Five Ways the so-called “Conventional Wisdom” within the Writing Conversation Can Take You Down

If you set out to write the perfect writing book, with content that has never been seen or assembled quite this way before, that changes the game and finally delivers what hungry writers yearn to discover but can’t seem to land on…

… what might that look like?

(The following is a bit of a manifesto. Part writing lecture, part wake-up call, part strategy for introducing you to my new writing book, which comes out October 8 from Writers Digest Books. You can see the title and cover at the end of this article.

The goal of every Storyfix post is to deliver value that facilitates a forward step in your journey. Nothing here is ever purely and exclusively sales hype.

Whether you buy my new book or not, this post will move you forward if you let the information in. And if you do take a chance on the book… well, nobody can guarantee an outcome. But I can and will guarantee you this: you’ll encounter the foundational information you need, in a way you’ve never seen it framed before– the core, principle-driven knowledge about what makes fiction soar, in the form of part-specific criteria—to write a novel that works at a publishable level. You’ll still need to add voice to the proposition to get to that publishable level… the book will help you there, as well.

This is the stuff nobody is talking about, at least as a centerpiece for coaching you upward. While everyone else is debating process, you can at last take a deep dive into craft at a level that will change you as a writer, and inform your work as an author. As bestselling author Robert Dugoni says in the introduction: “This is the stuff you wished you’ve have learned earlier in your writing journey.”

Also… there’s a little bonus for you at the end of this: a download of the Table of Contents for the new book, in case you’d like to see specifics about the areas of focus alluded to here. Or heck, just go there and check it out and then come back here for the fireworks…)

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When it comes to the collective conversation about writing—workshops, books, blogs, articles, forums full of never-published know-it-alls setting you straight—chances are you’ve heard or read most of it. That’s where the cynicism comes from… you’ve heard it, but it never seems to make a meaningful difference for you. Because so much of what you read and/or hear contradicts something else you might hear. One bestselling author tells you to outline your story, another advises you to never do that, to just let the story come to you organically. One guru claims that story trumps structure, while another assures you that story is structure.

And then there’s everything in between.

Here’s the truth: an outsized proportion of what you hear is someone’s opinion framed as truth, because hey, it works for them. Some of it, within the whole, may indeed be valid. Some of what you hear is full of snark and hubris. And some of it is pure, unadulterated horseshit.

It’s all just noise. Seductive nonetheless, because it promises answers to your questions and a path toward achieving your goals. If only you could see the stones of that path, where those answers await beneath steaming piles of conflicting camouflage and cynicism and hubris that fog the lens.

Wouldn’t it be great if someone, finally, wrote a writing book that rises above all that conflicting, imprecise prattle, that leaps over the running river of opinion, and focuses on what has been proven to really work, on what really matters?

A writing book that focuses on the criteria for a great story?

I’ve done just that. I assure you, you’ve never read a writing book quite like the one I’m about to publish. It’s taken me three prior books over a ten year period to assemble the infrastructure for what this book delivers, and it was enough to cause the editors at Writers Digest Books to excitedly welcome me back to finish what I’ve started within this work.

Here’s the first of the five ways the conventional writing conversation can take you down.

The vast majority of what you hear about writing—in workshops, in keynote addresses, in blogs and articles and forums and during coffee breaks with your critique group—is focused on, or contextually infused with, one particular thing. And it’s the wrong thing, if what you are seeking is knowledge about the fundamentals of storytelling; i.e, the stuff that makes stories sizzle on the page, and sinks others that don’t.

Why is this thing you’ll hear instead the wrong thing? A thing that will fool you into believing you are learning something?

Answer: Almost everything you hear from writers talking about writing is about the writing process.

Go ahead, spend 90 bucks on James Patterson’s Master Class. You’ll get twenty modules telling you to do it just like he does it, which is to put your butt in a chair and let the story come to you. (How’s that working out for you?) There isn’t a shred of dramatic theory or liberating core knowledge anywhere in that or many other teaching venues you will encounter out there. Some of them have part of it right, but almost always it circles back to your process… when in fact, at the end of the day, your process isn’t what matters.

There’s never been a reader who gives two hoots about the author’s process.

(To be fair, there are a handful of writing gurus—James Scott Bell among them—who put out consistently valid and empowering stuff, almost all of it aligned with what I’m writing about.)

Everybody has an opinion about process. And you can find successful authors at every point along the process continuum—from anal-retentive outliners and planners to absolute blank-page pantsers who have no idea what their story is about until the third or fourth draft—who you could look to as proof of life for their approach. The thing is, like I said… it works for them, maybe not for you.

On that note, consider this: if you don’t know what Stephen King knows (he, the Master Pantser of all time), it may be a slippery slope leading to a coma if you try to write stories like he does, or as he advocates. And my sure-thing bet is, you don’t know what Stephen King knows.

There is ONLY ONE THING that’s universally true about the writing process, and it is this: what you hear is usually half true, for half the people hearing it, half of the time. Do that math and proceed accordingly.

Here is the #2 thing that toxifies the writing conversation:

It is this: You don’t know what you don’t know.

Which means, you may not recognize a career-changing epiphany when it slams into your frontal cortex, or you may perceive such an arrival when in fact the Big News is just another opinion.

Keep reading. I will give you a precise list of exactly what you need to know at some point along your writing journey, the earlier the better. In fact, every step of that journey is, at its core, an endeavor to discover and internalize these things… the things you need to know about how to land on and develop a story idea… and the things you need to know to execute that story over a viable story arc.

But here’s the fine print of that: you don’t get to say what is viable. The marketplace does. Historical precedent and validating evidence does. The marketplace is precisely the laboratory within which the core principles and the criteria that gives us access to them have been culled, polished and presented. Which means, if you’re not writing toward accepted best practices, you are by definition trying to reinvent your genre (a low-odds proposition)…

… or you are writing without knowing what you don’t know.

Either way, you’re pretty much screwed if that’s you.

Here is the #3 thing that confuses the writing conversation:

Much of what you hear about writing novels comes in the context of literary fiction. Which, while leveraging the same core dramatic principles, has somewhat different standards and market expectations. Such as the so-called conventional wisdom that it’s all about your characters. Or that plot, in the form of dramatic tension, doesn’t matter. That slice-of-life episodic fiction is viable. Never have a handful of flawed pieces of advice been so incomplete, limiting and downright toxified as those.  As much as the commonly heard and wildly misunderstood battle cry, “Just write!”

That’s the explanation behind many careers that don’t reach a publishable level for decades, if ever.

If you’re looking to cut a few years off your learning curve, I’m your guy and this is your writing book.

Here’s the #4 thing that messes up the writing conversation:

It is the belief that there are no bad story ideas. That any idea is worthy of a novel to be written from it, if the author believes in that idea enough.

And yet, bad ideas—weak, overly familiar, too thin, too flat—story ideas account for as much as half of the collective rejection new writers experience. When was the last time someone told you that your story idea wasn’t strong enough?

Didn’t think so.

What if there were criteria you could apply to your story idea, to help you understand its potential for all of the myriad categories of story essence and power that will result in a compelling reading experience?

That’s the core essence of my new writing book, and this particular focus—the story idea—becomes the first of seventeen fully-fleshed out, category specific lists of criteria that show you what is essential for success.

You won’t have to guess anymore. You’ll know, because the criteria will expose weakness and strength with equal opportunity.

This leads into the eight primary criteria for a story premise that will fuel a story that stands a chance. Do you know what they are? They are non-negotiable, and yet, nearly every rejected manuscript is explained, at least in part, by one or more of those criteria not being met.

If you don’t know what those eight criteria are, then truly you do not yet know what you don’t know. What you need to know. And what you don’t know will sink you even faster than mishandling what you do know. Because the latter can be fixed… once you know.

And finally, here’s the #5 thing that sours the writing conversation:

The form and function of a commercial novel is not something you get to make up to suit your story intentions. Or, your limitations (in the form of what you don’t know about story structure). Rather, like a game that takes place on a field with lines and boundaries, it unfolds in context to an expectation.

Well over half of those attending your next writing conference won’t have a clue what that means. They, too, don’t know what they don’t know. But you don’t have to be among them, wondering how you will know what to write and where to put it within the story.  And most of all… why.

No writer who has ever published a successful genre novel has defied this truth. They may claim they didn’t write toward the known criteria for story structure, but again, that is an issue and perception of process, not product (and as such, an example of how the writing conversation cost them a year or more of their life pounding out a draft that didn’t work for this very reason). And indeed, some have no clue about any of this other than via instinct… because this is what instinct looks like when it is fully informed. By some means, their early drafts written outside of those criteria have evolved back toward those lines on the playing field, often through outside feedback, sometimes through what amounts to a wake-up call.

My new writing book—GREAT STORIES DON’T WRITE THEMSELVES: Criteria-Driven Strategies for More Effective Fiction—may be the wake-up call you’ve been waiting for.

The information about story—the knowledge you seek—is out there.

It will turn your process, whatever it may be, into an efficient story-generating machine, working from a story idea and premise that has already passed muster at the critical level of macro-intention, touching all the right bases in the right way, with all of the essential ingredients for story-efficacy already framed and empowered.

Want to see more? I can help.

Click HERE to see the TABLE OF CONTENTS for this book. It identifies specific areas of coverage, including the various lists of criteria, in four parts:

1. Navigating the writing conversation, so that you recognize value and can separate truth from opinion, most especially when it comes to the differentiating contexts of process versus product;
2. The originating story idea and its requisite evolution into a story premise, including how and why so many authors come up short at this stage, effectively sabotaging or at least compromising their story before they’ve even written it;
3. Navigating the dramatic and character arcs, as we work through your developing story from first page to last, identifying the four essential contextual blocks of narrative flow and their critical milestone transitions.
4. An exploration of the criteria for effective scene writing and the criteria for narrative prose, with a send-off that positions this new body of knowledge within the realities of the writing experience and marketplace.

If you’ve enjoyed my previous writing books, this new one will deliver a finish in a way that renders the whole a greatly enhanced realization of the parts. There is so much here that is brand spanking new within the writing conversation, but that will ring true and familiar as a retrospective of the novels that you’ve read and loved.

And if you’re new to the world of writing mentoring, or me in particular, I invite you to walk with me on the wild side . Because this isn’t something you’ll find out there, at least framed this succinctly and applicably toward the goal of writing a book that readers will devour and talk about. Or at a more basic level, will have a shot at being published and/or viable as an independent project.

Your process is your process. But your product… you need that to be for everyone. The criteria for making it happen are already everyone’s to discover, absorb and begin to practice. I didn’t invent any of it. I’ve only given it voice and visibility within the unique context of the serious author.

Thanks for engaging with me. Let me know if you have questions or thoughts. (Email: storyfixer@gmail.com; I’m trying to get a fix for my Comments section here on the site, which seems to  have a mind of its own and has been on sabbatical of late.)

Larry