Several writers I’ve consulted told me their idea for a story then sat back to watch my reaction.
My question was: what happens next?
There was a premise. They had a first act. It was the start of a story but it wasn’t a story itself.
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The old writing adage says to “start as close to the end as possible.”
It’s also essential not to write a story thinking the end is the beginning.
At its heart, Story is about change. But it is not about triumph. It is about the journey there, the conditions that led to the change.
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The start of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary is one of those rather iconic bursts, instantly recognisable when you hear it.
It’s there because when writing that CCR album, John Fogerty was listening to a lot of Beethoven. Fogerty was impressed with the opening of the Fifth Symphony.
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Even if it’s not obviously an adventure, fiction story elements are there to keep the reader captivated and turning the page in any genre.
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Structure is essential to guiding your reader through your story. It’s giving information when it is needed. It’s shaping perspective on the events in the book. Structure is the scaffolding that holds up other elements of writing. It also gives you plenty of room to play. When you’re struggling with how things happen in the story, in the order they happen, take a look at what theme and value you are bringing to these events.
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Deus ex machina. It’s a device we’ve all heard about from Ancient Greek theatre where a god was delivered by a machine, sometimes quite literally, to solve the problems of the players on stage. The famous example is when Medea needed to escape, the sun god Helios sends a chariot to save her. It wasn’t part of a subplot. It wasn’t something that grew out of lack of ideas. It was a device to bring a conclusion t a difficult position of the characters… and the playwright.
Even thousands of years ago, it wasn’t without its detractors.
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Writing seems straight forward. One word, then another to finish a sentence. Repeat while building on ideas. We’ve been writing since we were children. It’s just much more words for a book.
But when you rush into it too fast you will fail to put all the pieces together.
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Collaborating with a professional ghostwriter is not just about word count. There are other values a ghostwriter brings to the partnership. Ideas. Narrative structure. A way to recognise elements for your story that you might have overlooked.
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Riddles require you to make up the context of the scene and find what fits. Stories build that piece by piece. There’s no cathartic emotional revelation in having the context given like this. There’s no story. There’s no value placed on this information. There’s no tension other than trying to solve the riddle. Stories require that the information we need – hopefully – comes right when we need it in order to make sense of what has happened.
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Scenes and events don’t have a meaning on their own. It’s the context of a story that gives these events any significance.
The difficult part in writing is in building the foundations earlier so the emotional resonance speaks through these scenes.
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.
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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.
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Collaboration is powerful because of these very reasons. Playing with ideas and perspective can be confronting, but going through that process can be exhilarating. It brings chills and goosebumps. It brings surprising results.
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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.
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Stories are about risk.
The world shifts. Something is changed – for good or bad. The character reacts to this to either try to make things go back to how they were, or to make things better.
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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.
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The ending of Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) is an amazing demonstration of rising emotion in film, and character shown through choice.
In the harsh conditions of Rome after WW2, Antonio finally lands a job. But he needs a bike and he already pawned his.
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As in marking a character in stone. So, a face that shows character shows that which has been marked. Or deeply impressed.
The term didn’t come to mean a person in a story until the late 1660s – a good fifty years after Shakespeare had, as he put it, shuffled off this mortal coil.
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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.
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The architecture and design of the building was held together in a particular way. The pressure and tension was held in places that you might not first assume. The architects knew this. A fractured window in one place meant the tension was wrong somewhere else. This is like a manuscript.
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