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One day last year some of us were talking about work habits—whether or not it's essential to write every single day, how to prioritize writing projects, whether or not to quantify output or time, what's the best way to start writing every day.

And the answers all came down to one thing:

Why are we writing our stories?

Maybe we’re writing them because we grew up in the 1950s and sixties and seventies reading books by authors who—even though they weren’t famous—still made a sort of lower-middle-class living staying home with a typewriter all day doing what they were good at and they loved. And that was the future we saw for ourselves. Because we just loved books.

Or maybe we’re writing because, even though we’ve never been writers, these stories came to us, and we really, seriously, passionately wanted to tell them, but the more we work on them the more we want to tell them exactly right. And so we’re struggling to learn how to discover exactly the right way.

Or maybe we’re writing to become the next J.K. Rowling and make history in the industry and become famous as that break-out success everyone’s still talking about twenty years later. Truth be told, when we think this way we probably aren’t thinking about twenty years from now. We’re probably only thinking about next year and whether or not we’ll be so excited we’ll vomit on Oprah.

Or maybe we’re writing because everywhere we go these days people are asking us if we’re on Twitter and Facebook, whether or not we have blogs, if we’re ‘online,’ and when we do go online everywhere we look people are talking about how we have to start marketing our books before we even write them, and they’re critiquing each other’s manuscripts and offering for critique their own manuscripts on forums, and they’re bemoaning their wordcounts and trading tips on blogging agents and asking us if we’re doing NaNoWriMo this year.

And as soon as we ask ourselves, “Am I? Why not?” we realize we’ve opened the Pandora’s Box of writing advice that hammers at us relentlessly from all directions, “Build your platform! Drive your traffic! Leverage your social media network! Accumulate your subscribers!” As though the whole world were out there right this second waiting around just for us—for us to give it what it wants—and none too patiently either. And we’re thinking, Huh. I always thought I was supposed to learn how to write well before I could sell anything I’d written. How wrong was I?. . .

Now, more than ever in history, the aspiring writer must guard against other people’s agendas. We must consider every day with as much clarity and self-awareness as we can muster why we, personally, write. We must ask ourselves why we write what we write, just what we want to get out of writing, and how badly we want to get it. We must ask every single time we sit down with our stories, “Why this? Why me? Why now?”

We must keep our heads when all those around us are losing theirs.

Because the world of illusion has finally come off the page and taken over the actual experience of being a writer. It can seem it’s no longer about getting into that page and sinking with luxurious, tactile pleasure through the layers and layers and layers of brilliant and significant and riveting detail to the core underlying everything we could ever hope to write. As though it’s no longer about climbing back out of those depths when we look up and around and realize we’re sitting in a chair, at a desk, in a room, and our lives are in here with us. No longer about going downstairs to sit on the front steps in the twilight after a solid day’s work and think of those satisfying pages, smell the grass, listen to the birds, watch the clouds cross the iridescent sky, feel the good, firm earth beneath our bare feet.

It’s all Barnum & Bailey, now, lost in the virtual blogosphere twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, always and forever unto infinity.

We must remember, as we live our lives—this life of the writer in the twenty-first century—what an illusion the circus is. And remember what they say is born every minute.

We didn’t choose this craft to be the craft of our souls just so we could be that.

We must turn our backs on the circus.

We must turn to our stories.

Part 1

Storytelling

Chapter 1

Loving in the Time of Cholera with Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Storytelling for the ages

I have a wonderful writer friend whom I love to death, but he has dyslexia like nobody’s business, plus he doesn’t think of himself as an intellectual. He’s great if one of you has to climb a drainpipe to break into an upstairs apartment in the middle of a blistering hot summer afternoon. Ask me how I know. (He said, “Grab my keys.” He did not say, “Don’t grab one of those extra sets of car keys my roommate leaves lying around everywhere in plain sight.”)

And he’s actually quite an imaginative writer, because his dyslexia forces him to be certain every single word he puts down he really needs to put down. Years ago, when we were young and intense and tragically-hip, I used to type his poetry for him. He’d lean over my shoulder in his ratty San Francisco apartment on lower Haight Street (where the dealers and druggies were even worse than in my neighborhood in the upper Tenderloin), watching me disentangle 'cigarette' from the extra y’s and z’s that he’d given it and laughing. “So that’s how you spell that!”

But it took him two years to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, carrying it everywhere with him all day long every day. By the time he was done, it was as though he’d won the Olympics. I seriously thought it might take him. . .one hundred years. . .of solitude. . .

Because there’s only one thing that’s going to inspire a severely dyslexic non-intellectual to get all the way through One Hundred Years of Solitude.

And that's stunning craft.

Marquez is a craftsperson of infinitely fine sensibility. We could talk for hours (maybe I will) about how he gets away with writing entire 400-page novels of one paragraph about characters all with the same name. It’s a miracle.

But where he really clobbers us with his talent is in his endings.

Do you know why Love in the Time of Cholera is named that?

Because the final scene could only be orchestrated 1) between people in love, and 2) during a time of cholera.

Or what about Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter? What kind of madman comes up with a love story that revolves around a 1950s radio soap opera producer (not one of the lovers) whose single marketing mechanism is personally insulting a random handful of people? Complete with a rat eating something nobody should ever talk about a rat eating? I read that book as a very young adult and was blown backward against the wall by the manic glee of Llosa’s literary chutzpah.

If we can learn anything from these pillars of twentieth-century South American literature, it is that storytelling is (or was recently, anyway) alive and thriving in parts of the world with low literacy rates.

Why do you suppose that is?

Now I’m going to do something unpopular, and that is take a swipe at Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.

The Kite Runner had me completely engrossed for fully half the novel. It was gripping, it was detailed, it was powerful, it was real. The protagonist walks a fine line between wealthy Afghani political power and poor oppressed masses. Sometimes he stays on it. Sometimes he falls off. The details of his struggle are beautiful, harsh, and believable. He’s human.

Then he and his father finally make it to the U.S. I always start to lose interest when characters with fascinatingly different experiences wind up living boring mainstream American lives, but I was rolling with that, rolling with the exploration of how the loss of their wealth and political power affected them, because up until there it had all been so true.

Then he grows up and goes back.

And this should have been the heart of the novel, everything a Climax is meant to be. We should have gotten to go into this character’s childhood culture—which we have some real identification with now, because of that lush first half of the novel—and lived the internal drama of what happens on atmospheric re-entry. What happens when you put a human being through that. What happens to their insides.

Instead, we get a bizarre new plotline about hunting down a child through the evil tyranny of the Taliban and adopting it.

Heh? A new character? This late in the book? Someone we’re supposed to bond to and feel enormous investment in? Someone we don't know anything about except second-hand through another character's version of what's happened? Someone so important we’re willing to drop the whole exploration of human experience we’ve been caught up in up until this point and suddenly veer off into a completely different plot involving the child of a character we might feel bonded to based on that lush build-up, except that he's never put in an appearance, and a situation that might matter to us if we’d had any idea such a thing could eventually happen?

Suddenly it’s all violence and mayhem, the writer telling us what to think and how to feel about the Taliban, a totally different story from the long, meticulous accumulation of character and atmosphere of the earlier part of the book.

Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t force the awareness of your literary limitations on your reader by ignoring the true story you have chosen to tell.

Read Love in the Time of Cholera and study the plot and style. Marquez is very clear from the outset: this is not memoir, this is fiction. Fermina and Florentino spend the entire novel spanning the years of their lives at a distance, their youthful love long lost in the myriad of nuances that make up the profound truth about life lived out over decades. Watch how Marquez builds the plot points with subtle, unerring care. Sink up to your eyeballs in the wonderful plethora of telling detail and characterization, the gradual, sure-handed building of inevitable tension.

Then read the pen-penultimate page about the armed patrol on the river guarding against pestilence.

Three hundred and fifty pages—and the answer to one simple question is where this story was going all along.

Chapter 2

Searching for Entertainment-Industry Intelligence

A crash course

My husband and I fell in love under the shadow of SETI.

SETI, in case you don’t know, stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. When one morning sixteen years ago my new boss (and future husband) pointed out that the company we worked for was right down the hall from the SETI offices, I laughed out loud. I didn’t know you could rent office space in Silicon Valley from which to search for ET.

But as it happens, SETI, in spite of its X-Files-type mission, enjoys a serious reputation among scientists and serves as a funding clearinghouse for a great deal of astronomical research, with enormous grants from some very highly-placed institutions indeed.

All this is by way of explaining where I spent a certain weekend last summer.

My husband had spent the week right before that in Boston leading seminars at one of the major Linux conferences, where he was approached by the SETI people to attend their first annual conference. He was one of a handful of open-source advocates invited to be involved in a discussion on moving SETI’s software to open source. He was also invited to their black-tie gala, at which astronauts, Star Trek stars, and big names in astronomy got up and talked about the future of space exploration. They were holding this conference at a large hotel in Silicon Valley, only a few hours’ drive from where we live. So we went. Of course!

But the really important part of the conference came the day after the black-tie gala, when we attended a talk by the Director of the National Academy of Sciences’ Science & Entertainment Exchange on the question: How can we better bridge the gap between science-fiction entertainment and science?

We watched a wonderful pastiche of movie clips to illustrate this intriguing question, and afterward the Director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange spoke long and eloquently. She brought up several points that, in my mind, all fit into the puzzle the same way:

– Laypeople learn “science” from sci-fi entertainment

– Using science in sci-fi entertainment significantly influences the behavior of 'consumers' (a sitcom featuring science about breast cancer resulted in a major increase in women across the country getting check-ups, a sitcom based on forensic science resulted in a four-fold increase in enrollment in forensic studies programs)

– A fictitious hacker staring at a screen for twenty seconds and yelping, “Eureka!” is a far cry from the real hacker who stares at a screen for weeks on end before unraveling the complexities in their way

– The stories of scientists and their search for information often make gripping telling

– It’s more interesting to know the truth

She explained that the National Academy of Sciences consults, when asked, on sci-fi movies and TV shows (which is where this Director’s job comes in). They also, when not asked to consult, stand by watching the ensuing confusion.

“What can we do about this disconnect?” the Director of the Science & Entertainment Exchange asked.

She described the elitism among scientists that keeps them from being interested in fiction, the lack of understanding among many writers that science-fiction must be based on—who knew?—science. She even told us about her scientist husband’s attempt to write a screenplay on what he knows about the potential and lack of potential in time travel, outraged by the ignorance displayed in time-travel sci-fi. (“This is really hard!” he finally said.)

She proposed a Writing Workshop in which writers and scientists would be paired off, so the scientists could keep the writers in the real world while they developed their stories.

Fabulous! I thought, This all makes perfect sense.

The truth is that a storyteller is dependent upon the facts of the reality they share with their reader—the hidden life-&-death struggles controlling all human character, the cause-&-effect of events in a temporal world, the meticulous, sensitive selection and accumulation of real details—to create a reflection of life that, when gazed into, resonates with a profundity that’s always present in reality but often missed.

Storytelling is not something that interferes with life. It's not about faking or trivializing reality for the sake of the writer. Storytelling is about waking the reader up to the life that’s really there.

We must look for true aspects of character that we find utterly riveting. Explore real needs that power enormous agendas. Find ways to embed in these riveting characters with these powerful needs the counter-needs that create, deep inside them, internal conflict that rings inside the reader with devastating recognition.

“I know this person,” the reader thinks. “With all their beauty and horror, their insight and idiocy, their innocence and corruption. This person is me!”

Then we give our characters some fascinating premise. What if ionizing the air could bend lightwaves to alter the paths of lasers? (An example of true science from the Director’s talk.) What if time machines were possible, but altering the past through time travel were not? (Another example.) What if ghosts were the vibrations of the subatomic ‘strings’ that once made up the bodies of the living, continuing to reverberate after the bodies are gone? (I made up that one.)

What kind of nightmare could that create?

We put our characters into that nightmare.

And we design a plotline—along the lines of classic structure—around deeper and deeper exploration of the detailed, proven science that not only makes that nightmare possible but contains the only conceivable antidote.

We illuminate the eloquent search for truth that drives us all.

Chapter 3

How Stories are Written

An education

Accepting the Gullibility of Being a Writer

Last summer, I started an experiment on my blog. Instead of long, ~~opinionated~~ thoughtful posts on events going on in the publishing industry, I started posting numbered lists. Just silly ways of saying, “Write with your brains, folks.”

Wow. My stats doubled the day I started and tripled a couple of days later. And they kept rising after that until they took an exponential leap and I went into blogosphere hyperspeed.

Who would have guessed? People love lists.

I was particularly impressed by the response to the first one, in which I claimed to know “107 Things You Should Know About Being a Published Author.” Now, I don’t know 107 things about being a published author. Nobody knows 107 things about being a published author. Even Stephen King doesn’t know 107 things about being a published author. But we're willing to believe someone does!

“Hot dog,” we’re thinking. “The whole instruction manual! I can now plan my life. Finally.”

Granted, those of us who are so into such things are writers, not readers. We’re just a tiny bit gullible because we’re striving so hard to get somewhere, not simply looking for a temporary escape. It’s our intense need to become something that drives us, not our intense need to stop being quite so much ourselves for just a while.

Those really are different needs.

Because working in fiction makes us a bit crazy. I know this. You know this. We’re concentrating, we’re concentrating. We’re concentrating on something we want with our whole souls—to be really good writers—until we lose track of little things like perspective and, you know, maybe our native horse sense. It becomes quite easy to believe someone has figured out all 107 things we need to know about what’s going to happen to us when we get published, thereby simplifying our lives down to just this part, the part about creating something to publish. And that is a huge gift in this day and age, when absolutely everyone and their grandmother is stampeding toward publication, and we’re just running along with the herd hoping we don’t get trampled under their thousands of little cloven hooves.

Besides, what can writers not believe? Our greatest joy is hanging out with imaginary people. We like believing things we know for a fact aren’t true.

Reviewing the Definition of a Story

So what is the definition of a story?

And who gets to say?

There are a couple of well-known angles on this time-honored question, pointing at it from different directions.

First, there’s Flannery O'Connor’s wonderful discussion in the essays in Mystery and Manners—collected from her papers and edited by her friends Robert and Sally Fitzgerald after her death—in which she defines a story as ‘a full action with a point.’

Then there’s the canonical example:

The king died, and then the queen died. (plot)

The king died, and then the queen died of grief. (story)

This example illuminates two essential aspects of the difference between plot—an action or series of actions—and story—a full action with a point.

One essential aspect is causality. Cause-&-effect.

And the other essential aspect is character. Story is not just plot. Story is plot plus character.

Story is based upon cause-&-effect.

And story is based upon character.

Which, if we look at it from the right angle, are almost exactly the same thing.

Plot

King Rupert learns he’s dying. However, he has no heir. He tells Queen Isabella he has an illegitimate daughter. He introduces Isabella and Maggie. He dies, and Isabella becomes ruler. Isabella is hit by a bus.

Character

King Rupert is suffering from a terminal disease. This is tragic not only because Rupert is king of a small principality without an heir, but also because Rupert’s a darn nice guy who takes good care of his people. The only thing nobody knows is that Rupert has an illegitimate daughter, Maggie, from a liaison with a close friend of adolescence. Oh, yes, and Rupert is deeply, madly in love with his wife, Queen Isabella.

Isabella is a hot-headed but basically good-hearted activist, prone to launching herself into confrontations on a whim without pausing for little things like diplomacy. As much as she helps some of her people, she tends to alienate others, so she definitely does not want Rupert’s job, now or ever. Her and Rupert’s childlessness is an issue for the kingdom, but in fact means she is not manacled by motherhood as so many women in her position are. What Isabella really wants is to be an adventurer. She sublimates her hunger for excitement in her profound, sincere love for her husband, King Rupert. Right up until the day she gets hit by a bus.

Story

King Rupert learns he’s ill and most likely dying. That causes him to re-think his situation regarding his kingdom, his wife, and his illegitimate daughter, Maggie. That causes him to face the possibility that Maggie could cause trouble for Isabella when he dies. That causes him to go to Isabella to confess Maggie’s existence to her.

Isabella learns Rupert is ill and most likely dying. That causes her to become more hot-headed than normal. That causes her to tangle with embryo-rights activists over stem-cell research. That causes her to create a national incident.

Maggie is a medical intern at the kingdom’s major medical research facility. She learns King Rupert is ill. That causes her to throw herself into her stem-cell research, staying up night after night without sleep, desperate to find a cure for her country’s leader and patron. That causes her to become unstable. That causes her to attend a major embryo-rights demonstration in a less-than-reasonable frame of mind. That causes her to give an impromptu speech. That causes Isabella to use her speech as a rallying point for a passionate—if slightly incoherent—expression of her own anguish. That causes Maggie to mistake Isabella for an embryo-rights spokesperson. And that causes Maggie to turn on Isabella, sparking the national incident. . .

Do you see how we’re heading for the last conflict—the scene in which Rupert confesses Maggie’s existence to Isabella—loaded for bear?

Character is the basis of all fictional cause-&-effect. Why? Because we read to learn how some folks will do. We like human nature! We find it endlessly fascinating. Why do people go and do things? Why don’t we all just stay home twiddling our thumbs?

And—most importantly—when we don’t, how are we supposed to handle the inevitable crises we bring crashing down upon our own heads?

So we’ve got this last conflict set up, and we go into it:

Story Climax

Rupert goes to Isabella, who has just come home from causing the national incident and is in her boudoir being cleaned up and first-aided by her ladies, wishing she were in the Himalayas dealing with something reasonable like a nice, quiet avalanche. Rupert sends away the ladies and is about to confess to Maggie’s existence.

Meanwhile, Maggie arrives at the castle gates, prepared to take down the queen for interfering with essential stem-cell research that could possibly save the life of the king, but on her way to Isabella’s chambers she learns from the servants that Isabella was, in fact, defending Maggie’s research. This causes her to break down in tears, so when she is finally shown into the queen’s and king’s presence, she’s a stumbling, sobbing wreck.

This causes Rupert to run to her and throw his arms around her.

This causes Maggie and Isabella to go into shock, which gives Rupert a chance to tell them Maggie is his daughter. This causes Isabella and Maggie to be reconciled (faux resolution), but the effort of confession causes Rupert to collapse, and he croaks in their arms.

This causes Isabella, stunned and devastated, her whole life a shambles, to run raving with grief into the street and out into traffic. . .

. . .which causes her to be hit by a bus.

Do you see how it is the characters’ personalities—their needs and desires—that create the cause-&-effect that fuel the story? If we gave them different personalities, different needs, different desires, the cause-&-effect would be something completely different. And the plot (the king dies, then the queen dies) would be a completely different story.

This is how we can tell basically the same plots over and over again throughout history—there really aren’t that many—and yet continue to tell an endless panorama of stories. This is what Honoré de Balzac was attempting with his gazillion hilarious little stories: an infinitely entertaining and touching and educational portrait of The Human Comedy.

What would this story have been if Rupert were a lovable psycho? A loser? A mad scientist? A warmonger? Secretly a wizard with power over life and death?

What would it have been if Isabella were a useless wimp? A monster? A madwoman? An exhausted mother? A schemer? A brilliant leader?

What if there had been no Maggie, but a legitimate heir of Rupert and Isabella with their own needs and desires? Or both? If the people were a force pitted against the royalty? If there were yet other forces involved that we haven’t even thought of?

Why—someone would have to tell that story!

Reviewing the Definition of Fiction

We’ve started off with the definition of story through cause-&-effect based on character. As it should be! Now let’s review the definition of fiction: storytelling through the written word.

One day last year, I was talking to my son’s tutor about how I’d gotten back in touch with my old college chum Craig Bartlett and was planning to interview him as soon as the hoopla over Craig’s new PBS children’s cartoon Dinosaur Train had abated a bit. We chatted about Craig’s early work in pioneering claymation at Will Vinton Studios in Portland, Oregon, and my son’s tutor mentioned nostalgically that wonderful 1974 Will Vinton/Bob Gardiner classic of all claymation classics, Closed Mondays.

What he loved about it, he said, was the morphing you can do with claymation, the way one thing can magically turn into another without any break in credibility—because realism and surrealism are equally believable in clay.

Have you ever heard of Firesign Theater? They made surreal radio programs in the 1970s—not music or commentary, just stories exploring the possibilities of sound. And I can’t tell you how we loved them when I was a teen. We all had their records memorized, most particularly Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him and Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers. My brother and I used to go to shallow seventies teen parties and sit in the corners being wallflowers and quoting Firesign Theater shtick to each other.

Like clay, sound can magically turn one thing into another as we listen. A horse whinnying behind the wavering voice of ‘Tiny Dr. Tim’ saying, “It's a horsey! Let's give the horsey a sugar cube,” turns unexpectedly into a trumpeting elephant and thunders furiously away.

Great stuff, this playing with the eye of the mind!

And, just as with clay and sound, words can also magically turn one thing into another with no break in credibility.

We must use this to our full advantage. Zoom in on details—the protagonist is wearing argyle socks and playing obsessively with his wedding ring. Does our reader care if his hair’s normal? That he’s medium weight? That he has a 'nice' smile? No. They can guess all that for themself. They want a close-up of the chip in his front tooth, the tear in his screen door that lets in the mosquitoes he’s always slapping, the mole on his neck that the secondary protagonist is going to spend a lot of time thinking about touching or not touching.

In fact, fantasy and sci-fi are popular genres precisely because we can mix fact and fiction so cleanly with words.

Whatever fiction genre we love, our medium—words—gives us the surreal ability to create absolutely anything we want to create.

This is our lodestone, writers. This is our magic wand.

Reviewing the Purpose of Storytelling

So we come to our story with a question: “What’s going to happen to these fascinating people in my head?” And we spend hours, weeks, years exploring the answers—because there are myriad answers. There are almost infinite answers.

And the exploration of those answers—the long, glorious hours feeling our way through them as though blind, discovering which ones are right, when, where, in what way, and why—is our purpose in doing this work.

However, our reader comes to our story with a different question: “Why should I care?”

I learned this from the Gormenghast fantasy trilogy by Mervyn Peake, of which I read more than half in my early twenties at the behest of a friend. They’re the quintessential blending of the real and surreal. Gormenghast is a castle as big as a city, which its inhabitants rarely leave. It’s sprawling, ancient, gothic. Rats crawl in the dungeons, and bats fly around the belfries. Ivy covers the crumbling stone walls, and the furniture and draperies inside are tattered and dusty. The royal family is a collection of freaks—all except the youngest members, who are, against all odds, completely believable, emotional, multi-faceted.

Human.

Tell us a story about someone we’ve never met, but we’d love if we did. Someone interesting and funny and droll, but also baffled and clumsy and sometimes downright stupid. Someone whose life is weird and unexpected enough to be fascinating, while their reactions are ordinary enough to be poignantly familiar. Someone who screws up just like us, but handles it better than we do, who can fall over a footstool and land on their feet still walking, the eternal Dick Van Dyke. Someone who hits bottom, bounces up, hits it again, bounces up again, hits it again, bounces so hard they knock a hole in the ceiling and wind up flying, arms and legs waving, into the ether.

Make their story unexpected but credible—startling but satisfying—something new and exciting everywhere they turn, but always completely coherent within the context of their own personal fictional dream.

And keep them in the center of that story, forever falling over footstools and landing on their feet.

I was enjoying Gormenghast enormously clear up until Fuschia Groan dies.

Fuschia isn’t supposed to die! What was Peake thinking? She’s the character I was reading for! Cranky and obstinate, but decent and feeling inside, she has all the qualities of a true sympathetic character. Bang! She hits bottom. Bounce! She goes flying. Bang! She hits bottom again. Bounce! She goes flying again. I loved the castle, sure. But I was reading for Fuschia.

Peake could go on designing traps for the other characters as long as he liked, but I quit reading Gormenghast the minute Fuschia disappeared.

Writer beware! Never forget: we're storytellers. We may think everyone knows that stories take a lot of words, that fiction is longer than oral storytelling by very virtue of the medium, and therefore our reader understands implicitly why they must hang on and keep reading and reading and reading this story we’re so in love with. But the magic and flexibility of fiction are always submissive to the reader’s investment.

Why should they care?

We must make our reader believe. But, even more than that, we must make them want to believe.

Chapter 4

Character Arc/Narrative Arc

The rainbow

Character arc: someone living their life

Narrative arc: the things that happen when someone lives their life

When I work with children, the first thing I do on the first day is review the basic parts of speech, grammatical points, stuff I know they probably already know. Then I teach them the very simple, straight-forward, zen fact: every sentence has a subject and a verb. Someone does something.

Subject. Verb. That’s all there is to it. That’s all they need to know.

I look at them. They look at me. I nod.

And then, I mess with their heads.

I tell them, “From this you can learn that all storytelling is holographic. Do you know what a holograph is? It’s a document written entirely in the handwriting of the same person who signs it. A whole or holistic graph or piece of writing. And a hologram is a picture made out of light, of which every little tiny bit is actually the whole big picture in miniature.” I wave my hands around, showing them little-tiny and whole-big.

Then I say, “I think. Or the other way around. But, anyway, they’re both very cool.

“Because a story—just like a sentence—has a subject and a verb: someone does something. And everything in between the big picture of the overall story and the tiny picture of the individual sentence has a subject and a verb. No matter what the granularity—cosmology to quantum mechanics—it’s all designed the same. A subject and a verb.”

Now, these children don’t know what holographs, holograms, granularity, cosmology, or quantum mechanics are, but that’s okay because I don’t mind telling them. And kids love that! What cool ideas! It’s not listening to a teacher drone on and on and on about participles and imperatives and the pluperfect, much less calling on them to parrot anything. They’re bemused, but entertained. When is she going to go back to drilling stuff into our heads?

All those big words and concepts make subject-verb, frankly, laughably easy. Geez. Just two things stuck together. A person. And what they do. Anyone can remember that.

I like picturing the looks on their parents’ faces when they go home after an hour with me and say, “Did you know a holo-something is something that’s the same in its tiniest parts as it is in its biggest parts? And atoms are characters and what they do are verbs? And it has something to do with other stuff about writing too, but I forget what because I'm starting a novel?”

I love working with kids.

Character arc. Narrative arc. Subject. Verb. Someone does something.

So we're working on our story, living with these characters in our heads, hearing their voices speak to each other, watching them move around the rooms of their houses, the places they go, the wildernesses of city or forest or desert or small town ingrown like a toenail. And they’re doing things (things they shouldn’t), making decisions, taking trips, running into each other under inconvenient, embarrassing, or even dangerous circumstances. They’re doing, doing, doing, and it keeps twisting back on them, thwarting them, turning their carefully or not-so-carefully laid plans inside out, tossing them cavalierly, time after time, out of the frying pan into the fire.

What are their arcs?

Well, we go through arcs. We go to a child’s basketball game, maybe, and some kids there are mean to other kids, and we don’t like it.

It sets up an internal conflict inside: we have our own personal issues about confrontation and control over other people and public situations and, maybe, our own experiences on the basketball court as children. And at the same time we have this dearly-cherished value that we don’t let people hurt kids. Not if we have anything to say about it. So how do we resolve this internal conflict?

That’s our character arc.

Meanwhile, this trigger to our character arc also sets off a domino effect, a series of events sparked by that original event. We go to the game, which causes us to see the kids being mean, which causes us to make a decision. Maybe we decide to hide our head and shuffle out in embarrassment. Maybe we decide to go along with the kids and pretend it’s all fun and games. Maybe we decide to blow our top, and the police arrive. Maybe we decide on something else.

Whatever we decide causes another event, which backs us into a more specific corner, about which we must make a new, more refined decision, which narrows our options even more.

That’s our narrative arc.

So the further we work our way through our character arc, the more focused our narrative arc becomes, and the more inevitable become the events we face. Until we reach the point after which the life we were leading before this chain of events (this narrative) came along has been irrevocably altered into something different (by our character).

Who’s your story about? What’s going on inside them that sets them up for this original decision with which they must cope throughout the rest of the story? What’s on one side of their internal conflict—what need in their character forces them to make this particular decision? And what comes along and creates the conflicting side—what other need contradicts that original need, turning this one aspect of character into a narrative?

What values, beliefs, fears, hopes, prejudices, assumptions, secrets, denial, habits, and history bear in on this character constantly from all sides, forcing them to be able to react to stress in just the one way? What’s the core of their internal conflict, the Gordian Knot, the inescapable toe-stubber beyond which they simply cannot continue? How does that core illuminate their two mutually-exclusive needs, the clues to their basic character and to how all of us—every single human on earth—live with irreconcilable paradox in our souls?

We must ask ourselves all of this every time we find ourselves dealing with internal conflict of our own. How we resolve the conflict matters less than what we learn about ourselves in dealing with it.

We’re not just revealing characters when we create fiction. We’re revealing the key to being human.

And what are the dominoes that keep falling on us or out from under our feet? What scenes occur, one after another, other characters coming in and out, days and nights passing, outside events happening, conversations, gestures, activities, milestones in a life?

We’re not just chronicling stories when we write. We’re chronicling the inevitable forward motion of being alive.

Chapter 5

Graphing in Three Dimensions

Theme

We can think of storytelling as (x,y,z) graphing, which is drawing an image through three-dimensional space with a single line, using two sets of coordinates: one for one end of the line, the other for the other. Computer graphics engineers write these (x1,y1,z1) and (xn,yn,zn), where n represents the furthest possible point at the end the line.

A character must make a journey through an experience in their life. That's a story. It can be either an outer or inner journey, with other characters or without them, but they must start at one point, and they must wind up at another point, and those two points encompass everything in between.

The protagonist's conflicting, overwhelming needs are the two diametrically-opposed points that define our x coordinates. Those needs get our protagonist through space in one dimension, which is their character arc.

The plot begins with a Hook and ends on a Climax, which are the two structurally-opposed points that define our y coordinates. That structure gets our protagonist through space on exactly the same journey in a second dimension, which is their narrative arc.

And our major and minor themes contain those aspects of life we're exploring through this story. We want more than one theme so we can create tension between them, and the two most powerful are defined by our z coordinates. They get our protagonist through space on that same journey in the third dimension, which is the progress of our exploration of themes.

You'll notice there are multiple points—an infinite number, actually—between the first and last sets of (x,y,z) coordinates, and at each of those points we must be able to define the coordinates of all three planes. For every step of our character arc, we must know the corresponding step in our narrative arc, which illuminate—all on their own—the corresponding step in the progress of our themes. That's (x,y,z).

Now, I'm not going to explicate theme, and this is on purpose. I have a Taoist perspective on theme. I believe the less said about it the better for everyone, especially the reader. We must focus on our storytelling—on developing truthful, gut-wrenching characters and believable, hair-raising plot—and forget about theme while we do it.

Then when we throw our reader off the rainbow into their own epiphany at the very end of our story. . .there they find the full illumination of our themes, the part we didn't know we knew, the art lying at the core of the craft of fiction.

When we have written our story and polished it in exactly the right way, we will have illuminated everything we have to say about these particular themes.

Let the reader be one to put them into other words.

Chapter 6

The Only Two Stories

Relationship & Quest

Mining Yourself

There are no new stories, only new perspectives.

Has anyone ever told you that? It’s true.

There are two ways in this world to get into trouble: with other people and on our own.

If we want to get our protagonist into trouble with others, we give them a relationship. If we want to get them into trouble on their own, we give them a quest.

How many kinds of relationship are there? Well, there are romantic/sexual relationships (with women, with men), family relationships (with children, with parents, with siblings, with extended family), friendships (individual, group, crowd, close, distant, estranged), business relationships (with bosses, with subordinates, with peers, with allies, with competitors), and antagonists (original enemies or any of the above gone bad). We can also have relationships with things, as the narrator does in Marie Redonnet’s Hotel Splendid, but unless they also involve either other people or a quest they’re going to get boring pretty fast.

How many kinds of quest are there? Two. The kind where we actually go somewhere, external, and the kind where we stay in one place, internal.

See? Only a handful.

So how do we write something new, something unique, something that wasn’t already beaten to a fruity pulp long before we were even born?

These days everyone knows about Monty Python, that pillar of British non-sequitur and daftly logical conclusions. And many of us are even conversant with The Meaning of Life. But how many actually know the lyrics to The Galaxy Song?

Along with a plethora of cosmological facts (apparently first disproven and then re-proven, causing Eric Idle to demand 'the bastards' make up their minds), the song gives us that nihilistic reminder how amazingly unlikely were our births. And although it’s meant, in context, to scare us, I for some reason have always found it rather encouraging.

After all, if my birth was amazingly unlikely—which isn’t debated by scientists on either side of the argument—that means I’m unique, doesn’t it? And if I’m unique, then my experience of life can’t be duplicated by anybody, anywhere, at any point in history, can it? At least, not without my express written permission.

Take this to heart. You are unique.

We may have to paw through the minimalist slush pile of potential stories to find the ones that strike our fancy, but once we do we’ve got unlimited rein to do with them what we will.

Mine yourself.

No matter what story we want to tell, relationship or quest, we must look to our own lives to teach us how to tell it uniquely.

We must be alert wherever we go, whatever we do. There is only one person in history in a position to perceive and note down the specific, telling details of this life—nobody else’s—in all their extraordinarily singular significance. Does cheese remind us of telephone wires because of our cheese-slicer? We give that to a character. When we’re scared, do we finger our buttons? Some people do. When the one we love tells us they don’t love us anymore, is our first thought of tango’ing off an Argentinian cliff to the anguished wail of Tito Luisardo?

Does it, in fact, inspire us to travel to Buenos Aires and there meet the ravishing grandson of Tito, who tells us of the secret amor of his grandfather and the violet-eyed Amelia Bence? Is it our passion for 1930s Argentinian music that teaches us, in its complex, magnificently-detailed, ultimately poignant way, what it means to be alive?

There is only one person who can discover the links between one detail and another that illuminate the workings of their own bizarrely convoluted human brain. (Have you ever seen a human brain? Convoluted doesn’t even begin to cover it.) There is only one person who loves the unusual conglomeration of hobbies each of us loves in exactly the way we love them. There is only one person who will ever come up with the strange and unusual meanings each of us knows, in our heart of hearts, lie just beyond the surface of everything we do, everything we say, everything that ever happens around us.

It’s not getting our books on a bookstore shelf that makes writing worthwhile. Believe me, I know.

It’s getting to spend our writing time scrutinizing ourselves and our own lives for the devastating, electrifying, inherent beauty of living that is the essence of us—all that we will take with us to the grave.

Differentiating Between Together & Alone

So the first thing we need to know is that writing itself is a quest, and if we don’t know that when we first start out we sure will by the time it’s done wrestling us to the floor.

A quest is a journey, external or internal, the solitary path that is the true path of each of us throughout our lives.

A relationship, on the other hand, is an accumulation of the consequences of people’s influence upon each other, the mingling of individual paths that creates community between all of us out here rattling around in the world in the same place at the same time, social animals that we are. (This is, oddly, the act of publication—quite different and in some ways the opposite of writing.)

Is our story focused upon the characters and how they interact? Is it mainly about the ways in which these people relate to each other, how they come to signify to each other all things dreadful and ignoble and all things great and glorious, how they reach into each other’s hearts and souls and rearrange the furniture to produce something new and unusual, something poignantly true to life, something none of them has ever been before?

That’s a story of relationship.

Or is our story focused upon one character, one goal, one twisting, staggering, marvelous, and infuriating struggle to come to grips with what it means to be alone inside a single brainpan on this planet?

Yeah, that sounds like a quest to me.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov is a novel of relationships, the story of three brothers and a half-brother who struggle, in their different ways, to come to grips with each other and with the mysterious death of the father who has made their lives hell. It’s a mystery, and as a mystery it involves the infinite permutations of human interactions, all the ways in which we move and breathe and behave around each other and create—in the act of creating our own lives—the world in which we all live.

On the other hand, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a quest. Again, there’s a suspicious death, and again there’s a search for some resolution to the crime. But in this case, there’s no mystery. We know who committed the crime, how, and why, because we were there with him when he did it. Now we’re learning all about what happens to a man who does such a thing—just an ordinary man, a mediocre man, someone with faults and virtues no better or worse than our own, but a man who has done something beyond the pale that now he can’t undo. We are learning what the first step is for him, how this leads to the death and everything after, and by the end of the novel we learn how it turns out for him—what one man makes of this extraordinary act of character and how his goal (escaping punishment) twists around on him at the last moment and becomes something completely different from anything he could ever have predicted.

What about a story like the movie Galaxy Quest? Is it, in fact, a quest?

First, may I say to you: Enrico Colantoni? Tony Shalhoub? Sam Rockwell? Alan Rickman? Four of the great comic actors of our time, all in one place, all in one ludicrous, hilarious, death-defying spoof on Star Trek? Wow!

Ship's captain Jason Nesmith and his crew are the has-been stars of a science fiction TV show with all the overweening schmaltz and cliché of the original Star Trek. They’re living off their fading fame making appearances in malls and shopping center parking lots across America. It’s a hard time to have no talent except a surprising ability to conquer the galaxy.

There’s a Hook (Jason makes a fool of himself at a sci-fi convention, in a spoof on a Saturday Night Live shtick starring William Shatner). There are Developments (aliens co-opt the whole kit-&-caboodle to save their planet from Sarris, the Darth Vader of Reptilia). And there’s a Climax (Sarris wins! Oh, no!). There’s also a Resolution, which is of course the feel-good moment at the end of the story.

Throughout the plotline, the characters mess with each other’s heads, save each other’s butts, and come a cropper of each other’s failings. In the end, they have all learned something significant about themselves and each other and had a darn good time, to boot.

They have changed each other.

This is a story of relationship.

Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, on the other hand, while it purports to be about a man and a woman involved in an illicit romance during the bombing of London in World War II, isn’t actually about the affair at all. The reader follows Maurice through the years after Sarah inexplicably dumps him, digging deeper and deeper into his own character, until he learns not only the long-buried truth about the end of their affair but the truth about himself—the one person he hasn’t thought to confront all along.

This is a solitary journey into the very heart of what it means to live alone in a human soul.

This is a quest.

Molding & Being Molded By Relationship

There’s a legend that after Faulkner left Hollywood someone found a piece of paper in the garbage can by his desk that said repeatedly all the way down the page: “Boy meets girl. Boy meets girl. Boy meets girl.”

This is a take-off on the standard romance plot, “Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl.”

And, sexism aside, that’s the basic issue behind all relationship stories: meet someone, lose them, regain them.

The purpose of relationship stories is the exploration of the ways in which human beings, thrown together as we are on this increasingly-crowded planet, alter and reinforce and form each other’s lives even as we are formed. We might each start out alone in our own little squished post-natal heads, and we might, indeed, spend our time in this mortal coil isolated inside those heads, which is the whole point of the quest story and the point of writing in general.

But the time we spend here itself forces us into proximity with others so, unless we check out the minute we check in, our fate is the fate of all co-existing substances: to mold and be molded in turn. (Which, as it happens, is exemplified in the practice of publication.)

If a story is a full action with a point, then the point of a relationship story is whatever the writer finds significant in that relationship.

The entire history of a relationship, like the history of a life, is generally random and really quite boring unless it’s designed specifically around significance.

Therefore the full action is: the beginning of the significant part of the relationship, through the significant developments, to that one thing the writer wants to say is significant about this particular relationship.

In mystery, horror, and thriller, what is significant is who did or does what to whom and why. As mystery writers are so fond of saying, “Show me the why, and I’ll show you the who.” While some mysteries, horror stories, and thrillers explore the potential for danger in us all, many are less discerning—they can be about any type of threat, on any kind of flimsy grounds (and some are really flimsy), so long as they explore why people do things to each other.

Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins gave us the original Western mysteries (although the Chinese have been telling mystery stories for 2,000 years), while Horace Walpole gave us the original gothic romance, which is the basis of horror, which is the basis of thriller. And those darn resilient genres haven’t met their untimely ends yet.

In a romance what is significant is the sexual energy between people. As we all know, sex is the single greatest motivator in the Animal Kingdom. It would have to be, wouldn’t it? Any species that wasn’t designed specifically around sex would simply find procreation far too difficult and die out in a generation. (Have you ever given birth to the next generation? It's hard!) This is why romance has been and remains one of the all-time massive-selling genres in fiction. Nobody ever gets tired of thinking about sex, especially its powerful emotional ramifications, which in romance we are pleased to call love.

Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, and—much later—Jean Rhys laid the groundwork for all modern romance stories.

In a buddy story what is significant is the ability of two or more people to bond to each other above and beyond the confines of family—overcoming the plethora of differences between us, but without the magnetism of sex—to find a deeper meaning in that human bond. We need each other. Even when we sometimes can’t stand each other, we still need each other.

Interestingly, most of the earliest novels that might have been buddy stories are, in fact, quests: Don Quixote, Moll Flanders, Tom Jones. Fascinated as we are by bonding, buddy stories lack either death or sex and therefore typically need more plot than just the relationship to carry them all the way through to a Climax. So instead we use layering—multiple purposes—to explore the eternal greater truths.

The mystery duo Sherlock and Watson are buddies. The Japanese ‘Western’ The Seven Samurai is a buddy story. Mary Shelley's classic sci-fi novel Frankenstein, weirdly, is the story of what happens when we try to build our own buddy.

In a family drama the significant lies in the many ways in which family members create, influence, and infect the life they all must share. Family is our original tribe. We are a social species, and our brains are organized to find gossip, intrigue, and conflicting agendas interesting as all get-out.

Eudora Welty went to the wall with Delta Wedding, but before her we had Emily Bronte, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Faulkner, and James Thurber’s hilarious My Life and Hard Times. Rebecca West wrote the extraordinary Cousin Rosamund trilogy as a fictionalized account of her own family.

And in a parent-child story what is significant is the special power imbalance between parents and children and how that sets the participants up for conflict and union more fundamental to character than any other relationship.

Thus we get fairytales and their enormous dependence upon parent-child relationships: mothers, fathers, step-parents, runaway children, lost children, obedient children, disobedient children, dominated and dominating children. In many cultures, the royal family serves as the archetype of the nuclear family for fairytales, laying the groundwork for fiction and storytelling in general.

It’s especially effective if we can combine several of these stories into one. Almost any story—even William Gibson's geek sci-fi classic Neuromancer—gets more exciting if we add romance.

So what about the plot structure of the relationship story: meet someone, lose someone, gain someone?

In modern culture—after the rise of the romantic eighteenth-century concept that we might choose whom we spend time with rather than simply take what we get—we find ourselves especially drawn to that act of choosing. This means the beginning of the relationship.

But all stories need conflict. It’s not enough to say: “They met and lived happily ever after.” I mean, what kind of story is that? Remember, the reader wants to read about when things go wrong.

So it must be: “They met, they were prevented from being together, they triumphed over their obstacles, and then they lived happily ever after.” Frankly, once we get to the triumph, nobody’s even interested in the happily-ever-after. That’s why we can cram it all into one phrase like that. “Whatever.”

This, of course, lends itself very tidily to the standard plot structure for all stories: Hook (they meet or are reunited after a separation), Development through a sequence of Conflicts of rising tension to a Faux Resolution (separation, reunion, separation, reunion, big separation, big reunion!), and Climax (insurmountable obstacle to their union—oh, dreadful day, they can never be together again). And the Resolution: either they never will be together again, or somehow they magically manage to surmount the insurmountable to triumph over the ultimate separation.

And that, my friend, is the whole point of this story. I could have told you how it ended in the first place, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun, now, would it?

Aiming Past Ecstasy through Quest

I had a great conversation with a client one day on the subject of Galaxy Quest, which, it turned out, is one of both our favorite movies.

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