The more engrossed I am in improving my writing skills, learning new techniques, the more difficult it is for me to turn off the analytical part of my brain when I’m watching or reading something. It isn’t a bad thing. I get to enjoy things on two levels, as a reader/viewer, and as the writer, analyzing how the writers have told their story, and often dancing in glee to see pieces of things come together.

I recently read Scott Lynch’s phenomenal book The Lies of Locke Lamora, and found myself doing that little dance of glee on a regular basis. In particular, he nailed something that I often struggle with when I’m working on a book: making the stakes high enough for the protagonist. I am often too nice to my characters, because I like them and I think because I have a hard time trusting myself that, as the writer, I can get them out of whatever impossible situation I’ve put them in. And if the stakes aren’t high enough, why should a reader keep reading? This is something I’ve fixed in second and third drafts on many many occasions, and I still sometimes think I don’t quite hit it as hard as I could. Working on it!

Anyway, Lynch gives us Locke Lamora, a likeable roguish thief and con artist, and shows us his comfortable little life… and then proceeds to dismantle it piece by piece until he’s left only with his wits.I was in awe at how cruel Lynch was to him. And I really saw for the first time how effective that is in revealing what a character is really made of. It was eye-opening, and made me go back and revisit some of the plot elements in the book I’m currently writing.

Far and away though, my favorite storytelling technique to see done well, is Chekov’s gun. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Russian writer Anton Chekov once reportedly said, “If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” (Or words to that effect–he used the analogy several times.) Basically: everything needs to serve the story, or it shouldn’t be there. It’s been expanded as a way to plant little bits of information here and there, and for their full significance only to be clear by the end. I love those little moments or elements that have a small importance of their own only to become massively central to the plot.

Because I’ve been wrestling with my current project, I have been mainlining a lot of TV series lately–something I tend to do when I’m stuck on a problem in what I’m writing. It gives my hindbrain a chance to turn the problem over and over and solve it for me. At least, that’s what I tell myself.