Posts by Lisa Cron

Here’s a scary thought. When it comes to writing, you may have done everything you’ve been taught to do with utter perfection, and precisely because of that, it turns out you’ve written something that is flat, boring and uninvolving. This all too common phenomenon is something I’m going to be deconstructing, myth by myth, for the next several months in my columns here. I’m beginning this month with the overarching granddaddy of them all – the myth that derails otherwise riveting stories before they’re even created.

It’s this: The myth that beautiful writing is what makes you a real writer, and (an even more damaging belief) that the beautiful writing comes first, before everything else. Beautiful writing is often equated with talent, and without talent, why write at all?

It is heartbreaking how many writers suffer from the deep rooted, often crippling fear of not “writing beautifully” from the very first iteration of the very first sentence on the very first page of the novel. We’ve been trained to be so fearful of penning anything that feels like “ugly writing” that we often end up creating something far worse.

Pop quiz: Where do your characters go when they aren’t in the scene you’re writing? Are they pacing in the greenroom? Maybe chowing down at the snack table, catching a quick nap, or binge watching old episodes of Murder She Wrote on Netflix while waiting for their next cue. Or – and this is the most likely – have you inadvertently pressed the pause button, and sent them into stasis? As in, out of sight, out of mind.

After all you have so much on your mind – you’re focused first and foremost on the scene you’re writing. In fact, you may be so focused on what your protagonist is doing, that even the secondary characters right there on the page have blurred a bit. They’re no longer specific people, but representatives of a general category: mom, dad, BFF, sibling, co-worker. Uh oh.

A gifted writer I work with had that habit. Whenever her protagonist, Tess, appeared in a scene with her parents, Tess remained vivid and driven, but her parents turned bland and generic. When asked what was going on, the writer said, “Well, that’s how most parents I know act during a family dinner – so it’s totally believable.” But it wasn’t believable at all, because it wasn’t what Tess’s parents would have done; in fact, it wasn’t what anyone who had a specific past would have done — and sheesh, we all have a specific past, every last one of us. Ditto each and every character we create.

So in order to figure what actually would have happened at that family dinner, the writer had to plumb Tess’s parents’ story-specific pasts in order to unearth what, exactly, they would have done, and far more importantly, why they might have done it. This didn’t simply apply to that one scene in question, but to everything they did throughout the novel. Which, in turn, changed a bit of what Tess herself did, because now the writer had a much better handle on the situation Tess was dealing with, who she was, and how she saw the world.

The work the writer did to give her characters well-developed, story-specific agendas was invaluable, because now she had reliable, sturdy guidelines, enabling her to both create and track the arc of all their storylines – scene by scene — throughout the novel.

Which brings us right back to the question we started with: Where do these well-developed, story-specific characters go, and how do they keep themselves busy, when they’re not in the current scene?

The answer is amazingly simple:

There’s a meme I always see out there on Facebook (and that’s the whole world, right?) that makes me crazy. It’s the often lotus-adorned command to “let it go.” Something’s happened to you, something’s bothering you, and you’re told to just let it go. As if the fact that it’s bothering you is somehow your fault, and you’re purposefully holding onto it, as if it’s a choice. And, even more insidious, as if by “letting it go” –poof! It’s gone, and so is the pain, desire, and regret.

This is something I can’t let go because it’s so deeply wrong. Not only isn’t “letting go” possible in the way it’s so often taken to mean, but it shames us in the process. Now we have two problems: that thing we “can’t let go of” and the fact that we’re somehow morally weak because we’re “letting it” bother us. Yikes!

The reason this is on my mind today is that Jennie Nash and I have just finished teaching the beta version of our online workshop based on my upcoming book, Story Genius. It was thrilling to see so many writers – both fledgling and seasoned — crack open their stories and write with such power. A few writers, however, struggled much harder than others, and when we stepped back to try to figure out why, we noticed that the biggest thing that held them back had nothing to do with their ability to write. What held them back most was what they’d already written.

We’ve all heard the adage that we should kill our darlings and we all think, “Yes, right, of course!” But what we’re envisioning is a finely wrought sentence here or there, a couple of pages that don’t work, maybe a scene. It’s hard to kill these little darlings, because they’re not only part of what we’ve written, they’re part of us. We made them, we love them. Tough as it is, however, writers do often muster the courage to hit the delete button and move on. In these cases, we know what’s good for our story. We know what must be done, and so we let it go.

But no writer ever in the history of the world thought that the darling this adage refers to might be

No one likes a drama queen. We all have ‘em in our lives — that person who’s forever casting tiny things as great big problems, and getting everyone riled up over what turns out to be a bucket of nothing. They can be fun to watch for a bit, but they’re ultimately exhausting. It doesn’t take long to realize that those “great big problems” of theirs have no real consequence, which means that they aren’t problems at all.

Real drama is something else altogether. And – here’s the surprising thing – real drama very often has little to do with big, externally dramatic events – real or imagined. Real drama is internal, and that is the kind of drama that stories are about.

Think of real drama as the internal struggle that the plot catapults your protagonist into, forcing her to take action whether she wants to or not. If taking that action doesn’t cost your protagonist dearly on a deep emotional level, then it’s not a problem. Nor is it a story. Even if, on the surface, something big happens.

For instance, your protagonist might expect a completely normal day, and instead meets the love of her life at the bus stop, forever changing the course of her life in every way. Sounds huge, doesn’t it? But unless it mucks up something just as important to her, or unless there’s something she now has to overcome in order commit to her new found beloved, who cares? There’s a reason why stories never begin with “and they lived happily ever after.” Without internal conflict – without something crucial at stake — we not only can’t learn anything from her, we’re not really interested.

It’s a simple equation: