Posts by Kathryn Craft
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
To write a novel is to invite your reader on a journey. Once she gets to the station for departure, don’t expect her to be satisfied watching the train sit on the tracks. Or taking a tour of its cars. Or watching its engine be tugged from track to track, unsure of its role. And you certainly don’t want her settling into a comfortable seat where she can snooze! Invite her to join your protagonist right in the engine, where she can feel its power drive them forward onto the tracks that will take them all the way to the protagonist’s final turning point at the climax.
The story won’t really start cooking until the incident that knocks your character off his rails and incites him to set a story goal, as that will launch his trajectory through the story. Throughout your opening, you want to head purposefully toward that moment.
“Bridging conflict” can span the distance from opening to inciting incident—and what that means for your character is that he needs to arrive on page one with an intermediate goal. A goal will orient both protagonist and reader to the opening scene by directing your character’s intentions and revealing his perspective. Along the way, the reader will get to know him.
Create a good bridging conflict
Here are a few tips for creating good bridging conflict. Your guiding image: a bridge is strongest when it spans a short gap.
1. Create a goal that is close to being met.
Let’s say your character, Bonnie, takes art lessons because one day she wants to see her work hanging in the Louvre. That goal is distant, achieved by only a select few, and perhaps unattainable. Bonnie’s pursuit of it while taking “Sketching for Beginners” is vague, since we don’t know why she desires it. We don’t get a sense of what the stakes are if she doesn’t make it. We won’t invest in her pie-in-the-sky goal because it will be too hard to assess how Bonnie’s doing on her path toward it, so we’ll fail to bond with her. And let’s say you interweave Bonnie’s pie-in-the-sky opening with a second chapter in the POV of an antagonist determined to do her harm. Problem: we may end up liking him more, simply because his goal-oriented behavior makes him more relatable.
2. Clue us in on immediate stakes should your protagonist fail.
You’ve revised: Maybe Bonnie’s father, who just died, was an artist and she wants to uphold the family name. Maybe a memorial exhibition will be held next year that will tour the country, and she is desperate to have a piece in that show. Closing the gap further: maybe Bonnie is already technically accomplished, but is simply floundering for inspiration. If she fails to come up with a good idea she’ll miss out—not only on the opportunity to contribute to her father’s memorial exhibition, but also to gain the spotlight that could establish her as his heir apparent in the national arts scene.
3. Add more pressure.
Try closing the gap more. Maybe she not only promised the work, but publicity has already gone out featuring its name, “The Colors of my Father.” And the show is next […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Many aspiring novelists learn their craft by first writing short stories. This makes oodles of sense: the character’s goal is more immediate, its complications are fewer, and the supporting cast is more manageable. With the end never far from sight, its layers are easier to interweave. I’ve so believed in this logic that, over the past twenty years, I’ve accumulated way too many short story collections.
Why “too many”? Because despite my best intentions, I don’t read them. It goes something like this: I’ll read one story, say something to myself like “huh,” then look at the clock. And then I’ll think, “Damn, I could be forty-five minutes into a novel by now.”
This is a shameful admission, but what can I say—that’s how much I love the long form.
Only one collection stayed on my nightstand past the typical one-story cut: The Stories of John Cheever.
The collection came to me as part of a thoughtful Christmas gift. After hearing that my writing-heavy, high-school-English track had not introduced me to many of the must-read classics, my stepson, himself a high-school teacher, gifted me a bundle—Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Steinbeck’s The Pearl, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Updike’s Rabbit, Run—and among them was the surprise addition of the Cheever collection.
Cheever had already been gone from this world a good twenty years before I discovered him (just think on that a moment—wouldn’t you love to leave such a legacy?), but I immediately sensed that the man was telling stories from my life.
This at once both pissed off and excited me.
To wit:
“Goodbye, My Brother”
I adore this story, which begins:
We are a family who has always been very close in spirit. Our father was drowned in a sailing accident when we were young, and our mother has always stressed the fact that our familial relationships have a kind of permanence that we will never meet with again.
The narrator’s family has four children, one of whom is a black sheep, but despite their differences, an inexorable pull brings them back together at the same vacation spot each year. In the year of the story, push comes to shove.
My family had five children, “black sheep” being more of a floating determination, but despite our differences, an inexorable pull still brings us back together at the same vacation spot each year. Push came to shove at any number of those gatherings. I’m novelizing a slant on that premise now.
“O City of Broken Dreams”
This tale of a Midwestern family spending their last dime on train tickets to New York City while pursuing their dream of selling the husband’s play, and finding that nothing in the city is as they thought it would be, could have been ripped from my family’s life. Several times over. Until I’d read Cheever, I’d never before realized such a story’s inherent and relatable drama.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Each time Ann Patchett writes a novel, she sets a fresh challenge that will ensure her growth as a writer. At the time she said this—2002—she was explaining her decision to assemble a group of characters that must overcome a peril, even though none of them can speak the same language. That novel became the stirring New York Times bestseller Bel Canto, in which a group of ambassadors gathered in the home of a South American dignitary are held captive during a coup.
The notion of setting a fresh challenge stuck with me, since one of the reasons I find novel writing so appealing is the way it encourages me to engage in lifelong learning and growth. When starting on my current work-in-progress, I challenged myself to write a story in which a secondary character’s presence is felt on every page, even though she doesn’t arrive on scene until the very end.
It worked until it didn’t. After several “so close” passes from publishers, last month I pulled the project to revise. My upcoming one-week residency would provide the perfect opportunity to enact my revision plan, I thought.
Three days in, it was clear I had lost my way.
Thank goodness my friend Tori was on hand to reflect upon my tale of literary woe. She said she thought the only solution was to bring the character on scene so she could drive the conflict. I reminded her that originally, the character’s absence was the conflict. Tori replied, “And thinking that way prompted this whole beautiful novel. But maybe it’s time to let that notion go.”
I saw the truth in this because I’d heard this advice before.
When I was an undergraduate at Miami University (OH), the distinguished choreographer Phyllis Lamhut came to work with our dance company. A lit cigarette dangled from her lips—in the dance studio!— while she watched our work. After barking out a harsh critique of my graduate assistant’s piece, whose work I adored, it was time to show her mine.
I immediately regretted performing in my own piece, which gave her two ways to find me incompetent. My knees shook as the music began. The concept I was playing with was about space as a lone dancer’s partner (a concept I would revisit in my debut novel, The Art of Falling). As I moved, I could feel the heat of Lamhut’s glare on my skin.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Since it’s Valentine’s Day, I’m going to detour from my more typical craft posts to talk about the art of seduction.
Mm-hmm, that’s right: we’re going to talk submission packages.
I hear you, already moaning with anticipation and pleasure (although you’re ahead of yourself: this usually doesn’t come until the climax). Your attitude is on the right track. The only way to beg interest in your manuscript as it heads into the world is through a well-designed submission package. How will you wrap it—in the negativity with which so many approach the tasks of query letter and synopsis writing, or with the wily passion befitting your novel’s love letter to the world?
This post is not intended to help you craft these all-important documents. I’ll include links to other great WU posts for that. My aim is to help you love them, by showing how they work together to seduce a reader. (If you are seeking traditional publication, “reader” means an agent or small-press editor. If self-publishing, and using such material for back-cover copy, “reader” may be the end purchaser.)
Think these materials are too brief to fairly represent your project? Think string bikini. You might be surprised how revealing they can be. Let’s look at each aspect of the package in terms of its function.
Query: The Hook
The query is the bedrock of the submission package. This letter may be all an agent ever sees, since many request a query only. Rest assured that if written well, it is enough to earn an invitation to send additional pages. If you’ve ever bought a novel based on back-cover copy alone, you know this can work.
In just a few paragraphs, the query letter suggests whether you are ready to make the transition from writer to published author. Its opening is your pitch: one or two concise, enticing, cogent paragraphs meant to align us with your protagonist’s goal, hook us with its major complications, and suggest why any of this matters.
Note the italicized words.
Including word count proves you can produce within an acceptable target. Your bio will convey your understanding that writing careers are not plucked from thin air; they are built on platform.
Love the query, for the way it shows you are ready for this relationship.
Synopsis: Story Structure
The purpose of the synopsis is to assess […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
A few weeks after my first husband’s suicide, when I was able to think again, one thought pulled me forward through the difficult years of recovery to come: I was meant to write about this.
But how? Back in the late 90s, the memoir revolution had not yet gained purchase. People would read books about family suicides by Joan Rivers and Judy Collins, but who would care to read about a dance critic from Allentown, PA and her two sons? Memoir was out.
I considered self-help. I’d become a bit of an aficionada after all, gobbling up any book with clues to help me through and beyond, but lack of credentials and platform discouraged this route.
Journalism seemed an obvious choice, if somewhat of a genre hop. I’d already been a dance critic for fourteen years. Yet gathering facts and analyzing statistics, while a valuable exercise, did not promise what I was really seeking: a way to write a better story for my family.
When the need to express myself smacked against the cold hard wall of publishing pragmatism, I turned to fiction.
Creative writing is not an escape. It’s the opposite. Fiction demands that we dive headfirst into puddles of conflict others might choose to sidestep. It asks that we scratch and dig until we unearth emotional truths, and then find a way to convey them so that a reader we’ve never met can share the same journey.
With this challenge in mind, I want to share a few passages from novels whose authors’ mad skills rely on details, yes, but not facts. They are rooted in feelings. They made me pause to think, “Wow, that is so true.”
In The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon, two girls set out to find a neighbor who has gone missing. You have to love a writer who can help you see anew something as pervasive as heat.
There was nowhere to escape the heat. It was there every day when we woke, persistent and unbroken, and hanging in the air like an unfinished argument. It leaked people’s days onto pavements and patios and, no longer able to contain ourselves within brick and cement, we melted into the outside, bringing our lives along with us. Meals, conversations, arguments were all woken and untethered and allowed outdoors. Even the avenue itself had changed. Giant fissures opened on yellowed lawns and paths felt soft and unsteady. Things which had been solid and reliable were now pliant and uncertain. Nothing felt sure anymore. The bonds which held things together were destroyed by the temperature—this is what my father said—but it felt more sinister than that. It felt as though the whole avenue was shifting and stretching, and trying to escape itself.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
We’re just eight days away from the longest night of the year. What better time to think about the dark moment in your novel?
Until now your protagonist has been facing increasingly difficult obstacles to get what she wants, but at the dark moment, all hope for a good outcome seems lost. It is worse than falling short of her goal—it is the opposite of success.
The structural bones of your story will point you toward what this moment might look like. The examples for today’s discussion are brought to you by the mad skills of author Janet Benton in her historical novel, Lilli de Jong.
Inciting incident/story goal
To construct an effective dark moment, you need to look back at what it is the character wants, and why she wants it so badly.
Raised as a Quaker, Lilli de Jong values education, independent thinking, and a strong moral character. But when she soon finds herself completely at odds with her dreams for her life—pregnant, left behind by her lover, banished from her congregation and teaching position, and cast from her father’s home by his new wife—Lilli must face alone a society that has little compassion for unwed mothers. With no other option, Lilli enters a haven for wronged women to deliver her child. The expectation for this charitable support is that three weeks after delivery, she will allow a married couple to adopt her baby.
After giving birth, Lilli writes in her diary:
The doctor has cut the fleshy cord that connected us, but an invisible one has taken its place. I begin to suspect that this one can neither be cut nor broken.
And soon:
My shoulders, back, arms, and neck ache from holding her; my nipples are scabbed and sometimes bleeding; yet the most worn-out, painful part of me is my heart. It stretches so wide when she’s contented that I believe its fibers are tearing. When she suffers, it shrinks and throbs and hardens into a knot.
Lilli sees herself and Charlotte as an emotional, spiritual and physical unit. Her goal, further motivated by the strong bond she had with her recently deceased mother, is to keep her.
Stakes
To appropriately plan for the dark moment, you must return to the stakes, for this is where your protagonist will suffer from them the most. Lilli’s bond with Charlotte deepens through nursing, but as her three weeks of safe harbor near their end, Lilli attends a church service and has this epiphany:
I saw laid out the whole of my upbringing, which had urged me to live honestly; my coming situation, where lying would be the rule; and the cowardice that had kept me from admitting this divergence…
But the moment I let go of Charlotte and pretend she never existed, my life of sin begins. Lies will color—no, suffuse—my most intimate relations. The pain at my center will stay closed and festering, while lies spread like a layer of lard beneath my skin.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
A story a dancer once told me: It’s opening night. Six dancers wait in the wings, nerves taut. Their entrance is imminent—the overture has begun and they are counting the music—when the choreographer, heeding an infamous penchant for change, rushes over to them aflame with last-minute inspiration. The dancers do the only self-preserving thing they can do—stick their fingers in their ears and ignore him.
You’d think writing is more set—after a certain point, you are limited to the little black marks on the printed page, right? Ha—that’s what the “delete” key is for! And I’ve seen more than one author pause a public reading to decipher last-minute changes scribbled in the margins.
Truth is, we could tinker forever. But all artists—painters, poets, and novelists alike—eventually have to trust that it’s time to let a project go.
Deadlines and other useful delimiters
This post was pulled from a larger collection of wisdom than I could use, but I was limited by: 1) how much I could cram into a reasonable word limit, and 2) my deadline. But is reaching imposed limits reason enough to consider a piece “finished”?
In some cases, preset parameters can both inform a project’s conception and provide a sense of its completion, says writer and painter Joe Skrapits (Allentown, PA). This is particularly true in one of his specialties, plein-air landscape painting.
“The light is at a certain angle, or of a certain quality, or the shadows are in a certain place, and so you give yourself an hour or two to state what that is,” says Joe. “When the light changes, you don’t keep changing. It puts a limit on your participation of that day, anyway. And sometimes that’s good.”
A novel can’t be written in a few hours, but Skrapits offers a useful metaphor. Creating limits around your work is one way to practice walking away from it. A baby’s nap can give you an hour or two to free write. A contest provides a deadline. NaNoWriMo sets a one-month, 50K word-count goal. Creating limits will bring your finish line into clearer focus.
Perfecting vs. finishing
So how can you be sure you’ve come up with the perfect combination of the 90,000 words in your manuscript?
Of course, you can’t.
You will use the word “finished” many times in the life of your novel (you’ll finish… each draft. Developmental edits. Beta reader edits. Concision edits. Agent edits. Publisher edits. Copy edits.) But beyond the mechanics of writing “The End,” from whence comes your sense of completion?
“A piece is finished when it satisfies the artist’s intention,” Skrapits says, adding that his definition presupposes that the artist has a fairly clear vision of what he or she wants to achieve.
That leads us into the first of many ways to define “finished.”
Philosophical: What were you trying to say, and have you said it? Such a simple question and yet we can forget to ask it. Writing a new synopsis after each draft will help determine if your accumulation of words has indeed fulfilled your intention.
Editorial: Is it as tight as it can possibly be? Readers won’t want to wade through excess verbiage to find your story and publishers won’t want to cut down one more tree than necessary to […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Effective opening scenes orient your reader to a story’s core conflict while raising pertinent questions about the plot to come. Most often, we writers achieve this through devising a scene in the story’s current world, pushing our protagonist toward the story event that will forever change his life because our readers want this story to get underway.
Complex story worlds may require more setup, and yet you wouldn’t want to put the story on hold while you explain pertinent matters about race, politics, cultural differences, and economic challenge.
In his #1 New York Times best-selling memoir, Born a Crime, comedian and TV host Trevor Noah (The Daily Show, Comedy Central) jump-starts his South African world-building with an anecdotal opening from earlier in his life that interweaves these complexities.
Don’t cry foul yet.
I know this is a fiction writing blog, but you need only read the amazing opening to Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, in which our first-person narrator conveys the story of his own birth, to see how well a dramatic vignette from the past can work in fiction. Such a setup can help us understand why the protagonist acts the way he does and why it will matter when the inciting incident forever changes his life.
Good reasons exist not to use backstory in your opening, one of the best being that it might raise the wrong question in the reader’s mind. But if you devise the right scene, its emotional resonance will create an underpinning for the entire story to come.
Let’s break down Noah’s first chapter, “Run,” to see why it works so well.
Set the hook
Sometimes in big Hollywood movies they’ll have these crazy chase scenes where somebody jumps or gets thrown from a moving car. The person hits the ground and rolls for a bit. Then they come to a stop and pop up and dust themselves off, like it was no big deal. Whenever I see that I think, That’s rubbish. Getting thrown out of a moving car hurts way worse than that.
I was nine years old when my mother threw me out of a moving car….
These are Noah’s opening sentences. Does he have your attention?
Build core conflict
It was a Sunday, Noah recalls, because they were on the way to three church services because his mother was deeply religious. (Great conflict building—why would a religious mother shove her son from the car?). He explains that like indigenous people around the world, the Xhosa had adopted the religion forced upon them by their colonizers. Now his mother was “Team Jesus” all the way. Noah adopted a different perspective.
If you’re African and you pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common sense.
Noah, his mother, and his baby brother went to white church, mixed church, and black church. Through Noah’s impressions of the differences, we start to understand what it means to Noah that he is half white and half Xhosa. He creeps up on the core conflict.
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Kathryn’s post today is part of the “All the King’s Editors” series, in which WU contributors will edit manuscript pages submitted by members of the larger WU community and discuss the proposed changes. This educational format is intended to generate useful comments on what changes work, which may not work as well, and in either case, why.
The posts will appear on WU ~twice monthly. Each participating editor will have a unique approach, and speak only for him or herself. If you’re interested in submitting a sample for consideration, click HERE for instructions.
* * * * *
Editing a piece as well-written as today’s submission poses a challenge. Confident prose can make the reader sit back and float along on its rhythmic waves, never realizing that when the trip is done, the ride has left little impact.
This submission, told from the point of view of a dying woman, is about the circumstances of her youngest child’s birth. Death and birth are two of the most inherently dramatic events known to mankind, but also the most common. Not one of us escapes them. In order to make this story worth reading, the writer is charged with bringing fresh perspective to their mysteries.
Put that fresh perspective up front, and it will color everything we read (and the writer writes) from there forward.
There is one line in this submission that perked me right up and raised a question—in other words, it created a hook—but that sentence was placed too late, at the end of the third page. The only thing the writer will lose by moving that line toward the front of the story is the generic nature of her descriptions and a few sideways meanderings. The question it raises, on the other hand, will command this writer’s sentences to rise to the level of story—a specific story, told for a specific reason, from the specific perspective of the only person who can tell it.
As written, it’s unclear to me where this story is going. For our purposes here, I’ve decided to aim toward the torture of withholding a confession until it’s too late, and the freeing effects of thinking it through, nonetheless.
Note: Sentences in blue have been moved intact from their original, struck-through locations.
EXPECTED
There’s so much I want to tell you. The others have said their goodbyes, and now you and Imogene have the last watch. My Against shut eyelids, are pressed shut, but I can see the panoramaic view of my eighty years flashing stretches around me, dappled with leading toward the promises of a vibrant life to come., and I undulate between these two worlds. My older brother [see addendum to 7] beckons me from beyond and — I tell him, “Confound it, I’m not finished here yet”—and yet my spirit rises. [1] I hover several feet above the hospital bed and look down on you and Imogene standing over What tethers my withered body to this world is . The knobby fingers of my right hand grasp the flannel of my light blue flowered nightgown. My other hand clutches […]
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
In college, I was in a dance improvisation company that gave me a healthy appreciation of the way constraining creativity can help it move forward. Our on-the-spot performances were informed by suggestions from the audience. It usually went something like this.
“What would you like to see a dance about?” our director would say.
“Love,” someone would call out.
“That’s a start,” our director would say, “but we need something more specific. What is the nature of this love?”
Someone else would call out, “A man who loves a dog.”
“Closer. Narrow it more.”
“A man who loves a dog that for some reason can’t walk.”
Bingo. Narrowing the topic made ideas blossom, and a dance was born.
Why limit your story
What is the difference between “love” and “a man who loves a dog that for some reason can’t walk?”
The first is a generic topic that could go off in a million directions. The sheer number of possibilities can be paralyzing.
The second has rails that inspire, inform, and guide story movement.
A man who loves a dog that for some reason can’t walk might stand still, petting the dog, while the rest of the world goes by. He might carry the dog everywhere in a backpack; set it beside him on a chair in an outdoor café. Another type of man might drag the dog around, insisting that the lazy dog’s discomfort would eventually inspire him to use his legs, while yet another might manipulate the useless limbs, praying all the while, hoping that consistent attention might bring about a miracle. The man might decide that a dog was meant to run free, and conclude that the most loving thing to do would be to put the dog down.
Imagine that this man is a character in your novel. Maybe the novel isn’t about the man and the dog, specifically, but this relationship is simply a fact of the character’s existence. How he acts would tell us a lot about his character, wouldn’t it? The situation would create interesting limitations around the character’s ability to engage in other aspects of the story.
Specificity breeds universality
You know what the man in love with the dog reminds me of? Writing a novel manuscript.
A manuscript doesn’t have working legs. Without a publisher it can’t go anywhere. It may never have legs, despite the way you manipulate its limbs and cover it with prayer. Yet you love it, and so you take it everywhere in your mental backpack. Only you can decide when it’s time to put it down.
The late film critic, Roger Ebert, explained the importance of a story’s specificity while reviewing Brokeback Mountain, based on Annie Proulx’s story about two gay cowboys:
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
One of the first things an editor wants to know about your novel is how many points of view you’ll use. In the broadest strokes, who gets a point of view will determine the structure of your story; down to the smallest detail, it will determine how perspective will illuminate it.
Will this be a story sunk deep inside one character’s perspective, as Garth Stein chose to do through Enzo, a dog, in The Art of Racing in the Rain? Will it alternate first-person perspectives that define and deepen the conflict between adversaries, as in Andre Dubus III’s The House of Sand and Fog? Or will it represent the seven principal parties impacted by one young girl’s fight for self-determination, as in Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper?
Such a decision shouldn’t be arbitrary. Some readers choose the novels they read for the way they allow a new perspective through which to view the world.
Not all POV decisions can be executed perfectly. Dubus’s plan worked out just fine until about three-quarters of the way through, when his story demanded that the reader know something that only a non-POV character was experiencing—which led to an odd chapter in the third-person perspective of a secondary character. Picoult—or perhaps her publisher—anticipated that her multiple points of view would be so hard to track that they put each character’s chapters in different fonts.
I could tell you never to do that because it’s cheesy and against all principles of good book design and if your novel is that confusing just simplify it, but this is how much readers care about such things: My Sister’s Keeper, which came out in 2004, still carries an Amazon ranking of #12 in contemporary literature. And Dubus’s novel, with that glaring POV switch, was an Oprah pick, a National Book Award finalist, and a #1 New York Times bestseller.
The most important thing is that these novelists told great stories through perspectives that would serve their telling.
So, how might you handle sixteen perspectives?
That’s how many WU contributor Bryn Greenwood employed in her New York Times best-selling novel, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things. Why would she even attempt that, and how did she get away with it? Let’s see what we can learn from her mad skills.
Why choose multiple perspectives
Greenwood’s story zeroes in on a volatile cultural taboo: age of sexual consent. As much as I enjoy exploring topics that make us twitch, even I had never thought to look at this issue. I mean, we should be protecting our youth from adult predators, right? Case closed.
But what if the greater danger comes from the child’s own parents?
To raise this question in a way that would make her readers think—all while managing the emotions of readers whose opinions are entrenched—Greenwood chose a very loose POV structure that allowed her, in any given chapter, to dip into the perspective that would best illuminate that part of her story.
Her opening gets right to the heart of things, fittingly enough, through perspective.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Put your very best writing on the first page of your manuscript, I was once told, and the rest will rise to the challenge. This is a good thing, because your very best writing belongs on every other page, as well.
In fact, today I want to convince you why your very best writing belongs everywhere.
Synopsis
Most writers consider it a necessary evil, so why spend more time on it than you have to? Here’s why: if you treat it as a precious piece of storytelling, you might sell your book. Or a movie option. Infuse your synopsis with voice and drama and character. Make the reader feel something. Such synopses are out there, writers, and yours may be competing with them.
Website
Think of visitors to your site as browsers in your personal store. You wouldn’t want to leave punctuation and spelling errors lying around for them to stumble over, would you? Your customers are already hindered by having no beautifully designed book to pick up and flip through. Make your graphics and digital copy pop off the page to shake your reader’s hand in a way that says, “I am a competent, confident writer that you can trust for your entertainment needs.”
Blog posts
Blog posts have come a long way since those first steam-of-consciousness missives by “iamawriter” in the 1990s, when capitalization and correct spelling were optional. These days it couldn’t be more different. In 2014, while promoting my first novel, I was surprised at the hoops my publicist sent me through just to come up with original content for book bloggers. She vetted all posts and sent them back with comments like “you can write a stronger opening.” And I could.
This was my first stab at an opening for As I Turn the Pages in answer to the question, “How has dance impacted your life?”
I was an active child with an unquenchable thirst for rhythmic physical endeavor. When my nose wasn’t in a novel I was playing hopscotch and jump rope, skiing (snow and water), diving, taking gymnastics, and cheerleading. But nothing set me aflame like the dance class I discovered when I was sixteen.
Second try:
I leapt into the world feet first and ready for action. When my nose wasn’t in a novel I was skipping across chalked patterns, diving from springboards, slicing hills with my skis, flipping over high jumps—then trying to do any or all of it on the balance beam. But nothing set me aflame like the dance class I discovered when I was sixteen.
Pro tip: Even if the point of your post is to interview another author, fashioning your questions so they elicit a story arc represents your own abilities as a novelist better than five random questions.
Social media comments
You may not realize the impact you make with the comments you leave on other people’s social media posts.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Today’s mad skill comes to us via Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the music and lyrics for one of my favorite musicals, Wicked, based on Gregory Maguire’s bestselling novel of the same name. The show tracks the early life of Elphaba, the girl who is destined to become the Wicked Witch of the West. On an episode of American Songbook at NJPAC (full episode here), Schwartz spoke of including, early on in his musicals, what he calls the “I want” song. I think we novelists can learn something from contemplating the intent of this song, which in this case is the protagonist’s first.
On the show, Schwartz demonstrates how his first two attempts at writing Elphaba’s “I want” song fell flat. His son Scott, a talented theater director, pointed out why: the lyrics were generic to the point of cliché.
Make the desire specific
The audience didn’t need Elphaba to explain that she wanted to do good things in order to feel significant; they needed to know what achieving significance would look like for Elphaba. She is not “everywoman.” She is a witch. From Oz. Reviled for her green skin. The twist in Maguire’s telling is that she is also the story’s protagonist, so Schwartz had the challenge of creating a psychological bond between the audience and teenage version of the wicked witch who would one day send flying monkeys after Dorothy.
His son’s advice: “Have her show up at school and do something that earns her the right to sing.”
Schwartz gave it a try. After Elphaba performs an inadvertent act of magic in class, her teacher decides to tutor her in sorcery—with an eye toward introducing her to the great wizard. Everyone in Oz wants to meet the Wizard so he can fix what’s wrong with them. Now Elphaba might get her chance.
She hangs hope for her future on the imagined details of this interaction in the want song, “The Wizard and I,” made all the more stirring because we know from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that her name will not one day inspire the same kind of “celebration throughout Oz” that she envisions.
That little bit of story packs so much power: someone has seen through Elphaba’s skin color to a “talent” she’d been timid about exposing, but which has now been deemed brilliant. Her dreaming offers more than a peek at her soft underbelly; she exposes her most desired life story, full monty. Even if you haven’t seen this show, I’m sure you are already anticipating—perhaps even wincing at—the ways in which Elphaba’s story will not unfold as expected.
So how can we grab the power of the “I want” song for our characters?
Keep desire at the core of your story
Since your character will arrive at page one of your story with his deep desire already formed, it’s never too soon to start orienting your reader to what she or he wants. Some authors foreshadow the desire in their opening lines, as Julie Christine Johnson did in her debut novel, In Another Life:
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
I’m not one who believes that character likability is key to winning over the reader—for me, “relatability” is more important—but there is a character in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (long-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize) whose lack of moral compass challenges even my liberal stance.
After a night out with his college friends, Hugo has sex with the woman that Olly (his friend and the designated driver, no less) has admitted he’s in love with. Later, he hides near a phone booth and listens, amused, to Olly’s private despair as he begs for the return of her love. He’s slept with the mother of another of those friends and when with him, thinks about her naked. He tells a regular bedmate, a Brazilian nurse, that he’ll never introduce her to his parents because they don’t have that kind of relationship, and wonders “why women are uglier once they’re unpeeled, encrusted, and had.”
He steals and sells the valuable stamp collection of a former mentor suffering from Alzheimer’s and banks the money under an assumed name. He regularly fleeces another friend at cards, assuming his rich family will refill his coffers, resulting in such debt that the friend drives his last precious asset, a mint condition 1969 Aston Martin, over a cliff to end his shameful existence. Hugo’s reaction to hearing the news, after disbelief, is about the car: “I could weep. All that money.”
This character is a reprobate. What does it say about me that I cared about his story journey? Don’t judge me…yet. Suspecting mad skills, I had to go back and figure out how Mitchell won my interest.
1. First, there’s the character’s name: Hugo Lamb. Seriously—a huge lamb? Subliminally, the author is promising that the character has soft parts.
2. Hugo appreciates, in great detail, the work of 20th-century British classical composer Benjamin Britten.
3. He is entertaining. When he sees a beautiful woman in church:
The Kraken in my boxer shorts awakes.
4. His intelligence is on display during a long, off-the-cuff argument on the nature of power.
5. When it suits him, he’s loyal and protective. An undergrad in politics, he poses as a postgrad law student to warn off aggressors that threaten his group of friends.
6. The reason he knows about the brigadier’s stamp collection is because he visits him regularly in the nursing home to read to him.
7. Someone appreciates Hugo for who he is. At one point, Olly’s “girlfriend” tells Hugo:
“The problem with the Ollies of the world is their niceness. Niceness drives me mental.”
…
You, Hugo,” she kisses my earlobe, “are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you’d stumble across on TV at night. You know you’ll regret it in the morning, but you keep watching anyway.”
8. He is self-aware:
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