The Funnily Enough

Each character in a scene needs a goal. Obviously the main character’s goal is the most important, but every character should be aiming for something, and those goals should be acted on and in doing so affect one another. 

This doesn’t just refer to the protagonist/antagonist relationship, it should be true of all characters in a scene.

So you're writing along in your latest novel or novella, and you come to a screeching (or, at least squealing) halt. Your story seems stalled for some reason. You don't know what scene to write next.

So what do you do? I have a suggestion. I call them the two writing power questions.

Like many writers, I was interested from a very early age in the relationship between the way a story was told and what it was telling.

I liked the way the words in “Charlotte’s Web” made webs themselves, spinning out from one another, silken. As a teenager, I felt shaken by the hollow sound and empty spaces in “The Sun Also Rises,” how the novel seemed to be narrated by a dead person about dead people, which it both isn’t and is.

Thoreau said: “Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed. It is nobler when it is a deed.” Literature for me has always been about this duality, this double happening in the story being told and in the telling.

Self-publishing has lost its stigma, and it’s the publishing path of choice for a lot of writers these days.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Or that everybody who self-publishes will succeed.

Unfortunately, I’m seeing a lot of writers dive in head first without having a clue what they’re doing. Even long-time trad-pubbed authors who think they know the ropes can make fatal errors because self-publishing has a different set of rules.

Those who have taught, or lectured on creative writing, specifically the novel or short story, will remember being asked, at some time or another, that pertinent but most difficult of all questions: What constitutes good writing?

The revision process, new writers tell me, is confusing, long and really really difficult. Think of it this way: when you rewrite, you're in essence taking that lump of clay (in this case, a finished draft) and shaping it into the story it needs to be. Yet many writers have trouble with this part of writing.

How can you get started with revisions when you don't know where to start?

Recently I was at a workshop with Donald Maass and the topic of Emotional Writing came up. As you can imagine, I immediately perked up and my fingers became cyclones over the keyboard of my iPad, taking notes.

The gist of it was this: the most powerful stories have emotional writing, the kind where we dig deep into our own feelings and then put them on the page. Donald encouraged us to move past ‘expected’ character emotions and try for something deeper, more primal. Something unexpected.

Thriller writing? Mystery writing? Literary fiction? It’s all the same: Building apprehension in the minds of your readers is one of the most effective keys to engaging them early in your novel and keeping them flipping pages late into the night.

Simply put, if you don’t hook your readers, they won’t get into the story. If you don’t drive the story forward by making readers worry about your main character, they won’t have a reason to keep reading.

Think: Worry equals suspense.

The best part is, the secrets for ratcheting up the suspense are easy to implement. Here are six of the most effective.

Many writers try to skirt externalization, because they “say” they want to write “literary works.” Yet, even in literary fiction, externalization is critical. Why?

Because 99 times out of a 100, when someone tells me their writing is “literary” this is actually code for “pages and pages of self-indulgent mind-vomit.” Hey, I’ve been guilty, too. Don’t feel badly. If we aren’t making mistakes we aren’t doing anything interesting.

Thinking does not literature make. Many writers don’t like externalizing because, as humans, we have been conditioned to shy away from conflict at all costs. Great fiction writers must do the exact opposite and generate as much (outward and inward) conflict as possible. Even “literary” writers don’t get a pass.

There’s no point having a story by the end of which the reader will know who your main character is and what he’s about. 

You may think that the purpose of the story is to reveal this and that’s it’s intriguing for the reader not to be too sure where a character’s loyalties lie. That would be wrong. 

Did you have a good idea of what kind of person Harry was before he got to Hogwart’s? Did you have a reasonable idea about Katniss before she got to the games? 

The initial part of a story is to tell the reader the character’s values and beliefs. Once things kick off, then it’s time to test those values and beliefs.

You’ve probably heard the advice about writing hot and editing cold*—write freely without censor, trying any- and everything that might work, that could lead to a wonderfully creative, dramatic, or satisfying line or passage or scene, but only edit after giving yourself some distance from the text.

The writing hot part isn’t usually too difficult, though many times we do cool ourselves down, analyzing as we write, editing as we write, rather than simply allowing wild and wonderful and hotly passionate ideas to shoot off our fingers.

But rather than giving you suggestions for writing without a censor, an inner critic, or an editing witch perched on your shoulder—which I’ve covered before—I want to focus this article on the edit cool part of the advice.

What makes words flow? Some authors and poets swear by a highly particular writing ritual. Others swear they don't do anything special to get to that place where the words begin pouring forth.

I once had a client tell me she’d heard that sentences should never run more than fifteen words. To this day I have no idea where that rule came from, though it was probably from someone who either had a short attention span or had read way too much Henry James.

The rule is nonsense, of course. It wound up making all her characters seem like they had short attention spans. But it shows one of the dangers with trying to write by the rules – you wind up limiting your characters or story so you can color within the lines.