Jay Greenstein's Blog: Random Musings of a Grumpy Old Mind.

Hello, it’s me, your grumpy old writing coach, pressing my arthritic fingers to the keyboard in order to destroy your new writer aspirations of fame. It’s my only remaining hobby, but that’s okay, because it’s also a service to humankind. If I can talk you out of writing I’ve saved you long boring nights at the computer, and I’ve saved many, many editors the annoyance of having to read your crap. Plus, I sleep better knowing I’ve destroyed someone’s dreams.

Today’s lesson is: your writing sucks. Please feel free to respond with poison-pen letters. I find a day without one depressing.

Okay, on to the bashing. You’re a creative person, or you wouldn’t be interested in writing fiction, so let me start with a thesis:

1. Creativity without craft is nothing.
2. The craft of writing fiction is taught in damned few high schools.
3. It therefore follows that you have no craft.

Therefore: You are nothing.

The world is filled with people who have not a shred of creativity, and require none. The cabinetmaker who’s spent decades honing woodworking skills, but who builds only tried and true designs, enjoys well-deserved acclaim. The doctor who treats you with care, compassion, and knowledge is a prize. The technical writer who produces readable and concise manuals is the ideal employee. Even the hack writer who turns out mindless, formulaic drivel gets by with no creativity. But: Picasso, with creativity but without craft, would have been a cipher, useless. The Mensa member driving a taxi because learning craft in some field is beneath him or her, is a taxi driver, no more. Picasso was, first, a fully competent journeyman artist. Adding creativity to that platform yielded a map for the less creative to follow.

Take the tightly disciplined writing of the journalist, add a bit of genius, and you have Hemingway. Take John Smith without craft and you have “John who?”

The vast majority of people suffer from having gone to grade school. They’ve been taught how not to write fiction by people who can’t. Worse yet, they’ve been tested to be sure they’ve not accidentally done something right. Finally, patted on the back for being ignorant, they’re turned loose, secure in the belief that they’re ready for a career in storytelling—a celebration of the blind leading the blind. And if you, as a member of that great mass of “they” go into education you have the honor of perpetuating that stupidity.

My point should be obvious: Writing, like any craft/profession, is complex, arduous to learn, and is the horse your creativity must ride. The good news is that it’s fun to learn—as much as I hate to admit that anything is fun.

Okay, so you stink at writing, your mother stinks at writing, and your friends do, too. And it isn’t going to get better with time and experience, I’m pleased to say.

Why? Because no matter how hard you throw an egg down the damn thing still breaks—and always will until you begin to work on the real problem, in this case craft—or lack of it.

New thesis (not because I’m trying to prove a point, I just like to be argumentive): People don’t read because they like the story, they like the story because of what they read.

Ask anyone why they open a book and you’re going to hear, “For the story.” That’s a lie. They read for the misery, the suffering, and the disaster heaped on disaster. They read for the blood. They wallow in suffering, and a really good murder has them drooling. Try selling a story in which a nice guy meets a nice woman, has a nice courtship, lots of nice kids, and a pleasant retirement. See if anyone wants to pay to read that.

But take the husband and give him a secret career as a spy-chaser. Let his wife catch wind of it after more than a decade of thinking him a mild-mannered salesman, and you have the makings of a story in which their teen aged daughter ends up suspended from the nose of a VTOL fighter-plane staring at the pilot and saying, “Daddy?” Isn’t the plot of True Lies, more fun than, Mary and John Grow Old Together? Except... if Mary has a lover, who is really...

So why do we read? To worry, of course. To be interesting, a book has to be more fun than our own life. It has to be more dangerous, too. If we decided to try a bit of spying we would probably end up looking like a colander and leaking gore—and maybe radioactive blood. Not exactly the most desirable outcome.

But by becoming Ian Flemming’s Agent 007 we can not only take absolutely insane risks, we’re guaranteed to live through it—even if we die. With a book in her hands the mousy bookkeeper who has come home to an empty apartment and a boring life can romance the man who in life wouldn’t even notice her. She can put on the skin of the woman she only wishes she could be, and live the adventure that would leave her quite dead in real life. With a book providing the wings she can fly!

Okay, now that I’ve demolished your dreams of selling that manuscript you’ve been typing I feel a little better, so I’ll go see what’s in the fridge, or maybe taunt Dog-Breath for a bit. When the happy mood fades I’ll come back and maybe annoy you some more. Till then, an assignment:

The setup: Our lives are an unending chain of linked events. You have stimulus, followed by response, which causes the next stimulus, which causes...

The task: Take a look at your writing and ask yourself if every single act by your characters—every thought, movement, and decision—is a response to some stimulus your reader will be aware of before the act occurs.

People sometimes ask where story ideas come from, as if by learning that closely held secret—by finding that magical font of stories—they too may drink from it, be inspired and be able to append the term writer to their name. In fact, almost everyone I talk to about writing believes that all that separates them from success is that elusive but necessary idea, plus a bit of practice.

If only. Sad but true, ideas are the easy part. We have them ten times a day, triggered by casual events and stray associations. Witness the anatomy of a story:

I was talking to one of my son’s friends, a soon to graduate teenager. He asked the question on story ideas, and I gave him the answer I noted above. Then, I went on to say, “Last weekend I saw Sondheim’s Into the Woods. In it, Red Riding Hood, after an encounter with the wolf—who was charming but who saw Red as the blue-plate special on his dinner menu—realizes that, as she puts it, “nice is different than good.” I like that idea, and it’s stuck with me because we so often confuse the two.

“You could,” I said, “expand that into a million plots. For example, our popular culture holds that someone you find pretty is desirable, and desirable is good. We also learn that when a man and a woman strike sparks every time they meet there’s passion, so they’re going to fall in love before the story ends. So, let’s assume we have a man who is very much into the lessons taught in the popular media. A new employee shows up at the office, and she drives him crazy, by arguing with him about everything. Whenever they meet there are sparks. They don’t hate each other, they just have strong opinions that differ, and a strong belief that they’re right, so, they’re like oil and water.

“But then, one night, when they’re both in the office late, and screaming at each other, the man shouts, ‘You’re driving me crazy. You’re beautiful and you’re smart, but you drive me crazy!’ And the next thing you know they’re all over each other, with the same passion they showed in arguing.

“So the man quickly marries his nemesis, but of course, a few weeks later they’re back to arguing again because they’re still oil and water.

“In fact, the point of the story is about his buying into the silly societal norms, as we all do, and having them rubbed into his face. And through it all, his best friend is the woman he really should be in love with, but he can’t let himself see that, because doesn’t have an exciting face and figure, and so, obviously, isn’t what he should be seeking. It takes him most of the novel to wake up to reality, as he guides his friend into becoming a success at what she does best—other then being hopelessly in love with him.”

And just like that, in the five minutes it took me to tell the young man what amounted to a synopsis, the plot was complete and the story was written, at least in my mind. Hard to do? Not a bit. You could do the same. What was hard, was deciding how to organize and present it to a reader. You can’t simply tell the story as an expansion of the plot description, no matter how you expand and polish it, because that would be me, talking about the story, not presenting Drew, the main character, as he learns the lessons that will bring him to realize he’s been an idiot, and should have married Zoe in the first place.

Where do I begin such a story on the page? That’s where the craft of the fiction writer comes into play. Shall we begin with him meeting the woman he’ll do battle with—or with the model he also pursues under the assumption that pretty and nice are also synonymous? No, because the readers need to know Drew and what makes him tick in order to understand his reaction to those women on a gut level—so that reader will buy into it, too, and urge him to go after the women, as they would, and then learn, as he does, that nice, and pretty, are very different from good. We also need to know how he and Zoe interact, to realize what an idiot he is, and how important she is to him.

The most difficult task is writing it so the reader, rather then just being informed, is enticed, and made to be a participant rather than audience member. I had to arrange the scenes so the stakes kept rising for Drew, and the options narrowing, until he was alone and despondent. He has no job, he has no wife, and all that’s left is the single rock that has brought stability into his life, year after year: Zoe. That way, when Zoe’s life is threatened, and he's forced to look at what the future would be without her, Drew is forced to face the realization that Zoe means more to him than life, itself.

So Drew, to acquit himself, and to make himself worthy of her love, as poetic justice requires, rescues Zoe and gives her reason to commit herself fully to him, as he has to her.

It’s the elements of Drew’s epiphany, all coming together, that are the hard part of writing, because they have to be invisible to the reader on a conscious level. Done right, the reader will recognize that Drew is being an idiot. And on some level they will be aware that in the end Drew and Zoe will get together, but because they buy into his reasons for his foolishness, will worry more about the effect on Zoe, and her reaction to his decisions. That reader must never be aware that you’re manipulating them to urge the protagonist to do what the writer is about to have him/her do. They must never have unanswered questions that nag and pull them out of the story. And, they must never be confused or bored, not even for a single line.

Any competent writer can spark off story ideas. The only difference between theirs and a non-writer’s is that theirs are pre-shaped by the knowledge of how to present a story idea in an exciting and natural way.

So, if writing for publication is your desire, forget the idea that you’re being held back by the lack of that great idea. Ideas are easy. Presentation is the hard part because it’s not something we learn in school, where they’re teaching us to be a responsible adult, with skills an employer finds desirable. There, we focus on how to present reports, and the basics of writing on the job. In the stories we tell each other, aloud, we’re alone on stage and playing all roles, so to speak, which requires that there be a listener who can hear the emotion we place in our voice and see our facial expression, to make up for there being no other actors—none of which makes it to the page when we try to write a novel until we school ourselves in the craft and specialized knowledge of the fiction-writer.

So, where do I get my own ideas? How in the hell should I know? It’s how to stop them that stumps me.

If you’re wondering if Zoe and Drew made it to the bookshelves the answer is no. That story was written before I learned many of the techniques of fiction-writing—the things I mentioned above. It was a learning tool, and the result was badly flawed—too badly to think of submitting it. But one of these days…