Pantsers and Planners… we’re all just bozos on this bus.
(If you get this quote then you may be a social trivia genius… this is a paraphrase from the title of a 1971 comedy album by the Firesign Theater.)
Principle-driven, criteria-informed…right there is our opportunity to raise the bar for our work.
Hopefully, the process we apply to our work embraces things we know and understand about the principles of storytelling. But when one’s particular frame of reference is thin ice for a writer—either because of lack of experience or an absence of learned knowledge—then the story emerges from within a vacuum in that regard, in much the same way someone called to the cockpit in an emergency would be operating blindly as they try to land the airplane in a snowstorm using only the context of their experience as a passenger. Let us hope someone is on the radio speaking instructions into their headset. If they could even find the headset in that dire situation. If that ever happens to you, pray that whoever goes forward to help has at least been through ground school.
The key variable in story efficacy is not, by default, our choice of process, of how we prepare and plan and execute our stories. Lawyers and accountants and athletes and actors would agree, because once we put on the uniform and step onto the field or enter a courtroom or sit in front of our keyboards, we have in fact signed up for something in terms of the end product.
To say you hope to sell your fiction is to declare that you seek to become a professional writer. Certain standards apply. Maybe there aren’t so-called best practices relative to our chosen process, but there certainly are best practices relative to what ends up on the page.
No one in the audience cares how we got there, they only care about how well it works.
These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves.” Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.
One Response
Something else: “The audience HAS NO IDEA how we got there!” They just picked up a paperback before they boarded their next flight.
“Magick?” We don’t really want to know. That fantastic book materialized under a toadstool.”
But this means that the actual process succeeded in its mission: it remained invisible. No one actually saw how the trick was done, nor how many people actually had a vital hand in it.