Generating Story 2: No Clue, No Solution

ByJohn Brown

I want you to think about Ed Smylie, who helped save the Apollo 13 astronauts with his duct tape contraption. What if the authorities had come to Ed, but instead of saying, “Look, we need to fit the round CO2 scrubbers into the holes for the square ones,” they’d said, “We want you to do something; it involves thinking.”

Ed would have blinked. Waited.  “Yeah?”

“That’s it. Something. A lot is riding on this.” And then maybe they urged him on with a significant wave of their hands.

Can you see Ed at this point?

“Sure.” He’d say. “I’ll get right on that.” Then he’d wonder who put these guys up to this practical joke.

Do you see how impossible it is when you frame things that way?

To come up with solutions, you have to have a clue about what it is you’re trying to do. Even if it’s just a rough idea. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to fix a space ship, roast hotdogs, or write a story.

Once we have a rough idea of what we want to accomplish, the mind automatically kicks into gear to perform its wonders. Until we do that, we’re going to be like Ed in the example above—staring at a blank wall, wondering if our superiors aren’t a bit cuckoo.

So what are we trying to do?

Think about your reader. Is it a woman? A teen? A crazy dude? Do you remember my book tour with Larry Correia in 2009 and the guy who, during a booksigning / doughnut party at a Phoenix Barnes & Noble, proclaimed my book to be true?  Aliens really were eating our souls and enslaving humanity. They were lizards living in the hollow portion of the earth.

The point is: what are your readers hoping your story provides them? In fact, since you’re the first audience, what do YOU want from your stories? Why do you read?

I want you to write down five stories you really like. Movies, TV shows, novels, short stories, plays—I don’t care the genre or type. Just write down five. Do it now. Here are five random stories I like.

  • The Incredibles
  • The Good Guy by Dean Koontz
  • Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
  • The Sound of Music
  • Runelords by David Farland

This is going to be a powerful exercise for you. It was for me the first time I did it in a class on interior design.

A few years ago, Lovely Wife and I were building a house. We wanted to make our living space sing. We wanted our surroundings to make us happy, but we didn’t quite know how to go about doing that. So we took a class on interior design, hoping to learn the principles involved.

Except when we showed up in the first session and saw the many different design styles, it overwhelmed us. Some styles were ethnic (Southwestern, Asian, French, Gothic, Pygmy), some philosophical or religious (Zen, Feng Shui), many were artistic (Modern, Arts & Craft, Minimalist, Art Deco, College Room Mate ), a lot were mixtures. Some were about making statements and creating moods, some about practicality (here’s a taste of those styles).  How in the world were we going to learn this?

Luckily, we had a very perceptive teacher. She knew that most of us were there, not to learn all the styles, but to decorate our own houses. So in our second session, she brought dozens of home magazines. She spread them out on the tables we were sitting at and told us we would go through the magazines. When we found a picture or image we liked, we were to rip that page out and put it in our personal stack. So for about 45 minutes we looked and ripped and looked and ripped. Lovely Wife and I each ended up with a pile of a few dozen pictures.

Then the teacher told us to spread our pictures out in front of us and look for things that the images had in common. Colors, features, design elements.

I spread my pictures out. Lovely Wife spread out hers. And it was like magic. Boom! Right there in front of us. I loved arches and eyebrow windows. Loved dark blues and purples mixed with creams and whites. Loved the color of blond wheat and a navy blue sky. I loved wood. Loved Arts & Craft with a few tweaks.

Lovely Wife’s pile was equally revealing.

The teacher then said, “This is your personal style. This is what’s going to make you happy.” She told us that when designing the rooms in our house, that we should think about their function and merge them with these elements. And if any of us were to work with clients, we’d do something similar with them and find out their wants and likes.

With our styles now beginning to be fleshed out, Lovely Wife and I went to work. Some of her elements and colors overlapped mine. Some didn’t, like her idea of sleeping bliss: a bed with sheer red drapes hanging from some lamp shade contraption in the middle.

I told her I didn’t know if I could keep my man card and sleep in that bed. She decided I should keep my man card, but said she couldn’t sleep in a plain-walled zen room. We compromised. She got textured red on the walls. I got a bed without too many frills. We came up with designs for our spaces that did what we wanted them to do.

But we couldn’t have done this if we hadn’t identified what we were after.

So I’ve adapted that visual art technique used in the design class for our purposes. It’s just as powerful with literary arts. Which is why I want you to write down five stories.

I want you to take a moment and identify what you’re after, in a big picture general way.

I can’t do this for you.

You and I are different. Just like Lovely Wife and I are different. While our tastes may overlap in some places, they’re going to diverge. You don’t want to write my stories. You want to write YOURS.

So write down five stories. Then write down what you really enjoyed, over all, about each of those five stories. You might do this on five pieces of paper. What did you enjoy with each of the main story elements—character, setting, problem, plot, and text? What kind of an experience did they give you? What drew you to them in the first place?

You don’t need to go all crazy detailed on me with this and do a twenty page report. Just hit the highlights. The stuff that will fit on one page without writing in four point font.

When you finish that, step back and look at all five pieces of paper side by side. What common elements do you see? Circle them.

This is your style. This is what, in general, you’re going for.

If you found the exercise insightful, do five more stories. Ten is such a nice number.

I’m going to predict that 99% of the things you identify have to do with what the story did to you. The stories made you laugh, smile, scream, want to fall in love again. They made you curious or jealous or feel some type of desire (be a Ninja king, strong, beautiful). Maybe they gave you insight. Maybe they affected you so profoundly that it changed, if even in a small way, how you decided to live your life.

Stories–the ones people pay money for; the ones people stay up until four a.m. reading with a flashlight; the ones people tell their friends about–make people feel things.

A while back I wrote about this in three parts. I believe the things you’ll read in those short posts, if you don’t know them already, will change how you think about stories. They did for me. And it all begins with lipstick.

  1. Lipstick
  2. Getting specific
  3. My big draws

Okay, I hope at this point you are getting a general idea of why readers pay money to read the stories we create. Why YOU pay money and spend countless hours reading what others write.

This is the first step in being able to produce on purpose, not on accident. This is the first step to becoming the Ed Smylie of fiction—understanding what you, as a writer, are trying to do.

This week, keep your eyes open. Notice what stories do to you. Notice how you feel about different characters and plots. If you feel like taking it farther, notice the effect of different beginnings and ends of novels, chapters, or scenes. Notice the effect of different ways authors describe characters, places, and actions.

Of course, while knowing these general objectives is critical, it’s not enough. You need to know what you’re reaching for with the current story, the current characters, the current plot. How do you translate all this general stuff to the specifics of the story in front of you? Do you have to define everything up front? And what if you don’t know what you want in the current project anyway? What if you are clueless and have nothing but a handful of random ideas that for some reason are generating electrical sparks? What do you do then?

In the next post, I’ll talk more about those questions and where the how-to’s fit into all of this, and then we’ll get into the principles of invention.

For more in this series, see How to Get and Develop Story Ideas

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    John guest posts about writing memorable fiction on ReidWrite

    ByJohn Brown

    Luc Reid is the author of, among other things, Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures.  He is also the lizard king of Codex, which he started and of which I’m so happy to be a member. He’s always starting provocative threads on Codex, making us all think and reexamine the principles of story and the whole writing business. He recently posted some insights about what makes memorable stories. A lot of other fellow Codexians joined in the discussion. Happily, he asked me to share some of my thoughts on his site, ReidWrite. They begin as follows:

    YOU’RE MINE, DEAR READER

     Mwuhahaha.

     Okay, maybe not. But you are wired to be mine. And you wouldn’t have it any other way.

    Let’s back up. Luc wrote about writing memorable. I agree with the idea that the stories that produce a strong emotional reaction are the most memorable. In fact, I believe that triggering of emotion is THE reason why linear narrative that puts us into the trance has lasted so long in so many forms and makes so much money.

    But can writers guide reader emotions? Or is it all just by accident?

    Read the rest here: http://reidwrite.livejournal.com/8331.html.

    BTW, when you’ve finished that, you might want to check out Luc’s new site, WillpowerEngine.com. It’s a place where he shares what he’s found in his research for his current book project, The Willpower Engine, on how self-motivation works. I think you’ll find a number of the posts there very interesting.

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    Awful Intent Update: The power of having the electric ladies read to you

    ByJohn Brown

    Everyone says you cannot copyedit your own work.

    You’re an idiot if you try.

    Because you’re mind auto-corrects eorrs, and fills in missing punctuation or words like “of” “the” and “a”.  And often doesn’t care or know the house rules for capitalization. Etc.

    (Did you catch all the errors in that paragraph?)

    Except the brains of copy editors play this trick as well. That’s why some read the manuscript backward and others use arcane WordText code to suss out issues. And some change the font face. And some make multiple passes over a section, looking for dialogue issues the first time through, capitalization the next, and something else the third time. And despite all their work, you still find errors in the text.

    I’m not saying editors aren’t any good. I’m just saying that our brains, for the most part, don’t care about the details. They just care about the communication, and they’re very good at ignoring the rubbish. And when it’s just the brain and the eye working together, the brain makes sense of the text, even when something’s wrong or missing.

    So one trick to force the brain to see what’s actually on the page is to read your text out loud to yourself. It’s an excellent practice, except a human brain is still involved, and it sometimes still plays tricks. And sometimes we get lazy and start to read too quickly, and the next thing you know we’re subvocalizing and whipping along, missing all sorts of stuff.

    So what can you do?

    Well, a few book releases ago, I stumbled onto something. I invited an electric lady to help. And she was dynamite. (You can invite a man if you prefer the sound of those voices.)

    I’m talking about inviting your computer to read aloud every word of your manuscript to you. And highlight the words as it goes.

    I can tell you I’m never going back. These ladies have simply helped me see too many errors that were invisible to me and my beta readers who had editorial chops.

    I use WordTalk, a free plugin for Microsoft Word for this kind of reading. The University of Edinburgh created it to help kids learn how to read. It allows you to select from the text-to-speech voices you have on your computer, set the reading rate, and it highlights the word it’s reading so you immediately see where the error is.

    I set it at a slightly faster reading speed so my mind cannot wander during the reading and use the quick keys so I can start and stop and make my edits easily. And I always, always, always have my electric friend re-read any fixes I make because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve adjusted a sentence or paragraph and introduced more errors that I didn’t see, even though they were staring me in the face.

    I must admit that the electric ladies can’t do everything. Having them read to you cannot help you spot errors you don’t know are errors in the first place. If you don’t know, for example, the conventions for capitalization of personal titles or the conventions for numbers (is it a “.44mm” gun or “forty-four millimeter”?) If you don’t have your own house rules for the many areas where you have a choice like in an epic fantasy (do you use “Dreadman” or “dreadman”?) If you don’t know any of that, you’ll blithely skip over a host of errors and only see the issues you know like the misuses of “rise” and “raise” or “lie” and “lay.”

    So you have to learn the conventions or find someone who does (an editor). Or both.

    Also, doing this type of reading will not help you see if what you’ve written is actually translating the scene in your head clearly and vividly to the page for someone new to your story. Only a fresh set of eyes can tell you where your story isn’t clear, believable, or interesting (at least to that one reader).

    But for helping you spot the issues you do know, I haven’t found anything better. Give it a try.

    Oh, and the update on Awful Intent–Zira and I are almost finished with the copy edit! Which means the release is only days away.

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  • Writing a tie-in

    ByJohn Brown

    I read this article today, laughed, and then thought a while. Don’t know if tie-ins will ever be in my future. I would hope to do it just once for a series or film I love. In the meantime, it’s great fun reading about someone else’s experience.

    ‘Burn Notice’: The Novel
    Does a real writer accept a gig doing books spun off from films or TV shows? A real writer found the answer to his own question.
    By Tod Goldberg, Special to The Times
    August 24, 2008

    http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-tie-ins24-2008aug24,0,1463672.story 

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    Why you can’t popularize literary fiction

    ByJohn Brown

    T.C. Boyle is one of my favorite writers. He saved me in my undergraduate program. I was buying the The Best American Short Story, Pushcart, and O’Henry anthologies. I was reading for my coursework. And so much of it bored me to death. And then one day I began reading “The Ape Lady in Retirement” and my eyes hung out because finally the text was interesting. Finally someone wrote a story I could read start to finish.

    I immediately bought his anthologies–Greasy Lake, If The River Was Whiskey, Descent of Man. I was in heaven. Now, not all of his stories worked magic on me. But when I was having a hard time finding one story in a whole anthology, his books seemed like a treasure trove.

    He didn’t do as well in his novels. Oh, the writing was just as good. The characters and descriptions just as odd and stunning. But he didn’t keep my interest. The problems never built into anything. Nevertheless, I loved him.

    I’ve been having a brief conversation with him and the fan boy in me is delighted to finally talk to this guy. And after reading an interview with him, I realize why he probably spoke to me. While the other literary fiction authors were following the tastes of the fringe group, Boyle at least wanted to entertain.

    In his interview he says.

     Everybody has forgotten that literature, like all art, is, at root, entertainment. It is supposed to entertain you. It’s not supposed to be some conundrum to be resolved by some professors in the university. It’s not a game. It’s not masturbation. It’s art. And I think great art is great on all levels. But the first level on which it must be great is that it must be entertaining.

    Amen, brother Boyle. Amen!

    I’m in a top-20 MFA program in the West.  And I think it’s odd that many in these MFA writing programs, mine included, totally miss the boat on what readers want and bemoan it when nobody comes to buy their stuff. They don’t get it’s about entertainment. About being moved. About much, much more than the language.

    Here the full Boyle AWP interview.

    However, I still think he misses the mark. In it he says about bestsellers:

    But it’s mainly vampire books and Tom Clancy and all the rest of it. I don’t understand why we can’t make our books more available to everybody-not by compromising what we do, but by popularizing them, getting them out to the public.
    He also says about editors and MFA programs:
    I think that now we don’t have great editors. We have editors who are basically trying to hold on to their jobs and who publish good books once in a while. They’re basically cheerleaders for the books. They’re not editors, really. They’re incapable of being editors; they don’t need to be. Because editing is done-self-editing is done-through the apprenticeship in the writing programs. Nearly everyone from my generation on to your generation and beyond will have been through an MFA program. It’s just the way it is now. It’s a different world. It’s essential.

    I’d like to suggest that Boyle, despite his love of entertainment, still misses the mark in his interview because you cannot popularize something that only appeals to a small market. The reason why Stephenie Meyer, Patterson, et al sell exponential circles around folks like Don DeLillo or Louise Erdrich is because Meyer and gang are very good at delivering what the largest portions of the reading public want. They deliver types of entertainment that DeLillo and Erdrich do not. (And I mean “entertainment” in a very broad sense.)

    We could point at the Oprah effect (whether you like it or not, Mr. Cold Mountain) and say that’s not true. It’s all PR and marketing. But that assumes publisers are idiots. And while some of them may be, I think it’s an extreme assumption. Publishers are in it for the love AND money. And you can be sure that the board of directors is looking for smart, money people to lead the companies. You don’t make money, you’re fired.

    Which means that IF the publishers found literary fiction sold like hotcakes they’d promote it like hotcakes. But literary fiction too often fails to entertain anybody but a handful of fringe readers. And so trying to popularize it can only have a limited effect. When people are thirsty, not many are going to pass up tall glasses of ice water for the pickled jalapenos at the end of the line.

    Meyer, Clancy, Grisham, Roberts etc are masters of entertainment. And, like it or not, that’s the main reason the small portion of the public who actually read go to fiction.

    I think it’s fine to cater to the fringe audience if that’s your pleasure. But I think it’s ridiculous to think such fare is better than what most people enjoy. Or that it deserves any special veneration. The MFA programs I’m familiar with seem, by and large, to miss the point. Instead of teaching the meat of fiction (entertainment) they focus on teaching students to serve up the parsley with great pomp. And when the customers go elsewhere to get the meat they crave (or the salad for you vegans), they respond by saying the customers are simply too dumb to get it or have no taste.

    Now, I’m not saying the folks I work with in the MFA program are idiots. Or jerks. Almost everyone I’ve met has been extremely nice and smart. They have great insights. But there is a strong pressure in that culture, amost a moral pressure, to think about fiction this way. And it’s based on their tastes.

    I think we all do this. 90% of what’s out there is crap. But it isn’t, really. The truth is that 90% of what’s out there simply doesn’t appeal to us. And so because it doesn’t deliver the goods, it’s crap to us. The problem is when we don’t realize the difference and begin to think that because we don’t have the taste for something that it’s garbage.

    It’s not.

    And that’s one thing the gentle and smart people in my program have shown me. I’m just as liable to make this mistake as anyone.

    So what MFA programs need to do is teach fiction. The meat. As well as the parsley. They need to teach all the genres, not just one. Alas, for the meat you have to go to communications departments to even talk about it. And then hope you find someone like Dolf Zillman, Bryant Jennings, Jenefer Robinson, or Peter Vorderer.

    Which leads me to the next point. Boyle is wrong about editors and writers. The majority of the authors that actually sell never set foot in an MFA program. MFA’s teach students to write for a small fringe market. And so they’ll dominate that fringe market, but not the big markets. Not what most people actually read.

    Since I haven’t worked with any editors in that so-called golden age of editing, I cannot comment on the difference. But I do know that the editors I and other authors have worked with do many edits on the projects they oversee. They are thorough. They want it to be the best story it can be. It’s true they won’t take something that’s a complete mess and work on it. But why should they? There are so many better manuscripts out there it only makes sense.

    Anyway, I love Boyle. Probably becasue he loves plot and story as much as language. His shorts saved me in my undergrad program. They were one of the few interesting things I read. I just am dismayed that these writing programs are so far off in the weeds.

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    New Workshop: How to Write a Story that Rocks

    ByJohn Brown

    Folks, the first tentative schedule for Life, The Universe, & Everything (LTUE) has been set. For the past few years I’ve been teaching a 2-3 hour workshop called “The 3 Things You Must Learn To Write Killer Stories.” I think I must have taught it over 15 times in different venues. Hundreds have attended and said they loved it.

    However, this year I’m going to be doing something different. I’m developing a new two-hour workshop called “How to Write a Story that Rocks.”

    I’ll be teaching it Thursday evening, February 11th from 5 PM – 7 PM at LTUE at BYU. It’s FREE and open to all.

    What I found was that a lot of new aspiring authors get lost in mountains of rules. But great storytelling isn’t about rules. They try to form stories with word counts, chapters, and weird plot diagrams. But stories aren’t about those things. They have a hard time knowing what to write next because they don’t understand how story works. In fact, some don’t know how to start at all. They just flounder in their piles of zing. Finally, even if they can get a bullet outline, they have a hard time turning that into a scene.

    So what we’re going to do in this workshop is this.

    1. I’m going to bring in some ideas for character, setting, and problem. We’re not going to generate from scratch as we’ve done in the past because I want to get to the next steps.
    2. Then I’m going to teach you how to go from idea to outline–we’re going to do it together, and you’re going to learn exactly how to know what comes next 
    3. Then we’ll go from outline step to scene sketch.
    4. Then from scene sketch to draft.
    5. At every step I’ll be pointing out key story development concepts and principles

    When we finish, you should be able to:

    1. Identify the essential story objectives and story development questions–get these right and the rest doesn’t really matter. This will include the HANDFUL of key things you need to worry about and develop with character and plot.
    2. Develop more likeable and interesting characters
    3. Develop more powerful story concepts (call it premise, problem, situation, whatever). Once you get this the story writes a lot of itself.
    4. Explain the real Story Cycle. Not Campbell’s mumbo-jumbo hero’s journey. Not the three, five, seven, nine acts. Not Freytag’s diagram. Story.
    5. Explain what it means to “move a story forward,” “increase the stakes and tension,” “complicate the plot,” “complicate the motive” and how that’s done using surprise, conflict, motive, and problem. Included in this are “turns,” “rugpulls,” and “reversals.”
    6. Use the Story Cycle concepts to generate a story bullet outline and take a bullet step idea and turn it into a scene.
    7. Explain the creative principles that help you generate stories more easily.

    Larry Correia will be there as well. So I’m expecting this to be a very helpful workshop. I’m going to do all I can to make it as good or better than the first.

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  • Indie Thoughts: Lessons from Marie Force

    ByJohn Brown

    Some promo tips from mega-seller Marie Force.

    I just changed the cover of a book (Maid for Love, book 1 in my McCarthys of Gansett Island Series) that’s been on sale for three years and free for two as a loss leader for a series that has 11.5 books (as of today–release day for book 11). I changed the cover (of books 2 and 3 as well) just ahead of a BookBub ad for Maid for Love. This book has been on BookBub quite a few times since it’s been free and lately, I could expect about 25,000 or so downloads across the platforms after a BookBub ad. This time, the number was closer to 70,000 downloads with a huge conversion to books 2 and beyond. Another thing we did before the BookBub ad was drop the prices on books 2-3 from $4.99 to $2.99 and books 4-6 from $4.99 to $3.99, leaving the front list at $4.99. I realized with 11 books and a novella in the series, it would cost a new reader more than $50 to buy the full series, thus the price break on the earlier books. Both the new cover for Maid for Love and the new pricing for books 2-6 yielded very impressive results. The series has sold more than 1.3 million ebooks since it debuted in 2011 and the last three have been top 10 NYT bestsellers. I was hoping to gain many more new readers from these strategies, and so far, it seems to be working just as I’d hoped it would. I love being able to try these things as an indie author!

    Another poster congratulated her and said he’d gone and purchased the book. It was free; why not give it a shot?

    Thanks, Bill. Hope you enjoy Maid for Love, and thanks for the congrats. The 1.3 million sales is especially thrilling when you consider that Maid for Love was rejected all over the place. Except by the readers. 🙂

    Find more at The Passive Voice.

    What’s Marie using? A series with a number of titles in it, competitive pricing, loss-leader sampling that sometimes includes a free book, and BookBub.

    More about Marie and her books on her website.

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3 Comments

  1. I am starting a writing group in my little town in Texas. I would love to use some of your ideas to share with the group. In fact I was thinking that your ‘five favorite stories’ idea would be a great kick off. Thanks for being a consistant poster on your site it keeps me motivated in my own writing.

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