The Foreword to what, you might ask. I was grateful when Robert Dugoni agreed to write the Foreword for my new writing book, Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves. He went big with this, and it’s the perfect tee-up for the book. Some folks skip the Foreword… here it is again if that’s you (worth the read, I assure you).
Foreword
By Robert Dugoni
Many years ago, when I was a boy, my mother handed me what had been her brother’s trumpet. She thought it important that a child learn to play an instrument, something about learning the scales being a good way to expand the mind. I don’t disagree. I picked up that trumpet and I did my very best to blast air through the mouthpiece with the hope that the bell would emit a beautiful song. I suspect you know what came next. The sound emitted was so horrific, it summoned my father like a fog horn does a ship. I thought playing an instrument is a piece of cake, just like playing DaisySlots casino games. I expected it to be that easy, but I was wrong. He wasn’t as interested as my mother in any of his children playing an instrument. With ten children, I guess he figured there was already enough noise in the house. “Take some lessons before you blow into that thing again,” he told me. “And never again in the house.”
I took lessons. I learned to read music and I learned how to summon notes with my fingers pressed down on the pistons, and my lips pinched and squirting air into the mouthpiece. I never did become very good. I didn’t like practicing the scales and the runs essential to learning how to truly play a song well. I wanted to just be able to put my lips to the mouthpiece and magically blast out a tune.
Too often, I find, new novelists feel the same.
There is a misconception circumnavigating the writing world that anyone can write because everyone (or nearly everyone) can string words together. String enough words together in the proper order and you have a sentence. String enough sentences together and you have a paragraph. String paragraphs together and you have a scene. String scenes together and voilà! You have a story.
So, really, how hard can it be to write a novel?
“Just write from the heart!” is one rallying cry far too often given to new writers. “Pour your heart into it!” This advice is akin to my picking up the trumpet, blasting air through the mouthpiece, and believing that a song would magically come out of the bell. I can assure you that was not the case. Oh, you might get lucky and pinch your lips in just the right way, press down the pistons in just the right order, and produce a note. But think of that musical note as a letter. Now carry the analogy one step further. You’d have to get lucky approximately 500,000 additional times, in a row, to produce a novel.
How do you like those odds?
And yet, so many writers do just that. How do I know? Because I was one them, and I soon learned the fallacy of my endeavors. Mind you, I was not a person who had never written when I sat down to type out my Great American Novel. I had been the editor-in-chief of my high school and college newspapers. I wrote for the Los Angeles Times. I wrote news articles and feature stories of significant length. I also practiced law for fourteen years and wrote extensive legal briefs.
I had done just enough to think, how hard can it be to write a novel?
As Larry Brooks might say, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Insert the trumpet analogy from above, here. And that is not even commenting on the quality of the novel written.
It wasn’t until I had received close to fifty rejection letters that I fully grasped that writing a novel is a craft. It is something to be studied and learned. For some, this realization is disheartening—as it was disheartening for me when I realized I couldn’t blast tunes on my trumpet without first learning the craft. But for others, myself included, the realization is encouraging. If there is a craft, then the craft can be taught, and if it can be taught, then it can be learned, and if it can be learned, then those odds of stringing the right words together to actually produce a coherent novel significantly improve.
Find the right teacher, and the odds improve exponentially. Find the right teacher with the right material and the odds improve even more.
Enter Larry Brooks.
I first met Larry at a writers conference in Surrey British Columbia in October 2013, though I had known of him for many years. Larry’s work on the craft of writing had become a fixture on my writing shelf alongside the works of Christopher Vogler, Donald Maass, Sol Stein, Michael Hague, James Frey, and Stephen James. I had his books Story Engineering and Story Physics and I soon thereafter bought his brilliant Story Fix. We look for those teachers who can take a complicated mess and, somehow, miraculously unravel it. Larry, unbeknownst to him, had unraveled several of my messes before they ever became published novels, some of them ending up as bestsellers.
After our meeting, I called Larry during one of my hair-pulling moments and asked him for advice on how to fix a tangled mess I had created. Larry listened carefully before asking me a series of questions and prodding around the edges of my story premise. It soon became clear that Larry was not going to fix my problem for me. He was doing much more than that. He was teaching me the tools I would need to fix not just one problem but the many others I would face down the writing road. Going back to the trumpet analogy, he wasn’t going to teach me to memorize one song, he was going to teach me how to play the instrument, so that I could recognize and fix my mistakes on my own. I hung up the phone that day buoyed with a sense I had never had before—I might just make it in this writing gig after all.
Larry’s books on the craft of writing have always spoken to me because he offers the author no excuses. He isn’t there to hold your hand and console you. Larry pushes the writer to flex her writing muscles and to move forward, toward that elusive goal of becoming the best author that writer can be. Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves is the next book in Larry’s writing toolkit, and one I eagerly devoured. In it, Larry eviscerates the concept of the untrained author sitting down at her keyboard and typing out a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. To write a novel he says, is to have a mission. To understand that mission is to have a clue to the secret of great writing, a sense of the criteria that apply. Larry teaches writers not only the concept of the setup and the hook, but the difference between the first plot point and the first pinch point, and where in a writer’s story the reader should expect to find each.
I know there are many writers out there who don’t want to be bogged down by rules and outlines. In the business, we call these writers either “organic writers” or the less-flattering term— “pantsers”—as in, someone who writes from the seat of his pants.
Guess what? I consider myself one of them.
What I’ve learned over my twenty-plus years in this business is that there are very few truly organic writers, and by that I mean a writer who has never had any training on the craft of any kind but who has managed to achieve success (insert your own definition of success here). At this point you might be wondering about that theory you’ve read or heard about. You know, the theory that anyone who puts 10,000 hours into something becomes an expert—like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci.
Sadly, it is more fallacy than theory. As my grammar school baseball coach liked to say, “only perfect practice makes perfect.” Read the biographies of the two greatest artists the world has ever known, and you soon realize that Michelangelo and da Vinci didn’t just rack up hours like meters in New York City cabs. They spent thousands of hours in perfect practice to perfect their crafts.
You might just be the person who can beat the 500,000-to-one odds. You might just win the next mega-millions lottery too. But the better odds are, you’re not. Besides, doesn’t it make sense to learn from those individuals who have already put in thousands so hours of perfect practice and who are willing to teach you the skills and tools needed to perfect your own writing?
You can bang your head against the wall intending to break down the wall, but it’s far more likely you’ll just give yourself a headache. Wouldn’t it be so much wiser to open the pages of this book with a pen or a highlighter in hand and absorb what Larry Brooks has to teach? It’s a step toward learning the craft, which is a step in the right direction. It’s a step toward becoming your own best editor, which is a step toward publication. It’s a step toward stringing words together that produce a story so rich and intoxicating that readers experience the story as life itself. The characters feel real. The story rings true. To an extent that their own lives have been transformed by reading it.
It happens. Trust me. It happens every day.
The alternative is that beautiful trumpet, locked in its case, tucked neatly in the recesses of the attic, never to be played, never to be heard. And right beside it, in a neat stack, are your manuscripts, possibly never finished to the degree required. And because of that, never read.
No writing teacher will ever render the task of writing a novel that works easy. If they tell you they can… run. But they can make the work clearer, and the path more accessible, while elevating your creation. That’s what Larry and the element-specific criteria he discusses here can do for you. It’s the stuff most of us wish we had known much earlier in our journey. You now hold it in your hands. What you do with it is your choice. But what this book can do for you as a writer is something you just might find to be a game changer. As I did.
You can grab a copy of Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves here: in Kindle… in paperback… or at your local bookstore (who can order for you if they’re sold out, which is the case in many Barnes & Nobles stores).
ABOUT ROBERT DUGONI
His newest, The Last Agent (second in the Charles Jenkins series) is out now.
Robert Dugoni is the critically acclaimed New York Times, #1 Wall Street Journal, and #1 Amazon best-selling author of the multi-million-selling Tracy Crosswhite series. The first entry, My Sister’s Grave, has sold more than two million copies, has been optioned for television series development, and has won multiple awards and nominations. He is also the author of the best-selling David Sloane series, nominated for the Harper Lee Award for legal fiction, and the stand-alone novels The 7th Canon, a 2017 finalist for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for best novel, and The Cyanide Canary, A Washington Post Best Book of the Year. His latest novels include the award-winning The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, and The Eighth Sister, which debuted on several best-seller lists and elevated him to the #1 ranked author on Amazon.com. He is the recipient of the Nancy Pearl Award for Fiction, and the Friends of Mystery Spotted Owl Award for the best novel in the Pacific Northwest. He is a two-time finalist for the International Thriller Writers award and the Mystery Writers of America Award for best novel, among many other awards and best-of inclusions. His books are sold worldwide in more than twenty-five countries. Learn more at his website, www.robertdugonibooks.com.
3 Responses
@Larry is a gifted teacher who has learned how to express his lessons in the most difficult of venues: “a paperback book.” He didn’t write a memoir disguised as a writing guide – he got right down to work.
What first might feel like “tough love” is in fact pure practicality and efficiency: “how to get a major writing project completed, with good chances of success, in a reasonable amount of time, and with a minimum ‘scrap rate.'” He teaches planning and outlining, showing you how to capture and develop a story without wasting pages. He teaches you to make decisions early, and then how to weigh those decisions and to refine them – presenting a practical strategy that will lead your project through from beginning to end while keeping you in control of it.
@Larry applies well-known principles originally articulated in the world of screenwriting and makes them uniquely his own. He connects to his audience and teaches them as very few instructional writers can do. He’s one of the very best. Many people spend their lives without finding their special gift, but @Larry certainly found his.
Mike – just a quick thanks for the very kind words in your comment. Much appreciated. I wish everyone would “get it” as you do. Larry
Two awesome authors!
Kerry