Today’s excerpts are from Chapter 5: Realities, Odds, and Other Inconveniences
I’m assuming you want to be great at this work.
Not just to blend in, not just to sit in the workshop audience and take notes, but to truly become the next Gillian Flynn or John Green or Robert Jordan (real name James Oliver Rigney, Jr., an elite sci-fi/fantasy writer). If, as an alternative, you quietly admit you’d settle for simply getting into the game and have your book on the shelf at Barnes & Noble or ranked on a page on Amazon.com, you need to know that shooting for the middle may not get you there.
Whether your goal is to self-publish or land a Big Five contract, the odds are better when you aim for the higher bar, qualitatively-speaking, because agents and editors and avid readers are looking for the next home run, not the next base on balls, or even the next ground ball single. Being good in this business is the same thing as being average, because the vast majority of pretenders are good. Look around the room at your next critique group meeting and I’ll bet you’d agree.
Good books by good writers are rejected as a matter of course. You need to swing for the fences, beginning with the story premise itself, for which there are specific criteria, listed herein.
Bestsellers and break-in books aren’t always better written, but they are often—very often—built around a better idea.
There is an entire discipline of principles and reliable criteria that can help you diffentiate between a great story idea and an idea that is contrived, thin, over-used or better suited to a specific scene or short story. But to avail yourself of this higher wisdom — which means you may recognize that the idea you are laboring over is actually more DOA than MIA — you first have to submit to the fact that not all story ideas are good ideas, and this first-base truth is often the thing that takes manuscripts and their authors off the table before a reader — an agent, an editor or a book buyer skimming for their next read… because in that case, the idea is really all that matters — reaches page 10.
These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves,” with the addition of some framing new content here. Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.
