The Writers Paradox

As writers, we require ourselves to write as much as possible, to get as many words down as possible, as if length was congruous with talent. Instead, we should require of ourselves to write as much as possible, in as few words as possible. For example, the first two sentences of my blog post could have been summed up with “Do more with less”.

Colleges and academia trained us to provide length, not talent, in our papers. How often did we hear,

“Please have for me by the end of the week a *enter number here* page report on *enter subject you don’t really care about here*.”

Or what about business professionals who spend hours of mind breaking working performing due diligence on a company, compiling a thirty page report filled with complex valuation formulas and projections just to watch the manager read the first paragraph, and then skip to the last page to see the summary?

The point is, as writers for quantity, not quality.

Pages and pages can be written for the greatest horror novel of all time, when one of the most horrific tales is one sentence.

                “He was the last man on earth and someone knocked on his door.”

This is comically ended with some sort of Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormon missionaries punch line, or my personal favorite was the pizza delivery guy.

On the other side of this paradox are the writers who have a story, possibly the greatest novel of the era crammed deep within the grey crevices of their brain, but are too afraid to write it. One main driver for not writing is the fear of failure, which will happen. You must accept the fact that failure is inevitable for the thirty year veteran and the two day novice. Embrace the failure, make your friend, invite it over for coffee, get into a long term relationship with it, have a fight, break up, get back together, say you’re sorry and that you will never leave, and then do the best possible thing ever… cheat on it with its best friend Success.

When I was taking a creative writing class and attempting to get my first book published, I received dozens of rejection letters (as was expected for any first attempt). My professor said “When you get a hundred rejection letters, you have a party.” The reason is that for each rejection letter you receive, you are that much closer to success. Rejection and failure are milestones that are to be celebrated.

So, as you take up your preferred writing apparatus, try to capture more meaning, with fewer words. One common rule is to write, and then cut a third.

Good luck in all your endeavors.

Pitfall: Plots, Not People.

One of my own most frequent pitfalls as a writer is writing about plots, instead of people. Anyone can write a plot, someone going from point A all the way to point N with a climax, falling action and untying of the knot. What takes talent, and what should end up in the hands of publishing houses, book shelves, and NYT Best Selling lists are stories about the individual and the fight within themselves.

I recently finished, well, sort of finished, two “thriller” novels. One was a thriller romance by Karen Harper and another was a government conspiracy thriller by Greg Iles. Both stories were well researched, but halfway through both books, I skipped to the ending, not because I wanted to know what was going to happen next, but because there was nothing within the pages that changed the Characters. Both books were written about plots, which were very interesting ideas, but at the end, the people, the characters, remained the same.

My wife and I recently finished the Hunger Games and we are selling them as soon as we can for two reasons. Too much gratuitous violence, and no one changes. Katniss is still Katniss, if maybe more broken, Peta is still Peta, Gale is still Gale, and Hamich is still District Twelve’s town drunk. Her second book was good, there was internal conflict, but not enough in my mind to save the series. My last post was about writing more with less. The Hunger Games could have been written as follows.

Book one: Kids kill kids for food or glory. Katniss and Peta defy the capital and both survive.

Book Two: Katniss loves two guys at the same time and justifies her actions.

Book Three: Practically everyone dies and Katniss chooses the one she can’t live without.

Another point of that my wife and I discussed was 50 Shades of Grey. Neither of us have the desire to read it, and frankly do not want that kind of literature in our home, but I am not sure which is worse: the fact that I can go to the local family friendly grocery store and pickup a porno in paperback form, or that it is a NYT best seller.

Perhaps my literary analysis skills are well below par, and perhaps I don’t know a good story when I see it, and perhaps readers have changed so that they don’t care about personal growth, development, rebirth, or anything that made stories memorable. But as I write, I make a challenge to authors, upcoming and experienced: make your stories about people and their internal struggles for rebirth. There is too much in the world about characters going through a gauntlet of trials, just to remain the same as they were in the beginning.  

Make your writing Good vs Good, not Good vs Evil

A simple blue print to good writing:

Once upon a time there was a [Character with a decent description] who wanted [something or someone (calling this thing 1)] more than anything else in the world because [enter back story to set up a solid motive]. [Character] sets out on a quest or journey to get [thing 1]. When [Character] comes close to attaining [thing 1] he realizes that he must give it up to get [thing 2] which is something else that [character] has grown attached to during his quest that fills a gap, or fixes a flaw  in [Character]. [Character] learns this, and must overcome a villain in order to get to [thing 2]. At the end, [character] defeats villain and transforms into a new [character].

Simply put, the blue print to writing is to follow the cosmogonic cycle.

Think of Pixar's UP when Carl Fredrickson wants nothing more in the world than to get his house, and thus his wife, to Paradise Falls, because he crossed his heart in a solemn oath, and then lost her before he was able to do so. Think of Dreamwork's "How to Train Your Dragon" when Hiccup wants nothing more in the world than to slay a dragon and become one of the clan, but realizes he cant when he has captured Toothless. 

Within this cycle, there is a good versus bad (Charles Muntz or the Big Dragon that eats the other smaller dragons) but there is also a more important good versus good. When Carl gets his house to Paradise falls, he realizes that it came at the great cost of saving Kevin from Charles. When Hiccup doesnt kill the dragon during his last training session, he looses his father's blessing. That conflict, of good versus good, is and its resolution is where a story comes to life and makes an good story, great.