The Five ‘Insider’ Secrets Of Top Fiction Writers
by Dr. John Yeoman
How do you write a ‘killer’ novel or story that brings you a contract with an agent or publisher? Or that leaps over the short-list to gain a top prize in a contest? There’s a secret to it. But more than 90% of fiction writers have never discovered it, no matter how experienced they are.
How do I know? And what’s the secret?
I’ll tell you… in a moment. But first, let me lay in some background.
Since 2009, I’ve judged more than 6000 short stories in the Writers’ Village International Short Fiction Award. That’s at least 16 million words. (Think of Pride & Prejudice 135 times over.) I’ve read every word and carefully assessed each story. And graded it across seven criteria, using a points system to separate the stars from the also-rans.
They’re the ones that score 44 or more out of a notional 50, the grade for a ‘perfect’ story.
What am I left with? A big problem.
Or rather, around 20 problems. That’s how many stories I’ll have in my short-list. Each is excellent. Which will win my top $1600 (£1000) prize? Which do I place second or third? No points system can help me there. In the last hour, it comes down to just one thing…
Which story has emotionally engaged me the most?
If your story doesn’t emotionally engage the reader, you might have a PhD in creative writing (as I do) but your tale will languish. If it does, you don’t need any basic training in the craft of fiction. You’re a natural. (That said, you’ll never stop learning new tricks…)
What’s emotional engagement?
Your tale profoundly moves the reader. Grief, horror, compassion, joy… it’s your call. If only for a few moments, that experience has changed the reader’s life.
In every contest round, I meet at least one story that makes me gasp, shudder, laugh outrageously or wipe away a tear. Does that entry win? Not necessarily. It takes more than a single great scene to make a story work.
But if a writer sustains – and skilfully balances – an emotional affect throughout the tale, it will march towards a top prize.
How do you engage the reader emotionally?
In a short story of up to, say, 5000 words you start in paragraph one; in a novel, in the first scene. From that point on, you never lose your grip on the reader’s feelings.
Here are five ways to do it:
1) Provoke an emotional response in your first lines.
Quickly introduce a conflict that the reader can relate to with sympathy or understanding. It need not bear directly on the plot but it must contain some element of question, problem or uncertainty. Otherwise, why should the reader read on?
For example, I began my historical novel Dream Of Darkness with a question:
‘You cannot have a murder without a body, can you? No. Or so I had always thought, being a coroner. But what do coroners know about the many ways of dying? They know only of bodies. Dying is a separate art.’
That passage presents the essence of the plot. It leaves the reader wondering (I hope): how can a murder occur without a body?
Did you notice something else about the passage?
A murder has taken place. Until the killer is captured, the entire community is under threat. That unresolved question invokes one of the five primal imperatives. What are they?
Survival of oneself. Of one’s Significant Other. Of the family. Of the tribe/nation/nurturing environment. Of one’s soul.
These imperatives are timeless. They’re engrained in our DNA. If your tale is well written – whatever its genre – and it centres on one or more of those imperatives the reader has no choice but to be emotionally engaged.
2) Let the reader bond easily with your main character.
Which character is your ‘I/eye’ in the narrative? Can the reader slip easily into their shoes? And walk in those shoes for a long while?
A successful short story will usually have no more than one ‘point of view’ (pov) character, two at most. In a longer work, you might get away with multiple povs where the viewpoint switches between several players, but it’s a hard trick to pull off. In short fiction, it’s almost impossible.
Stay safe. Limit the pov to one person or entity. Or you’ll confuse the reader. And make it effortless for the reader to empathize with that person.
One ploy that’s so easy it seems like cheating is to make your pov character very similar to your target reader. Who can doubt that Agatha Christie created her demure sleuth Miss Marple to appeal to ladies of a certain age? Or that she crafted the precious Hercule Poirot with a different readership in mind?
Tom Clancy’s novels were clearly written for young men, with a few wives and ninja girls dropped in to appease his female fans.
To be sure, these novels continue to attract readers of every background, age and gender but the authors knew their target markets.
So how do you create an engaging pov character (or narrator) if you’re not sure of your target market? Picture your most probable reader. Male? Female? Young? Old? College educated? Not college educated? And so on.
If in doubt, look in your mirror. There’s nobody you understand better than yourself. So, unless you relish the challenge of crafting an alien mind, write for yourself.
3) Play on your reader’s senses.
Our emotions are usually triggered by a physical stimulus, whether or not that stimulus is a memory or current event. Stirring music (auditory), a fine painting (visual), a delicious meal (gustatory), a pungent perfume (olfactory), the fur of a kitten (tactile)… all might induce an emotion, pleasing or not.
So it is with fiction.
Infuse your story with appeals to several of the physical senses and you’re half way to inveigling your reader.
For example, this opening passage from Kathy Reichs’s novel Mortal Remains invokes three of the physical senses (olfactory, visual, auditory) and also hints at tactility (the ‘newly turned soil’):
‘The air smelled of sun-warmed bark and apple buds raring to blossom and get on with life. Overhead, a million baby leaves danced in the breeze. Fields spread outward from the orchard in which I stood, their newly turned soil rich and black.
A day made of diamonds.
A relentless buzzing dragged my gaze back to the corpse at my feet.’
The scene is three-dimensional. We are in it. Our emotions have been primed for engagement.
But be careful: the more sensory perceptions you weave in, the slower the pace. That’s why Reichs quickly added the phrase ‘the corpse at my feet’ to jerk the reader awake and start the plot.
4) Build in a firm structure
A compelling story has a comforting form. The reader likes to feel that, no matter how quirky its twists, the tale has a clear meaning or structure – at least, in retrospect.
Meaning and structure are often synonymous.
To perceive ‘structure’ in anything is, arguably, to create a sense of meaning. Without structure, there’s no meaning. How often do we look at an abstract painting, those unstructured swirls of shapes and colours, and naively ask ‘What does it mean?‘ The painter might reply ‘A piece of art is not intended to mean but be.’
That doesn’t work with commercial fiction.
Unless you’re writing experimental stories, which few will read or buy, give your story an emphatic shape.
Its plot might weave about at times, all the better to intrigue us, but – upon a second reading – it’s a unity. The reader must feel that nothing could have been cut or added.
Why does a strong structure help to engage the reader emotionally?
The perception of a pattern behind the story’s apparent chaos gives us confidence to proceed. We can relax. It’s safe to let the author play with our emotions. Clearly, s/he knows what they’re doing.
That’s why a pungent ‘slice of life’ tale which goes nowhere will rarely impress a publisher or contest judge, no matter how brilliantly it’s written. It has no shape. ‘What was all that about?’ they’ll ask, tossing the story on the floor.
Here’s a tip: Format your final draft in a very small type, eg. 8 point, and justify both the left and right margins. Print it out. Now it will resemble the format of a paperback book. At once, you’ll spot big grey slabs – paragraphs that go on too long. Break them up!
Balancing your paragraphs and sentences, by giving them different lengths, adds a reassuring visual pattern.
Then, using a red pen, strike through every paragraph that’s digressive, gratuitously poetical or adds little to the story. Cut or edit those paragraphs. Is a passage tautly written and indispensable to the plot? Tick it with a green pen.
I call this the Rose Bush technique.
Eventually, everything should be green. What’s more, you’ll now be able to see your story as a visual entity. Is its shape coherent? Do the scenes proceed logically, despite their beguiling twists? If so, that tale – if competently written – will leap into a contest short-list.
5) Close the story decisively.
The last scene of a powerful story should leave the reader emotionally stimulated, perhaps for a considerable time.
Relief, grief, hilarity, unease… again, the choice is yours. But unless you’re writing for Mills & Boon, the end should not be (entirely) foreseeable.
True, a classic detective tale might close predictably with all culprits unmasked, innocents exonerated and loose ends tied up by the clever sleuth. The structure of any genre story is typically as formulaic as a pancake recipe. Even so, for the story to work on our emotions, its closure should hit us from left field.
Wham!
Michael Cordy typically ends his novels on a faux-upbeat note. All villains have been trounced, the hero and heroine announce their wedding, and the world is saved! Except that, the last line reveals… the world has not been saved.
Wham!
A deliberate ambiguity or ‘double take’ can sometimes achieve the same effect. Mark Allerton won a top prize in the 2012 round of the Winter’s Village contest with World’s Turned Upside Down, a tale of racial bigotry in the deep south.
A woman gloats over the way she has tormented a black child. Her last thought is ‘The nightmares that little girl woulda had!’ It seems like a malicious snigger until we sense a ‘double take’. Has the bigot finally developed a conscience? Are those nightmares now tormenting her?
Wham!
It’s a ‘twist close’. Of course, a twist in the last scene is such a long-whiskered tactic – especially in crime suspense – that its very predictability can threaten its impact. But the perfect twist is the one that challenges us, at the last moment, to re-evaluate every aspect of the preceding story.
Anthony Horowitz does this brilliantly in his novel Moriarty.
Two detectives in 1890s London are hunting the master criminal Moriarty, a man so clever that not even Sherlock Holmes could bring him to justice. In the last chapter, Moriarty is discovered. Predictable? No. With a sense of disbelief, we realise that everything we’ve read in the story so far has been a lie.
The narrator has played a joke on us.
Wham!
Do we want to throttle Horowitz or award him the Booker Prize? Both.
That’s what I call emotional engagement.
What have I missed out from the rules above? Everything. Characterisation, plotting strategies, elements of style, the rules of presentation…
Let me tell you a secret. You can break almost any “Rule of Good Writing” – provided your story works. But to win a publishing contract or major award, you must follow one rule above all:
Engage your reader emotionally.
Dr John Yeoman, PhD Creative Writing, is a top-rated Amazon novelist. He judges the Writers’ Village story competition and is a tutor in creative writing at a UK university. He has been a successful commercial author for 42 years. You can find a wealth of ideas for writing stories that succeed in his free 14-part course at Writers’ Village:
http://www.writers-village.org/story-success
by Dr. John Yeoman (@Yeomanis) March 13, 2016
What about you, Scriveners? Have you read stories that you know are “Well-written” but somehow don’t float your boat? Do think this was because you weren’t emotionally engaged? What works for you in getting an emotional response from your readers?
This week Anne is over at her book blog talking about witnessing verbal abuse in a critique group or workshop.
NOTE: Dr. Yeoman lives in the UK, so he’ll be going to sleep over there soon after this post goes up on Sunday morning in California. That means responses to some comments will have to wait until tomorrow.
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I’m already writing science fiction – I don’t want to be crafting an alien mind on top of all that.
Excellent points and tips. John, you’ve outlined it well and made it seem easy. It’s not, but it is do-able.
Thanks, Alex. I agree. It’s hard enough getting to grips with our own mind at times, without having to wrestle with an alien one! And yes, it’s do-able. Good luck with your sci-fi stories. Here’s a tip for a sci-fi short story: let the environment appear to be (at first glance) just like Hometown, USA. Then throw in just one or two weird elements. That’s what China Melville does in The City & The City. Initially, it appears to be a police procedural. Formulaic. Generic. Except that strange shadows drift down the streets, the lamp posts keep moving about, and nobody comments on this. Weird indeed!
Thanks, John, for an excellent post! Very clearly explained and, as Alex says, *sounds* easy. 😉
Great post John. I like to think of your last 2 points together as the reader getting to the end of the story, thinking ‘Wow, what a great ending! I didn’t see that coming!’ yet knowing at the same time that it was inevitable; every twist in the structure was leading to this end and this end only.
It’s good to see you here, Mick. Yes, the ultimate close is when the reader sighs, prematurely, “What a great ending.” But hah! It hasn’t (quite) ended yet…
Hello John,
A really handy post for me – thank you.
I am particularly neglectful of your Point 3 – I don’t engage the senses enough so my prose reads like a flat, shopping list. Whenever I do remember and revise, (not often enough), the story suddenly emerges as more lively and real.
Thank you for sharing your expertise!
Hi, Zara. We’re all guilty of that. It’s so easy to engage the visual and auditory senses. ‘She saw/She heard.’ But what about smells and tastes? Many folk like me are synesthetic. Our senses are cross-wired. So I ‘smell’ Monday as cold steel but ‘feel’ Thursday as a furry brown object. And so on. Mad! No. Apparently, around 10% of the population are synesthetic to some degree. (Vladimir Nabakov was synesthetic big time.) If your story appeals to all the five senses, you’ll engage more of your readers.
Thanks for replying, John.
You know how egotistical I am, so I do hope that when you see the name, “Zara” you are assailed by wonderfully fragrant sensations.
If, on the other hand, you experience the local recycling centre on a hot summer’s day, please don’t tell me.
Kindest.
Ummmmm!
Hello John. I gleaned a lot of info from your post. The examples were very good. Thank you for sharing your insight and techniques. I shared the post to a closed group of romance writers (local chapter of RWA). Here is my comment to the group:
TERRIFIC post! It took me about 10 minutes to read through this post by John Yeoman – 10 minutes to basically attend a day-long seminar of how to make a story really work.
They all need to read it. 🙂
That’s great, Kris. Thanks!
OK, 6,000 shorts stories in six-odd years? That, sir, is yeoman work.
I think the refuge of epic fantasy is that you can (or believe you can) take all these precepts and lob them into amber. I’m not man enough to write a short story. I can see and agree with all those things, but I need TIME. And the epic fantasy reader needs a longer Patience Horizon than other genres: so your fourth precept is most important for me. Fantasy must convey a sense that this investment is not going to be wasted, it will come around and pay off (maybe a bigger payoff, I don’t know, but at least worth it). The only short story I think I could write would be horribly incomplete.
‘Horribly incomplete’, Will? Don’t struggle to build the pyramids. Turn that fragment into flash fiction. Add a top and tail (structure is everything) and you have a story!
Well put, sir.
I thank thee, sir.
I’m not sure if this is the right place for my comment (can’t find another!) I do agree whole heartedly with all your advice re engaging the reader’s emotions, ‘show me don’t tell me,’ etc. etc.
Just one thought and this is concerning writing a novel. I acquaint my writing group with the so-called rules, and say that rules are meant to be broken. For instance, you cannot ‘show’ the whole of a novel, you would never finish it! The one point I would like to make is that it’s a good idea to know the rules before you break them. (Excuse me if this point has already been made, I haven’t yet read the whole of your/Anne’s posting.)
Thank you for your magazine, John. It’s like having a writing buddy and your advice always makes me think! I feel I never stop learning even though, after years of selling magazine stories and articles, I am , at last, a published romance novelist (by Mezzanotte of London. ‘Go Steal a Bridegroom by Denise Lawrence.) Just an Ebook at present.
Congratulations on your success, Rosemary. (We go back a long way!) Yes, rules are made to be broken. Whoever made the first rules, back in the days of Gutenberg, insisted that all manuscripts must be double spaced, to assist the typesetter. It made sense then. It makes no sense today, in the digital age. But agents still insist on it. Madness. Break the rules! All that matters is that the story works.
Yes, we do!
Every writer should read this post and make sure they use these tips. (They should also get experienced CPs since it’s hard to see/feel the overview in your own writing.) Big thanks to John for the post, and to Anne for offering a great blog to put it on! 🙂
Thanks, Lexa. Yes, everyone needs a cynical beta reader. I wrote a short story this morning, the best thing I’ve ever done. My wife read it, threw it down and snorted ‘drivel’. Oi veih, you can’t fight an honest overview. 🙁
A super post! Bravo. I don’t envy you choosing one winner, you must tear your hair out hoping you haven’t bypassed the next booker winner. Emotional connections can make or break the smallest of stories.
Hair? What hair, Ellen? That handsome picture of me above was taken in the days when I still had hair. Six thousand stories later, I’m as bald as Donald Trump. Without his wig.
At least you’re not orange… *gasp* I hope
My orange days are over, Ellen. As Dubliner James Joyce once said. (Yes, you do need an Irish background to understand that joke.)
Thank you for sharing very useful advice.
Thanks, Maria!
I Love this post, John! I teach Crafting a Novel at college, and my most oft-repeated quote is: “Fiction is about emotion. We mess with the emotion of readers.”
Laughter, fear, even sexual desire…we strive to make you ‘feel’ something. And hopefully, that will make you care about what happens to our protagonist.
Great blog.
Caring is everything, Melodie. (Or so my wife often reminds me 😉 )
Nice listing of qualities of great short fiction. Thanks
Thanks, Michael. Nice to see you here.
I’ve judged contests in the past–entered quite a few–and would have loved to have had this criteria written on a 3 X 5 and kept by my side as I wrote my story or read the entries. A post definitely worth bookmarking and referring to when I enter or judge another contest. You’ve covered both sides of the issue. Thank you, John. My best, Paul
That’s an accolade, Paul! Glad you found my post useful.
Great post, John. I tweeted it and will share it in my upcoming Newsletter, too. I am not so sure about the twist ending when you write for children. Would it still apply? I never thought of twisting the ending for young readers before, and feel like it would be off-putting for kids. What say you?
That’s an interesting thought, Yvette. Who knows? But I suspect that children would be just as receptive to a nice twist ending as their parents are. I do remember playing a boisterous game with my own children which ended with the surprise: ‘and tickle you under there’. It always brought yelps of joy. But of course it wasn’t really a surprise!
This is a fantastic post, and one I needed to hear today. “When the student is ready, the master appears.” I feel lucky! Thanks, John. I’m off to check out the Writers’ Village. 🙂
I look forward to seeing you there, Jan.
Another excellent post from John. He’s a guy who really knows what he’s talking about. Experience combined with years of writing, judging and tutoring inform him, and he passes on his knowledge freely to who will listen.
Many thanks, Stuart. But you’re being too modest. As an ace novelist yourself, you know what you’re talking about as well 😉
Blushing!
Gustatory — what a great, great word! I’m going to use that every day until someone knows what it means — could be a nice meet/cute, eh?
Thanks, John, for sharing secrets. Engaging emotion sounds so simple, but many of the authors I edit translate that to mean character emotion, instead of reader emotion. Searing drama in the story doesn’t automatically equal strong emotional reactions from the reader. I explain (well, I try) that we often react most strongly when our mind is deeply or vigorously engaged. In that state of preoccupation, we’re ripe for emotional triggers — and then the book takes us to a cliff and throws us over. We’re screaming and scrambling, trying to regain control–and the author throws us a line. We react, cuss a little, grab the line, curl up around it and look around. It’s fun. It’s exciting. And if the author managed to not poke their giant nose in the middle of all the hub-bub, it’s something we want to do again…and again.
Thanks for opening the vault and sharing secrets!
Maria D’Marco
Thanks, Maria. You’ve got it spot on. A story is not about characters, it’s about readers. Who cares if the hero(ine) is panting with fear or lust if the reader yawns? Dan Brown rather missed that point in The Inferno, which is just one agony after another, every agony implausible and every one a yawn.
Thanks for your post and insight on the Rose Bush technique. When I finish my novel, I’ll be pruning away the rotten bits as I strive to make it visually and emotionally appealing.
The Rose Bush works, Tina. Just don’t get carried away and use pens of five different colours. You’ll end up with a pot of chrysanthemums…
I love it when secrets are shared.
John following your blog and other posts I can see you cannot keep a secret .
I find so much information and guidance from your pen.
Ah, but I can keep a secret, Margaret. For example, I know you’re a great writer but I’ve always promised not to tell anyone 😉
I really enjoyed this post. I read a lot of writing advice and while I’ve been advised to engage the senses, this is the first time anyone has mentioned that it slows the story down. Description is great when it adds to the story, overdoing it makes readers like me skip ahead to where the action begins again.
True, Frank, sensory descriptions do slow the reader down. Maybe it’s because they invoke several parts of the brain and the brain needs time to respond. To quicken the pace, use just sights and sounds (‘she saw, she heard’). To slow the tempo, call on the other senses (‘she could smell/taste/feel’). That’s also a neat way to balance the pace, alternating fast and slow passages – a mark of good craftsmanship.
While they do slow the reader down, they don’t always feel like they are slowing the reader down. You spoke of engagement and I think that’s where you find balance. I don’t notice the story slowing down if I’m engaged. It’s when description becomes burdensome and pulls me out of the story that I just want to throw the book.
I am a fan of Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta series but honestly, I skip a lot of what is written in each book as she is prone to describing things I care nothing about and that don’t add anything to the story. It’s description for the sake of description.
Strange you should mention Cornwell, Frank. I felt the same way. I wonder if she’s still emulating Kathy Reichs, her old rival? Reichs is infamous for her word play and extended descriptions. But I enjoy them because they’re witty. Cornwell’s are often ham-fisted. To watch Cornwell echoing Reichs is fun. It’s like a grizzly bear squaring up to a gazelle.
Hi John, thank you for this posting. I enjoyed reading it very much. I do, however, have a question for you. I am busy writing a psychological thriller, working title The Blade’s Edge. My question is from which point do I start the conflict? From my main antagonist’s POV his reason for the conflict or from my protaganist’s POV. ( I don’t want to give away my twist here, but…) do I start the conflict from where I circle around from the end (twisting the story forward) and then the conflict at the beginning. In other words do I engage my reader and write this story from one conflict zone to the next, backwards all the way to the beginning? I hope this question makes sense. Please let me know and I will try to rephrase this question, (that keeps flying) around my head, a little better, if I can find the right words for it.
That’s two questions, Beth, and obviously I can’t generalize without knowing more. However (to generalize nonetheless), I’d beware of starting the story from the pov of the antagonist. The reader will bond with the first strong character they meet. So your antagonist will become the hero(ine) in the reader’s mind whether you like it or not. Open with the protagonist. Then you’re safe.
Can you start with the main conflict, then work backwards? Why not? David Morrell did that a lot in his Brotherhood of the Rose novels. He’d open with a flashforward – a lurid incident that takes place later in the story – then flash back to the main narrative timeline to begin the story itself. We don’t hear about that incident again until half way through the novel. But the reader has been hooked.
Just be sure to mark each flashforward or flashback very clearly so the reader doesn’t get confused. (Morrell often does it with a dateline: ‘London March 12, 2009’, etc.)
Great! Thank you John for clearing up that question or rather those two questions. I CAN start with the main conflict, Terrific idea. I think my confusion came in when I planned and plotted this novel out on a paper sheet. I thought it was a great idea to write it from the antagonist POV at the time. At least it looked terrific on paper. I wonder sometimes, why our antagonists seem to have so much fun causing so much mayhem. Hmmmh! Their lives can never be boring. That’s for sure. Thanks again for the post and help. Looking forward to your next blog.
After reading your post, what stuck with me most was the line “write for yourself”. I enjoy writing books that “I’d” like to read though that sounds kind of selfish (?). But I look at it like this: I could never write a science fiction novel. I wouldn’t know where to start or what to say. But I “do” know how to write women’s fiction and know what I like to feel when reading it. And your suggestions about using all five senses is something that I lack. I use them but I don’t think I do it enough. Thank you for a very insightful post.
Patti
You’re welcome, Patricia. If we write solely for ourselves, and never mind the ‘market’, at least we’ll always have a book worth reading in our dotage. Leastwise, that’s what I tell myself. In my dotage 🙂
Good advice, John…
I pictured a story I’m working on while I read this….I saw where I went right and where I need to improve. Thanks
Glad it helped, Rebecca.
Excellent points to remember. I’m doing a rewrite now, so this post comes at a good time.
Thanks, Elizabeth!
Great tips John, I appreciate your breaking down such critical information into five easily absorbable points. I’m bookmarking the page.
Yes, do come back, Ann. Nothing works until we absorb it time and again. (Or so, alas, I’ve been known to tell the bartender at my local pub…)
Thanks for the tips to writing a great read, which comes down to execution. That’s what makes the craft so fun or, on days like today, so challenging!
True, Jen, the craft is fun. Why else are we practising it?
Exactly. Fun! It’s what we’re working so hard for. 😀
John, it surprises me that the most basic principles of story-telling need to be told and retold themselves as you have done in this post. I must say, it is instruction at its finest. Clear, concise, and, indeed, motivational. At the same time it is material that should be so obvious to any writer (or would-be writer) who has at any time read a book or story that has had an emotional effect (not ‘affect’…ahem!). It’s the simplest of story-telling caveats, and one that every comedian who shoots a one-liner successfully can tell you. The audience absolutely has to have an emotional involvement of some kind in the story being told. And therein lies the rub. It is ultimately up to the one who consumes the story, and particularly to the agent or publisher who will vet it for success or failure whether the story sinks or swims regardless of the degree of emotional attachment it contains. The question this raises, and perhaps it is one that you can address in future, is this: other than keep writing and keep trying, what is to be done for a story that has all of the qualities that you have discussed in this post – great plot, great characters, great everything and emotional impact in spades – yet fails to get past the first reader(s) and into publication? I have a pretty strong hunch that this has driven more than one author to throw up her or his hands in despair and self-publish (yes, there are excellently written and even praiseworthy works out there in the self-publishing market, though they are in very noticeable minority…but that’s a whole different discussion). It”s inspiring that you have presented this information in this post, and at the same time just a little disappointing that there is an actual need for writers to be told this time and time again. Good work, John!
I agree it’s surprising, Richard, that the first rule of story telling is not taught at every creative writing program in class 101: engage your reader emotionally. All else is engineering. Yet it’s not. I’ve taught creative writing at a major university up to PhD level. The syllabus, imposed by the college, was cluttered with theories and irrelevant techniques. (I had to run an entire workshop on ‘The Character Arc’. As if it matters.) Result: most newbies to creative writers have become thoroughly confused – and still need to be reminded of Rule #1.
How a newbie author of talent can survive today’s hurdle race of agents/publishers to get their work trade published is another question entirely. I have no easy answer. If it’s any consolation, authors have faced that dilemma since at least the late 19thc. H. Rider Haggard wrote a delicious lampoon on the myopia of publishers in 1888: Mr Meeson’s Will. In it, he lamented that publishers were 99% interested in marketability, and only 1% with quality. Nothing has changed in more than 125 years.
It sounds so easy. Engage the readers, but we can never know if we have touched a nerve. Great advice though. I’m going to bookmark this for my next short story and see if it works. Thanks for a most useful post. You love Kathy Reich, right?
Hi, Barbara. Great to see you here. Yay, I love Kathy Reichs. Some folk loathe her staccato style – all witcraft and games. But word games are my world. I could teach an entire master class in story writing techniques from just one of Reichs’ chapters. But… I’ve often wondered how a world-class forensic anthropologist, busy as hell, ever stumbled on those word games. Her own? No way. Methinks, she has ghost writers in the closet. All world class.
I don’t know about whether or not Kathy Reichs has a ghost writer squad, but I do know that one should never underestimate the word-and-witcraft ability of the well-read well-educated person. I’ve seen some pretty amazing examples of this in the halls of higher learning coming from people who were working out double majors as their ‘day job’ and just being creative otherwise.
True, Richard. The problem is, to weave those grace notes into a story that works. I would often get entries in the Writers’ Village contest that were epiphanies of prose poetry. Any single line might have graced a story. But a collation of beautiful phrases, without a strong plot or structure, does not make a story. I wish it did. Everyone’s job would be easier!
Thanks for this great post John and Anne. Using all the five senses is something I really need to work on. I’ll be sure to bookmark this for future reference.
Thanks, Debbie! (He said sensuously…)