SDSU Conference: Part 2

Last Monday I wrote about the San Diego State University Writers Conference, including the overall nature of the conference, and a panel discussion of agents talking about the emerging e-publishing paradigm. (click here)

Today I want to extend last week's discussion to share some notes I took at another excellent presentation at the conference, this one by bestselling author and teacher, James Scott Bell. His experience and insights on how to write fiction that will get published are powerful, and carry the extra bonus of utilizing a novel writing/filmic structure approach (i.e., get published and get Hollywood interested).

What I love about Bell is his way of communicating. It feels direct, hands-on, clear, and loaded with valuable content. The presentation was billed as being on Structure.  It was, but Bell made Structure come alive by giving examples of his points that provide content we can relate to in our own novels.  Here's an overview of most of what he squeezed into an hour:

Bell calls his system for structure LOCK.
L:  Lead
O: Opposition
C: Confrontation
K: Knockout

L is the Lead Character.  Readers get into a novel by bonding with the character.  You want to open with a Boom!  Pull readers in right away. The lead character in trouble works well. This will immediately interest readers and get them rooting for the character.
Techniques:
1.  trouble for the character/imminent jeopardy
2.  hardship, not of the character's own making, and the character doesn't whine about it. Example:  Forrest Gump
3.  inner conflict—two voices in the character's head:  a) "you have to do this," and b) fear (usually)
4.  vulnerability:  at any point this character could be smashed by the forces arraigned against her
5.  no wimps.  Can start out there, but must see change very quickly

So, you are shooting for your character to display inner strength and likability.  


Likability often comes from a character who cares about others. Bell suggests a technique for incorporating this characteristic. It is called the 'pet the dog' or 'save the cat' beat. (He spoke in terms of 'beats,' as in music.) This is where the character takes a moment to protect someone else while they are themselves in great jeopardy.

For example, Harrison Ford in The Fugitive: the moment when Tommy Lee Jones' hunt for him is closing in; HF has figured out part of the truth about who murdered his wife and framed him for the crime, and is in Cook County Hospital in Chicago tracking down the proof he needs, with the U.S. Marshalls hot on his trail, when he sees an injured boy on a gurney in the incredibly overcrowded, understaffed hospital. He risks blowing his cover and getting caught by taking an interest in the boy, talking to him and realizing (because he's a great doctor) that this boy will die without immediate surgery. As HF forges a doctor's signature on an order for surgery and wheels the gurney to the surgical suite, the Feds are bursting through the front doors of the hospital in pursuit of him. We LOVE this lead character, who demonstrates his humanity in a moment of personal peril. His act of kindness can get him in more trouble. It raises the stakes and his likability.

O is Objective:  the main goal of the character for the novel. It has to be about impending death. This can be:
1.  physical death
2.  professional death—if the character fails, their professional life will either be over or severely damaged. (For example, Clarisse Starling in Silence of the Lambs)
3.  psychological death—this is the key to category romance, e.g.  If the one great love is lost, that's death.


The Objective can take two forms:  to get something, or to get away from something. The stakes are death. You must make the stakes matter to the character that much. These things have to be thought through before you start writing.

C is Confrontation:  the opposition character. The opposition must be stronger than the lead character. The opposition character doesn't have to be a villain. It can be someone with the opposite agenda (e.g. Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive). But you need to explain the opposition character's justification, so the reader feels some sympathy. Fully justify who they are, be able to crawl into their skin, and ask yourself, why do I love this character?

K is Knockout Ending:  the reader thinks, this is the perfect ending, but I didn't see it coming.

Endings are the hardest things to write because each is unique to the story.

Think of the climax as a final battle:  inside and outside. Inner conflict. Example:  Casablanca—the final battle is inside Rick. He can have Ilsa, but at a moral cost. He makes the moral choice and loses Ilsa, but his reward is he becomes a full person again and rejoins the war effort.

Bell made the point that these guidelines hold true for all dramatic writing, whether genre or literary.

For our part as writers, we all know that guidelines are only guidelines. Great writers break rules all the time, by doing what they do instead incredibly well (Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford's literary novel, Independence Day, comes to mind, in which he opens with a beautiful descriptive passage of setting.) But James Scott Bell's points are very well taken. If we use these guidelines where we can in our work, it (and we) will benefit.

There are many points in Bell's approach that resonated with me. The one that surprised me the most, because I'd never really thought about it, was that the opposition character (antagonist) must be stronger than the lead. That little statement opened up a whole new way of thinking about antagonists for me. How about you? Do you have a favorite writing truth you use to guide a writing choice?

~Linda

                           
           

Show Don't Tell

Probably the first guideline we learn when we want to be writers is "show don't tell."  It's easier said than done, of course, but without a doubt it's also the easiest way to separate the amateurs from the pros when it comes to storytelling.

Sometimes it's necessary to tell, especially with setting.  The trick there is to be sure the telling doesn't sound like it's in the author's voice.  Have it come from the character's voice and express a legitimate character need, not the author's need to tell.

Telling can be distancing (She took her shoes off and walked across the pebble beach to the ocean's waves.) Showing, on the other hand, is intimate and immediate (Foam from the crashing waves gobbled the pebbles of the beach, racing toward her, and threw its icy fingers over her bare toes.) Showing puts the reader right in there with the characters and lets him/her vicariously experience what's going on.  This is certainly a desirable place to be for a reader, and as writers, we want to get our readers there frequently. The key to show, don't tell, is to dramatize the narrative, or "put it in scene."

Who doesn't remember this childhood scary tale line: "Slowly he came, step by step, inch by inch . . ."  Jumping up and down and screams all around! How boring it would have been to start, instead, with "The monster came into the room to eat up the little children."

One of my favorite examples of showing is from a contemporary author of fun crime fiction (I'm inventing categories), Colin Cotterill.  His opening paragraph of Anarchy and Old Dogs describes a blind man retrieving mail from the post office.  Immediately below is my rendering of it that makes it more telling than showing (with profound apologies to Mr. Cotterill).  Following that is his paragraph.

Mine:  Dr. Buagaew was blind, but he managed to get around fine.  At the post office he walked directly to the p.o. box section from memory and reached out to touch the wood boxes.  He felt for the loop of wool that was wound around the door of his box to make it easy for him to find.  When he found it, he ran his hand over it to find the keyhole, then fingered the key into it and opened the box.  He reached in to find the thin envelope he was expecting.  His co-conspirator had delivered, as promised.


Colin Cotteril's:  The post office box was eighteen across, twelve down, and it had a loop of wool wound around the door so Dr. Buagaew wouldn't miss it.  He traced the keyhole with his left hand and inserted the key with his right.  From inside the wooden chamber came the scent of bygone correspondence:  of brown paper parcels and glue, of old parchment and secrets.  His hand fell upon a thin envelope.  He knew it would be there and he knew what it contained because only one other person was aware of the post office box address.


What's so great about Cotteril's rendering of this paragraph is that he actually shows us that the doctor is blind, without using any clichés like tapping a white cane. Between the wool loop, tracing the keyhole, and the wonderful scents he notices, we know without being told.

What's your feeling about show don't tell?  Is it something you do naturally, or do you work at it? Do you have examples of telling vs. showing?  It's always great to add more ideas to the arsenal for that ever-greedy show don't tell monster.

~Linda

Details

You know that famous phrase, “the Devil is in the details?”  Or its corollary (which I think actually came first), “God is in the details?”  We all know the wisdom of these phrases when it comes to things like contracts—whether for health insurance or a car loan or pest control or a movie deal for our manuscript (well, we only HOPE to know it about the movie deal, but we can imagine).  Buyer beware!  Check those details with a magnifying glass before you sign on the dotted line.

But it's not only in areas where we need to be wary that details are important. It's also in areas that we want to be great, beautiful, and fulfilling in our personal lives, like love, food, travel and reading—and writing.  Just as the real worth of a contract is shaped, and possibly hidden, in its details, the real worth of our writing shines through the details we include.  When you think of the books that have meant the most to you, I'm willing to bet the ones that come to mind are the ones that evoke the clearest, most visceral impressions of characters, feelings, action and settings. How do those authors do that? Through well-rendered details.

Compare these two sentences:

1.  Tiny beads of moisture slicked Julia's skin, and larger drops fell intermittently from the trees to the sodden carpet of leaves beneath her feet.

2.  Julia stood under the still-dripping trees after the rain, getting wet.

Number one is taken from the prologue of Leave the Grave Green by Deborah Crombie.   Number two makes the same factual statement, without the embellishment.  In Crombie's rendering of this sentence—tiny beads of moisture slicking Julia's skin, the falling drops being larger and intermittent, the sodden carpet of leaves—what a difference these details make in painting the picture and making it visceral.  I especially like the work the active verb, “slicked” does in combination with those “tiny beads of moisture.”  I have an impression of how Julia probably feels standing there, because I'm there with her.

When I look at the use of details in this context, I begin to appreciate anew the rewriting my old professor in a novel-writing group required of us.  "Take that sentence and re-render it, using detail that comes from the character's emotion," he would exhort us, and we would sigh in frustration because we thought the sentence was doing it's job of getting the reader from point A to point B just fine.  But then we would do it and get excited because he was right.  Just looking at the difference between the examples above makes that clear to me. (And that part about making the detail relate to the character is essential,whether it's coming from her emotions or is external but clearly affects her in that moment.)

If this kind of attention to detail didn't come naturally to you as you wrote your first draft, it represents an important level of revision.  When I revise to add detail, I only hope to have the insight and patience needed to do it well:  awareness of where sentences can be made richer through more detail without slowing the pace inappropriately, and a willingness to apply myself in all those spots.  Pace is an important consideration with this topic—we need to be aware of that, too.  Even in the fastest-paced genre novels, though, deftly-used, telling details are what make the difference between a good story and a great one.

Linda