The shape of your story
I wanted to be a writer, but I lacked the guts. Maybe that’s not exactly true. In college I started out thinking that, but soon I realized that although I love to write, it was the power of books that really captured me. I wanted to wield that power myself. But before I shifted my sights to publishing, I took a lot of writing workshops. I studied. I practiced.
One rule I had for myself at the time was that I would never read a book by someone I took a workshop with until afterward—it was an idea of going in with neutral feelings about their advice. If later I read their books and didn’t like them, at least I wouldn’t have written them off before learning what I could from them.
Turns out it was a dumb rule. I had a workshop with Frederick Reiken, who was smart and earnest, but I thought he was a little too…particular… for my taste. He recommended an even fussier author’s book on writing, but I couldn’t read it—I couldn’t get over how arrogant the author seemed. Who was he to tell writers, artists, the right way to do their thing? Then a year or two later I read Reiken’s book, The Lost Legends of New Jersey and I wished I’d read it much earlier. It was great. I could see so many things working as he’d described them.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a book “work.” Many elements have to come together for a book to be a real knockout. I mainly work with nonfiction authors, but fiction is immensely valuable for anyone who wants to write a book that’s going to stand the test of time. Anyone who wants to write better would benefit directly from reading fiction and observing how authors tune every element of their stories to achieve the specific reaction they want.
I struggled to make this connection for a long time. Nonfiction authors, afterall, can’t simply make up facts to suit their narrative. That makes it trickier, but at the core, we’re all storytellers. If you want to make the case for a policy change or make people understand the ways that biology, economics, and culture interact in disease outbreaks, you’re telling a story.
Often I read proposals for books meant for a big audience—what we would call a “trade” book—that lose a bit of credibility by overselling either the problem or solution they’re putting forward. They can be overdramatic, oversimplified, or just overall overdone. It’s a sign that the author knows they need to capture the attention of the masses, but that they don’t know exactly how to do it.
Picking up on what great fiction writers do to evoke big emotions or the sense of curiosity and eventual revelation is one way to achieve the popular appeal authors look for without turning important and nuanced material into a caricature.
You don’t have to read Literary Fiction, though it can be a great source of inspiration as well as entertainment. Whether you read mysteries, sci-fi, or sword-and-sorceror fantasy, there’s a lot you can learn about pacing and how to reveal information. Do you want to give away the important knowledge up front, or build up to a big reveal? That’s a very important question to answer before you get too far, and you can find both approaches in fiction.
This is also a way to have some fun with your planning and be sure that you know where you’re headed.
This weekend I have two recommendations.
First, watch this short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the shape of stories and think about how you could apply it to your own work.
Then, get yourself a copy of The Art of Fiction, by John Gardner.
This is the book that Reiken recommended to me, and that I didn’t read at the time. After reading his own book, the realization trickled down my spine like cool water—I had at least partially squandered my opportunity when I was in his workshop. So I finally turned to this book—and still couldn’t get into it.
But I’d learned from my mistake. I started reading John Gardner’s novels (I think I started with Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, Jason and Medeia, and Freddy’s Book) and he quickly became one of my favorite writers. I could see that he really knew how to do what I wanted to know how to do. I wholeheartedly recommend that you read some of his other work like I did, but I am also happy to vouch for him and his advice. If you take away even a tiny bit of what Gardner offers in The Art of Fiction, I can almost guarantee that your writing will achieve a new level of quality.