Fair warning, this is a pitch. 

If you have a story, regardless of its stage of development, and you’d like to see how it stacks up against the criteria and parameters of my Six Core Competencies development model – or if you’d simply like to know if the thing is working or not – you might be interested in what I have to offer.

It’s on my mind today because I just finished an analysis for a writer who was pretty sure his story was ready to go.  While I don’t like wearing the black hat, I had to tell him it wasn’t, and I presented a lengthy and succinct explanation as to why.

He may not know it upon his first exposure to my feedback, but basically, I saved his ass.  This is a serious writer with serious aspirations, and this little intervention could change his life.

Because if he revises his story in the direction I’ve prescribed, he has a shot at selling it.

He’s a good writer working with the seed of a good idea, and while his fully-developed outline indeed covered all the structural and mechanical bases, it was just enough off the mark to ensure rejection.

If he doesn’t… at least he’ll know why it didn’t sell.

I can and will do that for you, too.

Here’s why you may need my services in this regard.

Imagine you’re a star pitcher – analogous to a strong writer – and you’re attending a tryout for scouts from a major league team (analogous to submitting your work for representation or publication).  There are lots of pitchers here that, like you, can throw a baseball over 90 miles per hour, the very thing that has made you a local legend.

You and every other player here today.  Velocity is a commodity at this level.

Like many of these pitchers, you look good out there on the mound.  Smooth as butter.  The folks in the grandstands ooo-and-awe as your fastballs pop the catcher’s mitt, and they assure each other – and you – that you’re ready for the Big Time.

But of the dozens of local star pitchers trying out today, only one or two will be offered a professional contract.

Will it be you?  Are you ready?  Do you know what it is that will separate you from the others in the eyes of those crusty old scouts? 

Are you aware, specifically, how high the bar really is, and what you need to bring to the ballpark to compete at this level?

Welcome to the Major Leagues

Like velocity, every writer pitching a story believes they have the chops to write the hell out of it.  Their friends and peers tell them so, and maybe they’ve had a dance or two with a few scouts (agents) before.

So if everybody is throwing heat (nifty prose and killer concepts) and if everybody demonstrates solid mechanics (story structure and character arc), who gets the contract?

In writing, that’s a judgment call.  One that you, as the author, aren’t in a position to make.  All you can do is the best you can do.  If someone can show you how to do it better… well, that becomes your call at that point.  You can listen, you can respond or you can defend what you’ve done.

Pitchers who continue to believe that their high heat will make them successful at the pro level find out quickly how wrong they are.

In pitching, it’s about so much more than velocity.  Or even throwing strikes, which is also a commodity.  It’s more about placement and strategy, about working the strike zone.  Because at this level a strike, thrown out over the plate, will quickly leave the ballpark in the form of a home run.   

At this level you need to tickle the black with a running sinker thrown deceptively from the stretch while behind in the count with men on base.

Which is to say, good just isn’t good enough in the major leagues of writing.  Because good is everywhere, common as discarded paperbacks.

Success at the major league level is about changing speeds, deception, movement of the ball, consistency, endurance, confidence and power, and a sure touch with men on base.

Is your story at that level? 

You may have nailed the structure of your story (you may have even learned it from my ebook on the subject), and you may believe your command of the six core competencies is what’s been getting you the approval of your peers.

But is it really ready?  Is it better than good?  And how do you know? 

Answer: I’ll tell you. 

Here’s how it works. 

I will evaluate your treatment or outline (we can talk about reading your entire manuscript some other time, because that’s much more expensive) up to 25 pages (combined with any actual manuscript pages you care to submit), for $400.

Why that much?  Because it takes me hours.  And it’s worth every dime no matter how long it takes.  Three decades of studying, learning, practicing and teaching this stuff is what enables me to know where to put my thumb in a leaking dike.

Included in the process is an up-front questionnaire that allows me to understand your intentions and strategy for the story, against which I will evaluate the story itself.  The evaluation begins before I read a word of the outline itself.

What comes out of this is a Coaching Document that analyzes your story on four of the six core competencies – conceptual strength, characterization, theme and story structure.  And while an outline doesn’t exemplify scene execution and your narrative writing voice (the other two of the Six Core Competencies), I’ll give that a go, too.

If it’s great, I’ll tell you.  If it’s broken, I’ll tell you that, too, and why. 

And if it’s good but could be better, I’ll identify what’s soft and what can be done to make the story stronger.

It’s like a coach coming to your house (figuratively, I promise not to show up on your porch) before you attend that tryout. 

That’s my pitch.  If you’ve got a story and you’re not sure if it’s good enough… or even better, if you’ve got a story and you are sure it’s good enough, it’s an investment in your writing dream.

(Sample Coaching Documents available upon request.)

Coming Thursday – The Top Ten Storyfix Posts of 2009

Let Me Fix Your Story… Before Someone Kills It is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com

All this talk about story structure… it’s easy to get the wrong idea.  Because in the sequence of revelations and midnight ah-hahs and pure flashes of genius that come with the territory of writing a novel or screenplay, structure doesn’t come first.

It doesn’t even come second. 

But eventually it must come.  Or the campaign you call your story will never fly.  Or if it does get off the ground – at least in your view – it’ll sink faster than a Dick Cheney Presidential run.

So what does come first?

Structure is the skeleton upon which you hang the meat of your story.  Which means, you need to create the muscle and skin and organs of your story, not to mention its personality and emotional landscape – the meat of it all – first and foremost.  Or at least have a strong notion of what those things will be.

Without all that, structure is just a bag of useless bones. 

And with all that, but without solid structure holding it in place, what you have then is a mess.

Didn’t know there even are such structural principles for storytelling?  Thought you could just make up whatever structure you want in the service of your story?

Here’s the truth: you can’t find a published book or movie without structure.  And not just any structure, or something the author concocted. 

You can’t just make it up as you go.  You need to apply the known principles of dramatic fiction or your story will collapse like a building without beams.

A successful writer uses principles of structure to help formulate the elements of a story.

For example, proper structure depends upon an inciting incident that transitions the story from set-up mode into hero-response mode. 

Which means, simply by understanding this concept the writer knows that the inciting incident – also known as the First Plot Point – is at the top of the list of the things that must be created before the story will work.   That it is the most important moment in the whole story.

And then, once formulated, the writer who understands structure knows precisely where to put it within the sequence of the story.

Structure, then, serves two purposes.  It is a tool that guides us toward the creation of the elements of our story, allowing no omissions or short-shrift.  Then, once the story’s elements are known, structure becomes the roadmap for laying out those elements in proper sequence.

So what does the writer need to know before structure becomes relevant as a roadmap?   

Well, genre, for starters.  Then, at some point, you need to decide on first or third person narrative.  You need a killer concept upon which to build.  You need a compelling hero to carry the dramatic ball – the key word being compelling, which means you need to have thought this through beforehand.  You need to give that hero something to do, to accomplish, to save, to fix, to discover or to redeem.  You need to give them a few internal demons that will make the journey difficult.  And mostly, you need external obstacles that oppose those goals.

All before you worry about structure.

Structure won’t give you those things.  But it just might lead to them by virtue of knowing you have a blank space to fill in.

And then, it provides a purpose for them and a place to put them once conceptualized.  It tells the writer that until that happens, milestone by milestone, part by part, the story isn’t yet complete.

If you don’t understand story structure, you may not ever realize that your story is half-baked or too thin.  Which means, when the rejection slip arrives, you won’t have a clue why.

Let’s circle back and put structure in proper perspective. 

Story structure is one of six core competencies you need to bring to the storytelling party.  The others are: concept, character, theme, scene construction, and writing voice.

Three of those – four when you include structure – are elements of your story: concept, character and theme.  At the end of the day, when your story stands alone as solid and saleable, all of them will be in place.

The other two – scene construction and writing voice – are issues of execution.

The four elements are the game plan.  The two executional skills represent the ability to bring that plan to fruition.  A great plan in the hands of an unskilled writer won’t fly.   Neither will a shabby plan in the hands of a great writer.

A skeleton – story structure – can’t walk around, chat up neighbors, have coffee, solve crimes, fall in love.  A skeleton has no purpose, no life of its own.  Only until you put some flesh on those storytelling bones will you have created something that deserves an audience.

And like a human skeleton, you shouldn’t mess with Mother Nature. 

Structure is a tool, nothing more.  An essential one. 

New definition of insanity for writers: trying to bring a skeleton to life before you know what the monster you are creating – the flesh of the story – will be like once incarnated.

The power of structure works equally well for story planners and pantsers alike.  Because successful pantsers write their drafts either in search of or in context to it, rather than making it up as they go along.  The only thing they make up as they along, at least the successful ones — is the flesh that will hang on those structural bones.

Once these elements – concept, character and theme — fall into sequential place, one of two things usually happens to the pantser: they go back to the drafting board and start over, writing the next draft in context to the elements that are now in play… or they try to retrofit them into a manuscript that had no idea (no context, no foreshadowing, and no structure) these particular creative body parts would ever make an appearance. 

The latter, of course, is a disaster. 

For story planners, we are stuck with another type of madness…

… the limbo of knowing too little about our stories to actually write it well.  So we resort to notebooks full of random thoughts, index cards, sticky notes on office walls, flowcharts and long walks with a patient friend to discover the best concept, character and theme that we might eventually come to wrap our head around it all.

And then, once we do know, we drag our skeleton – story structure – out of the closet to dress it up with the shiny new suit of dramatic flesh we see in our mind’s eye.  It may not work perfectly, but at least there will be something there that can be saved. 

Because all the essential parts are there, and roughly in the right place.

Here’s the magic of that process, for pantsers and plotters alike: that skeleton is roughly the same every time: two legs, a backbone, shoulders, two dangling arms, a neck and a skull.  And yet, despite that simplicity, human beings wander the earth with unfathomable individuality, both in a physical and an emotional (personality) sense.

God doesn’t worry about the structure, that’s a given.  It is what it is.  Yet God creates with great latitude the form and function of the individuals that are draped over that skeleton.

So it is with writers as we play God with our stories. 

Story structure is there for you, waiting in the closet of your imagination.  If you can’t grasp that skeleton in a generic sense, then chances are you won’t create a story that will work.

Once you know what your story is about, why it will fascinate, what it will explore, who it will introduce us to, and why the reader will invest themselves and come to care about it all, structure becomes the necessary and solid means by which you will bring it to successful life.

So many stories to tell, so little time.  And yet, only one basic skeletal model upon which to hang it all.

For an in-depth understanding of narrative structure, check out Story Structure – Demystified, a new ebook that takes the mystery out of knowing what to write, where to put it, and why it won’t be remotely formulaic.

To order, click HERE.  To learn more, click HERE.

Why Structure ISN’T the First Thing You Should Think About When Planning Your Story is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com

Beginning next week, if you hear what sounds like a flock of Hitchcockian birds descending on your neighborhood, that’s just the collective sound of thousands of keyboards on frantic overload. 

Because about 50,000 writers will be pounding away on a new novel, sweating blood to finish within 30 days as part of National Novel Writing Month.

If you’re one of them, good luck with that. 

I feel I should weigh in on this, since the mission of Storyfix is to empower authors to write successful novels and screenplays.  But I’ve been hesitant about it, because in some ways the whole proposition rubs me the wrong way.

You see, I take this novel writing thing very seriously. 

And that’s the problem… only a fraction of those 50,000 writers do, too.

I say this with love and empathy, by the way.  Not every person who wants to try their hand at a novel is a serious writer.  Nothing wrong with that, a lot of people play golf, too, and never aspire to a tour card.  And it’s likely a fine way to test the literary water, get your feet wet, see what it’s like to play God on the page. 

But if that’s you, then you don’t yet qualify as being serious about it… at least not yet.

It’s like going on a diet – whatever gets you in the game is good.  If there was a National Gut Losing Month out there, I might choose in, too.

But – and this helps make my point – it wouldn’t work.  Not for me, not for anyone truly serious about losing weight and keeping it off.  Because, if you know anything about shedding fat, diets don’t work.  Only a lifestyle-change can produce the results you seek. 

Only getting and staying serious works.  And part of being serious is knowing something about what you’re doing before you begin your program.

Same with writing a novel, in an analogous sort of way. 

There are only two possible camps here. 

In one there are those who just want to have a little fun with NaNoWriMo, experience the process, and hopefully end up with a pile of paper they can use to legitimize their claim that, yes, they’ve written a novel.  Their feet will be wet, and that will be that.

But if, at the end of the 30-days, you plan on stuffing your manuscript into an envelope and sending it to someone in New York – and many of you do – you need a reality check.

The other camp, much smaller, is composed of those who are serious about writing a novel and getting it published, and are using this “official” month as a catalyst to get it going. 

I have no quarrel with the former.   Have a gas.  And to the latter I also say, good luck with this.

Because you can’t really write a publishable novel in 30 days. 

Even the late Michael Crichton, one of the most prolific and successful of our modern novelists, took six to eight weeks of long, isolated days to get it done, and he was a freaking genius.

Credible advice for the serious writers signing up for this experience. 

First, writing a publishable novel is a function of knowledge.  Not the kind you get from having read a box full of novels in the last year, but the insight that comes from studying the craft and getting inside the discipline of it, which is largely invisible to readers. 

It is the rare prodigy that can read a novel and intuitively understand the inherent structure and criteria required to produce something that a professional reader – an agent or editor – will stick with past page 10.  Something that sometimes takes proven professionals years to finally master.

If you’re that prodigy – I’ll say it for the third time here – good luck with that.

If you’re not, then you need to bring a bag of tools to the table.  And you have one week to ramp it up.  It’ll take you more than 30-days, but if you follow this advice at least those 30-day won’t be wasted time.

Many sites are writing about this. 

Both Jennifer at Procrastinating Writers and Suzannah at Writeitsideways are offering a ton of good information, and they’re both credible.  Not so with a few other writing sites.  One so-called guru, who has done NaNoWriMo all of once (and has never published a novel, by the way), is offering to “share (his) secrets on how to be successful during NaNoWriMo.”

This is like Harrison Ford, who flies a small airplane on weekends, offering to “share his secrets of aviation success” to a crowd of graduates trying to enroll at the Air Force Academy to fly F-18s.

This will help.

One approach to ramp up is to cram on all the archived posts here on Storyfix.  There are over 91 articles available here, and about 85 of them are directly relevant, especially my 10-part series on story structure and my 7-part series on characterization.

This can work, too.

Another way to succeed in this endeavor is to go into Day 1 of the process with your story almost completely planned out.   Beware anyone telling you that you can over-plan your story – trust me, if you want to write a draft in 30 days that stands a chance at being anything other than complete chaos, you cannot over-plan.

Even professionals who use their drafts to explore and discover their story – a viable approach, by the way – can’t do so in 30 days, and they need to bring a steep learning curve even to stand a chance.  It just ain’t gonna happen here.

This will work, too.

Another way to succeed is to break the NaNoWriMo month down into two parts:

-         a 10-day planning phase in which you do the aforementioned story planning;

-         and then a 20-day intense drafting phase in which you write 2,500 words per day.  A very doable output, by the way, at least for a serious writer, and especially if you have confidence that the day’s pages are precisely what the story needs at the moment at hand.

Now let me tell you what won’t work.  

If you begin the month with no real idea how your story is going to be built, or worse, how it’s going to end, and if your plan is to feel your way into it by writing 1,667 words per day and seeing what happens next, your manuscript will be a complete mess.

Yeah, I know, sounds harsh.  And it’ll piss a few people off.  But the absolute sure-thing truth is that such an approach will yield a story that will require a massive rewrite.  Because, unless you’re Stephen King (who isn’t entering) or Michael Crichton (who isn’t entering because he’s dead), there’s not a remote chance in hell that your story will have the requisite balance, foreshadowing, structure and nuance it takes to even qualify as a first draft. 

Cynics might respond by saying that any draft will require a rewrite.  And they’re correct, which is why the whole NaNoWriMo proposition makes we queasy.  If they called it National First Draft Writing Month it would go down better. 

As is, the implication is that you can spend the month in a manner that will take you further down the writing road.  And you can, but only if you bring an understanding of story architecture and criteria to the party. 

You won’t learn it by writing, and more than you can learn surgery by just trying it, or by watching Grey’s Anatomy.  You must learn story architecture before you can write something good enough to submit.

Beware of Poseurs

Be careful who you listen to on this front.  Listen to Jennifer, listen to Suzannah, listen to me.  Don’t listen to self-proclaimed gurus who are taking time out from their busy blogging celebrity to irresponsibly grace you with self-anointed wisdom in an arena they know nothing about.

Or, just have fun with it.  Who knows, you might discover a talent you didn’t know what there, or at least, understand why something that looks so easy from the reader-side of the proposition, isn’t.

About NaNoWriMo – Three Ways to Thrive, One Sure Way to Suck is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com

In the creation and evangelizing of my story development model, the Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling, I like to tell people that there is nothing in the realm of writing fiction that doesn’t fall into one of these six buckets.

Why?  First of all, because it’s true.  But also, when you deal in such absolutes, some people go straight into challenge mode.  They need to make you wrong, to be smarter than you are. 

And that can be great fun.  Sometimes even enlightening.

While there are multitudes of folks smarter than me, I’ve yet to hear someone come up with an aspect of the writing experience that doesn’t fall into one of those six buckets.  Sure, you can dispute labels and combine them as you please, but when you break it all down this is all there is.

But lately I’ve been wondering… could there be a seventh core competency? 

Maybe.  And if it qualifies, it’s the most important skill of all.

Reviewing the Six Core Competencies

There are a dozen or so places to click on this website that will tell you what the six core competencies are.  But to save time, allow me to review.  They are:

-         concept

-         character

-         theme

-         story sequence (structure)

-         scene elements and construction

-         writing voice

In no particular order, by the way.  You need them all to be solid if you hope to write a novel or a screenplay that is of saleable quality.

Leave out only one, and your manuscript will get a “nice try, you came close,” and a rejection slip.   

So what could possibly still be on the table?

I have a condo in the Phoenix area.  Being an ex-minor league pitcher, I remain a rabid baseball fan who soaks up as much spring training as possible.  Every year I see hundreds of sturdy young men take the field in hopes of making the major league roster. 

Only 25 break camp with that particular hat, the others heading for places like Walla Walla and Dubuque. 

Here’s what’s metaphorically fascinating and relevant about that phenomenon: with perhaps a couple of exceptions, every athlete on that field arrives with the basic core competencies of the game of baseball well in command.

Many are worthy of being published… but only that analogous 25 break camp with a contract. 

Could there be a seventh core competency that makes it so?

As in baseball, or any other field of human performance, getting published is a competition.  Your basic mastery of the requisite skills is only the ante-in, the invitation to attend spring training.

Once there, you need to be better than the other guy.   You need to have something about your game that sticks out, that is not just good, but exceptional. 

Writers who consistently make the best seller lists, who make a career out of writing fiction, do one thing better than the rest of us.  You could argue that writers who simply get published in the face of incredible odds and stiff competition, do the same.

And that just might be because of the seventh core competency.

It is this: they put it all together with a value-adding panache and intuitive insight that defies definition or description.  With high art.  They get it, and they deliver it with a distinctive voice and storytelling sensibility and exceeds the sum of its six core parts.

So as you strive to master the six core competencies, as you absolutely should if you hope to get that spring training invitation, bear in mind that doing so is only your admission ticket. 

What must be summoned forth from there cannot be taught, as can the six core competencies.  It must be discovered within you.

The seventh core competency is the elusive magic that happens when art collides with hard-won talent.

Until you master the six basic core competencies of storytelling, it will remain dormant, a potential unrealized, if it is even there at all. 

There is only one way to find out.  And it has six components.

Is There Seventh Core Competency? is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com

Storyfix is proud to introduce an 11-part series on the fundamentals of story structure.

Following this Introduction, each day will bring a new post in the series.  They’ll be filed in a separate category under Pages for future reference.

Introduction

One question pops up at nearly every writing workshop I teach: how do I know what to write, and in what order to write it?  Everything we set out to do as novelists and screenwriters is part of the quest to answer that question.

Sometimes the writers in my workshops are surprised when I have an answer.  And then, almost without exception, they become ecstatic when I show it to them.

Storytelling can be as precise a craft as you want it to be. 

You can regard it as a cloud-like amorphous shape-shifting process that defies definition — a great many writers do — or you can blueprint it down to the most minuscule details of plot and characterization.  Interestingly enough, either approach can work. 

Because the central issue here isn’t whether you outline or not, or whether you work your way into your story through a series of drafts.  That’s just a question of sytle and preference, when the central variable, the one that makes or breaks your story no matter how you write it, is really one comprised entirely of substance.

The most basic storytelling issue of all involves a basic understanding of story architecture.  Some writers have never heard of it, they just sit down and write write write, convinced that a lifetime of reading great books has sufficiently prepared their intuitive sensibilities to get it done.  Others simply ignore or reject it, preferring to patch together their stories according to a structure of their own creation.

Which is a little like trying to invent your own airplane without paying attention to something called wings.

Without building our stories on a framework of solid story architecture, writers are blindly exploring  their creative options without really understanding what they are.  This, in a nutshell, is the most common explanation for work that goes unpublished.  Doesn’t matter if you outline your stories or not… because if what you’re outlining or drafting isn’t hitting the page in context to solid and accepted – key word there — story structure, it’s doomed until it does.

You can make up your own structure if you want to, but good luck getting it sold.  The people buying your work –novels and especially screenplays – virtually demand that your story conform to this standard.

So what is that standard? 

That’s the million dollar question.  Literally, in some cases.  And the answer is available right here, over the next 10 posts in this series.

Story structure is actually a sub-set of story architecture. In the building trade, a finished project is more than a blueprint that leads to a big hole in the ground, a lot of concrete and steel and a bunch of pillars strong enough to withstand a tsunami of Speilbergian proportions.  It is also the fine finishes and intricate designs and delicate mouldings, the textures and aesthetics that comprise the heart and soul of a space, the intangibles that make it more than a big box into which you unload furniture.

So it is with stories. 

Story structure is but one of six core competencies that must ultimately come to the party before a novel or screenplay becomes fully empowered.  (The others are concept, character, theme, scene construction and writing voice.) And yet is at once the most complex and the most defineable, the most basic of the basics.  And therefore, one of the first things a writer should endeavor to wrap their head around.

In this series we will introduce a basic 4-part sequential story model…

… that is as universal as it is misunderstood.  Each of the four parts exist for different reasons and offer different contexts for the scenes they house.  We will also look at the major story milestones that separate them, and the various part-specific criteria that help them bring a story to full and glorious life.

In other words, you’ll learn what to write and where to put it in the sequence of your story.

If you want to think of 4-part story structure as a roadmap, even a blueprint, that’s precisely what it is.

Already there are writers who, hearing words like roapmap and blueprint, make the leap to words like formulaic and generic.  But are mysteries generic?  Romance novels?  Thrillers?  They all follow a rigid basic story structure, and they all remain at the front of the bookstore decade after decade.

Four-part story structure is both ancient and universal. 

In screenwriting it’s called a 3-act paradigm, but when you break it down it begins to look almost exactly like the more universal 4-part model upon which it is based, and which applies to novels with equal validity.  Virtually every successful novel you read and every commerical  movie you see (art films get to invent their own structure; do so with your novels and screenplays at your own peril) are built on this trusted and proven structural foundation.

Story structure is to novels and screenplays what wings are to airplanes. 

What mathmatics are to software.  What the human reproductive system is to childbirth… and when you consider that no two human beings come out of the womb exactly alike, even twins, you see the metaphoric wonder of it begin to blossom.  Formulaic… I don’t think so.

It’s just the way it is.  If you want to sell what you write, then you need to understand it and use the principles of basic story structure in your work.

Tomorrow’s post: #1: Introducing and Defining the Four Parts of Your Story.

If you haven’t subscribed to Storyfix.com, I encourage you to do so now.  The posts will be delivered daily to your inbox so you can experience each installment in this series without missing a beat.

Story Structure — Just Possibly the Holy Grail of Storytelling is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com

We’ve all heard – and I like to quote this one – that there’s nothing new under the writing sun.  I’ve also come to know that if you rename something and view it from a new context it becomes startlingly fresh and powerful.

Such is the case with these three little magic pills of storytelling.  They’re already embedded in everything we know about building characters and plotting stories, but when you yank them out and look closer, you’ll see a magnificent opportunity.  One that you may not be fully seizing in your storytelling.

Take the Reader for a Vicarious Ride

Movie people like to describe tentpole pictures as a good ride.  If you look at all the comic book flicks and count the tickets sold to otherwise sophisticated adults… if you wonder why books like The DaVinci Code and The Lovely Bones and Harry Potter crash through the tipping point to become literary phenomena… if the allure of science fiction and fantasy has heretofore escaped you… then you need to understand the power of delivering a vicarious experience to your readers.

The key word here is vicarious.  Taking the reader someplace fascinating.  Someplace dangerous and wondrous.  Someplace delicious and forbidden.  Someplace they’ll never really go in the real world.

That someplace can be the centerpiece of the story – in The Lovely Bones the reader was literally taken to heaven – or it can simply be the writer’s choice of setting, like Tom Clancy placing his story of intrigue and betrayal on a submarine instead of in a bakery.

And by the way, this is precisely why pornography continues to outsell just about every other genre of literature.  Readers always respond to a vicarious experience.

As writers we have the power to go anywhere.  Take your reader on the ride of a lifetime and everything else about your story will suddenly become more intense and interesting.

The Context of Hopeful Empathy

Character 101 tells us to make our heroes empathetic and our bad guys despicable.  Good enough, but perhaps not enough.

A better strategy is to make the reader invest hope in the character’s fate, by sending them on a journey that the reader will feel in the deepest crevices of their psyche.  We know the reader needs to root for the hero, but when that rooting is representative of a personal hope- survival, romance, wealth, saving the world, etc. – then the hook is set even deeper.

Save the World.  Literally.

Not all stories are tentpole in scope or ambition.  But if you want to crank your chances of selling, then consider going there.  Make the stakes of your story bigger than the characters themselves.  Make the survival of an entire community, or even the world itself, the thing your hero must achieve.

Less is more goes out the window here – think huge.

I coached a writer once who had a killer idea about a young woman who was visited by the spirit of Joan of Arc.  A good start, perhaps interesting enough in its own right.  But when we hit on the idea of having Joan summon the young woman to a mission with apocalyptic stakes, the story suddenly exploded into a whole new realm of possibility.

The real indicator that her story had legs was the fact that when she pitched it to her critique group it commenced a rousing debate about religion that went on for months.  Dan Brown, for one, can attest to the power of that, and he has about a billion dollars in the bank to show for it.

Heroism plays better on a bigger stage.

Writer’s Live and Die by Their Choices

There’s nothing wrong with small, personal stories that dive into the mysterious microcosm of the human spirit.  Hey, there’s great Chinese food and there’s great Moroccan, there’s a market for both out there.  Except, one is huge and the other, not so much.

If your stories aren’t working as well as you’d like – which could simply mean that they’re not selling – then consider these three subtleties and see if there’s a way to make the reading experience more vicarious, more hopeful and more universally consequential.

FOOTNOTE: A QUICK APOLOGY

My last post went out to subscribers riddled with typos.  I apologize for this, and will crank up my proofreading efforts substantially.

In the case of that post, I was unaware of specifically when the Powers That Be actually distribute the entry to the subscriber base.  When I write a post I always proof the hell out of it, then come back 5 to 20 minutes later and proof it again from the Storyfix page itself.  That always results in catching more glitches, which are then easily edited away using the miracle of Wordpress.

This time, though, the distribution occurred moments after the original post, meaning I didn’t get the benefit of that online proofing phase.

My bad, won’t happen again.  I’m not promising a completely typo-free piece every time, only that I’ll do my best to make it happen.

3 Not-So-Secret Yet Spectacularly Effective Ways to Blow Readers Away is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com

If you’ve just arrived from MenWithPens, welcome.

If not, check out my guest blog on that terrific writing site, run by a guy I really respect.

And now for today’s Story Fix …

No matter how you go about writing your novel or screenplay, there are a lot of things you’ll need to know about your story before you decide it’s ready to submit to an agent, a publisher or a producer.   Five of them are absolutely non-negotiable.

And in my opinion, you should know all about those five moments – scenes, actually – before you start writing.  But hey, that’s just me.

Frankly, my opinion on this tends to piss some writers off.

They are for the most part organic writers who prefer to use the drafting process as a means of discovery, or as an exercise in story development.  Or just as often, who harbor a serious distaste for outlining, claiming it stifles creativity and spontaneity.

Whatever.  If it works it’s from God, and more power to ya.

But this much is true: organic writers, as much as any other type of approach, need to know all about these five scenes before they can finish a final draft that works.  A draft that might actually sell.  On that we can all agree.

The process is entirely your call.  Potato, pototo, whatever.  The end product is the same either way, and the reader will neither notice nor care.

The five scenes are: opening… first plot point… midpoint… second plot point… ending.

If this sounds a bit greek to you, I submit that perhaps you don’t really understand story architecture as well as you should - an affliction as common to outliners as it is to organic writers – and the best tip in the world for you is to stop writing and go back to square one for some serious form of writing bootcamp.

Because that is one of the most common pitfalls of all — beginning a story without a solid grasp of story architecture, and then wondering how and why you’ve just written yourself into a bleak little corner.

There are certainly other scenes you’ll have to discover before you can finish your story successfully.

From 60 to 100 other scenes, in fact, all of them expressed within narrative scenes.  But once you nail these five critical foundation scenes they are more easily developed, either during the drafting phase if that’s your modus operandi, or as you lay out a series of index cards on your kitchen floor in preparation for our outline.

Hey, whatever works.

As for me, the more you know about your story beforehand – specifically your key scenes – the better you’ll write them the first time you try.

These five scenes define your story.

The most important of them are the first and second plot points, because they introduce and launch the conflicting elements that oppose the hero’s primary quest and need within the context of the story, and then trigger the concluding sequence based on everything you know about what’s at stake, both for the hero and the antagonist.

But once you know these five key scenes, the rest tends to fall much more easily into place.

Spaced appropriately across a linear timeline of the story, these five scenes become the pillars upon which you build.  They are the foundations that hold the weight of your structure.  And most importantly, they separate and connect the other scenes that unfold between them – a total of four discrete sections of the story – each of which has a succinct and different context and mission.

It’s not a formula, it’s a roadmap.  Big difference.

Imagine having four shorter segments, each with its own mission, context and criteria, and each developed in context to the ones next to it.

Sort of clarifies the nature of the storytelling journey, doesn’t it.

Welcome to the wonderful and liberating world story architecture, the most powerful thing in the writer’s bag of storytelling tools.  No matter what process you employ.

“101 Tips” Preview: Tip #79 — Five Moments in Your Story You Must Understand Before You Can Write Something Saleable is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com

Check out my guest post today on www.WriteToDone.com.

And if you’ve come here from there… welcome!

I think all teachings about writing are good.  Wonderful, in fact.  Taken as a whole, the body of knowledge kicking around out there is astounding, and because there are so many views on so many of the variables that comprise the creative process, in the end the writer gets to decide what works for them and what doesn’t.

Next time you go to a writing workshop, notice how the topics break down into bite-size segments, each of which gets the once-over from someone very worthy of dishing it:  How to add tension.  How to impress an agent.  Writing better titles.  Fun with sentence structure.  Tips for better dialogue. Even how to be more creative.

But rarely is the Big Picture of writing stories addressed, including an exploration of what story even is.  (You’d be shocked and dismayed at how many experienced writers aren’t able to articulate or implement an understanding of “story.”)  Rarely do you see how do you write a novel or a screenplay at those workshops.  It sounds too entry-level, too basic.

They assume everybody with an admission ticket has that one nailed.  And everybody doesn’t. 

Which means — if that’s you — as you listen to How to write a better sex scene, you do so without the valuable context of the Big Picture.  You’ll get something out of it, sure, but too often you’re not sure what to do with it.  If you take that workshop but still don’t know how to write a story, you’ll end up with a broken story with a great sex scene in it.

It’s like trying to build a car from scratch and taking a seminar on how to repair your brakes, when you’re not sure how the brake system interfaces with the brake pedal, or even why the brakes are necessary.  It’s easy with cars, but with storytelling… not so much.

Writing saleable novels and screenplays is like that.  Do you need to master the parts?  Absolutely yes.  Do you need to understand how the parts relate to each other?  Of course you do.  Do you need to wrap your head around how to make the collective gathering of those parts into something beautiful, a whole in excess the sum of the parts?  Well, that’s the idea, isn’t it. 

But that workshop isn’t out there.  Neither is the book.  Not really.  I’ve talked to students that after three decades of reading how-to books and going to workshops, their vision of that “collective whole” is still baffling to them.  I read their manuscripts — and that includes my own — and realize that certain basic engine parts are missing, or they’re in the wrong place for the wrong reasons. 

The overwhelmingly common trait among unpublished manuscripts is that lack of big picture context that disempowers a relationship between the parts.  Bland ideas with great characters.  Great potential characters rendered one dimensionally.  Stories without theme, or too many themes.  Stories told without strutuce and pace.  Out of whack scenes.  Pedestrian writing.  Any one of these can kill your story.

 That’s precisely why all novels and screenplays don’t get sold, despite perhaps being technically sound.  Because it’s art, and art cannot be quantified or templated.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. 

Trust me, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer learned their respective games from the inside out.  Stroke by stroke.  Move by move.  Until one day the parts melded and became technical perfection.  But even then, it took years of honing and growing and further melding before their swings turned them into the Stephen Kings of their sports.

Short metaphoric example: my computer monitor likes to freeze up, go blank, then return as a mash of visual distortion.  Then it flashes a distorted little window telling me, basically, that I’m screwed.  I have to power down and reboot the thing, all right in the middle of writing something that had found its rhythm.  So, once back online, I begin to research the problem.  The “help desks” — perhaps the most ironicaly misnamed entities in all of computerdom — all profess a solution, using jargon like this: driver, register, cache, IP address, server, bios, FTP, SML, RDF, RSS, SGML, SQL and about a thousand other obscure terms.  Do I know what these mean?  Sometimes.   A few of them.  Have I “mastered” any of them?  What does that even mean? 

They assume I have the right contextual understanding to fix my monitor.  But I don’t.  So I just keep rebooting.  And at the end of the day, I’ll have to hire someone to replace the requisite driver necessary to repair the problem… which, I came to realize, is not an issue with the monitor at all, but with the underlying software.  Or, in more writerly terms, with the Big Picture.

That’s what writers face.  Tons of information about the parts.  An assumption that we understand what they all mean and how they all relate to each other.  A lack of Big Picture context.  An uncertainty about how to connect the parts, or even what those parts are and the criteria for them.

The magic pill isn’t out there, folks.  We still have to perfect our swings the best way we can, and then practice them until our dangling participles fall off.

I have something to offer you in this regard.  It’s called The Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling.  It’s a story development and process model.  It’s a Big Picture analysis of the parts and how they relate.  It delivers solid criteria for each.  It shows you what to write, how to write it, what will make it work, and why it’ll work.

It can’t give you the artistic sensibility required to sell it.  Or the dumb luck that springs from dauntless perseverance.  But it can give you some tools you’ll find nowhere else, at least that I’ve ever come across, and along with thousands of writing students who say this is what will finally liberate them from the bondage of writing outside of the context of the Big Picture.

All I can deliver here on Storyfix are chunks of that Big Picture, one exciting possiblity at a time.  But soon it’ll all come together, not only as a collective archive that blankets the Big Picture, but as a book.  Until then, keep writing — I shall — and just as important, keep reading about writing.

Hey, if you discover even one tiny criteria you’ve been missing — perhaps the one that will put you into the game – then both of us will have won the day.

Why You Need to Break the Writing Process Down is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com

This from a guy whose first book had a tied-up woman on the cover. I should know, right?  (See my books page if you’re curious… and I bet you are.)

Actually, that cover — not my idea — has caused me as many headaches as it has book sales. But that’s another blog.

Most of us are drawn to writing with something that comes easy and something that doesn’t. More than a few of us find writing fancy sentences an easy labor of self-absorbed love (sometimes so much so that we have to back off our eloquence to dim the purple in our prose) and some of us are naturals at creating great characters right out of the chute, too.

Me? Not so much. I’m a plot guy, and the crafting of deep, resonant and compelling characters, the kind that excite reviewers and elevate the work to something worthy of a dust jacket, has been something I have to work at. Still do.

There’s more stuff written about characterization than any other aspect of storytelling, and it continues to elude a lot of writers because, unlike structure, there’s no template or format for a great character. But…

… there is a checklist. And a good checklist shall set you free.

Before I offer up that checklist — each entry of which is fodder for an entire workshop or book — allow me to share my favorite tip about writing great characters. More of a warning, really, since this is the most frequent abuse of characters found among new and unpublished writers, and a few published ones:

Don’t confuse personality with character. Personality — or quirks — is only one of the items on that checklist, and yet for some it becomes the alpha and the omega of characterization. A quirk-heavy character without corresponding depth is what reviewers and high school creative writing teachers call flat or one-dimensional. And what editors call “pass.”

Think Jerry Seinfeld in his fabled television sit-com, which was self-admittedly about nothing at all. One dimension — funny. Now think Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Also funny, but much, much deeper. Immortally so, as it turns out.

From a character-evaluation standpoint it doesn’t matter what they wear or like to eat or if they chew gum or bite their nails or sit with their knees too far apart. Those are all just quirks.

Other quirks can be more telling and therefore valuable — like whether or not they shower, if they’re good tippers of not, if they’re litter bugs, etc. These are issues that connect to deeper roots, and therefore are something more than quirks designed to amuse or differentiate. Rule of thumb: a quirk is not an indicator of character, it just is; if quirky habits and values link to something deeper and connect to the story, then it’s of value.

What does matter when it comes to characterization is the nature and depth of their values, their integrity or the lack thereof, their decisions under fire, their actions despite their darker urges, what they say versus what they mean, their relationship with the truth, their dreams, their courage, their kindness, the way they love, or not. In other words, their “character” as a human being.

My favorite non-literary example to make this literary point clear is a fellow named Bill Clinton. Brilliant. A true public servant. Funny. Eloquent. Nice hair. But what was his relationship with the truth, even when that truth was accountable to the entire American public? Where was his integrity when Monica wanted to play Hide The Cigar? What were his values when it came to his marriage? Just who was this guy?

Say what you will about Bill, he was complex and compelling. He stirred it up. Like him or hate him, there’s little doubt that he would go to the ends of the earth to defend his country and our way of life. Heroic in one sense — even if he’s a bit cloudy about the definition of the word is — very human in another.

If Bill Clinton was a character in a book, he’d be interesting.

Here’s that checklist about great characters. Much more on each in future posts.

What is your character’s backstory, the experiences that programmed how they think and feel and act today? What is their inner demon, and how does it influence decisions and actions in the face of the outer demon you are about to throw at them? What is the character’s arc, how do they change and grow over the course of the story, and how to they apply that learning toward become the catalytic force that drives the denouement of the story?

There’s more, but those are the basics. And they’re a whole lot deeper than a few quirks and a great sense of humor.

As for faster and harder… well, these, too, are products of all of the above. Just ask Bill.

Great Characters Go Faster Deeper Harder is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com

The oldest and perhaps best morsel of writing advice ever is to read.  You can’t play tennis having never seen the game (not so with golf; you can watch it until your eyeballs bleed and you’ll still suck) and you can’t write publishable fiction until you’ve absorbed enough storytelling to intuitively recognize what works.

Trouble is, like tennis and golf, the pros make it look easy.  And that becomes a seductive illusion for newer writers who put down the latest Grisham and say, not so great, I can do that.  If you’ve tried it that way, and like most of us have enough rejection slips to wallpaper your bathroom, then you know its much more difficult than it looks.  From the right seat it seems pretty easy to fly an airplane, too, but you wouldn’t rent a Cessna and just take off.  To write publishable fiction you need to comprehend the hidden infrastructure of story architecture and adhere to critical criteria for every aspect of the process.

One of the reasons you need to tear into the craft of story architecture as a student as well as a reader is that published books aren’t, for the most part, broken.  That’s the seductive illusion, you don’t see what can go wrong and the train wreck that happens when it does.  Being a story coach, I see things in unpublished work that stick out like a tennis player swatting backhands with a five iron (to borrow from both previously abused metaphors here), which prompts me to warn you ahead of time about the major flaws you won’t see in next Dan Brown or Nora Roberts.

There are six of them here, but there are others lurking about like agents with bad taste.  All of them are fodder for an entire workshop of examples and avoidance strategies, but hopefully this teaser will help you to sniff them out in your work before someone else does.

1.   Heroes that aren’t heroic.  I read a manuscript recently with a hero worthy of a Tom Cruise role.  Hunky, smart, brave and so very charismatic.  That is, until he lands in jail and sits there while the damsel in distress rescues him and saves the day.  Nothing wrong with damsels doing that, but when the protagonist just sits and waits around while it happens, that’s a fatal flaw.  Your hero needs to be the primary catalyst that brings about the resolution of the story.  They need to be proactive and heroic in that role.  They need to have conquered some inner demon before they can step up and save the day (character arc).  If the hero isn’t heroic — or worse, if your hero is rescued - you can post that rejection ship right above the towel rack.

2.  Heavy, purple-hued prose.  Nothing says newbie quicker than chapter introductions that try to describe the inside of a coffee shop in Shakespearean terms.  Overwriting and the inhuman abuse of adjectives will get you booted faster than not including enough postage on the submission.  Editors hate purple.

3.   The dreaded deus ex machina.  Which in literary terms means, god is the machine.  Which means, the hero isn’t the catalyst for the solving of her or his problem, some outrageous and fortunate coincidence is.  In Nelson Demille’s #1 bestseller Night Fall, the book that displaced The DaVinci Code from the NY Times top spot, the story resolves when all the bad guys and even the guys who will save the day just happen to schedule a meeting together in the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  Demille can get away with that kind of thing — that’s a whole ‘nother rant — but you and me, not so much.

4.   Slow motion pacing.  This is a structure issue.  When you follow solid architecture, your story unfolds and then accelerates over the landscape of your narrative.  Things need to happen in your story in certain places, and when they do they need to ratchet up the tension and the stakes.  We’ve all read books that we’ve put down after the first hundred pages, but chances are the author’s name on the cover is money.  Again, for you and me, no pace means no contract.

5.  One word: boring. While this seems obvious, the reason behind boring is a lack of stakes.  The core essence of fiction is conflict – the hero is put into a situation in which she or he needs or wants something, has to solve a problem, reach a goal, meet a deadline, whatever.  There are always obstacles in the way of that goal.  Always.  Stakes are the bad stuff that will happen if they fail to reach the goal and the wonderful things that happen if they do.  When stakes aren’t clear and compelling, editors stop reading.

6.  Wrong notes.  In other words, questionable and odd creative decisions.  A studly all-American hero who smokes unfiltered cigarettes.  A morning business meeting at which beer is served.  A politically-motivated mass murderer who is pardoned by the President because he meant well (and, because the President happened to agree with the author’s radical political views; I’m so glad I live in a different city than that guy).  I’ve seen these and worse in unpublished manuscripts.  Personality quirks aren’t issues of characterization, more often they’re candidates for wrong notes.

Wrong notes aren’t limited to poor  choices of words, they become glaring deal killers when delivered as eye- rolling disastrous choices by a writer trying to be clever and hip.

All of these issues pertain to what I call The Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling.  Stay tuned, that’s what this website is all about.

In the meantime, I just heard back from a publisher, and I have to go finish wallpapering the powder room.  Because even when you master the Six Core Competencies — which I haven’t… we’re all and always will be works-in-progress as writers — there are still no guarantees.  It’s art, afterall, and one man’s art is another’s faux finish.

Fatal Distractions: Six Things That Will Tank Your Story Every Time is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com