I may have mentioned that one of my goals is to increase
my writing output, increase my publication rate, and increase the relevance of my
writing. In my WRITING ADVICE column, I had started using an article my sister sent
me by Lisa Cron. She has
worked as a literary agent, TV producer, and story consultant for Warner Brothers,
the William Morris Agency, and others. She is a frequent speaker at writers’ conferences,
and a story coach for writers, educators, and journalists. I am going to fuse
the advice from her book WIRED FOR STORY with my recent trip to South Korea. Why? I made a discovery there. You’ll hear
more about it in the future as I work to integrate what I’m learning from the
book, the startling things I found in South Korea, and try and alter how I write
in order to create characters that people will care about, characters that will
speak the Truth, and characters that will clearly illustrate what I’m writing
about.
“Remember when Luke has to drop the bomb into
the small vent on the Death Star? The story writer faces a similar challenge of
penetrating the brain of the reader. This book gives the blueprints.” – David
Eagleman
I’m done with iterating what I’ve learned and applied from Lisa Cron’s “A
Reader’s Manifesto: 15 Hardwired Expectations Every Reader Has for Every Story”.
The list is below here and I’ve put links to each essay in the series below.
So, now what?
I practice. I’ve been working hard to use this methodology since I read
the article and then the book – which all started April of 2018. Since then, I’ve
written nine stories and sold three – two of them to my dream market of ANALOG
Science Fiction and Fact.
My usual number of published stories has run about ten percent for
decades. Since reading Lisa Cron’s article and book, the percentage has jumped
to 33 percent. A third of what I write.
That’s significant. It shows that I’ve started to internalize the ideas
she presented in the book and article. It shows to me that they’re an effective
way to look at writing stories.
The reader expects…
- …that the story will start
making a very specific point, beginning with the first sentence.
- …the story to revolve around
one, single plot problem that grows, escalates and complicates, which the
protagonist has no choice but to deal with.
- …a glimpse of the big picture
from the very first page.
- …that there will be a
protagonist.
- …that the protagonist will be
flawed and vulnerable – never, ever “perfect.”
- …the protagonist to not only
have a past, but one that affects the future.
- …that the protagonist will
enter the story with a longstanding agenda – that is, something she
already wants, which is what gives true meaning to her goal.
- …the protagonist will have a
longstanding misbelief that has kept her from easily achieving that goal.
- …that the plot will force the
protagonist to confront and overcome her misbelief, something she’s
probably spent her whole life avoiding.
- …to feel something, from the
first sentence to the last; and what the reader feels is what the
protagonist feels.
- …a clear, present and
escalating force of opposition, with a loudly ticking clock.
- …that there will be something
crucial at stake in every scene, continually forcing the protagonist’s
hand.
- …that as the protagonist tries
to solve the plot problem, she will only make things worse, until she has
no choice but to face her misbelief.
- …that everything in the story
is there strictly on a need-to-know basis.
- …that at the end of the story
the protagonist will emerge changed, seeing the world through new eyes.
So, I’m working on a new story that combines my veterinarian and South
Korea. The working title is “Dinosaur Veterinarian”. In the reviews of “Road
Veterinarian” (ANALOG, September/October 2019), while people had trouble
believing that a road covering could be a living substance and given enough
prodding (starvation) it could actually move, reviewers did like the
interaction between my genetically modified soldier and a veterinarian with a
genetic disorder called “piebaldism”. I suppose my message is that just because
people are genetically changed, they’re still people. Also, the message is that
we have a choice: we can take something wonderful and make a weapon out of it;
or we can just take in something wonderful. In this case, it’s wildlife – we can
take it in (obviously not something like bubonic plague, coronavirus, or other
diseases that cause suffering – though I’ve heard that there has been
discussion of the philosophy of microbial rights (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3059913/,
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-016-0702-7)
or we can turn wildlife into weapons.
The metaphor is carried in my characters, Thatcher is a deliberately
modified Human; Javier is an “accidentally” modified Human. The antagonists in
the story have not only modified an influenza virus (one of a series of
iterations of the H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 Flu Pandemic) to make it more
virulent, they have altered the genes expressed in certain species of birds who
are the most closely related to prehistoric velociraptors (Microraptoria), in this case,
the red-legged and black legged seriemas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seriema)
though they are the sole survivors of the small bird family of Caramidae and represented
by these two separate species. One, the red-legged seriemas is a runner and
often captured in its South American niche and domesticated as a “guard bird”;
like a carnivorous form of farm geese in Europe and North America.
A “flock” or pack of these “terror birds” is infected with an avian flu
and released in the DMZ. It’s up to my main characters with the help of two
others to figure out what’s going on and stop it.
While maintaining the romantic tension between the two mains. If I can
execute Cron’s methodology and meet the reader’s expectations, I may be able to
sell this story as well.
As always, I’ll keep you posted.
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