When it’s looked at from a distance we can try to make a narrative out of it but they’re numbers, just statistics. Every half-time break in sports we witness talking heads trying to make sense out of statistics in order to give us a story of the game – some better than others.
These numbers don’t have meaning. But stories do.
There was a point while he was writing Fight Club where Chuck Palahniuk came to realise that the two characters – the narrator and Tyler – were the same. It wasn’t a twist he’d thought of before writing. It wasn’t a gimmick to string the reader along. He was writing a damning commentary on masculinity as he saw it in the mid-1990s.
The power of your story depends on clearly locating your inciting incident.
The fundamentals of this are often misunderstood.
Story is about transformation. A story is in how a character changes. This change does not come easily but there is something that pushes the character out of their comfort to begin the journey.
Writing is a process that uncovers what you’re saying. There are times to do it quickly but there must also be moments of revision, reflection, rewriting. And this is slow, sometimes painfully slow.
But that process is worth doing. It uncovers more layers of the beauty around your story, your concept, your idea.
Steve Albini – ““When I talk about recording an acoustic instrument, what I really mean is recreating the sense memory of having heard an acoustic instrument. I say that because acoustic instruments have an extremely long tradition. Every part of the world uses some form of acoustic stringed instruments, and we all have engrained in us personal and cultural memory of these instruments. So when I say I’m trying to make an accurate recording of an acoustic instrument, what I mean is I’m trying to evoke the sensation of having heard that instrument in life.””
Aristotle opens Poetics by describing poetry as a species of imitation. There are different ways to do that, different mediums and different ways. Painting, too, is imitation, Aristotle points out.
In our stories, that’s what we do. We imitate to recreate sense memory.
Brian Eno has a card in his Oblique Strategies set suggesting: Whatever worked last time, never do it again.
That might be more extreme than we always need but the sentiment is a good one. Just because it worked last time doesn’t mean it would work again. And just because a client has one idea in mind with their story, it doesn’t mean that’s the best way to narrate their own journey.
“But I contain multitudes! How can it truly be about my life when so much is left out?”
What we’re doing is crafting a story with a thread running through it that captivates the reader, keeps them turning the page, and delivers an emotional climax. To do that properly we need to find that core.
The film about Johnny Cash was built on the thread following the death of his brother. Cash, as it was portrayed in this film, was striving to come to terms with that loss while filling the role of the older brother that he idolized. The theme of a brother’s death was also at the core of the film about Ray Charles. Man On The Moon about Andy Kaufmann left out huge parts of his life – that he was a father was completely cut from his story – in order to focus on the key thread about Kaufmann’s artistry.
If you were to discuss Johnny Cash you would not point to his brother’s death as the defining point of his life. But when developing a tight film script it serves as a powerful core for the personal journey of the Cash character.
The first months of working on a ghostwriting project are spent discovering what the story is, and outlining these points in the arc. What is the core theme and value? How does this build to a powerful conclusion? How do we structure your story to bring out the emotion in this for the reader?
With that in place we start to pool the parts of the story and journey that support this. Part of this is deciding what doesn’t make it. What parts of the journey distract from the story.
For one client, I structured his story in a non-linear approach to emphasis the way he’d overcome set backs at each part of his journey from Brooklyn to Silicon Valley. For another client, I structured her story as a journey, an adventure, into the wider unknown world as she discovered a larger industry from her small town.
Helping writers come define and refine this core is a key part of my coaching and developmental editing work. We work on identifying those essential elements of the foundation. What is the core theme? What in the story supports that? And what can we cut off to sharpen the story?
When that’s in place, the page is set for a powerful story.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s shorter insights to story craft are now available on her website.
They come from what her site calls an “informal workshop” answering questions posed by readers in 2015.
The first one addresses an article she read about breaking rules in writing – Show, don’t tell. Write about what you know. Sympathetic characters.
