Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 12

There is an A-list product, rather than an A-list process.

I submit to you that the latter doesn’t exist. Because A-listers across the board, in equal measure, create their bestsellers using both sides of the proposition — organic pantsing and/or plotting leading to an outline — and everything in between, with no clear majority emerging.

I’ve seen this prove itself in more than a few keynote addresses by famous authors with bestsellers to back them up.

Not long ago, one of them told hundreds of serious writers at a major conference that he composes a 100,000-word character biography before tackling a draft of his work-in-progress, just to “find the voice of the character.” He contended we should all do the same. That finding your voice always requires pain and suffering.

Such a contention from the mouth of an A-list author proves nothing other than the circle I’ve just completed here: How they write their books doesn’t matter. What matters, from a learning perspective, is being able to recognize what it is about their work—the end product—that succeeds.

Better to cull value from their product rather than their choice of process. And yet to acknowledge, at least for that writer, that this circuitous route was what it took to get him there.

That doesn’t have to be you, by the way.

Here’s the footnote to that story: That 100K character sketch the author wrote? He intended it to be the novel. It wasn’t ever a strategy or a tool; it wasn’t even a story-development exercise. He thought it was the novel. He admitted as much. He sent it to his agent as such. The agent returned it forthwith, riddled with, well, ridicule.

Because it wasn’t just a bad novel, it wasn’t a novel at all. It was hundreds of pages of character sketch and uneven backstory, with no dramatic tension (plot), no theme, no structure, and nothing to root for. Nothing happened in those pages. Which means this successful author, standing behind a podium at a major writing conference in front of many hundreds of other authors who are, for the most part also working or at least aspiring professionals, couldn’t tell the difference as he typed.

This is what happens when you write your novel without reference to criteria, or even actually knowing the difference between a novel and 100,000 words of brainstorming.

This is not the common wisdom, nor lack thereof, among any category of author. Actually this is the antithesis of wisdom. It’s certainly not a choice that the majority of A-list authors would make. It’s just that guy.

Trouble is, that guy is telling other writers, like you, that this is the conventional wisdom, that this is indeed how it is done. Happily, when I looked around the room full of serious writers in that moment, I joined a sea of rolling eyes and more than few shaking heads.

The only truth in that is this: This is how it’s done … for him.

One of his books sold four million copies and was made into a poorly reviewed movie (hey, I’d take that, no question), so by hook or crook, he got to the finish line on that project. But I’ll risk saying this: You can bet there is an un-credited editor out there somewhere who knows her role in that success story.

Earlier, when I said there has to be a better way… there is.

---

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.