Posts by Kathryn Craft

Identifying and Crafting Your Inciting Incident

By Kathryn Craft / July 9, 2020 /

photo adapted / Horia Varlan

You are circulating at a gathering of fellow mountain climbers, listening in before joining the most interesting conversation.

Martha speaks: “Did I ever tell you about the time I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro at the age of sixty?”

(You think: Wow, there goes Martha again, bragging about her world travels and her fitness level. You keep walking.)

Dot speaks: “Did I ever tell you that when my husband died, just three weeks before our fortieth anniversary climb of Mt. Kilimanjaro, I went ahead and made the climb by myself?”

(Martha  may have one hapless listener pinned, but you and many others flock to Dot, questions already forming in your minds.)

What’s the difference? [I’ll give you a moment here to go back and compare the two.]

Martha had an idea she wanted to do something, and acted on it.

Dot had a desire to do something, then something unexpected happened to complicate that, so she set a new goal and made a plan to enact it.

In other words, Dot had a story to tell.

 

Inciting Incident, defined

A story exists because something happens in a character’s life—the inciting incident—that upsets her equilibrium and arouses her desire to restore balance. As the protagonist seeks a story goal that will restore that balance, a related story-worthy question is raised in the reader’s mind: can the protagonist achieve her goal? By arousing both the protagonist’s desires and the reader’s curiosity, this incident creates an emotional bond between protagonist and reader that, if successful, will last until the goal is met and the question resolved at book’s end.

What this means for you: The story you write will start rocking and rolling—literally—when something happens to your protagonist that will rock her expectations in a way that requires her to start rolling: she’ll reshuffle priorities, set a new goal, and then create a plan to achieve it.

Is this important? Hell yeah. Look at the crowd reaction when Dot spoke! You want readers flocking to you, right?

They will hang with Dot’s story because they want to know: Will sixty-year-old, grieving Dot be able to complete the climb? And that won’t be their only question. They’ll also want to know: Why on earth did she do it? How did she summon the fortitude? What was it like? How did the climb change her?

And most importantly, the readers will ponder: If Dot could do it, could I?

Create that bond with your reader—through inciting incident, story goal, and story question—and your reader will want to stick with your book till the end.

Compare that to the question raised by Martha—oops, wait, there isn’t one. She already told us she made it. She hasn’t piqued our curiosity about her adventure.

 

Why bother identifying your inciting incident?

Determining the inciting incident is important to creating a strong, thoroughly interwoven story. Your first draft may have evolved from your imaginative meanderings, but your success at organizing story events into a structural spine that raises, dashes, and rewards expectation will determine how closely the reader will connect with it.

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6 Ways to Incorporate a Dash of Foreign Language

By Kathryn Craft / June 11, 2020 /

photo adapted / Horia Varlan

After speaking English for soixante-trois ans, I am learning French. This is a particular challenge for me, because while my eighth-grade classmates were flocking in droves toward French, I was drawn to the challenge of learning a new alphabet. So I took Russian, continuing in college for a total of семь лет. I still have the Slavic rolled “r” positioned against my hard palate, forgetting to send it throat-ward for the gargle needed in French.

At long last, I understand the linguistic challenge faced by Dmitri DeLaval, the Russian-French choreographer I created in my debut novel, The Art of Falling. Dmitri: my humblest apologies.

Yet this new experience with language has me thinking differently about the manuscripts I edit.

Let me pause here to ask for a moment of self-reflection. When you hear someone struggling to speak in a language different than the one s/he grew up speaking, do you perceive them as:

1) having an intelligence equal to the sum of their errant syllables, or as

2) someone who is courageously wielding sounds that will never feel at home on their tongue so that they might communicate with a broader range of humans?

Knowing the Unboxed community to be an empathetic bunch, I’m going to hope you answered (2). The people you meet—and the characters you create—deserve this respect.

I breen dees up becoss I keep seen manuscripts wit dialogue ware ebbry syllable ees transcribed ass eet woss herd—complete with unnecessary misspellings. Unfortunately, in what I’d like to believe was a good-hearted attempt to make a cast of characters more diverse, such dialogue comes across as mockery.

Clearly, not everyone has gotten the memo: this approach is no longer cool. Yet if you want to effectively evoke a multicultural cast, how can you pull that off?

Let’s turn to the mad skills of some published authors who’ve successfully negotiated this challenge.

 

1. Distort idioms. When I googled why English is so hard to learn, the first thing that came up was the vast range, variety, and unpredictability of English idioms. Botched idioms are a relatable way to suggest that a character is not a native speaker, one that Jill A. Davis makes good use of in her debut novel, Girls’ Poker Night, through a secondary character named Skorka.

While Skorka does drop in the odd article now and then, she mostly messes up on the idioms. (You’ll note, however, she has the cuss words down pat.) Among them:

“No, you like the hard life, that’s why you work for the a**hole. Before that, you worked for some other a**hole. You want to hit the head against the wall.”

. . .

“I’m pumping more money into this economy than you are. Who gives a f*** if I speak the language of the green moon mans?”

While the other women sit at the poker table, Skorka gets up to slow dance by herself with her cards spread in a fan, blowing smoke rings and drinking tequila from a bottle. “It’s the kind of thing you can do when you’re a model,” our narrator says.

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8 Ways to Unblock Your Scene’s Potential

By Kathryn Craft / May 14, 2020 /

photo adapted / Horia Varlan

The verdict is in: one of the most important scenes in your story has fallen flat, and you’ve been told to either deepen it or cut it.

As an editor, I’ve attached that note to a number of scenes one might expect to be inherently dramatic—among them, funerals, weddings, childbirths, battles, and first sexual encounters. But even as expectation runs high—as a reader, I’m right where the author wants me to be—the author loses his path into story while unspooling generic action.

To deepen the scene you’ll need to dig for the specific, story-relevant drama lurking beneath your breezy treatment. These eight questions will point you in the right direction. I’ll use a funeral as my example, because, duh. Digging.

1. What might you be assuming? That people would be sad at a funeral is so widely assumed, in the manuscripts I see, that writers just drop their characters at the church door and open the waterworks—sometimes right on page one, when we readers are trying to orient ourselves to character and story. Is the cryer woebegone, or faking it? We have no way of knowing. What makes one character cry might make another scoff, or laugh. It’s up to you to build both character and context, because in fiction, nothing can be assumed.

2. Can you sink deeper into your character’s perspective? Perspective provides the memorable blade that will cut into your story and free its secrets. Set aside for a minute all those things you-as-author feel your reader must know, and think about what your point-of-view character is compelled to seek. Why did your character come to the funeral? List all the reasons. There will be more than you think. Which reason might you be side-stepping? The oddest, most insignificant reason might end up being the most revealing, and the most interesting to your story. Once you decide the thing your character wanted most from that funeral, create an obstacle that will make goal attainment nearly impossible—then show us what he’s made of. Develop your character’s unique perspective through backstory motivation, inciting incident, dark moment, climactic fight—these structures comprise the core of the drama in a scene as well as in the overall story.

3. Why are you blocked about revising this scene? Consider asking the spirit of someone you know who has died. (I’m not suggesting a séance, but have at it if you want—and report back!). This is simply a way to leap beyond the limits of your perspective and adopt the sensibility of someone who no longer fears his mortality. When I ask such questions of fictional characters, I like taking down their answers longhand, in in first-person voice, as if their message is flowing right through me and into a journal. The revelation may be eye-opening—and ultimately, freeing.

4. What might be seen better from afar? Try writing “about” the scene from a greater distance. Not in the POV of the character caught in the clutches of inner turmoil, but a person who’d been driving through the cemetery, perhaps, and caught sight of the funeral. What begged this watcher’s interest, to the point that he was compelled to pull over to sate his curiosity? He now stands at the top of the […]

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Delivering the Ring of Truth

By Kathryn Craft / April 9, 2020 /

photo adapted / Horia Varlan

My engagement was memorable to owners of jewelry stores within a two-hour driving radius of my home. I’m no celebrity, but apparently I’m a well-recognized…type. As unforgettable as the feel of grit on sandpaper, some might say. I didn’t set out to earn a reputation. I’m simply a person who struggles to find meaning, and since there isn’t an occasion more meaningful than a wedding, I struggled a lot. In public.

Perhaps the jewelers would have been more empathetic if I’d told them the whole story—that I’d done this all before, eighteen years ago. That it hadn’t ended so well. That my new beau recognized me as a potential life partner right away through the newfound honesty with which I expressed my vision for my life—a vision that almost word-for-word echoed thoughts he had written down himself, years before. With that knowledge, certainly anyone could understand my need to find the perfect ring, right? Past childbearing age, why remarry at all unless the union adds meaning to your life?

Since the average length of each store visit was already bumping the one-hour mark, I spared jewelers the narrative and picked my way through dozens of rings that any less demanding woman, they’d quietly inform me, would be thrilled to own. Dating had offered a similar quandary—it’s hard to find the right one when you have no idea what “the right one” looks like. The ubiquitous answer: you know love when you find it.

I loved my first engagement ring, a round-cut diamond with two smaller stones on either side, and kept finding myself attracted to similar rings. But wasn’t this why I’d sought therapy after my first husband’s suicide? To break the habit of seeking out the same old relationships? I forced myself to look at styles to which I’d never before been attracted—marquis and pear cuts, unusual shapes that required a matching band, estate jewelry, different kinds of stones.

While shopping for rings that spring of 2000, one exasperated chain store owner told me to come back later—much later, in July—for his setting event, when he would have a thousand different settings to choose from. “It’s your only hope,” he’d said with a smirk. Dave and I had planned a September wedding—call me old-fashioned, but I’d been hoping to have the ring on my finger for longer than two months.

“If only you could describe the ring to me,” said another, plopping down a pile of catalogs. If only. I half-heartedly flipped through one of them. I knew one thing—I wouldn’t find it on paper.

Weeks later, I was trying even my own patience. Dave had asked me to marry him in March, and we were coming up on May. While telling those who knew my story that I’d gotten engaged, I’d been touched to see their faces light up with hope for my sons and me, but the “Let me see your ring” part was getting old. I began to see a “setting event”—or two, or three—in my future.

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Let Your Protagonist’s Light Shine

By Kathryn Craft / March 12, 2020 /

photo adapted / Horia Varlan

A novel’s protagonist is the reader’s gateway into the experience of your story.

As with all things creative, there’s no one perfect way to construct that gateway. We just want the protagonist to show us why this story matters. Let’s dissect a few alternative approaches for the attributes that are bound to be most convincing—this character’s motivation, a compelling desire, a goal-oriented perspective, and an inner conflict that is itching to be resolved.

 

1. Show your protagonist in scene on page one.

It is generally accepted that while actively scanning for orientation to your story, your reader will latch onto the point-of-view character you present first. Lisa Barr, in her award-winning novel Fugitive Colors, will show us how this is done—in a prologue, no less. It opens in Chicago:

Yakov Klein slowly ran his finger over the cover of the art book he was about to steal from the library, as a burglar would a precious jewel just snatched from a glass case. Pressing the book to his face, he inhaled the familiar dusty scent of his latest prize: Gustav Kilmt. It was a delicious moment, but one he would have to savor later, in the secrecy of his bedroom once the lights were out and his parents were sleeping. Right now, he had to get out of the library without getting caught.

Right away, Lisa uses sense imagery to evoke within us Yakov’s own forbidden desire. The last sentence attaches stakes to his scene goal. Even without yet knowing why we should care, we are wondering: can he get away with this?

In the next paragraph we see him tuck the book beneath his overcoat and make a beeline to the exit. Then:

From the corner of his eye. Yakov saw a little girl, no more than five, holding her mother’s hand and watching him. He knew what she saw—what everyone saw when they looked at him—the long black wool coat, the tall black silk hat that was still too big, and the payis—long sidelocks—that Jewish custom had required him to grow his whole life. It was a uniform borne of a different century. Yakov, son of Benjamin, raised as an Orthodox Jew, wore some version of the same clothing every day—black and white, a wardrobe devoid of color or change—and he hated it.

That’s why he stole the art book. If truth were told, that was why he had been stealing art books since the week after his bar mitzvah, nine months earlier. He desperately needed color.

Ah, motivation revealed. And “Yakov, son of Benjamin” extends the shame of getting caught to his family as well. Especially since he’s the only child of Benjamin—through overheard arguments, Yakov knows that his mother deals with the shame of being unable to give her husband more children. Then she discovers his sketches.

“I’m afraid for you, Yakov.”

“Don’t be,” he said, sitting up straight, knowing she hated when he slouched. “I’m not afraid.”

“But your father…and the rabbi. It is forbidden. The drawing. You need to study your Torah.” His mother’s tone was stern but her gaze was milky and far away. “You are too young to understand. But passion, dreams of something else, something better—can destroy.” Silent, slow-moving tears began to […]

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7 Ways to Overcome Story Implausibility

By Kathryn Craft / February 13, 2020 /

photo adapted / Horia Varlan

While preparing last month’s post with examples from Cutting for Stone, I was once again awed by author Abraham Verghese’s ability to help readers suspend disbelief. I mean seriously, the story’s opening 131 pages are devoted to the main character, Marion, sharing the circumstances of his own birth in amazing detail. Can you recall yours…at all?

As the novel continues, Marion serves as both a first-person protagonist and the narrator of events to which he was not privy. He even relates intimate moments between his parents from before his birth, even though his mother died in childbirth and his father took off, making it impossible for either of them to fill in these blanks.

You know darn well that if it were your manuscript, your critique group would have written “POV breach” written all over it. So how did Verghese pull off this narration—not only believably, but so successfully that his debut novel remained on the New York Times bestseller list for two years?

Much of the craft here touches on “lampshading,” which refers to a variety of techniques that allow the author to preempt the reader’s anticipated accusations of implausibility.

1. Support believability with indisputable detail. From the first sentence of the prologue, Verghese is intentional in the way he delivers his narrator’s implausible perspective.

After eight months spent in the obscurity of our mother’s womb, my brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths at an elevation of eight thousand feet in the thin air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia.

Who will argue with his knowledge of his mother’s womb, among so many other verifiable facts?

2. Share the narrator’s mission. Doing so substantiates the narrator’s presence as the necessary way to tell this story. At the end of Verghese’s prologue, Marion does so with these inspiring words:

What I owe Shiva most is this: to tell the story. It is one my mother, Sister Mary Praise, did not reveal and my fearless father, Thomas Stone, ran from, and which I had to piece together. Only the telling can heal the rift that separates my brother and me. Yes, I have infinite faith in the craft of surgery, but no surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed. To begin at the beginning…

3. Admit that some of the tale is born of imagination. After a factual paragraph about Sister Mary Praise’s arrival from India—in her POV, a good seven years prior to Marion’s birth!—Verghese qualifies Marion’s narration by suggesting that some of his story is imagined:

In my mind’s eye I can see the novitiates lining the quay, chattering and trembling with excitement and emotion, their white habits flapping in the breeze, the seagulls hopping around their sandaled feet.

4. Reveal research. To support the reader’s suspension of disbelief, our narrator tells us how he traveled to Madras, where archived papers gave him a sense of his mother’s life in the convent.

5. Raise questions that inspired these imaginings. Here, our narrator is admitting he doesn’t know the whole tale:

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Bridging Temporal Story Gaps

By Kathryn Craft / January 9, 2020 /

photo adapted / Horia Varlan

Slowing and speeding up time can effectively enhance our stories, as my last post showed. It seems apt that this January post should discuss the mechanics of such manipulation. Just nine days ago felt like last year!

First, a confession. When I attempted my first novel, I wrote down everything my protagonist did, every hour of every day. How she woke up (oh, how I varied it—alarm clock! Rooster! Someone barging into her room!). Everything she ate (conflict—she didn’t cook!). You get the picture (oh how I overwrote, when the reader might have gotten the picture with only two examples!). But I had to start somewhere to get a sense of what it’s like to move through story in a world of your creation, and I did.

I’m not alone. In my work as a developmental editor I see a lot of clunky handling of time, so let’s look at some ways to bridge awkward time gaps that might be introduced once you pull all the non-crucial elements from your story.

Physically, a gap in time is represented by a gap on the page: a line break, chapter break, or section break (Part One, Book Two, etc.). But since every break in your novel is an opportunity for the reader to set down your book, you’ll want to take care with how you set it up. Let me show you how.

[Note paragraph break here, introducing a gap that might inspire you to set down this post. But I have raised a question, and if you want the answer to it, you’ll keep reading.]

 

Raise question, insert gap, woo reader

Bridging the gap involves raising a question to which the reader wants an answer, inserting the gap, and then wooing the reader back with a line as effective as the opening of your book. Think of this as a literal bridge, with tension suspending a path back into the story. Re-orient the reader as you hit new territory on the other side, so the reader knows where the characters now are in time and space.

Let’s look at examples from Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, a novel that spans four decades and two continents.

The opening is devoted to the harrowing delivery of twin brothers at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—131 pages of it. That is a long trip down the birth canal! The excessive word count—nearly one-sixth of the novel—shows us that the drama surrounding this birth is at the core of the story. The medically squeamish will be happy to hear that wound through the delivery story are threads that show the convergence of important characters and their backstories in a way that will set up the story’s seminal relationships.

After a prologue gets things humming, Verghese revisits how the mother, a nun, and the father, a psychologically disturbed yet brilliant surgeon, met and grew close. Backstory is an element that introduces a time gap, so let’s see how Verghese ramped back up to the current timeline:

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Manipulating Story Time for Maximal Effect

By Kathryn Craft / December 12, 2019 /

photo adapted / Horia Varlan

Time is a trickster.

It expands and contracts, often against our will. This observation holds so much truth about the human condition that I urge you to think carefully about how it affects the characters in your work-in-progress.

In thinking about how to structure a novel about my first husband’s suicide standoff, one truth kept coming to light: my life would be forever divided by “before the suicide” and “after the suicide.” To underscore that effect, I wanted to structure the story within the standoff’s twelve hours.

As a sophomore novelist, I had no clue whether I could pull that off. It wasn’t until I read something by Sarah Pekkanen that I gained the needed insight to give it a try. While Pekkanen has published eight works of women’s fiction as well as several thrillers with Greer Hendricks, it wasn’t a novel that clued me into the mad skill I sought: it was her feature article about the shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School that ran in the Baltimore Sun back in 1999.

While I urge you to read the whole article when you can, here is my highlight reel as to why Pekkanen’s manipulation of time was so effective.

 

How and why to manipulate time

Set expectation. Pekkanen’s opening paragraph puts a focus on imminent change and the passage of time (emphasis mine):

A boy could hide in Columbine High School. Let others choose colleges, majors, futures. Senior Adam Foss drove fast, pulled pranks and drifted towards graduation. School was a lark, life a good time. Then the halls erupted with gunshots. The killers were outside the choir room. Panicked students needed help. Who could they turn to? “In here!” Adam shouted. He herded them into an empty office. They waited. They prayed. And in those hours, an aimless boy discovered himself.

Deepen characterization. By telescoping between hijinks that day to pranks throughout high school, the next dozen paragraphs characterize her main character, Adam, as a senior whose true leadership potential hides beneath a fast-driving James Bond persona. In fact, his nickname is “007.”

Explore the effects of shock. Time speeds to a blur in the next dozen paragraphs as the first shots were heard. Adam is shown at the door of the choir room, witnessing the death of a teacher out in the hallway—and in that moment, on instinct, he shuts the door on the rampage and herds everyone into the choir director’s office. Time splits as others freeze in horror:

Adam didn’t hesitate. He lifted a girl out of her seat and carried her to Mr. Andres’ office.

Adam glanced around the choir room. No one was left. He squeezed into the office and shut the door.

Evoke the struggle against helplessness. Time slows to a suffocating choke inside that office. For the next ten paragraphs, the students try to avoid detection while “a steady thunder of gunshots” come from the library:

The tiny, unventilated room filled with gasps and sobs. Just 8 by 12 feet, the space couldn’t comfortably hold 20 people. Fifty-eight were crammed inside.

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Career Writers: Embrace Paradox

By Kathryn Craft / November 14, 2019 /

photo adapted / Horia Varlan

At the Writer UnBoxed UnConference last week, I led a session in which we explored emotional strategies that would keep writers in good stead for the long haul. Of the many we discussed, the necessity of embracing paradox struck a fresh chord with those present, so I thought I’d expand on that in today’s post.

To embrace paradox means to hold diametrically opposed concepts as equally true. Wisdom literature is rife with paradox, suggesting that we receive through giving, gain through losing, and live through dying. “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it,” said Mahatma Ghandi. Experienced writers have personal experience with this truth. Comedians make use of the inherent absurdity of paradox all the time, from Ellen DeGeneres’s “Procrastinate now. Don’t put it off,” to George Carlin’s “If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?”

As a literary device, a paradox asks the reader to puzzle through a challenging concept. Consider these examples:

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” This statement from George Orwell’s Animal Farm certainly has the sting of political truth about it.

“The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb,” from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, makes us think about the way nature both gives and takes away life.

“Child is the father of the man”—this phrase from William Wordsworth is a concise way of saying that all childhood experiences lay the groundwork for our future lives; in that way our childhoods “father” us as adults.

As a reader, does encountering paradox excite you or make you toss your literary cookies and run for the hills? As a career writer, you’d best make friends with it, because the writer’s life is full of paradox. A few for your consideration:

Writers must have intense focus but breadth of perception.

Writers must believe in their salability even as they receive rejection after rejection.

 Published writers must believe in their worth, yet few will receive life-sustaining paychecks.

 Fiction writers make things up to seek the truth.

 Authors must invest fully in creating and promoting their product while detaching from its commercial and critical success.

Sound crazymaking? It’s the way of paradox. Yet creatives are well suited to its challenges; we are used to being both “this and that.” In any one writing session we might be both mother and child, healer and destroyer. A powerful wizard or a humble shoemaker.

If this much paradox feels overwhelming, start with the basics.

 

Start with these crucial paradoxes

As concerns the inner wars of a writer, two seem universal.

1) The ongoing fight for dominance between your creative innocence and your inner critic.

Because our need for creativity is self-evident, our poor inner critics have been demonized to the point that many speak of switching off this valuable creative partner while drafting. I only suggest doing so if you are truly stuck in the mire of perfectionism. Without the influence of your inner critic, you might amass plenty of black marks on previously white pages, but did any of them create words that point you into the depths of your story? Despite our need to quantify progress and slap something down on the page, word count is not our ultimate goal. […]

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12 Signs You’re Afraid of Your WIP

By Kathryn Craft / October 10, 2019 /

photo adapted / Horia Varlan

Writers are regularly intimidated by what might seem the oddest thing: the work that springs from their own minds. If you have days when you seek a reason to do anything but write, you may be one of them.

Not because you’re suddenly dragging your feet—but because, in one or more small ways, you started dragging them long ago. If that’s the problem, soldiering on may not net the best results.

(Full disclosure, I just read the exact opposite advice on Facebook today—“keeping your writing momentum is key”—but hang with me. If lack of story impulsion has already brought you to a dead stop, why not let your manuscript show you how to move forward?)

Re-read what you’ve written so far. If it reinvigorates you and impels you forward, problem solved! Chances are, though, the writing itself may reveal your reluctance to drive deep into the heart of your story’s conflict.

Know that you are not alone. Denying fear is so common that you may not realize it has been a problem—until you start flagging the following for further analysis.

Is fear holding you back? Here is your early detection guide.

  • Story withholding instead of storytelling. Writers who fear pushing forward convince themselves that if they don’t tell parts of the story, the reader will be dying to know by the time they get around to surprising them at the end—but by then the reader may be long gone. The reader needs story to get hooked by it. A useful adage: Put your best material up front, and the rest will live up to it.
  • Detection Q: Are you laying down story that raises questions, or might you be withholding story from your reader—and yourself?

  • Repetition/reiteration. Detectives in mysteries reflect on clues, politicians in thrillers analyze strategy, lovers in romance sort through their emotions—but the right to reflect must be earned, and only when a new clue forces the protagonist to reassess everything she once thought was true. Driving the story forward in a cause-and-effect chain will remove excessive plot re-hashing born of the author’s need to remind, because everything will become more memorable.
  • Detection Q: Did your character really need that episode of “where we are now in this story” to move forward—or did you need it, to spur you on? (In which case you can remove it)

  • Bland dialogue and associated beats. Since “I told you not to call me anymore” is a decidedly more interesting way to answer the phone, maybe keep “Hello?” for when your character has a gun to her head and she is being ordered to answer normally. Don’t fear all that edginess Emily Post, the Scouts, and your mother tried to iron out of you.
  • Detection Q: Is your character speaking while running his hand through his hair just because you’ve seen something like that before (so has your reader—too often), or is that dialogue needed to increase tension, reveal character, and further story?

  • Prose bloating. Don’t make the reader to sift through buckets of words and overlapping sentences to find a dramatic nugget because you fear building a gold mine. Instead, research “gold mining.”
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    “Showing” through Exposition: A Study

    By Kathryn Craft / September 12, 2019 /

    photo adapted / Horia Varlan

    When writing teachers say “show, don’t tell,” they typically suggest doing so through dialogue, action, and sense imagery. Exposition, on the other hand—the writing that contextualizes the more active aspects of scene, and is often thought of as mere connective tissue—is often pointed to as “telling.” After all, its etymology is from the Latin exponere, which means “explain.”

    If a reader wanted to be lectured, he’d probably choose nonfiction. Fiction fans love to add things up in their own minds. They rarely want their stories explained.

    But exponere can also mean “expose.” When a woman exposes her body to a lover, do you suspect there’ll be a whole lot of explaining going on? [Except in Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls, that is, where such “explaining” is used to comic effect. In one scene, Dr. Kellogg, a man experienced with the deflowering of virgins, is speaking to the young supplicant (our POV character) lying naked on his bed. “Forgive me if my hands are cold, Vivian, but I’m going to begin touching you now.” She finally kisses him to make him shut up. Ha!]

    Clearly, exposition can either show or tell, or pull off both, which does not make things clear at all for the studious writer.

    Take the opening of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, often misremembered as “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” By applying his value judgment, the author is telling you about the times.

    But the actual first sentence is:

    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

    Within the context of the whole, the best of times/worst of times paradox—that on its own had felt like telling—becomes the first of many paradoxes, whose accumulation “shows” that only superlatives can define the period.

    But stories have changed since 1859. Who knows if today’s publishers would let a writer like Dickens through their gates? So let’s look at a New York Times Notable Book that was published in 2001: How to be Good by Nick Hornby. The novel starts with the following first-person observation. Is it telling, or showing?

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    Give Your Reader an Experience

    By Kathryn Craft / August 8, 2019 /

    photo adapted / Horia Varlan

    Our earliest attempts to fill a fresh, daunting expanse of novel-length white can be a bit like choosing crayons. We want colors that will show what our characters look like, how they feel, what they think about this or that. We want to fill in all the details about where they live and work. But this first rush to deliver a story world, if left in place, can inadvertently create a problem on the receiving end. Those colorful blocks of overwritten description, which should be intended to invite the reader into your story, can end up creating a wall that keeps her out.

    To fix this in subsequent drafts, think “active sketching” instead of “ham-fisted coloring.” Harness the most crucial details to tell your story and put them to work—and leave some white on the page so the reader can fill in the rest.

    There are many ways to do this. Consider the way a simple comparison engages the reader’s associative powers, as in this passage from Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. A lone naturalist studying coyotes on a mountain crosses paths with an armed man on one of her daily rounds. He sees her first—he’s caught her sniffing a stump for an animal’s scent. He speaks:

    Eddie Bondo.”

    “Good Lord,” she said, able to breathe out finally. “I didn’t ask your name.”

    “You need to know it, though.”

    Cocky, she thought. Or cocked, rather. Like a rifle, ready to go off.

    We’ll get more of a description later. Here, Kingsolver’s short, evocative passage asks the reader to contribute her considerable life experience to make quick sense of the situation. Just like the character had to. But there’s more going on here than the metaphor. The chop of the man’s two-word sentence underscores the woman’s shock; that those words name him bring this stranger fully into the story. She is going to have to deal with Eddie Bondo.

     

    Guide the reader toward understanding

    Don’t worry that you’re asking the reader to do your job for you—you’re still in charge of your story world. But you can choose to be a guide rather than a dictator. To beg the reader’s participation, you need only leave some gaps in your wall of words so the reader can fully immerse in your story.

    This sensibility can be incorporated into all kinds of writing. Even in genres like science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction, where you are building worlds in which the reader has never lived, you can still ask your reader to tap common human experience for meaning.

    To illustrate  today’s mad skill I turn again to Prodigal Summer. Rather than offer up an early, static look at where the naturalist lives on this mountain—as she may well have, on her first draft—Kingsolver holds off describing her cabin until p. 27, when its details can be used to further the story.

    This first look at the character’s personal space accomplishes so much. . It also contains so much of the story’s DNA that it could almost have been its opening. Let’s see if you can tell what’s going on.

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    Writing Book Club Fiction: What 5 Reading Guide Questions Can Teach Us

    By Kathryn Craft / July 11, 2019 /

    photo adapted / Horia Varlan

    Long before I started writing fiction, I belonged to numerous book clubs. For me, adding book-centered conversation to a glass of wine, snacks, and the chance to poke around in a neighbor’s house creates a perfect social event. Yet 90 million Goodreads members and the plethora of online reading groups suggest that many don’t even require an in-person component. They just want to connect over the books they’ve read.

    In order to earn a piece of the book-club audience, which has the potential to serve as a a word-of-mouth marketing machine for novelists, I look here at some of my favorite questions from reading guides to glean what I can about how to meet the needs of of readers who hope a novel will generate great discussion.

    Let’s give them something to talk about, shall we?

  • “What interested you about the protagonist’s unique perspective?”
  • One of the things fiction does so brilliantly is to allow you to walk for a while in someone else’s shoes. Think The Girls by Lori Lansens, told in the alternating voices of conjoined twins. Or Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, narrated by Death.

    I’ll never forget the third club in which I discussed Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain, told from the perspective of an evolved dog who has observed crucial information for his beloved human, Denny, yet cannot effectively communicate it. At one point, a book club member who was profoundly deaf, and struggling to keep up with our excited chatter, waved his hands to get our attention. We looked over at him as one, as if surprised he wanted to speak. Forcing a vocalization, he said, “I am the dog.” Had goosebumps then, and have them again now while typing this—it was a powerful moment.

    Book club members want a chance to look at life in a new way. How will your protagonist’s unique perspective help them do that?

     

  • “Which character did you relate to the most?”
  • To inspire this discussion, consider orchestrating your character set around a timely or meaningful theme. One of my favorite examples of this is John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, whose cast is orchestrated around a woman’s reproductive rights. It features middle-of-the-roader Dr. Larch, who both performs abortions and raises unwanted children; pro-lifer Homer, one of the abandoned children and Larch’s reluctant apprentice; Homer’s love interest, who came to end her pregnancy; and the incest victim that inspires Homer to perform his first “in extreme circumstances” abortion. By giving us deep access to a range of characters we can relate to, such stories help us learn more about ourselves.

     

  • “How did the story’s developing drama reflect something the protagonist was already wrestling with at the opening?”
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    When Something Good Incites Story

    By Kathryn Craft / June 13, 2019 /

    photo adapted / Horia Varlan

    A story arc is launched when something happens to a protagonist that knocks her off her rails. Life did not go as expected this day, and in fact, life may never seem the same again. You may call this event something else, but I use the common term “inciting incident” because it makes sense to me—this is the incident that incites the main character to create a story goal. In pursuit of the goal, the story action begins.

    Authors in every genre have put all manner of hurt on our poor characters in such a scene. Frank L. Baum sent Dorothy Gale’s Kansas home over the rainbow to squish the Wicked Witch of the West in the Land of Oz. In Good in Bed, Jennifer Weiner had Cannie Shapiro discover that her skinny, pothead ex-boyfriend was now writing a major magazine column about what it was like sleeping with a fat girl—her. In The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Katniss’s beloved younger sister, Prim, is randomly chosen to participate in a televised fight to the death.

    I am one of those authors. In my novel The Far End of Happy, a woman who is at the end of her rope in trying to help her husband end the destructive behaviors threatening their family, prepares for the day that he promises to leave—all the while adding up the disturbing clues that this is the day he plans to die.

    When a character butts up against an unexpected horror, it’s easy to see why life might never be the same for them.

    But what about when life provides an unexpected turn of good fortune? The world is full of entitled leaders and suicidal celebrities to serve as examples: when we suffer a windfall, we don’t always negotiate it well. Such “be careful what you wish for” tales can be equally as compelling, and yet in preparing this post, I noted I have very few on my overstuffed shelves. (“Woman Killed by Tipping Bookshelf”—did she suffer a horror, or a windfall?)

    That’s one reason why reading The Overdue Life of Amy Byler by Kelly Harms was such an unexpected delight. Amy is a librarian and mother of two teens, and though overworked and stressed, has been managing as a single mom the past three years after her husband went abroad on a business trip, “forgot to come home, and has been living with a much-younger Korean woman. In the opening, she bumps into her husband in her local drug store. As she cowers behind an end-cap display of Q-tips, she struggles to pull herself together:

    One time, only a few weeks after he left us, I thought I saw a John-shaped man in the back of a car with a ride-sharing label on it turning onto our street, and I got this absolutely certain feeling, the feeling of just knowing, and my blood began to race through my veins, and I felt like, I don’t know, lie I had been trapped in a canyon without food or water, and now someone was coming with a rope ladder to save me.I pulled over and water for the car to pull into the driveway. But it didn’t. It passed right by while I sat […]

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