Write from your passionate self

We all wear a mask to protect us from hurt in the world. It also blocks the light of our vision. As children, we quickly learn which behaviors are praised and which are punished. We learn to act other than we really feel to maximize our experience. In time,we buy into that mask, believing it is who we really are. But the mask evens out the peaks and troughs of our passion, leaving us afraid to explore the depths of our passion and reveal our true selves in words. To speak with a clarion voice, you must shatter the mask, discover your actual self, and thrust it into the world.

Writing Tip of the Day

Having a core concept for your story before you write will provide you with a creative beacon – a lighthouse by which to guide your creative efforts so they stay on course to your ultimate purpose: a completed novel.

While this seems fairly simple, it can be a lot harder than it looks. It is the rare writer who has a focused concise story concept right from the beginning. Many discover the essence of their novel during the development process or even as they write.

At the beginning of the story development process, many writers find themselves with a collection of story elements they’d like to include but no overarching concept.

Without a core concept, the first inclination is to try to pull all the good ideas into a single all-encompassing story. Problem is, people think in topics more easily than they think in narratives. And while all the material may belong to the same subject matter category, more often than not it doesn’t really belong in the same story.

Still, no one likes to abandon a good idea – after all, those aren’t that easy to come by. And so, writers stop coming up with new ideas as their attention turns more and more toward figuring out how to connect together everything they already have.

This can create an every growing spiral of structural complexity in the attempt to fit every notion and concept into a single unifying whole. And before you know it, your inspiration and enthusiasm have both run dry to be replaced by creative frustration with a candy coating of intellectual effort that is not unlike trying to build a single meaningful picture from the pieces of several different puzzles.

To determine the central vision for your novel try these techniques. First, shift your focus from what your story needs, and ask yourself what you need. More precisely, consider why you want to write this story in the first place. What is it that excites you most about this subject matter? Is it a character, a plot line, a thematic message or topic, or just a genre or setting or timeframe or…?

Create a list of all the elements you have been pondering to possibly include in your story – put it on paper so you can easily see them all at once. Next, considering your own personal interests, prioritize that list,putting the items you most want to include at the top and those less compelling ones at the bottom.

(Tip: sometimes it is hard to pick the most interesting and it is easier to start at the bottom of the list with the least interesting and work up!)

Now, block the bottom half of the list to see only the top items. These are the aspects of your story that are most inspiring to you and represent the heart of your story. Think about them as a group and see if you can perceive a common thread.

This common thread is called a log line. Log lines are like the short descriptions of a program you see in cable or satellite television listings. As examples, here are the log lines for two stories of my own:

Snow Sharks (Don’t Eat Red Snow) – A group of rich teenage ski-bums are terrorized by escaped sharks that have been genetically altered by the U.S. government to act as mobile land mines in potential arctic wars.

House of W.A.C.S. – In 1942, this cross between Animal House and The Dirty Dozen follows one of the first groups of young women in the newly created Women’s Army Corps as they learn to work together as a team to thwart a Nazi fifth column and protect a crucial war factory.

The top two examples are plot-oriented, but many novels may be much more concerned with character growth or a thematic message or even both.

For example, the log line for “A Christmas Carol” might be:
An unhappy and miserly man has isolated himself from an emotional connection with the suffering of humanity as a shield against his own childhood pain, but through the intervention of three ghosts who force him to confront his past, present and future, he ultimately see how he has victimized both himself and others, repents, and seeks to make amends.

Naturally, you don’t have to stick to one sentence in your log line – that could be an exercise in futility and put your attention more on form than purpose. The point is simply to boil down the heart of your story to its essence with the least possible number of words.
In this manner your collection of potential story elements begins to take on a unifying identity – a sense your story’s world, who’s in it, what happens to them and what it all means – all at a high-level overview.

If your material is too limited or sketchy to get a grip on it, just describe what excites you about your potential story, rather than what’s in it, such as:

“I’m fascinated with the notion of an archeologist finding a modern device embedded in the ruins of an ancient civilization.”

You really don’t need more than that to center yourself on what you’d like to write about and, so armed, you will much more easily be able to pick and choose which ideas to include and which to exclude from your novel in progress. And, it will also inform your Muse as to where future inspiration should focus.

If, on the other hand, your wealth of story ideas is so wide-ranging or diffuse to easily see the thread, gather these ideas into groups organized by having a common connection and put each on a separate sheet of paper.

Then, try writing writing a separate log line for each group. Each of these sub-log lines will help focus a different part of what you’d like your story to be. So, rather than trying to find the core directly from your original list, try to see the central concept outlined by your collection of log lines – essential a master log line that takes all the sub-lines into account and finds an overarching concept in them as a collection.

By applying some or all of these techniques, you’ll should be able to define the essences of your story sufficiently to pick and choose which inspirations and concepts to include or exclude and to direct your ongoing story development so all the elements work together and generate in the reader a sense of a unified whole.

–Adapted from my book, Write Your Novel Step by Step

Inspiration for a novel or screenplay is all around you. Every day the mind naturally takes note of odd juxtapositions, inappropriate contexts and unlikely “what ifs” that crop up in overheard conversations, two television commercials that butt up against each other or folded over newspaper in which the visible part of the headline is “just not right.” Any time you encounter a “tilt” moment during your day, jot it down, as it might be fodder for your next story. For example, you might trip over a concept (computer geeks are transported to the old west), a plot twist (a detective discovers he is investigating his own murder), a situation (Ponce de Leon still lives today), a thematic topic (fracking), a character study (an aging rock star who is losing his licks) a line of dialog (“Just cuz somthin’s free don’t mean you didn’t buy it.”), a title (Too Old To Die Young) or any other creative notion that makes you think, that’s a good idea for a story! What’s more, any of these ideas might be a topic for conversation within your story, as opposed to the overall idea for the story itself. If you train yourself to jot down any unusual notion before it disappears into the block hole of the mediocrity that surrounds it, you’ll never be short of inspiration.

Beginning writers often look to other successful stories to learn how things ought to work. But so do all the other beginning writers. A book editor, agent, or script reader sees hundreds of manuscripts every year, all made up of the same pieces and hitting the same marks. You’ll never get noticed in that crowd. If you want your work to be discovered, break format, shake it up, do something different. Make your sheriff 8 years old, make your two lovers twins, set your gothic romance underwater. You’ll never be noticed if you don’t stand out.

What makes you a writer? Writing makes you a writer. Being a writer says nothing about how good you are, how prolific you are, whether you are published or not. When you write you are a writer. When you don’t, you aren’t. So practice your craft and proudly call yourself a writer.

Today’s Writing Tip: “Red Herrings”

Red herrings are false leads. In storytelling, red herrings are used to make something appear more connected than it really is. Several good examples of this technique can be found in the motion picture The Fugitive about a man, Dr. Richard Kimble, who is convicted of a murder he did not commit, and then escapes custody.

In one scene a police car flashes its lights and siren at Dr. Kimble as he is walking down the street, giving the impression he is about to be recaptured. But, in fact, the cops only want to tell him to move along as he is blocking the sidewalk.

In another scene, Kimble is in his apartment when an entire battalion of police show up with sirens blazing and guns drawn. It turns out they were really after the son of his landlord and had no interest in him at all.

In summary, red herrings can inject interest, suspense, and tension without altering the course of the story itself.

Read more writing tips at Storymind.com

Today’s writing tip:

You can hold your reader’s or audience’s interest by revealing the true size of something over the course of the story until it can be seen to be either larger or smaller than it originally appeared. This makes things appear to grow or diminish as the story unfolds.

Conspiracy stories are usually good examples of increasing scope, as only the tip of the iceberg first comes to light and the full extent is ultimately much bigger. The motion picture All The President’s Men about exposing the Watergate Scandal illustrates this nicely. Stories about things being less extensive than they originally appear are not unlike The Wizard Of Oz in which a seemingly huge network of power turns out to be just one man behind a curtain.

More writing tips at Storymind.com

Write until the Muse is gone, then hump her lifeless body.