[link] Larry Brooks on Story Structure and "Going With the Flow"

Larry Brooks has one of the clearest explanations of story structure I've read. He calls it "story physics" -- the basic underlying rules for generating a satisfying reading experience, no matter what the genre. In general, he's not an advocate of "pantsing," that is, writing whatever pops into your mind without any idea where your story is going. I began writing that way, and had to learn to revise and revise and revise. Then I learned to use story structure principles as a diagnostic for where my story wasn't working. The more experienced I become, the earlier in the process I reach for those analytical, structural tools.

Brooks says, 

Organic storytelling — pantsing — is certainly a viable way to find your story, and to get it into play in a story development sense. But be clear, that’s all it is. If you stamp “Final Draft” onto a manuscript that hasn’t, in fact, landed on the optimal structure for the story you are telling, then you are putting your dream in jeopardy.

I like that he recognizes that some of us need that seat-of-the-pants experience. He talks in terms of finding the story, but it can also be crucial to the joy of writing and therefore to the nurture of our creative muses. But we also want the thrill of "nailing" the story exactly right, and to do that, we need more than very cool ideas. We need to understand how to put them together, how to present them, in the way that enhances and makes them all work together -- the "flow."

One of the things that delights me about this concept is that it seems to rely not on some artificial set of rules, but on an understanding of how the human psyche works. The Greek playwrights understood this. So did Shakespeare. So did Jane Austen.

So can you.

The "Middle Book" of a Trilogy

I’m in the process of proofreading  Shannivar, the second volume of a fantasy trilogy (The Seven-Petaled Shield). As is typical, I swing between elation at what I’ve accomplished (“This is brilliant!” “I nailed it!”) and wishing I could take the whole thing apart and put it back together right. I’m also reflecting on the challenges and joys of “middle books.”

Middle books present particular challenges that reflect whether they are truly the second of three parts or whether they are “the continuing adventures” of a successful-but-complete first book. A trilogy is like a three-act structure, only on steroids. The whole work gets fractal, if I’m using that term correctly. Overall, you have three books, but each book has a three-act or four-act architecture within it. And each scene has its own buildup and partial resolution of tension, etc.

In a successful trilogy, the second book soars. It takes off like a rocket from the firm foundation that has been established in the first book, using the unresolved or partially-resolved tension to get a running start. There’s a great freedom in middle books because the “problem” – the threat or goal – has already been established. It may be clarified or elaborated or modified, but we’re not starting from scratch. Now we have the freedom to ratchet up the tension, increase the stakes, have a gazillion things go wrong wrong OMG DISASTER. I wonder if many middle books have a soggy quality because they limit themselves to “getting from here to there” instead of “swamp-malaria-alligators-sinkhole-hurricane-ALIENS FROM SPACE-PLANET GO SPLODY!” Middle books work when every turn makes the situation exponentially worse and our characters have to work that much harder and suffer that much more.

On Naive Prose

Photo by Pauline Eccles

"What did you think of (self-published first novel)?" I asked my husband, fellow writer Dave Trowbridge.

He paused for a moment. "The ideas were interesting, and the sentences grammatically correct..."

I waited, since he was so clearly trying to identify what bothered him. Finally, he added, "but the prose was naive."

Now that's a description you don't often hear. I'd read the first few pages out of curiosity after I was on a panel with the author. My initial reaction had been that I understood why the book hadn't sold to a traditional publisher. I wouldn't say the prose was awful or unintelligent, only that it didn't feel professional. And yet even in those few pages, I was able to discern enough of a "hook" to suggest an actual story. You know the phrase, "You can't get there from here"? This was a case of, "You can't get there by this method."

Lessons From Marion: Story is Paramount, Everything Else is Negotiable

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The devil is in the details -- Anon.

One of the joys and frustrations of writing in the Darkover universe is the fluidity of the landscape (and sometimes the time line and the genealogy as well!) Although others have attempted to create maps of Darkover, Marion herself refused to do so. She wanted to make each Darkover novel complete in itself and not dependent on knowledge of any other. Geography and chronology, therefore, changed to serve the integrity and emotional completeness of each story. The wonder is not that there are inconsistencies, but that there are so few.

Why Not to Kill Everyone in Chapter One

I've been thinking about the idea of "storyness" in the context of the books I read (or that someone read aloud to me) as a child and how they taught me some important fundamentals about what makes a story. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Every student in a beginning writing class hears this ad nauseum. We make a big deal about set-up (beginning) and climax (end), leaving the middle as a wide and soggy swampland. Actually, the middle is where all the fun happens--jacking up the tension, throwing one complication after another at your protagonist, Making Things Worse at every turn.