Larry Brooks's Blog

You sort of expect the author of a book to talk about it on their website. I’m quite aware of the short rope in doing that. But when someone else steps up to review and/or discuss the book – especially as a video in the “how to” realm – that’s a different thing entirely. Especially […]

The post “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves” – a working author’s review appeared first on Storyfix.com.

Pretty much everything and anything you need to know to empower your NaNoWriMo experience. Specifically, today I’m linking you to a roster of 32 NaNoWriMo tutorials, one for each day of the Big Month, plus a final word (post 32). NaNoWriMo is beloved by tens of thousands of writers who want a structured and metered […]

The post Your NaNoWriMo Treasure Chest appeared first on Storyfix.com.

If you’re reading this via email, then I invite you to CLICK THROUGH to the site and check out the new paint job and some nifty remodeling, including a cool new banner. My thanks go out to the designers and programmers who helped me get this done (which took over three weeks… and we’re still […]

The post Welcome to the new bright and shiny Storyfix.com! appeared first on Storyfix.com.

But first, it’s helpful — to your story, and your learning curve, and thus, your career trajectory — to understand why this question is critical.

Simple fact: a significant reason stories get rejected, or don’t find a self-published readership, is that the story, at its core, doesn’t glow in the dark. The premise, and perhaps even the idea that hatched it, is too familiar, too lacking in dramatic juice, too less than fully compelling.

Just because the idea appeals to you doesn’t mean it will ring the bell with agents, editors and, most important of all, readers. Some writers advise you to write for yourself, that nobody else matters. That’s terrible advice if, in fact, you seek to establish and build a career. It’s like starting a restaurant chain called PB and Mustard’s, because that’s how you like your sandwiches.

The premise is the DNA of your story. If the DNA doesn’t line up, then the writing itself may not be enough to save it. (I worded that to be polite; here’s the straight skinny: unless you’re writing in the “literary fiction” genre, your writing isn’t why people come to a story. They come for the idea. For the premise. For the sauce that promises a vicarious experience.

Click the link (below) to discover the eight core criteria — the same as the eight essential elements — of your premise. This article appeared in the March issue of Writers Digest Magazine, and exists here — republished just this week — as part of their online offerings.

Enjoy. This could be the epiphany you’ve been looking for.

https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/how-to-mind-the-facets-of-premise-for-story-gold

The post Is Your Premise Strong Enough? Are you sure? appeared first on Storyfix.com.

Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to ask. When Penguin Random House took over the business and the inventory of Writers Digest Books, they pegged the price of my new writing book — Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves — at $19.99.

I know. That’s a lot for a trade paperback.

In fact it was the most expensive book in the top-100 in the “Authorship Reference” category (the book has bounced in and out of that ranking for a few months now). So I called my new editor at PRH and pitched her on the logic of a price reduction. She’s a pro and a great colleague, so here’s what happened:

The book is now just $12.39… right in the sweat spot for popular books in this niche. Many thanks to my editor for getting that done.

Now for the Kindle version… still $14.99. That price reduction request is still on the table.

And in case you missed it, Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves just co-won its category in the 2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards (PRH is hardly and Indie publisher, but Writers Digest Books (still the imprint under PRH; curioiusly, is considered an indie house).

The post Quick Note: Amazon has reduced the price of my new writing book… by a lot. appeared first on Storyfix.com.

That last one is a question I’d like your help in answering. Use the comment section below to tell me what you’d like to see here next. I’m thinking another series that does a deep dive into a critical facet of the novel writing proposition… much like the 19-part series I did in May on the groundwork and criteria for your story premise (all of it here for the taking, if you haven’t seen these posts yet; see below). Tell me where you’d like to go next.

A few updates from this end:

My new writing book, Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves, just won its category (Writing and Publishing) in the 2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Co-won, actually, just ahead of six other finalists and a flock of other entrants. This is my fourth book to win in its category, including two of my novels.

Also, this website was named in the May issue of Writers Digest Magazine to their 100 Best Websites for Writers list. Thanks for the nominations, if that’s you. This is the sixth appearance on that list in the last ten years… I am very grateful for my readers and your feedback.

Happily… that same May issue of Writers Digest Magazine has another peice with my name on it (my third this year), in the Workbook section shown on Page 57. This article is an exerpt from my previous book, Story Fix, on how to revise your story by hitting the sweet spots. There’s also an ad (on page 53) for my new book, Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves.

All in all, with three seats in the May issue, a good month for me.

But it all gets even better in the July/August issue.

The cover article in that edition is an extensive interview with author Robert Dugoni. This was the result of my pitch to the magazine, boosted by the fact (read: access) that Robert wrote the Foreword for my new writing book.

Pardon if you feel this is a little too “me”- oriented… I just wanted to share the good news with my Storyfix regulars, and with anyone else who happens along here.

More good stuff is in the pipeline. Anxious to field your suggestions for what you’d like to cover next. Thanks for sticking around!

The post Storyfix: What’s here… what’s new… what’s next. appeared first on Storyfix.com.

Sadly, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Happily, there is wisdom that can keep you away from that edge.

Let’s go back to process for a moment. There is really only one goal for your story development/writing process, even though some claim that “I’m just here for a good time” and they really don’t care all that much how their process turns out.

The means by which we get to that goal distribute over a singular process continuum–pure pantsing at one end, pure outlining at the other, with most writers operating somewhere in between–in which you are, in an order of your own choosing, scanning for and vetting a story idea, expanding that idea into a criteria-meeting premise (Chapter 7 seven the the book, GSDWT), creating characters and concocting scenes that populate an expositonal narrative, and then imparting those scenes to the page.

Then rinse, revise and repeat.

Earlier I suggested that, even if you don’t have THE ending of your novel in your head yet, it is orders of magnitude more productive, efficient, and even fun to write your story with at least a placeholder ending (how your story resolves) in place. Even if that ending gives way to a better idea as you go along, hey, that’s a win, right?

Indeed it is. You may have no idea how big a win that can be.

But when you aren’t writing toward something, then by definition you are–in much the same way that a still photograph differs from a clip of video or film–exploring a moment or a place or situation. Sooner of later something has to happen… and if there isn’t at a minimum a vague vision for that, then your story’s eventual and perhaps default ending is literally floating around in the vacuum of your process, waiting for you to somehow bump into it.

The most enthusiastic and successful organic story developers (pantsers) understand this to be true.

But even they can topple into an abyss of their own creation from time to time… though you’ll rarely hear about it, because a floor full of editors (or a few more years of bleeding from the forehead) will have solved the issue.

The solution is too often (when no logical expositional sequence of resolution manifests for you) to simply let God, or the Universe, or pure random contrivance, take care of things. To leverage a monumental coincidence or an unlikely turn of events–something that is not the result of your hero’s best efforts–as the plug-and-play ending to your otherwise seat-of-your-pants story.

Here’s the tale of an A-list novelist who actually pulled it off. Even though he got caught with a deus-ex-machina in his pocket.

Nelson Demille, who is one of my personal writing heroes despite what you are about to read, is one of the most popular commercial authors of the past few decades. Top ten, by any metric. In fact, his novel Night Fall was the book that shoved Dan Brown’s The Davinci Code out of the #1 spot on the New York Times Bestseller List in December of 2004, after occupying that ranking for over two years. Night Fall remained in the top spot for eleven weeks, when The Davinci Code won it back.

It must have been a pretty good read to accomplish even that much, right? And it was, if the writing of Nelson Demille and an alternative history of one of the greatest modern airline disasters—among other historic disasters—is your cup of literature. Personally, I love that stuff. Alternative history is as conceptual as it gets.

However, as good as Night Fall was as a hero’s quest leading to a dark end-game, Demille admits he got to the ending and wasn’t sure where to go next. A classic panster’s paradox (Demille is an instinct-driven, research-reliant pantser, by the way, which means he neither proves nor disproves pantsing as the preferred method for anyone else, just for his own work, which is the choice we all entertain; in Night Fall, however, the pantsing Nelson Demille found himself teetering over an abyss frequented almost entirely by pansters).

What he ended up doing is perhaps the most heinous, convenient and against-all-odds contrivance of any bestselling novel in modern history, because it delivered the poster child for deus-ex-machina endings to an extent never seen before. One that redefines the word coincidence.

The entire Part 4 quartile of the novel was the arrangement of dominos and choices that would lead the reader with him to this point of conclusion, which becomes evident only a sentence or two before it actually splashed onto the page with a thud that resonated around the entire publishing world.

A quick review: Night Fall was a speculative history based on the conspiracy theory that TWA Flight 800–which on July 17, 1999, exploded shortly after takeoff from JFK bound for Paris, killing all 230 souls on board–was actually shot out of the sky by a missile launched from a ship. Supposedly there were witnesses who swear they saw tracers from the missiles heading skyward moments before the 747 exploded into a fireball that slowly sank toward the pitch-dark sea.

Demille took that much, stirred in the loudest conspiracy theories, and he was off to the keyboard. The players in this novel, including the beloved hero from previous Demille novels (ex-NYPD homicide detective John Corey, whose wife had worked the crash investigation and pushes her husband to take a closer look), find themselves part of the secrecy-riddled aftermath of the investigations that followed, including the official version from the NTSB, endorsed by the FBI and the CIA, that state that the accident was the result of an electrical malfunction that sparked near the fuel lines, igniting a catastrophic chain of events.

Corey, of course, ever the rebellious hero (that’s why readers love him), dives into the collision of self-interests and agendas against the wishes of his FBI bosses, including those of the witnesses, the press and a plethora of various agencies, not all of whom want the truth to surface. Of course, hijinks ensue, people get killed, evidence disappears, stories change and generally it all descends into the cluster of chaos we’ve come to expect when final federal verdicts collide with popular mythologies about what actually happened.

In the Part 4 quartile of Demille’s fiction, the hero has managed to get enough people on the same page, and has arranged a gathering on a specific day, in a specific place, with irrefutable evidence in hand. The truth was about to be revealed.

That day, when the truth would at last be known, was September 11, 2001. That place was the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The meeting was scheduled for 9:00 am.

Of course–kudos if you could see this coming–the hero was stuck in traffic and called ahead to say he’d be late. About twenty minutes late, in fact. Late enough, as it turns out, to survive the day, but with nothing to show for his investigative work, and no one left to back the truth.

Of course, the evidence, the proof of the conspiracy, including the identities of the guilty, as well as all the people who had the means and credibility to do something about it, all vanished that day, shortly after 9:00 am when a terrorist flew a 757 into the tower, changing life in our country as we knew it.

Notice, too, that there has been no movie version of Night Fall.

That’s
a deus ex-machina on steroids.

Don’t try this at home. Don’t try it all,
wherever you are. Because unless your name is Nelson Demille or one of his
peers, it will get you rejected at best, or laughed off the internet in the
reviews of your self-published novel on Amazon.com. As Picasso advises—stated
earlier, but repeated and paraphrased again here, for relevance sake— Learn the rules/principles like a
professional, so you can break them like an artist. As writers who aren’t
yet famous enough to get away with it, we need to earn the ability to wield art
that contradicts the wisdom of best practices.

Whether Demille was artful or simply stuck is another mystery that will never be fully revealed. More likely, he was inarguably famous enough to get away with it.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves,” with the addition of some framing new content here. Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

The post When Your Premise Paints You Into a Corner — Part 19 of the GSDWT series. appeared first on Storyfix.com.

In the last entry in this series (Part 17), you were introduced to the Eight Essential Criteria for Premise.

Premise may begin with a Big Idea, or sometimes premise is what leads the writer to a Big Idea… but in all cases — no exceptions here — this principle explains stories that work, and explains why they don’t.

As a goal and an application, Premise is a qualitative proposition. The goal isn’t to simply check off those eight boxes… rather, you are trying to hit home runs as you fulfill each individual criteria.

You can fulfill all eight criteria and still end up with a story that is prefectly mediocre, in the same way you can design a house that passes local building codes but is perceived as a cookie-cutter tract home.

These eight criteria aren’t what makes a story great. Rather, they are what renders a story viable. They are entry level criteria… yet a huge percentage of rejected stories are explained by shortcomings from this list.

There are actually two forms of premise, each with its own unique form and function.

The quick take: there is a short form of premise, known as an elevator pitch, often as minimal as one sentence fragment. Like: “The wild west, only in outer space.”

And then there is a longer form, the full story version, which is composed of eight criteria that embrace the entire story. Notice how that little example elevator pitch doesn’t touch on any of the essential elements of story, it’s just an appetizer, a way to hook someone with a bright shiny object.

And yet, despite the thinness, it may still be perceived to be a compelling pitch. Which means, your “idea,” or the bright shiny facet of your idea (like, a killer story world or an amazing character), actually works. But then comes the hard part… rendering that story within a dramatic arc that checks off those eight criteria boxes.

Idea, plus execution. You need both.

That example was the pitch for Star Wars, by the way, so there you go.B

Professionials know that a pitch for an undeveloped idea — or a vanilla one — sounds very different than a pitch for a story that the author has fully developed, even in its shorter form. Because even though those eight essential criteria aren’t clearly called out in the pitch, they will be contextually implied.

Agents and editors can tell the difference. Not hearing a dramatic arc in the pitch, even if the idea is compelling, is the primary reason reason they don’t ask to see or hear more. And vice versa.

Want to hear what a killer pitch sounds like?

Watch the video below. It’s Robert Dugoni pitching (in essence) his mega-bestselling mystery, My Sister’s Grave… in less than 15 seconds.There isn’t a hole in it anywhere, because all eight facets of premise are defined or are clearly implied. Listen between the lines… there you’ll find a hero’s problem and quest, stakes and antagonistic opposition to what the hero is seeking to achieve, even though none of that is spoken to directly.

Rest assured, as Dugoni wrote his first drafts, he was doing so armed with an instinctual awareness of all eight of those criteria for premise, and he knew he wasn’t at the finish line until all eight of them were in place.

Not just taking up space, but qualitatively adding to the story experience..

(If you aren’t seeing the video here, which probably means you are receiving this post via email, click HERE to view it on Youtube.)

This is the degree to which an author must know their story before they can write it in its highest form of execution.

As a footnote… Robert Dugoni wrote the foreword to my new writing book, as mentioned below.

*****

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves,” with the addition of some framing new content here. Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

The post Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 18 appeared first on Storyfix.com.

In the post that was distributed earlier today (part 17 of the series) I misspelled the word “essencial” (rather, essential) in the subhead.

Happily, I didn’t just misspell the word “misspell” in that first paragraph, or this one, where I’ve unwisely used it twice.

Typos suck. We all make them, but saying that doesn’t remotely justify it. As someone who writes about craft and principles, I am an especially juicy target for writers who love to jump on this (the last person who wrote me about a typo used the term “For shame!!!” in her closing, as if I’d just maligned the Pope).

So, this is me acknowledging the mistake, which has been repaired on the website. For all I know there are more typos to be discovered there, and here (I’ve found four in my first pass at proofing this piece), and in all my future endeavors, but I’ll always be “for shamed” when they happen, and I’ll continue to do my best to execute better proofing.

Hope you are enjoying the series. Especially today’s earlier entry, and the one that will arrive over the weekend. These are the center of the Oreo, and they really can empower your storytelling once you commit these principles to instinct.

As a fun footnote…

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/essencial

Mar 14, 2020 · “essencial” in Gran Diccionari de la Llengua Catalana, Grup Enciclopèdia Catalana. “essencial” in Diccionari normatiu valencià, Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua. “essencial” in Diccionari català-valencià-balear, Antoni Maria Alcover and Francesc de Borja Moll, 1962.

The post Owning The Typo appeared first on Storyfix.com.

This post might change the trajectory of your career as a novelist.

It just might be the singular awareness that gets you over whatever lull or hump or wall you believe you are stuck behind. If you are already an experienced writer, your response might be… “well duh….” (which, if that’s you, this response might be a bit on the arrogant side, because trust me, all of us – including you – were once on the dark side of this awareness).

It is that important.

In this post I will present — after having done so many times on this site, and with an entire chaper in my new book — THE EIGHT ESSENTIAL CRITERIA FOR PREMISE.

I can’t stress enough how important this list is, for experienced writers every bit as much as for new writers. Often the former have these criteria engrained in their storytelling instincts, while newer writers can look here to understand why their work is being rejected.

Because almost always, on the story execution side of things (your writing being the other essential core competence, with roughly a 50-50 split between which deficiency resides at the root of your rejected manuscript), one or more of these criteria have been short-changed (including simply being less than compelling) or omitted altogether.

Here’s a confession: I’ve struggled with this post. Just as I struggled with this a particular chapter in my new book (Chapter 7). Because this topic — the eight essential criteria for Premise — is too easily minimized… if… the writer skips, under-values or doesn’t get/appreciate the valuable context that must be applied… both before and after encountering these criteria.

Because there are two principles that underpin an understanding of premise. Leading to this — any one or more of these criteria — nearly always being part of the reason a manuscript is rejected, or deemed in need of massive revision. Mangling any one of these will take you out of the game.

And then, there are two forms of premise that the enlightened writer can use — the abbreviated pitch form, or the fully formed premise, which is a checklist for story efficacvy — each for entirely different purposes.

I’ll deal with all four of these issues in tomorrow’s post.

Just remember… in genre fiction it isn’t a story until something goes wrong. Which creates a hero’s story quest, which becomes the Dramatic Arc of your novel… that being the principle that is the header for the eight criteria for an effective premise.

You can’t finish or apply these eight criteria UNTIL the full nature of the Dramatic Arc is clear to you. Which is where too many pantsers drive off the cliff, and too many outliners don’t know what they don’t know. Because these eight criteria are, in fact, a drill down into your Dramatic Arc. And, your chosen process, whatever it is, is a means of discovering and fleshing out your dramatic arc… working toward a compelling compliance with these forthcoming eight criteria.

In other words… the collective eight criteria actually become — they are — the dramatic arc of your story. Like an eight-cylinder engine, if one goes bad the vehicle sputters to a stop at the side of the road.

Here
are those eight essential criteria for an effective premise:

An understanding of these elements will elevate you toward a higher level of the craft… where nuance and breadth and qualitative and conceptual value-add becomes part of your repetoir.

These excerpts are taken from my new craft book, “Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves,” with the addition of some framing new content here. Feel free to share with your writer friends, directly or via social media.

This post, in particular, might be the one you’ll want to share with your writing friends and colleagues.

The post The Whole Ballgame: Pearls, Nuggets and Excerpts… the Series, Part 17 appeared first on Storyfix.com.