Stories Are Like Bullets: Aim at One Target

I'm sure you're all tired of hearing me explain what many of you already know, so I'll try and make this the last of this particular series of posts, and get into something more savory next week.

The last of Vonnegut's eight rules that I will discuss is number seven, quoted below for those who don't recall it from week one:

7. 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.

This is one of the less-obvious of the rules, and one which rarely is followed as much as it should be. Writers often try to look at their piece and tailor it to 'Market Well' or to appeal to a 'Wider Audience,' and often end up diluting or perverting something that started as a good piece of fiction. This is a tricky rule for some people to stomach because they think that if their piece doesn't appeal or fit a certain mold, nobody will be interested in it. This is only half-true. If the story isn't any good, nobody will be interested in it. If you spend the time to make sure you are writing your story for the purposes of getting a good story, and not for purposes of who will or won't be interested in it, chances are you will have a piece that is good enough to gain interest.

A piece doesn't need to be liked, or be on a pleasant topic, to sell. One of Shakespeare's earliest tragedies, Titus Adronicus, gets a lot of criticism, both for content and style, yet it was as popular as it was brutal during it's hayday. For a more modern example, I suppose I could point out Eragon or Twilight, which have both sold extremely well, despite appealing to very specific groups, and drawing harsh criticisim from many, many other groups. In the end, your story doesn't need to please a wide audience, and most stories won't. But if you write well enough, there WILL be an audience, and their vastness may surprise you.

I'm pretty sure this is the same point your parents were trying t0 make when they lied to you about growing up to be the first president-cowboy-astronaut-superhero, actually. Who knew they had something worth listening to?

Ugh. This post makes me feel all good-guyish. I'll do my best to dash your dreams next week to make up for this.

Characters, (Designing and Feeding Thereof)

Stories are made of characters. It follows that if you want to write good stories, you need to have well-designed characters. Many times, the design of a character winds up being what sells a book, sometimes more so than the plot (Ian Fleming, I'm looking at you), and dynamic, well-thought out characters are usually the first thing people think of when reflecting on an author or a piece of fiction.

Last week I mentioned eight rules that Kurt Vonnegut wrote for fictioneers. One of my favorite of these is number three, which states:

"Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water."

While definitely not the kind of advice that can help you craft characters to steal hearts and sell books with, it is definitely something to keep in mind during character design. Most writers know to give their main characters goals and aspirations, but it is important to remember that every character, even those who fall in the 'everybody else' category, need to have goals and motivations and reasons to do whatever it is that they do. For your focal characters, you need to make sure that these motivations make sense and are consistent with their actions. A desire to bring honor to your family rarely involves kicking in doors and waving a sword, and greed doesn't make characters leap to block bullets. It's also important to realize that a character's goals affect more than just their general actions, it bleeds into their personality, their relationships, their appearance, everything.

One way I like to check the realism/believability value of my characters is to compare them to real people. Hopefully you aren't going to find your characters real-world counterpart, but you should still be able to draw parallels. "My friend George likes computers, went to school to be a programmer, but dropped out and plays video games instead," can have lots of parallels with, "My character, Eli, is a humble servant to the house of Wobblestein, but when faced with a hearty bribe, happily abandoned his allegiance and pocketed seven hundred pieces of silver." You can also try to draw parallels in history, theology, and even other literature. If you can't find anything remotely similar to your clinically depressed medieval soldier who decides that a path of revenge and womanizing is the way to solve his problems, that's not a hint that your character is original, it's usually a hint that he is not a well-designed character.

A lot of this may sound similar to Pat's "Economic Fiction" series of posts, mostly because it is. In order to avoid the Idiot Plot, characters need to have motivations that drive actions and make economic sense. Not everyone can get everything they want, so it is up to you, the author, to decide who will place what value upon what. Only after that decision is made can you begin to write something of any value or plot.

Brevity

Most of what I know in terms of writing comes from reading, and most of what I read are short stories. This isn't to say I don't read novels, but I usually read about 1 novel to 10 or 20 short stories. Many writers who are most famous for their novels, ie., Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye), Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five), and Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anne Karenina), also have an impressive collection of short stories that I have had the opportunity to pour through.

In almost all of these short stories, you can see commonly followed rules and a distinctive style. Kurt Vonnegut, at the beginning of his short story anthology Bagombo Snuffbox, gives eight rules, as follows:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No 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.

7. 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.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell 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.

Now, these are all great rules to write by and occasionally ignore. But for now, I'd like to focus on numbers one and five, which address something which often gets de-prioritized in short stories: making them short.

I know, it kinda sounds odd of me to insinuate that people don't know how to keep their short stories short, but there is a difference between a story that happens to lack length and a good short story. Every sentence and every word costs time and space, and if your reader lacks the first or your publisher lacks the second, you'll never even get your story out of the notebook. Besides that, people want their time to be used efficiently, and if you take five pages to say something you could have done in the space and time of four, your reader will know it, and won't be above holding it against you.

This is a rule that, while Vonnegut wrote it for short fiction, can be made to apply to any writing. It holds just as, if not more, true in poetry, for example. Here, word are counted and unnecessary lines can not only waste time and space, but also tend to majorly obstruct flow and style. Journalism also benefits from the use of brevity. If you can keep your reports concentrated and focused, you not only hold a piece that will read and inform better, but one which will take up less space, a trait that, especially in print journalism, can be the difference between the writer who gets printed and praised, and the one who goes hungry.

Before you all take a proverbial (or non-proverbial) weed whacker to your story, I should probably let you know that almost as soon as he wrote these rules, Vonnegut mentioned that they get broken. It's important to keep in mind that there is a time for everything, and a thing for every time... or something to that effect. JD Salinger spent days agonizing over a single word, and has wonderful stories to show for his effort, but that is not the only way to do things. Rambling is never advisable, but some topics require a bit of a rant, some things need to be repeated, and some stories are downright painful to end. Only the individual writer can make the final call on just how long is too long or long enough, but it's important to keep in mind that what you are willing to write isn't always what another is willing to read.

I'll probably address a few more of these rules next week, and look forward to writing at you again.

Starting Out

I said it before, and I definitely mean it: the fellow writers on this blog are amazing, and I respect each one of them immensely. Everyone here has a very specific and unique style of writing they use, which suits them well, but that I could never pull off myself. In particular, KB uses a very distinctive style, but one that I think would counter my own so horribly I'd never be able to draw from it.


The main reason behind this is her lack of chapter-breaking. She does it in such a way that makes you hesitant to stop reading. Personally, though, I need chapter breaks in anything I write for more than 5000 words, so despite admiring KB's work, I could never do anything like it myself.


I think the reason I need chapter breaks is that I enjoy starting things. This isn't to say that I don't like finishing them, because I do, but I love to start things. Anything, really. I'm pretty sure the use of the phrase 'Want to start...' could be used to talk me into about anything.


The start of a story, though, is unique and, for me, always a challenge. When you start a story, a chapter, or, really, any form of writing, storytelling, or entertainment, you need to be able to hook people. I like to use sound for this effect, though there are dozens of ways to go about it, and I'll try to cover some of the more common and (in my opinion) effective ones below:


BOOM: Not sure if there is a word for this. But, in essence, start your story/chapter/scene with a powerful onomatopoeia. If you are walking down the street, and hear a loud "KASHOOM!" echoing from the street, you aren't likely to look away. Same applies to when you're reading. If there's one thing I learned from my years as a comic-book-enthusiast, it's that some good POW, BANG, WHAM, and SOCK is enough to keep people reading, if only to find the source or results of the noise.


Pretty colors: This is another fairly common one. You present the reader with a powerful or striking image that burns itself into their minds. This is one I see a lot in post-apocalypse settings, and it is also a favorite to movie makers. Sunset over broken cityscapes, blood sprayed across the snow, and even a well-done description of a character all fall into this category, and serve to feed the mind's eye with enough candy to get them reading a bit further. In general, I oppose taking time to simply describe and describe, but at the start, you can get away with it a lot more.


The ____ is ____: Give us the setting/plot. Bluntly. The president is dead. The world is green. My cat is sick. I am a robot. (These are not related, by the way. Though if anyone gives me a story which starts like this will probably earn bonus points.) "Why should I read this?" the reader asks. Sometimes, it's best to just tell 'em, and tell 'em good. You can cater the intensity of this to fit your story, theme, and mood, but I always did like to start with a blunt punch to the face. This is another one I see a lot with post-modern settings, or disaster/incident-stories.


Pants on my head!: An unusual scene is always a good way to hook the reader from the beginning. Because if your story starts out in the middle of a crazy situation, who could resist reading, even if only for the sake of curiosity? I know the only reason I got past page one of some books is because it started out with something so unusual, ridiculous, or intriguing that my curiosity got the better of me, allowing me to swallow that worm hard.


I don't know. Maybe I'm the only person around who enjoys starting a story this much. And obviously there are lots of other ways to open up a story, but these are all fairly common, safe, and effective. Maybe this all seems rather cut-and-print textbook, and has you saying, "We already knew that, Seth, I can see why you get stuck on the end of the week," But it's all quite fascinating to me, and loads of fun.


And who knows. If I can help you guys out the next time you are stuck on an opening for your chapter, short story, or book, all the better.