The 39 Steps
Many years ago a student handed in a story with sand mutants as
the main characters. That story occasioned this off-the-cuff primer
for our new students. |
A Primer on Story Writing
1) Step one in the great enterprise of a new and preferable you in
the house of fiction is: Mean less. That is, don't mean so much. Make up
a story, screw around with it, paste junk on it, needle the characters,
make them say queer stuff, go bad places, insert new people at
inopportune moments, do some drive-bys. Make it up, please.
2) Don't let it make too much sense.
 3) Do use stuff that you care about when you're making it up. If you're mad
at your mother, husband, boyfriend, wife, lover, neighbor, dog, take it out on a
mother, husband, etc. and put it in the mouth of one of your characters. If
you're full of love for the sea, say something nice about the bath.
4) Leaven the piece with some merchandise (figurative) you don't particularly
care about but that seems to you odd, intriguing, curious, baffling, quirky.
Attach this material to your characters.
5) Do not use the above to rationalize disconnected, ersatz, or unrelated
oddball debris. "I'd like to talk to you but there's a giant in my room" isn't
the answer to any narrative question.
6) Long plot explanations aren't going to get it. Like, when something neat
(horrible?) happened to one of the characters a real long time ago, and you
really really want to tell us about it, you know? Don't.
7) It doesn't particularly matter which characters these things you care
about (see #3) get attached to (these are things like pieces of dialogue, bits
of description, some gesture, a look somebody gives somebody, a setting,
tabletops). In fact, you're probably better off if the stuff attaches itself in
unexpected ways to wrong characters (so you don't go meaning too much, see #1).
8) Remember: Many things have happened which, to the untrained eye, appear
interesting.
9) Grace Slick.
10) At every turn, ask yourself if you're being gullible, dopey, pretentious,
cloying, adolescent, Neanderthal, routine, dull, smarty-pants, clever, arty,
etc. You don't want to be being these things.
11) Be sure there's a plot for the reader to grasp; while not necessarily the
center of the story, it's key to lulling the reader into that comfort zone where
he's vulnerable.
12) We can't care about sand mutants; if you do, or think you do, kill
yourself.
13) Coherence is a big part of the game. Make sure the story is coherent,
that the scenes flow each from the last, that the reader has the clearest sense
at all times of what is going on. Err on the side of clumsiness to start with;
back away later.
14) For dramatic purposes you're probably well-served sticking close to an
objective narrative (1st person unvoiced, or 3rd person objective--in either
case, the camera view). This forces you to write scenes in which characters do
and say things to/with/for each other; these things will then construct the
story for you. This expedient blocks the "telling" problem.
15) Organize the story's structure around the simplest available strategy.
For example, if there's no obliging reason that the story be told in flashbacks,
don't use flashbacks. Don't use flashbacks simply because you get to a certain
point and then think of something that requires telling in flashback if it is to
be told at that point. Instead, return to the front of the story and add the
material in its appropriate spot.
 16) Plain chronological storytelling is a good idea. Rules on deviations: (a)
avoid disruptions in time as much as possible; (b) flashbacks (and similar) are
ten times more confusing to the reader than they seem to you (keep in mind for
use in strategically confusing parts); (c) flashbacks, dream sequences,
drug-induced beatific appreciations, Mongol hordes, etc. are not good excuses
for lumbering attempts at the high rhetorical bar; (d) deviations from a norm
tend to draw attention away from the story, away from the characters, away from
the emotional/spiritual center of things; (e) sometimes you may want to do this.
16a) In the redundancy department: Give us as much of the ground situation as
you can as soon as possible. The first paragraph is not too soon. The first page
is not too soon. Tell us who, what, when, where, etc.
17) Do not do this "artfully."
18) Remember that you want something to change over the course of the story.
Something big and visible to the reader. Start with one situation and end with a
clearly different situation. In between tell us how you got from the one to the
other. Don't be subtle designing this change-for purposes of nailing dramatic
structure be as reductive as humanly possible.
19) Remember this simplified structure is not the story, but the hanger on
which the story hangs. The story is shirts and jackets, ribbons, the perfumes of
the closet, details, bits of persuasion, rubber gunk underfoot, attitudes,
hints, suggestions-everything you can attach to this hanger.
20) Obviously, these carefully hewn 39 steps must be adapted to your way of
working. If you're murky, then take these as bible and pare away. If you work
bare bones, then murk up what you do. Throw stuff in. Make a mess. Don't clean
up.
21) If you write a sentence that isn't poignant, touching, funny, intriguing,
inviting, etc., take it out before you finish the work. Don't just leave it
there. Don't let anyone see it.
22) To repeat, there is no place for rubbish & slop in the highly modern
world of today's fiction. Every sentence must pay, must somehow thrill. Every
one.
23) Also: Obscurity is not subtlety; intentional obscurity is pinheaded and
unkind.
24) Doing odd stuff is good, especially like when you make characters do it
in the story, like when stuff is happening to them and they just do this
unexpected, even inappropriate stuff, and then somehow it makes a little sense.
This fills the heart.
25) Don't let too many paragraphs go by without sensory information,
something that can be felt, smelt, touched, tasted. Two or three paragraphs is
too many.
26) Don't be enamored of the idea you start with, or the idea that comes to
you after you've been working on a piece for a time. If you're lucky the idea
will keep changing as you write the story.
27) Don't reject interesting stuff (things for characters to say and do,
things to see, places to be, etc.) because the stuff doesn't conform to your
idea. Change your idea to wrap it around the stuff.
28) If you have a story in mind to start with, leave it there. Ditto a
"character."
29) Apropos the big issues, note that parents don't sit around getting
heartbroken about abortion, they get heartbroken because they killed the baby.
30) Or, because the baby was born with fins for hands. It's the particular.
31) Sometimes it's useful to shut your eyes and imagine a scene as if it were
in a movie; this helps flatten things and helps you "see" what the scene looks
like.
32) Also, when doing the above, notice the things you notice in your own
"real" life--like what's at the horizon, how the sun is in the sky, what kind of
light's going on, the way the street, ground, grass, dirt looks, your interest
in bushes, what's happening at the edges of things-buildings and signs and cars,
the sounds of stuff going on around the scene--who's that wheezing? what's that
rattle? are those leaves preparing to rustle? Etc.
33) No characters named Brooke or Amber.
34) Study steps 1,7,13,16a, and 24. |
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