I’ve run into a familiar principle from theatre school in my novel-writing and my copywriting work: I was taught that the best way for an actor to tell a story is from “a point of innocence”. That is, you don’t want to ‘telegraph’ the ending of the story, but reveal it as a surprise at the end for the maximum impact.
A few months back, my editor pointed out that I kept doing this in our Strategic Coach articles. Most of our articles are about one of the concepts, strategies, or tools we teach entrepreneurs in our program, so my approach to this was to sneak up on it — present a threatening problem then wallop it on the head with a solution I had hidden behind my back. (Well, ‘I’ — I’m a ghostwriter, so it’s whatever disembodied official voice speaks for the company.)
The way that Dan, owner of the company, speaks in person, though, is much more like an ad-man (because this is his background): “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them.” I suppose he’s simply confident enough from seeing his ideas work for thirty years or so that he keeps his hat on and just hands people the rabbit. The magic, for him, isn’t in the trick, but in the way the idea works in practical application for the entrepreneurs.
But I still like telling stories. And it’s fun to surprise people.
I woke up with a head full of ideas about the year 2050. All this stuff I’ve been reading about, that’s being talked about in the news — it’s already happened then. So I’m figuring out how that world works.
And pretty soon I’ve got to stop talking about this, because talking about writing isn’t writing.
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Oh, okay, just one more thing before I shut up and get to work: suffering. Suffering is boring.
Last night, I watched a bit of Battlestar Galactica with Patrick and Anita over dinner (a wonderful lasagne that ‘Nite mate). The program is just so many orders of magnitude greater a thing than the crap 1970s show. Still, though, we’re into the third season and the characters have been hunted down for years, lived through a prison camp, and now they’re all suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — or something — because they’re all acting horribly toward each other. I watch the show, and I’m tired.
Payoffs are very big for me. If I’m going to watch something or read something — and this goes for when I write something, too — I want the people in the story to experience some big payoffs to justify why I’ve spent this time with them. I want them to be transformed by the experience. I want there to be movement. I feel that if I’m going to ask people to follow me through the woods of my imagination, the crumbs I leave for them had better taste good. In fact, I should leave some loaves for them from time to time (like at the end of every chapter). Likewise for the characters: yes, the job of the author is to keep applying pressure, to make things worse and worse for this person, but still, they have to get a few moments of fun in the story, some respites of joy. Or else it’s just a story about someone suffering, and who wants to give over their free time to that? I think we romanticise suffering far too much. Who cultivates that but a dedicated loser?
Last night in bed, I sat with a little fluorescent book-light thing (reminiscent of the old “flashlight-in-bed” trick) and tucked into a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s early short stories called Bagombo Snuff Box. Vonnegut is one of those writers I’d like to be when I grow up — and I took great comfort reading in that he was 47 before he had commercial success. I didn’t get past his introduction, because I found eight rules for writing fiction there that I loved. They validated a number of things I’ve come to feel are very important. I just wanted to roll in them like a dog rolls in something dead. Here they are:
- Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
- Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
- Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
- Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
- Start as close to the end as possible.
- Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
- Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
- Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), pp 9-10.
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