Storytellersunplugged

by Justine Musk

Just back from the Southern California Writer’s Conference, where I led workshops and said things like, “You need to take us inside the physical experience of transforming into a giant puddle of metallic goo.”

After listening to people read and discuss, and chiming in thoughts of my own while wearing what I hope was an expression of serene wisdom, I heard certain points made more than once. For example:

Live inside the fictional moment, don’t stand outside and apart from it.

People have a natural tendency to write from the head instead of the senses: “He applied the tape across her mouth and then rendered her incapable of movement.” Lose the essay-speak. Remember this scene is from the woman’s point of view. So give us the sound of the ripping duct tape, the awful gummy feel of it. Don’t write…”…and then he died.” Give us that last gasping rattle in the back of his throat, the end of the light in his eyes. Make the moment live and sing, even when it’s dark one.

Other writers lived inside a moment – usually one of panic or terror, which shows you the kind of stories that get attracted to my workshops – way too long. Entire paragraphs of physical fear: heart pounding, eyes bugging, thoughts racing, palms sweating. Trust your writing, I said. Trust the reader. We ‘get’ that the character is afraid. Give us one or two well-chosen, evocative details. Not ten. Less is more…when the ‘less’ is done right. Trust yourself to do it right.

Trust your writing.

People said they had already changed their story because other people told them how they’d broken ‘the rules’. A few of those rules surprised me. “No first-time novelist should ever use first person.” Huh? “ Never do prologues.” What? (My own published novel has a prologue. Sometimes they’re useful.) “Never use words the reader doesn’t know.” The last concerned a young doctor who was writing a genuinely funny chick lit novel about a third-year intern. By the time she got to my read-and-critique, she had been persuaded to remove all the medical terminology from her writing. So one patient was now described – through the first-person perspective of this intern – as a woman on a bed “with a tube down her throat”. People in my workshop didn’t find the intern believable – she seemed too much like an airhead. She didn’t seem educated enough.

“When someone like me looks at that patient,” I said, “I see a woman with a tube down her throat. Because I know nothing about that stuff. But when a third-year intern looks at that woman, she sees something quite different. She sees a woman with a…a…That thing.”

“Tracheostomy tube,” the doctor said pertly.

“Right. Shows like ER use terminology like that all the time – nobody in the audience understands what the hell those characters are talking about, but it doesn’t matter, because the context makes clear everything we need to know. What those words actually do is create an authentic and believable world for the reader – we believe in your intern, she seems authentic, precisely because it’s natural for her to use words which most of us don’t understand. So use them carefully, but use them. Like that trach – that thing.”

“Tracheostomy.”

“There you go.”

Look, I said. These ‘rules’ are not carved in stone. They are guidelines, and for the most part they’re quite useful, especially when you’re a beginner and need some protecting from yourself. “Show don’t tell.” Genius! But don’t forget to pay attention to the nature of your particular story. Part of learning to write is learning how to adapt those rules to your writing, instead of vice versa.

I also learned to ask the magic question: What is your novel about? Tell me in three or four sentences. People had been working on these things for a while, and many of them had scheduled private pitching sessions with agents and editors at the conference. So when I popped the question — after they had read their opening pages and were starting to receive comments — almost everybody had a proper answer.

Which often changed the nature of the comments. We would discover that their opening was going in a different direction than what their book was actually about. When I brought them back to the gist of their novel – to what I kept referring to as the ‘throughline’ — it was easier for them to make decisions about where to start, what to cut and what to change (and easier for other people to advise them). They were still listening to the criticism and being careful about ‘the rules’…but they were also listening to the story itself, which allowed them to better identify what they could apply and how they could apply it.

Several people said, “I have no idea where this thing is going.”

“I don’t really know,” one man said blithely, “if this is a mystery or a thriller or what.”

“But you should think about that,” I said, “because you’re talking about different forms.” Mystery and suspense are not the same thing. A mystery is when the reader discovers things right along with the protagonist. Suspense happens when the reader knows more than the protagonist. Two characters are playing cards, for example, but the reader knows – and they don’t – that there’s a bomb in the closet about to go off.

This guy was unfazed. “Maybe it’s a thrilling mystery.”

“A book can be both,” I allowed. Although it’s difficult. “But mysteries are often written in first person because that way the reader really is limited to what the protagonist knows, when the protagonist knows it. Thrillers are written with multiple perspectives so the reader can have more information than any of the characters, which is what accumulates suspense. You are writing in first-person, but if you want to write a thriller – if that’s the form you feel drawn to, if that’s what you tend to read – then maybe you want to rethink that POV, and do it now at the beginning, instead of six months and two hundred pages from now. You see what I mean?”

You need to make some decisions. You can always change them later. That’s what revision is for.

Besides, many writers – like my mystery/thriller guy – know a lot more than they think. They just need to have a little dialogue with themselves. What do I like to read? What kind of story am I naturally drawn to? What kind of story do I want and need to write? I suspect one sweeping glance at this guy’s bookshelves, for example, would be enough to tell him whether his fledgling novel is indeed a thriller or a mystery (or something completely different).

And, especially when you submit yourself and your novel to a series of workshops, never forget:

What is my story about?

That, my friends, is the million-dollar question.

So keep it in the front of your mind. Put it on endless repeat.