Fiction writers often do too much. In most cases, if you showed it…
it’s done. Resist the temptation to “explain the punchline” with a needless “village explainer” summary of what the reader just saw.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOnQbE4DmEI

Some time ago, I asked the question, How do you create your characters? I’m really happy about the way the results stacked up. What the numbers tell me is, readers of my blog have their heads screwed on right. The final tally is just about exactly what I hoped it would be. Behold:

• I free write until I understand them 45.8%
• I base them on people I know 30.6%
• I “cast” them with actors I like 5.6%
• I take them from history or the news 2.8%

By the way, I might have “closed” this poll once before, but this time it’s really, really gone. Another one will take it’s place as soon as I come up with a good polling topic. Any suggestions?

It was a hit last fall, so we’re doing it again. The Powerful Narrative is returning to beautiful Wildacres Retreat Center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, October 4-8, 2010.

The Powerful Narrative is is a workshop my wife Carol––a nonfiction writer and coach––and I developed focusing on the role of that powerful engine and how it runs both fiction and nonfiction.

We’ll look at how story elements shape and power both fiction and creative nonfiction. We’ll examine story structures and methods of narrative storytelling. Narrative is the driving wheel of both, so we’ll zero in on how it works in each––emphasizing similarities and differences.

It’s a hands-on workshop, meaning you’ll do lots of of writing, and leave with a notebook full of fresh ideas–for both your current projects and the new ones you’ll discover in our intensive, deep-diving workshop freewrites.

Trust me, the food’s great –– and of course, you can’t do any better than Wildacres in October for combining creative work with simple pleasure. Take a look:

Both Carol and I will be available for private conferences. There will be special afternoon events and readings in the evening–by you. We’ll also spend a little time on the practical side of today’s writing life: your “platform” as a writer, and how to use low-cost or free web tools to build it.

Registration is open, but spaces are limited, so sign up soon. Carol has more information on her site, Writer, Teacher, Coach. To register now, click here.

I am a desperado. I go to war every day. Self-motivation is my battleground, and many days I limp off it, bloody and ready to die.

Oh, I have my excuses: start with personal management skills so bizarre they could probably not be charted. Hands down, I am the world’s worst boss–of myself or or anybody else–and certainly worse than any I have ever worked for (with a couple of exceptions). Then there’s attention deficit disorder and migraines and some other neurological oddities and on and on. But ultimately, who cares about the excuses? If you are serious about writing fiction, especially long fiction, it’s all about getting to the table. That’s Job #1 for a novelist. In the end nothing else matters.

For most of us, at best, self-motivation is hit-or-miss. Mine is split so many ways that the total result spans a scale from intense to “disaster,” so I need help. That’s why I’ve always been big on self-motivation methods.

One of my favorites is something I call “Desperado Self-Motivation.” I first tried it years ago, when I decided for the nth time to stop smoking. From the start, it didn’t look promising–as a musician, I was working in the worst possible types of environments––clubs, frat houses, and concert venues so smoke-filled that the whole enterprise seemed dead on arrival. But here’s where the Desperado machinery kicked in.

The bass player in the band I worked with also wanted to quit, so we made an agreement: the first to smoke would pay the other $50. The penalty would double in the second month, double again in the third, and so on, exponentially. At the end of six months, the penalty would have ballooned to $1,600, an unimaginable sum for me in those days.

A key supportive factor was that, since the band worked steadily, we would be able to monitor each other. This removed cheating as a factor, and––cut to the chase––it worked.

What made it work? In the crunch it was money, and it’s conceivable that money could be used in a like manner to goose your writing production–imagine a kind of NaNoWriMo with a financial gun to your head. But I’ve never come up with motivational factor that rivals the fear of losing cash.

The closest I’ve come is shame. The fear of failing PUBLICALLY. This is the basis of one NaNoWriMo Tip I posted last year: schedule a “Victory Party,” and send out the invitations.

Now, Michael Todd Cohen, a client of mine, has taken that idea to the absolute max. Not only has he planned a party plus reading, he’s started a blog and a Facebook page to promo it. On top of that, he’s rented a New York theater for the event, and reserved a nightclub for the party.

Michael’s goal? To produce a new draft of a novel I had critiqued for him, revising it drastically at a pace of 1,000 pages a day. When I last checked in with him, he was close to on schedule––and definitely ready to party––this Monday, July 19.

Not everyone can marshal Michael’s resources (he’s a TV producer) but with a little honest self-reflection, anyone can locate their own equivalent–the emotional pressure point that makes them squirm–and figure out their own ways to turn it toward positive action. How about you? Do you have a favorite self-motivational system? If so, please share.

Writing those big dramatic moments is perhaps the greatest challenge any fiction writer will face. Example:

A man returns home after work to discover his house ringed by police and fire vehicles, and a crowd of onlookers.

He tries to break through the police line but is stopped. He struggles desperately, then stops cold at the sight of two stretchers, rolled out of the house, bearing two covered bodies. Behind him, he hears a hushed voice: “The wife and kid. Both dead.”

A terrible moment. How would you write it?

Here’s one way:

“No. No…couldn’t be. The wife and kid? HIS wife and kid. Dave’s mind reeled at the thought. Disbelief flooded him like poisoned sap. He struggled to regain his composure, but denial gave way to desperation, then hysteria, causing him to renew his struggle to break through. “Yeah, it’s both of em,” said a voice behind him. “Poor guy.”

What do you think? Did that attempt render the horror vividly enough? Well, I don’t know about you, but it certainly wouldn’t do it for me. Why not?

Notice the kind of terms the action is described with:

His mind reeled. A cliche. What specific mental or emotional experience does this convey you? None. It conveys a type of experience that applies to anyone in a state of profound disorientation.

Disbelief flooded his mind. “Disbelief” is a category word, and “flooded his mind” is another cliche. Together they are an informational, but say nothing about this particular man’s mental experience in this particular moment. Nor do they convey a sense of how it feels to be going through it all.

“Desperation…hysteria.” Generic words. Again, they tell me what general type of experience he’s going through, but fail to address his specific experience, the thoughts and feelings particular this this man in this moment.

Struggles… Another generic word, another general class of action, but it doesn’t convey an image. Yes, he struggles, but does that mean he claws at the officers? Do his arms push and shove to rip his way through? Who knows? Generic words don’t deliver particularities because, they’re designed to be broadly informational,. it’s not their job. [Yes, I'm aware I used it myself in the set-up, but my job there is to quickly inform you. I'm not writing fiction.]

Renewed his struggle… Does that describe an action? Would you say, “Look at that man renewing his struggle.” Not likely, and it’s because those words are normally intended only to inform a reader that certain thing is happening, but not what that certain thing is, looks like, feels like, and means.

So let’s do it again, this time right. But how? Here are a couple of helpful principles that, if you can hang onto them as you write a moment like this, will transform the result:

• Simpler is better. The more you reach for a suite of modifying words and phrases to encompass the experience, the less impact you’re likely to have. Why is this? Because more words mean more linguistic mediation, more refinement. When the experience is one like this–the most devastating emotional punch this man will ever receive–the refined and complex takes a back seat to the blunt and bone simple.

• Explanation pales before the power of the raw image. I can explain what Dave is going through until I’m blue in the face, and you’ll understand it, but you won’t feel it. Have you ever watched a TV news report in which suddenly there are 30 seconds of gut wrenching visuals? What was the announcer saying while you watched, transfixed? You can’t remember, can you? That’s because the power of that visual dwarfed the expository drone of the announcer’s voice, blanked it out.

So then, let’s visualize: what does Dave do, physically, when he sees the bodies rolled out and hears, “the wife and kid. Both dead.” What do we see him do?

First, look to the most obviously expressive part of his anatomy–his face. How would you objectively describe the facial changes of a man in sudden and intense shock?

Then don’t forget his body–does it contort, slump, go into spasm, go rigid? The unusual postures people assume at moments like this are richly expressive.

Screenwriters face the challenge of the visual all the time, because every piece of narrative they write must be a potential screen image. What would you write, for example, if the director said, “I don’t want any dialogue for this moment. Do it all visually.”

So let’s try: “Dave’s mouth fell half open. No. No…couldn’t be. His eyes drifted, then snapped back into focus at the sound of the stretchers rumbling by. The wife and kid? HIS wife and kid? He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He clawed at his lips with both hands, then with a wail, propelled himself forward into the restraining arms of the cops. ‘Yeah, it’s both of ‘em,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Poor guy.’”

Not too awful––except that after some powerful visuals comes the purely explanatory phrase, “he couldn’t believe what he was hearing,” an informational buzz killer. What do do? This one’s easy: get rid of it. Drop it out, and you then have the full power of Dave’s desperation in a single mini-sequence of images, and there’s no narrative interpretation to get in the way.

“Dave’s mouth fell half open. No. No…couldn’t be. His eyes drifted, then snapped back into focus at the sound of the stretchers rumbling by. The wife and kid? HIS wife and kid? He clawed at his lips, then with a wail, propelled himself forward into the restraining arms of the cops. ‘Yeah, it’s both of ‘em,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Poor guy.’”

You don’t need more–raw images will do all the explaining by engaging the immediate emotional comprehension of the reader. When that happens you’ve got involvement, and in fiction writing, that’s gold.

Fiction writers often take forever to write and revise a scene. Weeks, months, years later, they can still rewrite. Improvisors, by contrast, must build a scene instantly, by interacting in real time with other players. When it’s over it’s over. There’s no rewrite.

Could there possibly be two such different ways of reaching similar ends?

In a sense, no. The fiction writer’s particular skill is to merge inspiration with slow, steady synthesis––building toward completion of a narrative that purposefully drills deeper and deeper into the dark core of character and conflict. The skill of the improvisor is to find “the game of the scene”–that is, commit quickly to a character, define a situation and a relationship with your scene partner, and–always in the moment–to build an audience-pleasing dramatic unit.

I can report from experience that not only do the skills of the writer NOT help much in building an improv scene–they can even get in the way. In my case, a characteristic irony (which serves me well in fiction) caused me to make poor choices. I would turn a promising moment on its head by tossing out a skeptical aside totally uncharacteristic of the character I had chosen to be, or inappropriate to the moment. I had changed the game. Other players had to make instant adjustments to this new version of my character, and more often than not, the scene took a dive and never recovered.

One of my teachers made it his mission to cure this. “STOP!” he would shout from the darkness of the house. “You were a fireman trying to save a baby. Now you’re fretting over forgetting the lox for the bagels. Do you realize you just let all the air out of the scene?” Game over.

Here’s what I took away:

A novelist has plenty of time to develop a character, complete with needs and desires, as well as secrets, foibles, neuroses, etc. An improvisor doesn’t have the luxury. You must build a character lightning-quick, from one or two pertinent traits. You commit to that character and GO. You can’t hesitate, waver, or play metafictional games. As my teacher put it, “hang onto your sh_t!”–and play out the game of the scene with ferocious dedication.

It was a powerful lesson to learn. New awareness seeped into my writing and reading. My instinct for the right action at the right moment sharpened up, as well as my nose for the marginal choice–the inappropriate character move that could undercut the power of the scene. “No, this man would not turn on the TV at this point in this scene. Think. Remember who he is. Remember what’s of vital concern right now.”

Remember the game of the scene. Play by its rules and play to win.

A few years ago, I got involved in learning long-form improvisation. That’s long-form, by the way, not the short, hilarious improv sprints you see on “Who’s Line is it Anyway?”

Long-form improv is a lessor known, but––to a fiction writer––vastly more interesting form of improv. In a long-form show, what the audience sees is a team of 5 or 6 improvisors spontaneously creating a piece of improvised theater 25 or 30 minutes long, with an underlying structure that presents characters, relationships, and situations, moves through “beats,” or levels of complication, and ultimately resolves in a compressed coda of revelations, “callbacks,” and thematic full stops.

When skilled improvisors are at work, it’s hard to believe what you’re seeing wasn’t written–and written by a genius playwright. You feel you’re seeing a great work unfold–a human symphony with the pure authority of a dream.

There is no way for non-improvisors to understand how this process occurs, or how much skill and experience underlies it, beyond throwing oneself into an improv class at one of the growing number of good improv theaters around the country.

In a typical entry level class, you learn that the qualities you thought made good improv–facility for clever jokes, the ability to delight an audience with a lot of witty chatter or slapstick physical skills–are not at all what it’s about. You learn that saying, in effect, “no, it’s not like that, it’s like this,” gets you nowhere in an improv scene, where instead the traction comes from “that’s true, it IS like that, and here’s another aspect of it.” It’s the first principle of improv, a basic tool of scene building known as “yes-and.” If you progress up through the higher level classes, you learn good improv is about listening, about character relationships, supporting your scene partner, finding “in the moment” a shred of a notion that you can build a character on, suggest a scene with, then committing yourself with manic focus to that character, that scene.

There are usually 5 or 6 class levels before you’re qualified to perform in a “house team”–metaphorically, the equivalent of being an improv graduate student. At that point, you can get through a Harold, or a Armando, or a monoscene (examples of underlying longform structures) with competence, and if you’re good, occasional moments of brilliance. But it’s a long time before you can perform with the brio, confidence, and sustained brilliance of the top teams at UCB, Imrov Olympic, DSI, Annoyance Theater, The Groundlings, or any of the other top rang improv theaters.

Here’s the point: there’s a lot novelists and short fiction writers can learn from plunging into the discipline of longform improv. There’s so much, in fact, that I won’t even attempt to encompass it all in a single post. In fact, my word count is so high already in this one, but I’ll just say, before signing off, that in the weeks and months to come, I’ll be revisiting this subject. When you see the banner above (which I created by ripping the logos of several top theaters), you’ll know it’s another improv-based observation that fiction writers will profit from.

Check in tomorrow for the first in this occasional series, “The Game of the Scene.”

SUBPLOTS––chicken soup?

It’s the source of a thousand vaudeville jokes–chicken soup as the common kitchen remedy for a ton of ills. For example:

Have you ever heard from an agent, editor, or trusted reader that your novel “just isn’t long enough. Maybe what you have there is a novella.” Sag. And it gets worse. “Oh, and you know, it takes way too long to to get your story started.”

Wha-a-t? So I need to make it longer, but at the same time, I have to cut to the story quicker?

It makes you crazy with frustration, especially if you’ve done everything you can to push it at least into the 65-75,000 word range. Yet readers are still bailing out before your inciting incident. What to do?

You might solve both your problems at once by introducing a good subplot.

What can a subplot do for you? First, it can take up space. That’s not a joke: even though novels are getting shorter, any word count that drops below 50,000 is heading for novella territory, thus will rarely be considered for book publication unless you are a well-established author.

A subplot can occupy the reader with what appears to be The Story right away. Then, when the event or situation that truly opens your A-plot finally comes, you still have your readers. And if you develop your subplot with the proper care, that A-plot will launch from a springboard of extra meaning.

Harper Lee, in To Kill a Mockingbird, strings the reader along for nearly half the book, before introducing the main plot, the rape trial of Tom Robinson. How does she do it? Great characters, to be sure, a riveting narrative voice, a time and place indelibly represented. But these elements alone won’t hold a reader for over 100 pages.

She does it by deploying subplots, principally and most memorably the Boo Radley story, to space with enough narrative tension that the reader will keep turning those pages—while soaking up character knowledge, a sense of the complex world beyond Scout’s understanding, and by osmosis, the themes of fairness and justice in a world too quick to pervert them.

Subplots—and you can certainly have more than one—are what put the meat on the bones of most novel length fiction. And after all, isn’t what we love about the novel, traditionally and now, its breadth of vision, its willingness to present for the reader an entire world, employing plot mechanisms to dramatize the richness in so many situations involving so many people?

There’s a lot more to say about the subplot. For example, a good subplot pays unexpected rewards later, in the main plot—example, again, Boo Radley. I’ll be blogging more about subplot in future posts, that’s a promise.

Here’s why you can never know too much about your characters, their dark private selves, the subtle ideals that drive them, the hidden urges and desires that hinder them.

In fiction, as in life, some people are hard to know. In life you can throw up your hands and walk away: “She’s a mystery. Who knows why she does what she does. I’m through trying to figure it out.” Not so in fiction. If you ever catch yourself saying, about one of your characters, “I don’t know. It’s a mystery,” that’s a red flag. Get busy. You need a transfusion of rich character knowledge and you need it now.

CALL IT WRITER’S BLOCK, self-sabotage, wretched indolence, what you will. Sometimes you stop writing––and it hurts.

Every fiction writer has at least one writer’s block “war story.” In a recent Poets & Writers, “Why I Write” column, Dawn Haines, who teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire, remembers what happened when, free of MFA Program structure, she stopped writing–and couldn’t get started again.

“Before long, I noticed I was feeling bad. Really bad. So bad that I wouldn’t get out of bed. I told myself that tomorrow I’d start writing, every day, just for me. But I stayed in bed and read novels and watched movies on my son’s portable DVD player. I turned on my computer only to read e-mail and catch up on American Idol news. And the longer I didn’t write, the more I felt like a failure because of all the unwritten words.”

That’s serious. That’s a nervous breakdown. Why does it have to come to that?

The reasons why we stop writing are many and various. Fear, sloth, distraction, misdirection–on and on. Not unlike the many reasons why we don’t make money, or stay in contact with old friends, or lose weight, even when part of us knows these are the very things in our lives that, if served, will give back the richest spiritual nourishment imaginable.

You can talk forever about why you’re not writing, why life is such a difficult trick for the creative writer who must be always self-motivated–and rarely for money, love, or power. But you’ll get nowhere unless you can look straight into the heart of the beast, where the answer hides in plain sight:

If you can’t write, you simply…write.

It sounds like circular logic but in fact it’s as non-circular as a sword thrust. If, against your will, with nothing to say, no ideas, you sit down and bang out 500 words–of something, anything…if you do that, do that again tomorrow, and again the next day. And the day after, and the day after that…

You will be writing again.

All of us eventually come upon this most simple of truths if we are persistent enough, or thickheaded enough, to stay in this business. Dawn Haines found it thanks to a tip from a writer friend. “Just write about not writing,”

It wasn’t much. Truly it wasn’t. But to see what you can do with “nothing much,” follow Dawn Haines’ step by step chronicle of how the lowliest, most apologetic of subjects can reignite the flame you thought you had lost forever.

So you start with what you have, even if that is less than nothing. Hemingway began by sitting in a café with an empty blue book, watching the waiter, and letting himself simply describe the waiter’s actions. The alchemists of legend could create gold only starting with the basest of materials. One thing leads to the next and to the next.

P&W hasn’t put Haines’ full column on line–but it’s well tracking down the May-June print version for her step-by-step recounting of how she progressed from the doldrums of paralysis to a productive daily writing habit.