Writers: Don’t Just ‘Write’
Without a story, writing is merely expressing literacy.
‘Writers’ set themselves apart by telling stories with a thematic core and a hero whose goal reflects the emotional evolution they need to grow as a person.
If you’ve read anything I’ve posted here on Medium about writing and story-crafting, you know that I consider ‘writing’ to be far less important to a writer than their story-crafting prowess.
Proving my argument is as simple as opening your favourite book at random and reading. You see a page of words, the same words you know and use. They’re just words.
The book in your hands is your favourite because of how the story touched you, not the words themselves.
Story Comes First. Always.
‘Everyone has a story.’ Maybe they do and maybe they don’t, but then, not every story is worth telling.
No one just sits down and writes a masterpiece. No one. You won’t either. I’m not dissing your talent, just speaking plain truth. Because if you believe you could plop down in front of a keyboard and put into words that pulitzer-winning idea for a novel bouncing around in your head, you’re going to disappoint yourself.
Writing a novel is not easy. Not only is it time consuming, the compositional landscape is little different from a battlefield peppered with hidden obstacles lying in wait for the unprepared and littered with dramatic mines eager to lacerate your creativity.
My point is that you must know your story thoroughly before you start to write it. After all, if you insist on entering this compositional marathon, the least you owe yourself is a decent finish. Why sacrifice your time to slog through a swamp without first finding a viable path?
When You Know Your Story, Don’t Write It
Craft it. So push your chair away from your keyboard, grab a pen and a cheap notebook and go for a walk. As a writer, most of your time should be spent thinking about your tale and following up on possibilities with research.
First of all, what kind of story is it? Vengeance? Seduction? A search or a heist? What do you like to read? Have you ever found yourself thinking how you would have done things differently than the author of a book you read, or perhaps someone else’s tale inspired a story idea of your own?
Don’t sweat about genres — they are merely marketing labels from the moldering model of traditional publishing. There’s no room for originality in the claustrophobic commandments of genre identity.
Write the story you want to write, but for God’s sake don’t try and define why — you have a lot of work to do before the edge comes off that blade. In the meantime, just think about it, note those creative fragments that tug at the fringe of your emotions and scribble them in a cheap, spiral-bound, college-ruled notebook — trust me, the notebook is important because it demands no file names, it never corrects your spelling and to make it happy, all you need do is fill its pages. There is no greater literary tool.
Start by thinking about your subject matter, its history, and cultural relevance. How did it start, where did it come from and what is its purpose? Ignore truth, turn away from fact. Can you imagine that behind whatever attracted you to your subject is a shadow, a lie, or even some wild conspiracy?
Ask ‘What if?’ and let the creative choices catch the breeze of your passion. Some will vanish, but the better ones will wrap themselves around you. To these you will ask ‘why?’ because every premise needs a rationale, a ‘raison d’être’, even if it’s a lie — if it could be true, you’re good.
You might imagine yourself a villain set on thoroughly ruining, breaking, or destroying the precise thing about your subject that piqued your interest in the first place. What would you do and how would you go about it? What outrageous motivation might drive you?
And what kind of hero would it take to challenge villain-you?
Drama is conflict
Themes flourish in the contradictions and passions of opposing sides and different perspectives.
One classic type of conflict which is theme-heavy is ‘old’ vs. ‘new.’ Perhaps two spies are teamed together to find and retrieve a valuable secret. The next step is to reinforce how each partner represents their ‘side.’
One agent is a veteran who has survived decades of time in the field and is close to retirement. The second agent is younger, perhaps a female, who has a higher level of training in modern technologies and pushes herself further to overcome bureaucratic sexual bias. She is a marksman (sorry for the gender bit) with a wide array of weapons. He still has the original pistol and silencer he was issued in the Eighties but he could count fingers on both hands the number of times he’s fired it — he prefers the knife sheathed on his calf or the braided wire around his neck that secures his wedding ring, a perfect garrotte.
See where I’m going with this? The greater their differences, the more drama and tension. Add the fact they were seconded from rival agencies and ‘trust’ is an obvious theme. His agency has been around forever, which means it has had its share of failures and scandals. Her agency is young but tech-savvy and has just killed or captured several high-profile bad guys.
Of course, there has to be one area where he holds ‘new’ views and she holds ‘old’ ones, and if I were writing this story, this would hold the crux of the trust theme. What if he is willing to cause collateral innocent deaths to get the job done (a modern position), but she needs to do as little lateral damage as possible (truly old-school). The icing on the cake, then, would have her in charge of the mission.
Maybe I should write this story. We’ll see whether or not it sticks around in my head. And what the hell, they fall in love at the end, so it’s a spy romance.
The Trick to Originality
Is time. The time you devote to thinking about your tale, asking ‘what if?’ and ‘why?’ and noting every detail that might possibly be twisted into something else.
And don’t be afraid. Sure, there will be pages of dumb ideas and dead-end threads, but so what? You have to have the dumb ideas to put aside so you’ll recognize the good ones as they show up. And they will if only you invest the time to loosen the reins of your imagination.
Now, go get ‘em.
