From Writer Unboxed: The Art of Propulsive Fiction

I like this post a lot. It’s by someone named Cathy Yardley, who is a book coach and an author. Checking Amazon, it looks like she’s written lots of contemporary romance in the basic category of “short romance novels, priced low, published fast.” That’s something of a guess because I only glanced at a few of her titles, but I know that can be a highly successful strategy for authors who have a knack that way.

Anyway, I do like this post. The reason is: Yardley isn’t declaring she is Promoting The Truth or declaiming that This Is The Secret. She’s saying this: plot and character intersect. Generally speaking, you will probably be focused on both. But maybe not, and that’s also fine.

Yardley says: For fiction to be propulsive, you need fully fleshed characters, pursuing something the reader becomes personally invested in, that changes that character as a result (for better or worse) through the crucible of addressing the story’s conflict.

When I teach, I always advise starting with character, because no matter what theme you want to explore or premise you want to set up, the protagonist is the vehicle through which the reader experiences the story. … Because the ongoing action is going to result from your character’s choices in pursuing their goal and the logical and increasing conflict you introduce as the story progresses, the resulting responses and new decisions will be organic and engaging, forming a natural and immersive plot.

This seems like a good way to put that.

She also adds that some writers don’t want to follow three-act structure because they think it’s too cliched and predictable. She says, Pride & Prejudice and Fight Club (the novel) both use three act structure. Few are going to say “Wow, those are basically the same book.”

I agree. The concept of three-act structure is so broad and so vague that it’s not possible for it to be either cliched or predictable, because it barely exists at all.

Most importantly, Yardley winds up by saying essentially: What if you don’t want to make your story propulsive? Then don’t, because it’s your book and that’s fine. I’m glad to see that because nothing irritates me more than The One True Way style of writing advice.

AND, she actually intersects with a post here from last week, thus:

Literary fiction quite often abandons what would be considered classic three act structure, because it isn’t the aim of the piece. The same could be said of experimental structures like slipstream, some kinds of microfiction, or the very real rise of LitRPG (which I am devouring like potato chips at the moment! Although that actually is very propulsive, but compressed, and by its nature not broken into “acts.” That’s a different post, though!)

And that caught my eye because of the LitRPG post last week, and I’m starting to feel like I should read something in the general neighborhood of LitRPG just to see what Yardley means by “very propulsive but compressed” and “not broken into acts.” I think that latter probably means “neverending episodes,” but I’m not sure.

Anyway, good post, click through if you’d like to read the whole thing.

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