 study suggested that people who overthink can be better problem solvers, while a more recent study points to overthinkers […]
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I wasn’t able to submit my regular monthly article in June. And I felt so bad about it because I only gave the Writer Unboxed team a couple of days notice that I wouldn’t fulfill my commitment. Of course, everyone at WU is extremely supportive, and I even gained some sympathy when I gave the reason why: I had just moved house.
I had totally underestimated what this would involve, despite having moved house many times in my life. Moving to a new house is regularly in the top five most stressful life events – often placed higher than a major illness and losing your job.
There’s a lot involved in moving house. There’s all the packing, and we shouldn’t forget the emotional aspect to that, of finding something tucked away in a drawer that reminds you of an earlier time or a loved one. You might be moving farther from your friends and have to go through the whole process of meeting new people. Maybe the children have to start a new school, and they probably won’t want to, so you have all the stress of upset kids. Then there are the practical things like changing address at so many different agencies, companies and organizations. Plus the physical labor involved in lugging boxes around and shifting furniture.
And that’s just a few of the things you have to deal with. I’ve just gone through the process and already I find it difficult to list everything involved. That’s what makes it so easy to underestimate – there’s just so much involved.
As our wonderful and understanding WU editor, Therese, told me, “Moving is such a huge undertaking, and it’s the ‘gift’ that keeps on taking time, energy and usually $$.”
Thankfully, writing is much easier. As Hemingway said, “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Yep, not easy either.
To procrastinate or not
Novels usually start with an idea, and that’s often the easiest part of the process. Inspiration can come in a flash. Or you get that spark which smolders for a while until you get the burning need get the whole story down on the page.
That’s where the procrastination starts.
Do you just start up your computer and get tapping away with your standard word processing program or do you go for a more specialized software, like Scrivener? There’s no right or wrong answer to that, more a personal preference. The main thing is to get writing. And that’s not just about procrastination, there are some serious decision to be taken then.
One of the most important choices an author has to make is: who is going to narrate the story. Will you give readers an omniscient god-like point of view, looking down on your characters as if from above, seeing them all move around and interact. This is great for sprawling epics or stories with many characters because it gives readers an overview of the drama and it’s easier to switch from one character to another. Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is an example of this. The disadvantage is that an omniscient perspective can feel distant, detached from the characters.
To get nearer to your protagonist, you might want to chose a close third-person perspective. In this case readers get the direct thoughts […]
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My friend’s 15-year-old son has just had his heart broken for the first time. He’s also just written his first song. It’s about a guy who got his heart broken. He’s a talented musician, so it will probably be a pretty good first song.
Many wonderful creative works have come from strong emotions. Aristotle wrote that everyone who “attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.”
In a recent episode of the excellent Happiness Lab podcast, Helen Russell, author of How to be Sad: Everything I’ve Learned About Getting Happier by Being Sad Better, called sadness a creative emotion. “When all is going well, there’s little need to do anything different. When we’re sad, we think about our next step.”
That next step could be organizing a fun night with your friends, looking for a new job or throwing your ex-lover’s record collection in a lake. Or it could be to write a poem or a story, paint a picture or craft something from clay.
Russell also says that we should try to accept sadness as a part of life. If we can accept it, not be afraid of sadness, that acceptance can enrich other parts of our lives . If you’re not afraid of sadness, then you won’t hold back in other parts of your life, you won’t be afraid to give more, and so your happy times could be even happier. Sure, the sadness might come again, but that is part of you, part of life.
Let it all out
We need to accept our sadness and anger and other strong emotions, and maybe even learn to enjoy some of the things they bring us as individuals, like the idea for a new novel or the inspiration for a love song.
Love, in general, not just heartbreak, can motivate us to be creative. Think of all those songs from people who just wanted to tell the world about their love. And all those novels too. There’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. And The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir is based on her affair with the writer Nelson Algren.
And there are too many examples from poetry, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning deserves a special mention. She wrote a series of poems to her husband, which ended up in the collection, Sonnets from the Portuguese. It includes, How do I Love Thee. “Let me count the ways.” Swoon!
Then there is anger.
There are some brilliant angry comedians. Bill Hicks remains my personal favorite, and Larry David has managed to apply his particular brand of rage to fill 11 seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Intensity
A group of psychologists in the Netherlands showed that people experiencing anger brainstormed ideas in a more unstructured way than those who were not angry, and that this type of flexible thinking produced more creative results. This makes sense since anger can be an invigorating kind of emotion. It really does get the blood moving and gets us thinking in irrational ways, which, in the right conditions, can lead to some great creative works.
Protest songs are obvious examples of anger used in creativity, and Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam is one of the greatest, […]
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Every hero has a flaw, and that is a major element drives stories to their conclusions. In the meantime, the character goes through all many trials, overcomes all several obstacles to reach a point of self-realization where they can change and become a different person.
Sometimes, however, the flaw leads to the downfall of the character. Aristotle called this the tragic flaw, often referred to by the literary term hamartia, although that is also taken to mean the error the character makes that leads to the tragic end.
Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is a classic example of a hero with a tragic flaw. Loman has many flaws, but his pride and refusal to accept the reality of his situation and his obsession with success and achieving the American Dream leads to him to deliberately crash his car.
It’s not clear from the story if he does this because he can no longer take his repeated failures—and therefore has accepted his flaw of denialism—or to simply to make sure his sons get the insurance payout on his death, which would suggest he never accepted his flaw.
So some characters don’t want to overcome their flaws. They persist regardless. And some even work hard to maintain them. Don Draper in Mad Men is a good example of this. He goes to great lengths to sustain the illusion of the persona he had created for himself.
Temporary answers
Clearly, not all flaws are tragic. Many characters change to become better people, but that’s only at the end of the story. Before that, they struggle with their flaw, fight against it or deny it’s even there. As the story progresses, most characters will employ short-term solutions. They might hit the booze, take drugs or run away from their tricky situations.
While these tactics solve the problem that day, night, maybe even for a few weeks or longer, the same issue will inevitably return, and often magnified as time is running out—a great technique to develop suspense in a story. Or the problems accumulate and cause increased pressure for the character, leading to more and more obstacles for the hero.
So, it’s worth being clear about what your character’s flaw is and how they deal with it.
My previous article of the wonders of your character’s world view can help you identify the flaw. But how can you make the best of it to raise that suspense and pressure in the story?
The first step is to make a list of the short-term solutions your character could try. Usually that’s some kind of avoidance. It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as alcohol or drug abuse; it could just be walking out and slamming the door in the middle of an argument.
Build suspense
Next, look at the effect of these solutions on the character. How did they help in the short term? Did some smooth-talking from the character addicted to gambling buy time from the angry bookie? Did the corrupt cop’s tipoff at the right time buy some temporary favor from the mafia boss? Or did these actually make things worse?
Imagine, for example, a jazz singer with stage fright. She tries many ways to deal with her anxiety, such as sitting at the back of the club, near the door, […]
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I’m sure we’d all agree that the books we buy should be good quality products, just like anything else we buy.
For me, that means a book should have an attractive cover that tells you something about the story; the text should have a presentable layout that makes it easy to read; the words on the page should also flow well and have acceptable standards of punctuation, spelling and grammar; and a novel should have a compelling story, something that’s going to make us stick with it to the end.
The author, however, cannot be expected to be responsible for every aspect of these qualities. It takes a different kind of talent to produce an attractive cover and to design a layout with a readable typeface with, for example, no widows and orphans.
As for the other two aspects—text that follows recognizable conventions to a specific standard and an engaging story—it could be argued that these are the sole responsibility of the author.
Tools of the trade
Punctuation, grammar and spelling are undoubtedly important aspects of a good book, and arguably essential tools for any writer. Social media is full of examples that make fun of common mistakes.
“I saw your dog chase a man on a bicycle.”
“That can’t be true, my dog doesn’t have a bicycle.” LOL.
In these days of trolls and general online negativity, authors can become easy targets for derision, whether warranted or not. E.L. James, the author of Fifty Shades of Grey, was slated on social media when the book was first (self-)published by people pointing out, for example, the overuse of ellipses, the lack of apostrophes and the number of typos.
But even established writers make mistakes, which is why every quality publisher and self-publisher hires an editor to look over all the text in all their books. And then hires a proofreader before the book goes to print. These publishers want the best quality product for the people who pay their hard-earned cash for that novel.
Built-in knowledge
Few of us have great grammar skills since many English language education systems decided some decades ago that we learn grammar inherently anyway, so there was no need to teach us all those boring old rules.
That’s true if you think, for example, about the order of adjectives. We instinctively know that the long, brown, wooden table sounds better than the wooden, long, brown table.
However, that doesn’t cover everything. A frequent error I see from English language writers from all over the world is the confusion between past simple tense and past perfect tense. More people get that “wrong” than “right.”
Then there’s starting a sentence with the -ing participle of a verb, such as:
Opening the door, he walked across the room and grabbed his rifle.
The -ing participle implies a continuous action so, in this case, the character is still opening the door while he also walks across the room and grabs his rifle. It would be better as:
He opened the door, walked across the room and grabbed his rifle.
Inclusion
There are many reasons why people’s writing skills are not always up to the standard expected by quality published books. People from marginalized backgrounds often don’t have the same opportunities as others in society. As a result, when they submit an uncorrected manuscript […]
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I had a friend who turned out to be a criminal, and a big time crook at that. He was pretty much a gang leader, involved in robberies, drug smuggling and murder.
When I found out about it, I did what you would probably do too. I wrote about it. To the police. And my gang boss friend found out. Somehow, he had managed to get hold of the letter I’d sent. Which I’d signed. I denied it, of course. Anyone could have written that. He was cool about it, which scared me more. He let my imagination run with all the possibilities—none of them good. And he made we wait to find out which one he’d settle for.
But I woke up before it got that far.
There is a theory that, once we started telling stories (about 40,000 years ago), our dreams developed to become more storylike and therefore worth telling other people about.
Two things strike me about this theory. The first is that my dreams are often way too weird to be understood as any kind of story. The second is that, while the dreamer might think that this dream is worth recounting, it’s not always that interesting to listen to. It means something deep to the dreamer, but not the listener. It’s a bit like: you had to be there, and, of course, nobody else was there.
And yet, there are writers who can take that dream as source material and make something magical from it.
Inspiration
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a famous example. Stephen’s King’s Misery and Dreamcatcher are both said to be inspired by the author’s dreams, while nightmares informed the work of H.P. Lovecraft Edgar Allen Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Dreams are not only useful to horror writers. They can often have a spiritual element too, which can lead to works like Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. And dreams can be wonderful for the imagination, and so we get novels such as Stuart Little by E.B. White.
This is not to say that the authors dreamed those entire stories. It’s more that an interesting idea arose in the dream or there was some imagery or an interesting thought that then inspired the creative process. It’s these little nuggets that you can then use in your writing, either to develop a scene or a whole novel.
Dream work
It’s become something of a trend now to use dreams in other artistic pursuits, known as dream work. Several big name movie stars have hired dream coaches. Kim Gillingham works with many of them, and uses techniques from Jungian psychoanalysis and method acting to offer creative professionals “access to the rich and undiscovered content of the unconscious, allowing artists of all disciplines to create more authentic work.”
There are many techniques we can all use to inspire and enrich our work.
A dream journal is an excellent way to record and consider your dreams. David Corbett wrote on here recently about his experiences with dream journaling.
Writing down your dreams just after you wake up is probably the best way to remember them, although your alarm clock won’t help much as an abrupt awakening can often wipe most of that dream clean […]
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A troubled teenage boy takes a claw hammer to the dry wall in the family’s living room. His reasoning is that he’s looking for the source of a drip. He knows there are pipes running through this wall, but he also knows they carry gas, not water, and so are unlikely to drip.
His parents are visiting his grandmother. He didn’t go because he argued that grandma was “boring” and “dumb,” and his mother and father, tired from so many such arguments, relented and let him stay home. He soon has a substantial hole in the wall, and his boots are grinding the crumbled plaster into the polished wooden floor.
I had to discuss this scene with the author as part of our ongoing editing and coaching program. I know that much of this person’s story is based on real events in his life, but he’s not writing “yet another misery memoir,” as he puts it. He wants to use techniques from fiction writing to give his narrative more of a structure and to introduce elements that he feels will make his point stronger.
This is autobiographical fiction, more commonly known as autofiction, and made popular in recent years with writers such as Rachel Cusk, Marguerite Duras and Karl Ove Knausgård. In an article for The Guardian newspaper, the author Nina Bouraoui described autofiction by saying that, “It may not be the absolute truth the author is telling, but it is her truth as she lived and experienced it.”
A version of truth
Not everyone is positive about the rise of autofiction. It is seen as the literary equivalent to a selfie Snapchat with filters, more evidence of increasing self-obsession rather than a genuine art form. But even memoir has struggled to be taken seriously as a genre, as the authors—especially if they are women—can be judged more for their experiences than for their writing.
And yet real life stories, or story based on real events, whether books or movies, have mass appeal, as publishers and Hollywood producers are aware. Could somebody really have lived through all these events in their life and survived, we wonder. And not only to survive but to still have the determination and persistence it takes to write several thousand words while reliving the experiences all over again. Who wouldn’t be impressed?
How much fiction enters into these stories varies widely. I worked with one author who wrote about her time as a teenage runaway in the context of a zombie apocalypse because that’s how she experienced it—everywhere she turned there was another predator wanting another piece of her. The conceit worked perfectly as a real-life zombie story.
Working with these authors takes on another dynamic too. When I’m editing fiction, I can be clear that I am talking about the words on the page. Any criticism is not personal but purely about the work. In that way, both the editor and the author can take some distance from anything that might have happened in the real world and objectively discuss the content of the novel, even if they are writing—as we are so often told—what they know.
The need for compassion
With autofiction, it’s a little different. It takes a touch more sensitivity along with a willingness from both the author and editor to […]
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It’s approaching that time of year when many of us reflect on what has passed in the last 12 months and what might come in the next.
But it’s not only at this time of year that we have thoughts of the future and what might or might not happen. What shall we have for dinner tonight? What shall we do this weekend? Where shall we go on vacation next year? Where do I see my career in five years’ time? Or, these days, maybe it’s more like: will we have a vacation next year?
Psychology is increasingly recognizing this preoccupation with the future and adapting and developing therapies to take our thoughts of the future into consideration. Previously, therapists were more concerned with our pasts—the relationship with your mother, for example. But current thinking sees that the real issues arise when we use past events to inform what might happen in the future.
Past experiences can give us a distorted view of the future. We make assumptions, wonder if it will happen again, what to do if it does. We can all recognize these situations where we start to tell our own stories about a future situation. “Next time, I won’t sit back and take it. I’ll tell him exactly what I think.”
These projections can lead to anxiety and avoidance behavior that can affect how we will act in the future, even before any such event has happened, something that might never happen.
Even if it’s something positive, something you’re really looking forward to, you can start to anticipate what will happen and have expectations that can lead to disappointment if the experience falls short.
Which is why we get advice about living in the moment, which, in this context, really just means that past events don’t need to affect how you behave now or in the future.
Page turners
But that’s easier said than done, of course, especially if this preoccupation with the future is such an intrinsic part of being human.
And this obsession with the future is reflected in stories too. Stories are all about what happens next. Where is this heading? Will Dorothy get home to Kansas? Will George Bailey realize how wonderful life really is and come back from the brink?
Literature—any art for that matter—is about exploring the challenges of the human condition, the things that make us uniquely human. And there are obvious examples of when literature examines our obsession with the future: in science fiction and dystopian and utopian novels.
But it could be argued that every novel is concerned with what will happen next and that a preoccupation with the future adds that element that—I would say—no story can do without: suspense.
That doesn’t mean waiting to find out who the killer is or if the hero will escape from the clutches of the evil antagonist. Suspense is present in every story to drive the narrative forward.
And suspense basically means offering the readers a question so that they will keep turning those pages to find the answer. There will be the overarching dramatic questions that drive the narrative right to the end: will Romeo and Juliet finally be together? Will Indy find the ark?
Crucial questions
To build suspense throughout the story, however, there needs to be a series of smaller questions, some […]
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When your readers engage with your novel, they go on a journey with your characters, through the twists and turns, the highs and lows. They gather up all the details as they go: our hero has two kids, her sister has vicious dog, her boss has been bankrupt twice, and we’re not sure if we can trust him this time either.
Readers take in these details as they go, almost like they’re gathering trinkets and storing them in the virtual backpack of their memory. The backpack gradually fills up as they make their way to the satisfactory (but, of course, not always happy) ending.
Problems can arise, however, when they get to that end and find that their backpack is full of things they didn’t need. We didn’t need to know the boss had been bankrupt before if his financial skills (or lack of them) don’t affect the main character. We don’t need to know anything about her sister’s dog if it doesn’t bite anyone or become tame as a result of some action in the narrative.
You don’t want to overburden your readers, so every detail has to count, and this is especially true of characters. Every one of them should have a role to play. Some characters are, of course, more significant than others, but each one – like each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence – should move your story forward in some way. Every character should affect the narrative and influence the actions of the main character(s).
Typical types
For those of you who have read some of the guidebooks on storytelling, you will probably have seen character roles described in terms of archetypes. Joseph Campbell, for example, talks about the trickster, shadow and shapeshifter in The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Many of these are based on the archetypes described by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. He saw them as characters that could be universally recognized and part of the ‘collective unconscious.’ He spoke about the shadow as representing the dark side of a personality. Tricksters are clever but play by their own rules.
And we see archetypes in all stories. Siblings, for example, especially a twin, but even a childhood friend, can help to show what the main character’s life could have been like under different circumstances. Dominick and Thomas in Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much is True is a stark example of this, where one twin suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.
Children in a story can represent innocence and/or the need to protect that innocence. Heroes will often put their own lives at risk to save a child. Older characters, meanwhile, are seen as mentor’s to the younger hero. Sirius and Dumbledore in the Harry Potter stories, for example.
Your characters don’t always have to fit to archetypes, but being aware of them can help you define your characters’ roles in the narrative.
Character needs
Another way to make sure you don’t have any surplus characters to weigh down your readers is to map their roles in the story. This method can be quick and useful if, for example, you’re busy with NaNoWriMo this month.
It works like this: imagine you (or your main character) had to leave home and live overseas for a couple of years. What would you miss while you’re away?
Most of us think […]
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I work with a writer who is in a refugee camp. She’s been there for a while (I don’t know exactly how long), and she’s been in a few others along the way (I don’t know where or how many).
As you can imagine, she’s heard many stories from the other refugees on her journey. Some are harrowing, some violent, some heart-wrenching, some laugh-out-loud funny. She has a little notebook where she writes down many of these stories, simply because she loves stories like some people love exquisite chess pieces or Civil War memorabilia. She collects them.
Some elements of these stories enter into her own writing. She takes little bits from this one and details from that and combines them to make another story. Fiction, right?
But sometimes I’m not sure.
Her current novel is about a woman who has spent several years in refugee camps. It’s a fictionalized version of her own life, she says. And it’s an amazing story. Really stunning.
I don’t know many details about her life. I don’t know how long she’s been a refugee, why she ended up in a camp for so long, or why she left her country. I don’t think that any of that is my business. My business is editing, so I concern myself with the story on the page and not the one she’s experienced.
Usually.
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Apologies in advance for the unpleasant imagery that follows.
Some years ago, I was traveling through Malaysia, and part of that meant a long bus journey. At one point, I really had to use the bathroom on the bus, but I’d been avoiding it the whole trip because I could smell that bathroom all the way to my seat near the front. But, as my old dad used to say, you cannot hold what is not in your hand. So, eventually, I had to go.
I tried to make the visit as short as I could – no longer than I could hold my breath. But that wasn’t short enough. In the moments I was in there, the bus took a sudden sharp corner. Physics took over and shifted the momentum to the back of the bus, concentrating its focus on me. I flew backwards through the bathroom door, breaking the thoroughly inadequate lock. I made enough noise as I went that it attracted the attention of everyone on the bus. Everyone. And I was in no state for an audience. But I had one anyway.
Although I can laugh about that story now, it remains a very embarrassing moment from my life. As I think back on it, picture myself there again, I can easily relive the sequence of emotions I went through. The shock, the surprise, the realization, the mortification, the contrition for what I’d put my fellow passengers (and now you) through, and my anger at the driver, the bus company, the tight corner and Newton’s laws of motion.
Memories
Most people recognize this idea of recalling an event that arouses the same feelings as in that past moment, even though you might be far removed from it now. This can be especially true of strong emotions. Remembering an argument, for example, can bring all that anger and frustration back again.
This can, of course, work for things you might not have a specific memory of. Imagine cutting open a lemon and biting right into it. Even if you’ve never done this, you can imagine the sensations you’d have in your mouth.
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Writers are fantasists. It’s pretty much part of the job description. Writers spend large parts of their days imagining scenarios, pondering what-ifs, and dreaming about stories and characters.
This fantasizing can spill over into real life too. Writers, like everyone else, envision new directions in their lives. We all have ambitions. We all have goals we’d like to achieve, whether it’s giving your Nobel acceptance speech or writing 500 words of your novel today.
And it feels good to imagine these things, to picture yourself on that podium or typing THE END on the last page of your book.
But imagining them and feeling good about achieving even relatively small ambitions doesn’t bring us any closer to actually achieving them. In fact, despite all the talk and self-help books about positive thinking, research by Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at NYU, has shown that positive thoughts alone are not enough and can actually detrimentally affect your chances of doing better in your career, your love life or even recovery from major surgery.
Does that mean it’s bad to fantasize about your future? No, says Professor Oettingen. It’s a good thing. It just needs to be tempered by a healthy dose of reality.
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A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was in a meeting to pitch his screenplay to a movie exec. My friend sold that plot with all the gusto he knew he needed in these rare moments. And he did well. He’d rehearsed that pitch till he could recite it backwards. On a tightrope. While juggling.
The exec was impressed. He picked up the screenplay from his desk and flicked through the pages. He turned to page 10. Not 8, 9, 11 or 12; 10. Then he turned to page 25. Again, not 24 or 26; 25. He put down the screenplay, the disappointment clear on his face.
“I don’t see the inciting incident or the shift to act two.” To this exec, the inciting incident comes 10% of the way into the story, and the main character crosses the threshold into act two at the 25% mark. No earlier, no later.
This is taking story structure to an extremely literal limit. It has to hit those beats, he reasoned, and it has to hit them at these exact times.
I wonder what this exec would have made of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. There, she sees the rabbit in paragraph two, by the fourth para, she’s down the rabbit hole. From inciting incident (seeing the rabbit) to crossing the threshold (going down the rabbit hole) in roughly the same amount of words as it’s taken me to get to this point in the article.
That’s how good a storyteller Lewis Carrol was.
But Carrol was writing at a time before there were whole libraries of books on story structure. The most popular among them being Story by Robert McKee, Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, my personal favorite, The Anatomy of Story by John Truby and The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler.
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I’ve been updating the house style guide for Arkbound Foundation, where I’m on the board of trustees, and for its publishing arm, Arkbound. This means I’ve been reading various style guides over the last few weeks. These are generally dry documents that detail the publisher’s preferred spelling, punctuation, layout, reference formatting and even grammar choices.
Almost every time I edit for a new corporate client, I have to read through their guide and make sure the style is applied consistently throughout all their publications. And I love it. I’m fascinated by these proclamations that can range from a single page to a book as thick as a bible.
The The and the The
The word “bible” is a good example of something you might find in a style guide. Some of them would insist that “bible” always gets an initial capital letter, others would say only when referring to a specific bible, such as the King James Bible. Another example is whether to capitalize the t in “the” in that last sentence: The King James Bible.
This gets us into the much debated territory of whether it should be The Beatles or the Beatles, especially, say proponents of the former, since The Beatles is a registered trademark. I always wonder if it’s then more correct to say that John Lennon was a The Beatle rather than state that he was a Beatle. The way around that, and more accurate, I’d say, would be: John Lennon was a member of The Beatles.
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