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What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Friends

Life is funny sometimes.

By which I mean peculiar, not amusing. Unless you’re talking about the kind of amusing that’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek, bitter, or noir. Laughter and tears in one and all that.

Sometimes, life makes you write in sentence fragments, too, but that’s another story and shall be told another time.

Let’s Skip Straight to the Point, What Say?

Last week, I read this blog post by The JackB. Jack talks about blogging because you’re passionate about it and blogging what you’re passionate about. He takes exception to bloggers who blog about things they don’t really want to be talking about — all for the sake of SEO, King Content, and headlining.

Jack’s post made me wonder if that’s the trap I’ve been falling into lately. For almost a week now, I’ve been questioning myself:

Am I blogging because I really want to?
Or is it just because I feel like I should?
Am I blogging about things I enjoy, inspirations that fire my passions, people who challenge me?
Am I paying too much attention to “quality blog content” — and not enough to heart content?

Still in the throes of unpacking, I haven’t had much mental energy to plumb the depths of these questions. But they’ve been stirring in my mind.

They’ve been making me uncomfortable.

Then, today, I received something else that made me uncomfortable: an email from a friend, pointing out my recent lack of communication and letting me know the negative results of said lack.

There’s more to the conflict than just that — but that is the gist of it.

It’s all making me sit back and ask:

What are my true priorities?
Is their nature what I think it is? Or have I just been fooling myself?
Have I been too focused on “business” relationships — to the detriment of personal friends?

In what ways have I been brightening the corner where I am — and in what ways have I been darkening it?

It’s time for a change, dear inklings.

I don’t know just what form this change will take…but there’s going to be a change.

What’s this got to do with writing?

Well, you tell me.

If I’m mending tears in relationships…if I’m re-evaluating my priorities…if I’m at least blogging my passions — how do you think it will affect my writing?

And how will that changed writing affect me in return, thereby influencing my priorities and relationships?

How would changed writing affect your priorities and relationships?

On Self-Publishing: Contagion

There’s a bug that’s been going around recently.

As a matter of fact, there’s two.

The first is a summer cold. An upper respiratory virus. Nothing terrifying or crippling, but just enough to take a man down for six to ten days. In this case, the grown man was me.

That’s only a small part of the story, though. See…two weeks ago, I woke up feeling immensely relieved and immensely worried. Worried because there was a little bit of soreness in the back of my throat, some ache in my joints as I pulled myself out of bed. I was aggravatingly sick just four months ago, and I had no interest in going through that again. I spent about thirty seconds grumbling and grousing and just generally frustrated at the possibility I might be getting sick again.

Then I remembered it was Tuesday morning, June 21. That was the official launch date for Taming Fire. I’d spent the weekend working hard to get it published. I’d spent more than a month frantically rewriting it. I’d burned my candle right down to the stub to get it done, but I got it done. And now it was time to relax and bask in the flurry of launch-day activity.

I didn’t get to do as much relaxing as I hoped. In the midst of that activity I had a chat with our amazing cover artists asking me if I could please get them a copy of the next book. I barely have this one out the door, and they’re already frustrated the next one isn’t in their hands (and for good reasons).

So Taming Fire got to launch itself while I got to work banging out schedules, getting people ready, and diving straight back into my next book. Luckily this one wasn’t going to take nearly as much work as Taming Fire had. This one, I knew, should be a couple days’ work. Maybe one day’s. I just had to get to it.

I spent the next week not working on it. No matter what I intended, the Taming Fire launch demanded some of my attention. There was more to it, though. I was mentally exhausted. I did some amazing work on Taming Fire in a remarkably short time span, but it took its toll.

So I took a week off. Not off, but off writing. I read Jessie’s novel (due up for publication in 2012). I read Joshua’s novel (also 2012). I started on Courtney’s (October). I was working, I just wasn’t writing.

I was also getting sick, but we’ll get back to that.

And in the midst of it, while I was working on scheduling stuff with the hope of making our next book launch less stressful than the last one, I discovered something rather delightful: my next book wasn’t actually due yet. It wasn’t due until July 6th. I’d spent all this time beating up on myself for being so behind schedule…and I actually had two weeks to spare.

So I let myself enjoy the reading, let myself take a little break. I had a holiday weekend coming up, and really just half a day’s work to do, right? And the way things worked out, I ended up staying home for the holiday weekend while the wife took the kids to visit her parents. It was the perfect opportunity to finish up Restraint and maybe even get started on The Dragonswarm for December.

And that’s where the sickness crept in. By Monday of last week, we had a Consortium Time meeting where three of our writers complained they were having trouble focusing on their writing projects, and I huddled in a corner trying to cough up a lung.

You’ve heard about that Consortium Time meeting. Courtney talked about it here, and Jessie talked about it on her blog today. (Sorry, Jessie.)

I felt really sorry for them. It’s brutal when you have a project you want to work on, you need to work on, but you just can’t make yourself work on it. I tossed back some pills, spent a few minutes coughing violently, and then went back to feeling sorry for them.

On Friday I bid my family goodbye over lunch. I got home from work, set up my workstation in the living room, and pulled up the book I hadn’t really done any work on for the last two weeks.

And I stared at it. For two hours. I did nothing. I scrolled. I reread chapters I’d read a half-dozen times. I changed a word. I changed it back. I switched to another browser tab and checked my sales of Taming Fire (it’s doing ridiculously well, by the way).

Finally I gave up. I turned on an old episode of Friends and dove into another project I started last week just to get something accomplished before bedtime. I ended up blazing away on that project for three hours and finally fell into bed with my mind still racing with ideas.

Some of them even had to do with my book. I slept late Saturday, but as soon as I was up I went to my computer. I pulled up Restraint and reread the last half a chapter I’d finished with Friday. I stared at it. I checked my sales numbers. I made myself breakfast. I stared at my document some more. Then I took a bunch of pills and went back to bed.

Honestly, that was my whole weekend. I had four straight days with no interruptions and no obligations other than this one deadline. I made essentially no progress on it.

  • I designed and documented a new videogame.
  • I catalogued all my long-abandoned Magic cards.
  • I did a story conference with Joshua and Courtney.
  • I spent four hours on a friend’s birthday lunch.
  • I read several more chapters of Courtney’s book.
  • I watched three full seasons of Friends.
  • I took so many naps.

And I didn’t write a word on my novel. I barely touched it. I did spend a lot of time feeling guilty, but that was probably the least productive part of my weekend.

When I mentioned some of this to my wife, she just shook her head. “Sometimes you get sick,” she said. “It’s just part of life. It’s a good thing you had this weekend to get better. That’s what matters.”

And she’s right. That’s writing advice for all of us, even if she didn’t mean it that way. Honestly, most of the reason I couldn’t work on my book was chemical — the cold was messing with my head, and the boatloads of medicines only compounded that. All the fun little things I did instead were also things that didn’t need the attention that I couldn’t muster anyway.

But I’m looking at three other writers in my little writing group who are perfectly healthy, but we have all caught the other bug. For lots of different reasons, we’ve all found ourselves at the same time unable to sit and concentrate.

And Trish’s is good for all of us. It happens sometimes. Sometimes it’s even contagious. Take a break, get some rest, do what you’ve got to do to get better. Life will pick up again when it’s over.

So now I’ve got some work to do. I’m gonna get started. If I can find the time, I’d like to talk a little more about self-publishing and self-promotion later this week. See you then.

On Marketing: Product Descriptions

This week we’ve got guest posts from my good friend and fellow Consortium Writer, Joshua Unruh. He’s back today to talk about writing product descriptions, or back-cover copy for your books.


Last time I gave you a bit of my career background to help explain why Aaron crowned me king of back-cover copy. (Kings and czars? I may have delusions of grandeur.)

This time, I’m going to tell you how Aaron and I whipped his latest blurb into shape and finally explain why the kind of books I write polished me into the senses-shattering copywriter I am today.

Taming Fire In Tandem

Early last month Aaron and I knocked out what we thought was some strong back-cover copy for his latest novel, a fantasy piece called Taming Fire. Something was tingling Aaron’s spidey-sense though and he couldn’t shake an uneasy feeling about it. So I did a little instant-message-focus-group and ran it past some friends of mine who I know to be fantasy fans.

Aaron and I had a shock to the system. None of them loved the copy.

They all had various reasons for this, but all their issues tied into extraneous details. These details that we thought added color and were integral to getting a feel for the novel either didn’t make sense together (without reading the novel, anyway), straight out contradicted each other, or diluted the bits that were more interesting.

We were deeply thankful to these guys because, not only did they help us with Taming Fire, but their feedback was the first step in realizing what we were doing right.

Neo-Pulp to the Rescue

See, when it comes to my books, I tend to get it right. I’ve been known to nail the back-cover copy of a novel before I’ve even written one word of it.

I don’t ever set out to do this, exactly. It’s just that when I fill out the Unstressed Syllables Tested-and-Approved Pre-Writing Package (patent pending), a synopsis is the second thing you do. And synopses should be pure plot distilled to weaponized potency.

This isn’t hard for me because I typically write in a very neo-pulp style. Some of the books I currently have on deck feature a science-hero crime buster, a kung fu master from a mystical city out for revenge, and a cowboy that fights demons and monsters.

Now, there are emotional aspects to each of these things because one-dimensional characters are boring. But at the same time, these are definitely plot driven just like old school pulp was.

  • Doc Savage fights John Sunlight over super weapons stored in the arctic.
  • The Spider has to stop a herd of rabid animals from destroying a town at the behest of a madman.
  • Texas Air Ranger Gerry Frost has to storm a floating fortress to bring in murderers and thieves.

There are three examples, but they’re totally typical of the old pulp magazines. These are not emotionally fraught, claustrophobic, matches-arranging stories. They are plot thrown at you like lead pellets from a .45. I’m happily drenched in this style.

So when I recently worked through the big Pre-Writing Package, I shared a couple of my synopses with Aaron (mainly because pre-writing in this detail is a bit of a new discipline for me). Every time I sent him one, I was surprised at how much he enjoyed just the short summary of the novel.

About the third or fourth time I did this to him, he said I had already written the back-cover copy for my books (usually one of the last steps in the publication process), because that little snippet would totally make him read the book.

Laser Focus Nails It Down (And Other Mixed Metaphors)

Somewhere between the focus group and talking about my synopses, we hit the formula:

Back-cover copy has to be about the plot and nothing but the plot.

Take the most surface yet most exciting details of the plot. Then marry that with a few clever turns of phrase and/or clichés turned on their head.

Lastly, finish with the Story Question or the Story Question restated as an affirmation (ie, “Hero must save the girl!”). Stir it all up and bake it in the crucible of cruel people who are willing to tell you if it doesn’t work, and you’ve got back-cover copy.

Lemme give you an example:

It’s the wedding of the century for world renowned crime buster Ajax Stewart and Shiarra, Queen of the Enigma Isles. But when Ajax’s archnemesis, Arkady Androvich, kidnaps the bride-to-be, Ajax is forced into a series of contests to prove his superiority to his old foe. Ajax and his heroic friends must now quest for something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue to save Shiarra’s life. Their travels will take them across the globe, to the bottom of the oceans, and to the end of time itself. Can even the Engineer of the Impossible outsmart the world’s maddest scientist and make it to the church on time?

Sounds exciting, right? Thrills, chills, and all that stuff. But I leave out all kinds of details that are really fun and interesting but would not, on their own merits, add reasons for a potential reader to check out the book.

Describe Your Product (Creative Writing Exercise)

The lovely Kelley, writing at a coffee shopThis is key: I take the plot and boil it down to the most essential, most interesting elements. I don’t talk about how Arkady and Ajax used to be best friends but turned bitterest enemies in their teens. I don’t talk about how the Enigma Isles are a lost land where dinosaurs live. I don’t even talk about the Roaring Corsairs who are vicious air pirates and the crux of one of the contests.

All that stuff is probably at least as exciting as what made it into the final product, but it would take too much explanation to make it work for back-cover copy. Back-cover copy has to sing while also punching a potential reader in the face and making them want the same thing to happen for several hundred pages.

You can’t do that by putting in every single clever idea you came up with for the book.

But you can do that. Most of you have finished novels or works-in-progress, right? Give it a shot. Take one of your stories, maybe one you did without a pre-writing synopsis, and create some back-cover copy for it.

Try to distill its plot down to the simplest but hardest-hitting essentials, and then put it together in the cleverest package you can.

Then hold on to it. Aaron and I are cooking up a little fun with them. Stay tuned.

On Marketing: Joshua Unruh

This week we’ve got a guest post from my good friend and fellow Consortium Writer, Joshua Unruh. I could tell you more about him, but he does a great job introducing himself below. Read on.


Ladies and Gentlemen, please direct your attention to the CENTER RING!

What’s up, party people? I’m Joshua Unruh, novelist and marketing director for the Consortium, and Aaron asked me to do a guest post on marketing copy for your novels. Here’s why you should care what I think.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life. That’s pretty normal for everybody. But I’ve also had a lot of careers and that tends to be a little more rare. So, working backwards in time, here are the high points of my working life.

Stay-At-Home Dad

Through a twist of timing and hormones, I volunteered to stay home with my son. That was four years ago and I’ve never regretted it. One reason amongst many is that it afforded me the opportunity to do something I’d always wanted to do but convinced myself I didn’t have time for: writing stories.

I’ve been an avid reader all my life and nearly as avid a player of tabletop roleplaying games, so I was no stranger to stories and their telling. As you’ll see in my job history, I was no stranger to writing things either. But I had never made a real effort to tell my own stories from start to finish.

Private Investigator

Before that I was a private investigator. This is probably my favorite gig other than novelist and is my official “cool guy” job. For about three years I operated as a private investigator and did all kinds of cases.

  • I helped a family declare a man incompetent so he could get the help he needed.
  • I aided the local police in some drug busts; I busted a couple bail jumpers and hauled them back into custody
  • Of course, I did my fair share of catching cheaters.
  • I also had to outrun and almost shoot a dog.
  • Some county deputies illegally searched me and then ran me off a case.
  • And I had a couple guns pointed at me by some city cops in a positively wild misunderstanding.

These were good, fun-filled years.

Marketing/Advertising/Sales

I lump this time all together because, while the skills were very different, they all worked very well together. Right out of college, I worked on both the public relations and advertising side of one of Oklahoma City’s larger agencies. My degree was in PR with a minor in marketing, so these were more or less what I wanted to do.

Or so I thought. The deeper I got into the business, the more I realized I liked being a suit but I wished I could have written some copy and been more involved in the creative side of things. Still, I got to put a lot of my basic marketing knowledge to work and, even more important, figured out which bits of my education were outmoded or just plain junk.

From there I went into advertising sales. The money was a lot better and I got to talk with a lot more people. Also, since it was advertising I sold, my skill set allowed me to be more of a consultant to my clients (when they’d let me). Here is where I developed my utter lack of fear when it comes to talking to people, even people who are probably going to yell “NO!” at me and slam doors in my face.

I Didn’t Land on Consortium Rock, Consortium Rock Landed on Me

When I met Aaron, it was mainly in my mind that I needed both some help with and an outlet for my creative writing. I think Aaron was just excited to have another writer on tap.

But once he figured out I had a background in marketing and advertising (and a total disregard for the terror talking to strangers engenders in some people), he put me to work as the Director of Marketing for the Consortium. I lobbied for Marketing Czar, but I haven’t managed it yet. I also don’t have business cards, though, so I think there’s still time…

At any rate, a nice title and a couple bucks will get you a cup of Joe at Starbucks. What do I actually DO?

  • I look for strategic opportunities to leverage the Consortium brand in ways that will be visible to the people most likely to care.
  • Our budget is not large right now, but I’ve already started laying the groundwork for when we want to do more ambitious advertising. For instance, I’ve spotted some likely ad venues and lined up some talent to put the ads together should we want to.
  • I look for ways to get our books in front of more people inexpensively and effectively. I continue to bug Aaron about our novels as podio books given away free as promotional tools. I look for fair reviewers and new ideas like blog book tours.
  • I write copy for any of our services, explanatory brochures, web pages, and novels. This last one is the most important today because it’s in this capacity that I write the back cover copy for all our novels.

Covering Your Backside

I got the job of writing back cover copy mainly because I’m better at it than anyone else at the Consortium. That’s not ego and it isn’t natural talent alone. There are two very good reasons I’m currently better at it.

  1. More practice thinking and writing in terms of ad copy. I have spent more years than any other member thinking about copy that will grab you immediately, that will tell you the most information in the least space, and that will get you excited about the product. PRACTICE MAKES BETTER. (Sound like familiar advice?)
  2. The other reason I write better back cover copy is because of the types of books I write.

But we’ll talk about my kind of novels and why they make my back cover copy awesome tomorrow. See you then!

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Becca J. Campbell

Jill-of-All-Trades

Hile, inklings!

As you already know if you follow me on Twitter or if you read my blog, the past several weeks have seen me in the desperate throes of moving from an apartment to a rental house.

Hence, I’ve been doing everything under the sun except writing: painting kitchen cabinets, packing, loading vehicles with an atrocious number of boxes, vacuuming, scrubbing, unpacking, and voicing to one and all my joys of living in a house and my despair at ever getting the previous abode clean enough to turn in the keys.

*whew*

Somebody, Please, Hit the Reset Button!

The point of that rather long sentence was that I haven’t had the time, energy, or mental capacity to do anything creative. (Painting my new kitchen does sort of count — but it was a labor, not a love.) On Monday night, I took a break from my endeavors and hied myself to Aaron’s house for Weekly Monday Night Consortium Time (WeeMoNiCT?).

Hanging out with my fellow creatives is always #goodtomysoul (as one might tweet), and Monday night was no exception. I arrived exhausted and left rejuvenated! This happened, in part, through a chat with my friend Becca J. Campbell, who doesn’t know that I’m writing this about her. 😉

Becca J. Campbell of Inspiration for Creation

Inspiration for Creation

Becca has a fantastic blog, Inspiration for Creation, which you really should check out if you haven’t read it yet.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Ah. There you are. See?! I told you she’s cramazing.

Creative Space: The Artist’s Frontier

So, Becca’s been writing this smashing series of posts on designing the space where you do your creative stuff. As I’ve thought about moving into my new home and arranging my own new creative space, I’ve leaned heavily on the things I’ve gleaned from Becca’s posts. So far, however, this is just an intellectual exercise, because I’ve still got too many boxes filling up the places I think I’ll be creative in.

Bad, bad boxes! The excitement of moving and the exhaustion of cleaning frenzy have left me drained. I want to be writing, but I can’t think straight long enough to write. I want to be painting, but my art-studio-to-be looks like a hoarder lives in it. I don’t know where my paints are, and I’ve lost track of my scribblebook.

You Bet I Want Cheese with My Whine

What happens to a creative when she’s not creating? She either wilts, or she gets restlessly itchy. When I arrived at Aaron’s on Monday night, Becca and I delved into this topic almost as soon as I arrived — because, you see, it turns out Becca’s in the same non-creating phase I’m in right now.

I’m getting restlessly itchy. I’d even go so far as to say I’m getting petulant.

Becca is wilting. She’s started down a spiral that leads to depression.

We’re both sick of where we are.

Becca, initiator that she is, decided to do something about it.

Spinning a Good Yarn

Soon after we started talking, Becca pulled out some craft supplies. We’d both watched Trish make these awesome, swirly pictures by gluing pieces of varicolored yarn to a flat, solid backing. I’ve wanted to try it.

Becca is doing it.

As we talked, she worked with her yarn and her glue — and by the end of the evening, she had a cool, funky yarn picture of three trees rising up out of grass.

Me, I had a finished blog post — but that didn’t feel terribly special. After all, I write 2-3 blog posts per week. Not that they’re perfect or I’m an expert, but it’s not like I haven’t done it before.

Becca did something she hadn’t done before. And just watching her inspired me.

Not that I’m ready to try my hand at the yarn thing. For one, I don’t know where my yarn is. Maybe it’s off having a little tête-à-tête with my scribblebook.

But I am ready to do something creative and new-to-me, or maybe just something creative that I haven’t done in a long time. Hmmm…I wonder how tough it would be to find my pencils and sketchbook in all this moving mess?

Anyway, I think a new-to-me project would tide me over until I can get down to noveling again. I don’t yet know what that project is — but, thanks to Becca, I’ve remembered that the petulance/depression of not-creating only has power over me if I allow it.

I need to write — but when I can’t write, there are other creative avenues open to me. I just have to choose to walk them.

And that’s WILAWriTWe!

_____________
What is your creative cure-of-choice?

When you can’t pursue your first creative love, do you feel such petulance/depression? Do you give in to it?

How do you fight it?

How do your fellow creatives inspire you?

On Storytelling Terminology: Hidden Story

Yesterday’s post on the narrative difference between conflict and adversity ended with some specific advice: Avoid adversity by putting malicious cause behind your protagonist’s setbacks. The best way to do that is to make your antagonist responsible, but sometimes it can be a challenge to follow through on that.

The trick is to manage your antagonist’s off-screen antics so they’re consistent and believable. If you do that well enough, even if it never moves beyond a thought experiment, the events of your story will take on a whole new cohesiveness.

Lonely Fun

Before we get into our proper lesson, I’d like to introduce another little bit of jargon I’ve run into recently: “Lonely Fun.” Joshua Unruh introduced me to the phrase when he named me the king of it.

This isn’t particularly a storytelling term (and, again, not a dirty euphemism). It comes from Joshua’s other major background: gaming. In the role-playing game crowd, “lonely fun” refers to all the work a player does within a game system but not directly related to an actual (multiplayer) game session.

For a player, that might mean rolling up a bunch of characters he’ll never actually use in a campaign. For a game master, it might mean designing remote and far-flung cultures, histories, and artifacts that the players are unlikely to ever actually come across, just for completeness.

If you’re a writer at all, that should sound awfully familiar. I’ve generally referred to it as backstory, but I honestly spend a ton of time thinking about and working through details for my story worlds that never make it into the narrative at all. Most of the time I know they won’t, but my curiosity drags me down those paths anyway.

Incidentally, the title I got from Joshua was well-deserved. We were talking through some of the 4,000-year history of my fantasy world and it is surprisingly rich and deep for a world that only has two complete novels written (set within a couple hundred years of each other) and barely a handful plotted. That’s a little bit excessive.

Hidden Story

But not all backstory is “lonely fun.” During the first couple semesters of my Master of Professional Writing studies, my professor Deborah Chester has introduced me to another term, and this one is industry jargon: “Hidden Story.”

“Hidden story” refers to all the things that happen during your story that are not shown directly to the reader. This includes things your protagonist does between scenes, and what the secondary and supporting characters are doing.

It might include the cops investigating an incident that your (civilian) sleuth is independently investigating. It usually will include everything your antagonist is doing to set up the obstacles your protagonist ends up encountering.

Obviously there’s a whole world of things going on that don’t have any relevance to your story. That’s the lonely fun. But there are big parts of the hidden story that happens off-camera but has direct ramifications for your plot. That’s hidden story.

Hidden Story Summary (Creative Writing Exercise)

The lovely Kelley, writing at a coffee shopAnd hidden story is how you manage your protagonist’s adversity. Hidden story is where (and when) your antagonist finds the time to set up obstacles. Hidden story is where (and when) your sidekick manages to get kidnapped. Hidden story is where (and when) the villain breaks into the lab and steals the piece of equipment necessary for his grand plan.

You don’t tell the hidden story, but the hidden story is running quietly in the background, propping up your whole plot. It easy to ignore hidden story and let it write itself, but that gets you stuck with implausible (or just inconsistent) obstacles and aggravating adversity instead of compelling conflict.

So here’s your exercise for this week: Consider your current work-in-progress, and evaluate its hidden story. What are you taking for granted? Who’s pulling the strings? What’s happening in between your protagonist’s bouts of pure heroism?

Work it through and make sure it’s logical enough. Make sure your villain can realistically tie the girl to the railroad tracks, get all the way to Nevada to steal a nuclear warhead, and get back to town in time to suspend some other girl from the clocktower within the time period you’ve indicated on-camera.

Make sure you know exactly what happened as part of the antagonist’s scheme, and when it happened, and where everyone else was. That’s as critical for a rom-com as it is for a James Bond novel.

You’re already in the habit of writing scene lists and synopses. Take an hour this afternoon, and spend 300 words writing a synopsis for the story you’re not telling. I guarantee it’ll make your novel better.

On Storytelling Terminology: Conflict and Adversity

Way back when, I tried to start a series around here on some of the specialized storytelling terminology I’ve been learning in my Master of Professional Writing course. I got into Plates and Hooks and Scene Questions and Story Questions, and that diverted me off into a separate series on Story Questions.

I’m not complaining. I’m pretty proud of the Story Question Worksheet I debuted last week. I’ve already put it to good use in a prewriting package for a collaborative novel.

But I’ve also got more terms that need defining for our future conversation. So let’s return to that.

Conflict

“Conflict” isn’t going to be new terminology to anyone interested in storytelling. Conflict drives story. My dad has been known to design entire novels around nothing but the conflict potential in a given character relationship.

The problem we can run into — and the reason I’m devoting a blog post to this well-known term — is that conflict has a lot of connotation and a pretty varied denotation, too. That’s great for the English language, but it makes things a little vague when we get down to industrial uses.

So for the sake of storytelling terminology, we’re going to define “conflict” a lot more narrowly. Conflict is the struggle between two characters in direct opposition over a single goal. Or perhaps I should say “over directly opposite goals.”

The easiest way to clarify that (and the most common way we’ll use this version of “conflict”) is to look back at my earlier definition of “scene.” And as I look back at that definition, I discover that I’ve already established the precise definition of conflict, too.

The Scene Protagonist starts the scene with a clearly stated goal. There is something he wants — something that can be expressed in a straightforward yes or no question.

Every scene has a Scene Antagonist whose goal is precisely the opposite of the Scene Protagonist’s.That’s your conflict: directly opposing goals.

That comes from the second article I linked above, and the article contains several examples in case you don’t remember it. Still, we’re returning to old material here. So what’s the new lesson?

Adversity

The new lesson is this:

Adversity is not conflict.

So, see, you do get a newly-defined term in this article. “Adversity” in storytelling refers to random bad things happening. I talked before about throwing alligators over the transom. I talked a lot about setbacks and catastrophes. We all end up reminding ourselves again and again not to protect our beloved characters, but to let bad things happen to them.

A lot of those bad things that can happen to your characters would fall under the definition of “adversity.” Your hero needs to get downtown to save the day, but he misses the bus. Our hero steps out the door, and by authorial fiat we decided the bus was already leaving instead of just arriving.

That’s adversity. Obstacles like that can shove the story forward, but they’re clumsy. Any time “luck” plays a major role in your story (good or bad), you’re asking more from your readers. You’re pushing the willful suspension of disbelief.

It doesn’t matter that adversity happens all the time in real life. All kinds of things happen in real life that have no useful place in fiction. If you want to create really compelling scenes, you need to build them on a foundation of conflict, not adversity.

Motive Will

So how do you fix that? Malice aforethought. Premeditation. Motive will.

In other words, wherever possible, turn adversity into conflict. If your story needs your hero to miss the bus, he can certainly miss the bus. Just have the super-villain change the bus schedule as part of his malicious (and extremely subtle) bid to plunge the city into chaos. Have the hero’s vindictive ex keep him tied up on the phone two minutes too long in a deliberate bid to mess up his day.

In either case, you’re looking at direct conflict. And that matters because your story is all about the protagonist overcoming conflict. You can’t overcome bad luck. But a villain can be hauled off to prison, a vindictive ex can be beaten in court.

That’s the magic of a storytelling. A novel is one long string of obstacle after obstacle, catastrophe after catastrophe. And sometimes it feels brutally unfair that after all that failure, scene after scene, the protagonist only actually gets to win once.

But there’s power in resolution. A well-structured story lets you wrap up all that misfortune with a single, satisfying victory that makes up for everything that has come before. One victory makes up for a whole bookful of defeats. And the easiest way to make sure your ending achieves that goal is to assign as many of those defeats as possible directly to the antagonist that you’re already working so hard to serve righteous justice.

Of course, that could get a little overdone if you’re not careful. To really do it right, you need to manage everything your antagonist is responsible for without necessarily broadcasting it to the protagonist (or the reader). We’ve got a handy industry term for that, too: Hidden Story. Come back tomorrow, and we’ll talk about that.

On Storytelling Terminology: Taming Fire

I lived in Wichita, KS, for six years while I was growing up. That’s where I attended middle school and high school. That’s where I wrote my first fantasy story, and my first (terrible) novel. That’s where I met my wife. That’s where I made most of the friends who have shaped my life in the decades since.

Partway through my senior year, it really hit me that I would be leaving. My dad drove me down to Oklahoma City to tour the university I’d chosen, and in addition to meeting English professors and peeking into classrooms, I also got to see the student center and the dorms.

And I interviewed with the director of the honors program, who went on and on about the interdisciplinary focus of the program. Students from every school at the university came together to study a core humanities curriculum and participate in debates, discussions, and extracurricular events. More than social clubs and majors, he said, honors students tended to stick together and become friends.

The interview went really well. So did my meeting with the chair of the English department and the Dean of Academic… Something. I dunno. Because I was enrolling in the honors program, they had me meet with a lot of important people, and we all got along really well.

But I spent the long ride home feeling uneasy. It took me a while to place the source of my discomfort, but it was the idea of making new friends. I’d had to make new friends when we first moved to Wichita six years ago, but the friends I made then had served me well ever since. Now I would have to do it again.

It was terrifying. But I didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time on it. Senior year is a busy time, so I spent two semesters ignoring my worry and wrapping things up so I’d end with an impressively high GPA, but not high enough that I’d have to make any speeches. It was a tricky balancing act.

And while I was doing that, my dad was living his own life. I didn’t really pay much attention when he complained about his bosses. I didn’t really pay much attention when he spent a weekend out of town, interviewing for another job. I didn’t really pay much attention when he started making plans.

Then we had a family meeting one night, and Dad explained that he’d accepted a job in Little Rock. They wanted him right away, but he had put them off for two months so my sister and I could finish up the school year. That gave me time to graduate, and then we’d be moving.

As it happened, we moved to Arkansas the night after my graduation. I left behind everything I’d known, and found myself in a strange town, surrounded by strange people, with three short months of summer before I’d have to move off to college and do it all again. I felt overwhelmed and very, very alone.

Several weeks later I was at home when Mom and Dad threw a dinner party for some of my dad’s coworkers. I locked myself in my bedroom to avoid having to chit-chat with strangers. To pass the time, I started work on my second novel. I sat on my bed with a scribblebook in hand and wrote the first three chapters of Taming Fire.

Taming Fire was about a boy who had nothing. He was talented and ambitious, but he had no friends and no real path to success. It was about a kid who got invited to the prestigious Academy of Wizardry to study among some brilliant minds, but found himself unwelcome there and surrounded by hostility. It was about a brilliant if overly-optimistic old teacher who had a vision to train a swordsman in the art of magic — the height of interdisciplinary study — and whose plan fell to tatters.

It was, in short, all the worst fears of my little teenage heart written in high melodrama.

I wrote it in my free time. I workshopped it in creative writing classes and did a complete rewrite as a senior project. I presented it to a class full of engineers and business majors and ended up feeling like a meganerd. I shopped it to publishers and agents. I gave up on writing.

I left it untouched for eight long years, even as I rediscovered my love for writing. And then, back in March, I dusted it off in the hopes of adding it to my self-pubbed library.

And I discovered to my horror that it was wretched. “Melodrama” doesn’t say enough. It was unstructured. It was meandering. It descended into tedious philosophizing at times and jittered into farcical swashbuckling at others. And I had about eight weeks to set it right.

It took me ten. And it took me hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of brand new words. But I built a story I can be proud of out of a project I’d once poured my life into. I found the diamond. I made it shine.

Taming Fire is available for $0.99 at Amazon and Barnes&Noble.com. Look for it in other formats soon (including a $12.99 paperback). Grab a copy, and let me know what you think. If you ask nicely, I might even let you read the original.

On Story Structure: The Story Question Worksheet

It was a couple weeks ago when I talked about the importance of designing good story questions. Since then I’ve talked about the diverse properties of bones, and some rules for using story questions to build a structurally sound novel.

Leaving out the cute story about my kid, most of the discussion has been about why and where you should define story questions to help move your story along. Today, I want to talk about when and how.

The Story Question Worksheet (Creative Writing Exercise)

The lovely Kelley, writing at a coffee shopThe answer to “When?” as far as I’m concerned, is “As soon as possible.”

  • This is prewriting. This is basic structural stuff, and you should have it in place when you start writing.
  • If you don’t, if you’re mid-story and reading this and realizing you’ve never considered your story question(s), now’s the time. Figure it out before you write the next chapter.
  • If you’re already finished with a question-less (or instinctively-structured story), now would be a great time to figure out your story questions as part of a focused, deliberate rewrite.

I can hardly throw all that at you without a “how to,” though. I went over most of the details back when I described what a story question is. But today I wanted to provide a worksheet to help you work through how you’ve implemented them.

1. Define Your Story Questions

As I said yesterday, you need to have a separate, fully-developed story question (with satisfying resolution) for every subplot in your novel. Let’s start out by defining them. Work through the following questions separately for each subplot (starting with your main plot).

A. Who is the protagonist?

For this particular question, who’s the protagonist? Who is most impacted by the (sub)plot?

B. What does the protagonist want most?

Once you’re working on subplots, “most” in this case includes a disclaimer of  “relevant to the topic under discussion.” I gave an example of a hero who wants to survive a zombie attack and wants to pay his rent. Within the subplot related to the protagonist’s money, paying his rent is what he wants most.

C. Who is the antagonist?

Commercial fiction works best when there’s a single, clear, human(ish) antagonist. Antagonists work best when they’re in unrestrained and direct conflict with the hero. So, concerning this story question, who wants exactly the opposite of what the protagonist wants? In the zombie story, it might be the Zombielord. In the rent subplot, it might be the landlord who’s looking for any excuse to evict his tenant.

D. Put the pieces together.

You don’t need a D to parallel B (“What does the antagonist want?”) because the antagonist wants the opposite of what the protagonist wants. That’s all there is to it. It is handy to come up with a “why” for the antagonist, but I’m not necessarily going to make you do that here and now. You only need these three pieces to build an effective story question.

Remember that a good story question should require a yes/no answer. It will often take the form

Will [1A] [1B] despite the best efforts of [1C]?

So you get

Will Harry survive the zombie attack despite the best efforts of the Zombielord?

Or

Will Harry find a way to pay the rent despite the best efforts of his jerk of a landlord?

Easy yes or no questions, which makes it easy to see at a glance if the resolution is a happy ending or a sad ending. Either one can be satisfying (if sad), but only if they’re clear. That’s the advantage you get knowing your story question.

2. Evaluate Your Story Questions

Now that you’ve got a clear list of all your story questions, it’s time to evaluate how well they work. Remember, these are the structural elements that define your story. Take some time to make sure you’ve put them together in the best way.

A. Double-check your protagonists

For each question, re-evaluate your cast of characters and make sure you’ve chosen the most interesting character for the question.

B. Sort your story questions

Arrange all your story question from most interesting to least interesting. Look them over critically and make absolutely sure your most interesting story question is the primary plot. Make sure the story is designed, start to finish, to provide a satisfying answer to that question.

And keep this list. If you end up with a bloated story (whether it’s over-complicated or just over-long), you can trim it down by cutting subplots. You always want to start with the least interesting and move up from there.

When you’re done ordering, assign every question a number for later reference.

3. Evaluate Your Scene Questions

If you go back to the article I referenced before, it spent as much time talking about Scene Questions as Story Questions.

Now that you know your major story questions, you can design the structure of your entire story (scene-by-scene) according to those questions.

For each scene, ask yourself:

A. Which story question does this scene address?

B. Am I telling it from the right point of view?

C. How does this scene advance its plot?

4. Evaluate Your Story’s Structure

You probably have a good idea how a story arc works. The protagonist faces obstacles of increasing difficulties, each one including a significant setback, right up until he reaches a climax that results in resolution (a clear yes or no ending to the story question).

Your scenes should be structured to work through that process for every single subplot. Now that you know which scenes apply to which subplots, you should be able to separate them out into ordered lists. Maybe your primary plot consists of scenes 1 -> 2->3->5->6->8->9…. and subplot 2 consists of scenes 4 -> 7 -> 10….

Now look at each story arc separately and evaluate how it works.

A. Where in the story (which scene) introduces this subplot?

More important subplots should generally start sooner.

B. How long is this subplot (in scenes out of the total)?

More important subplots should generally take up a larger portion of the story.

C. Where in the story (which scene) provides the final answer to the story question?

More important subplots should generally end later.

D. Is it a satisfying ending?

This isn’t as difficult a question to answer as it might seem. There’s a reason it’s the last question on the worksheet, though. The answer to this question depends on several factors:

  • Did you spend enough time developing the subplot? That’s why we went to the trouble of counting out scenes.
  • Did you make every aspect of the story question clear to the reader, as early as possible? Remember that sometimes story questions can depend on careful nuance, and that nuance needs to be conveyed all the way through.
  • Did you answer the story question in a clear and definite way?

If you can answer each of those three questions with a “yes,” you’ve got a satisfying ending. That doesn’t guarantee it’s an interesting or exciting or happy ending, but it’s satisfying.

If you have to answer one of them with a “no” (or, more likely, with an, “I’m not sure”), then you know exactly what to work on in your story.

  • If the story question doesn’t really become clear until halfway through the novel, you should go back to the scene where you introduce it and find a way to clarify right there.
  • If there are nuances to your story question that determine how effective your resolution can be, go back to every scene relating to that story and see if it points your reader toward the nuances. If not, look for ways to shore that up.
  • If the final answer to your question is vague… well, you can change the resolution, but it’s quite possible you really just need to add nuance to it. Or make the question itself clearer. Then again, you might just need to spell it out right in your protagonist’s thoughts. “She loved me. She really loved me. And that was all I ever needed.”

That works whether you’re looking at a prewriting package and evaluating your scene list, or you’re looking at a finished novel trying to figure out why it doesn’t feel quite finished. Work it through the story question worksheet, figure out what’s loose or weak or vague, and tighten it up until every piece is pointing straight toward the answer to an interesting question.

Do that, and you’ll find yourself with a remarkably effective ending. That’s what story structure is for.

On Story Structure: Managing Multiple Points of View

I’ve spent a couple weeks trying desperately to finish up Taming Fire for publication this month. But last time we talked, it was about the questions that keep people reading your stories, and the big story question that drives your story forward. I said offhand that well-designed story questions and scene questions make it much easier to write a story.

This week I’d like to follow up on that idea. I want to talk about story questions as structural storytelling elements. If you use them right, they define your story’s skeleton. They hold it up (keeping it believable), they fit together cleverly to allow your story to move around (keeping it focused on the plot), and they protect the softer, more vulnerable bits (keeping it interesting).

For that to work, you have to use story questions. You have to use them deliberately, and you have to string them together in all the right places. When I talk about “story questions,” you probably go straight to the big one — the spine — but you’ve got to build structure out into the extremities, too. That’s what I want to talk about today.

Points of View

I’ve talked a couple times about my novel-writing professor at the University of Oklahoma, Deborah Chester, and her deeply rules-based storytelling technique. It has been astonishing to me how often one of her students will ask a question that requires a vague, subjective answer, and without hesitation she’ll provide a concrete, objective rule concerning the situation.

It has been even more astonishing to learn, again and again, how accurate and effective those rules can be.

One example of that came when a classmate asked her about multiple points of view. She asked, “How many characters should have a point-of-view scene in a good novel? How do you know the right number? And how do you manage them all?”

I snickered from across the room and shook my head. “There’s no answer to that question,” I thought. “It’s a matter of style, of preference, of ability and experience.”

Deborah Chester shrugged and said, “The only characters who should get point-of-view scenes are the ones who are protagonists of subplots. And the only scenes from their points-of-view should be the ones most relevant to that subplot. If your scene is primarily about the protagonist’s story, that scene should always be from the protagonist’s point-of-view.”

Bam. Just like that. Hard and fast rule. And it makes perfect sense. The point-of-view character for any given scene should be the character most invested in that scene, the one who has the most to lose.

Subplots

Of course, to really put that rule to use, you have to know your subplots. You have to know what every scene is doing, and which subplot it’s advancing. That’s basic story structure.

And the easiest way to design, understand, and manage your plots (as I said a couple weeks ago) is to build them around story questions. So the corollary to Professor Chester’s rule about points-of-view is this:

Every subplot needs to have a clear story question, and a clear resolution

You understand the main story question, the spine of your story. You understand the idea of a Big Event at the opening of your story that introduces conflict into your protagonist life and causes him to seek resolution. That becomes the story question (“Will the protagonist find resolution?”). It’s not necessarily conscious, but it’s natural and even instinctive to build your story around that central pillar.

The trick to strong writing, though, is to do it deliberately and effectively. And to extend that same level of care to your subplots as well. They’re the extremities of your story, but they need structure, too. If your protagonist is almost as concerned with paying his rent as he is with fighting off the army of attacking zombies, then you need to do the same things for the “Pay the rent” subplot that you do for the “Zombies” plot.

  • Establish the story question early, and clearly
  • Devote some scenes entirely to pursuing an answer to that story question (and encountering setbacks along the way)
  • Wrap up the subplot with a clear, definite answer to the story question to provide a satisfying resolution

And if your subplot happens to belong to the love interest or the sidekick or the villain instead of the protagonist… well, you do precisely the same thing, but the subplot’s hero is the one who gets point-of-view.

Gods Tomorrow

I thought it might be handy to discuss all this in a real-life example (albeit a simple one). My sci-fi crime novel Gods Tomorrow is told almost entirely from my protagonist Katie’s point of view. The only exception is the very first scene of the book, which acts like a Law & Order-style prologue to introduce the scene of the crime that will drive Katie’s investigation.

That scene happens from the killer’s point of view. And, according to the technical definitions we’re using, it’s not a “scene.” It’s a sequel. The point-of-view character is reviewing the conflict-heavy scene that just took place (he strangled a young woman), considering the impact that’s going to have on him, and then planning how he’s going to handle it in the future.

Even in the sequel, it’s clear what the killer’s goal was in his scene. He wanted to get away with it. And instead of a major setback, the scene closes with a “yes” ending when the killer closes his eyes secure in the knowledge he’s safe.

We don’t see anything else from his point of view. We do see the resolution of his story question, though, when his identity is revealed in the climax and he gets the ultimate “no” ending to his story question.

Meanwhile, the whole rest of the book follows Katie’s goal, and the conclusion of the story is focused on answering her story question. That’s about as simple and straightforward as you can get with “multiple points of view.” Obviously many writers like to make it much more complicated.

I can’t tell you not to. I can tell you how to measure whether or not you’ve done it right.

  • Every point-of-view character ought to be the protagonist of his own subplot, and he should only be the point-of-view character in scenes focusing on that subplot.
  • Every subplot ought to have a clear story question, and that question should receive a clear, satisfying answer in the book’s conclusion.
  • The most interesting protagonist should be the main protagonist, and the most interesting story question should be the main story question.

As long as you’re sticking to those rules, I can hardly quibble. I can just promise it’d be a lot easier to stick to them if there’s only one of each.