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  I remember Gary telling a similar story: "When I was a teenager I used to read the writers' magazines. And whenever I used to take these magazines into someplace public, a diner, whatever, I would always put the magazine face down on the counter. The reason was that I was embarrassed about the fact that I was studying writing, embarrassed that people might see that I thought I was a writer. I guess I felt like a fraud. I thought that since I hadn't published anything I had no right to call myself a writer."

  TO BE A WRITER, WRITE!

  Perhaps you feel this way? It's worth remembering it isn't what we publish that makes us writers, it's that we write. If you write regularly, you can call yourself a writer. It's OK. Think of writing as something like martial arts. There are grades of belt, from white to black, that define your experience. And when you reach black belt, there are grades that define degrees of expertise even among the masters of the craft.

  Writing is a profession, like the law or medicine. You don't learn to be a neurosurgeon in three months or six months and then dive in with a scalpel hacking away at people's brains. You put in a lot of time, learning slowly by doing the work over and over. Similarly, writing and storytelling are crafts that develop over time and with practice and take more time to learn than it seems they should.

  That feeling Gary and I had of being a fraud is, I guess, somewhat universal. Some time ago, political cartoonist and satirist Jules Feiffer wrote the following, which may strike a chord with you:

  I felt like a fraud, so I learned to fly an airplane. At fifty-thousand feet, I thought "A fraud is flying an airplane.' ' So, I crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat. I docked at Cherborgen. I thought, "A fraud has crossed the Atlantic in a rowboat," so I took a space shot to the moon. On the way home I thought,' A fraud has circled the moon." So, I took a full-page ad in the newspaper and I confessed to the world that I was a fraud. I read the ad and I thought, "A fraud is pretending to be honest."

  Perhaps he anticipated some of the feelings you have about writing. We hope this book will make you feel more like a writer.

  Many people believe that story sense is the one thing that can't be taught, that it is only a God-given talent. Neither Gary nor I believe that, or we wouldn't bother to teach or write books like these. After all, we learned it. You can, too.

  One final point: How to Tell a Story is about writing character-based narratives, whether they are novels; nonfic-tion accounts, such as true crime or biography; screenplays; plays; etc. The techniques discussed here can be adapted to apply to nonfiction—for example, rethinking the concept of defining a protagonist by how formidable the antagonist is into defining the strength of a nonfiction idea by including the strongest arguments against it in the book—but scholarly or nonnarrative nonfiction is a different topic with a different set of demands made on the writer and is beyond the scope of this book.

  Chapter One

  Ideas

  Getting an idea for a story is not nearly as difficult as it seems. After you've been writing for a while, ideas come to you pretty easily. You may not believe this at the moment, but once you work at developing story ideas, they'll start tumbling out of you, and you must be willing to throw all but the best ones away.

  The problem is not getting the idea—it's (1) figuring out a good idea that will sell vs. a weak or mediocre one that won't, and (2) figuring out whether this idea is best written as a book, a short story, a screenplay, a magazine article or what have you.

  Once you start developing your "idea muscle," you'll have so many ideas, believe it or not, that writing can become quite frustrating because you'll realize you can't possibly develop them all. So how do you decide which ones to work on?

  A NOTE FOR THE SECOND-TIME NOVELIST

  For most of this book, I'm going to assume you haven't published any book-length material yet. However, I'd like to address a brief note to those who might be struggling with their second books. For some, first books are relatively easy. They had great ideas and mastered enough technique that, with the help of agents and editors, they got themselves published. But now they have to repeat the trick!

  When you're starting out as a writer, and particularly if you've published one book and are now thinking about your

  second, coming up with a good idea for the next book can seem a Herculean task tinged with a vague air of desperation. That first successful book (that got you published!) was like a nagging child tugging at your clothes, filled with emotion, an idea that came to you and wouldn't go away until you paid it some attention and helped it grow to some sort of maturity.

  Before you got published, you thought getting published for the first time would be the biggest obstacle you'd have to face in your writing career. After that it would be all smooth sailing. But now what? Your agent and your editor expect you to come up with something new, at least as good as, if not better than, your first book. If you're not careful, panic can set in, and not far behind that, depression. It seems like you're back where you started. Where will you get this next great idea?

  "WHAT IF ...," OR, "SUPPOSE ..."

  An idea is all the things you think about in the creation of your story before the story has plot elements. The idea can be a memory from childhood or a character based on your Aunt Sophie; it might be a gimmick, such as the detective figuring out who committed the murder by pressing the redial button on the phone and finding out who the victim called just before she died. It might be one of these things or a combination of them.

  So how do you come up with ideas in the first place?

  In the absence of a compelling idea that won't let go, you grope around looking for something to start work on. You watch TV, read newspapers, listen to the radio, eavesdrop on other people's conversations, start asking yourself, What if that happened this way instead?

  That seems like a good place. Let's start with, "What if... ?" or, "Suppose . . . ?"

  What if an advice columnist were murdered? What if the newspaper replaced her by running a contest? These were some of the questions Gary started asking himself when he began to write his murder mystery Baffled in Boston. The idea for that came about, incidently, because Gary entered a contest to replace the famous advice columnist Ann Landers, who was retiring. He didn't write about that experience, but he did draw upon it.

  What if a policeman tracking down a serial killer in the Blitz of London comes to think the killer is a werewolf? This was the starting idea for my novel Werewolf.

  Back in the 1800s, there were stories of sea monsters in the North Atlantic. Sailors would come back and report seeing them, and the "monsters" became all the talk. Herman Melville heard these stories and asked himself, What if one of these monsters was a great white whale? What's more, what if his worst enemy was the obsessed captain of a whaling ship? And he wrote Moby Dick.

  Over in Europe, Jules Verne was listening to the same stories. He asked himself, What if one of these monsters was a submarine? And he wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

  H.G.Wells asked himself, What if a man could travel in time? And he sat down and wrote The Time Machine.

  Once you're into the habit of coming up with book ideas, one of the best ways to decide which to play with and which to ignore is to focus on those ideas that seem to insistently nag you. Each time you try to ignore the idea, it comes back a little more formed and shaped and insistent than before until eventually you have no choice but to sit down and write your story.

  With nonaction book ideas, consider first: Who is my audience? Is it men? Is it women? Is it men and women? It's worth remembering that men and women have different interests in what they want to learn from books.

  Is the topic a big enough idea that twenty to thirty thousand copies of this book could be sold? Will my idea appeal to a broad, though distinctive, audience? A good rule of thumb is to think: Am I affected by this topic? And if not, is someone I know—a friend or relative perhaps—affected by it? Will people be passionate about the subject? If they're only mildly interested, th
ey more than likely won't buy the book in large enough numbers to make it worth publishing.

  THE GERM OF AN IDEA

  Here are a few quick ways to come up with ideas for stories, whether fiction or nonfiction:

  • Scour newspapers, magazines, and other sources of current events; what are the implications for the broadest number of people in these ideas?

  • Invent lives for strangers you observe as you go about your daily business

  • Think about something that happened to you or someone you know. What would have happened if things had gone differently? How many times have we said, "If only . .."?

  • Spontaneously write an opening "hook" or sentence

  • Rewrite fairy tales and legends as modern stories.

  As you can see, ideas are relatively easy to find once you start looking.

  Now, let's say you have an idea. Some nonfiction ideas work well as articles in newspapers or magazines but don't hold up as books. So how can you tell what will make a book and what will make a successful article?

  First of all, to make a successful book, even if it's a negative idea, say about those who are facing imminent death or about debunking popular myths, you need to find a positive spin on the topic. People don't want to spend twenty-odd dollars to be told things are dreary and impossible to achieve; they want to get some intimation of how to solve the problem.

  A great example of how to do this is The Physics of Star Trek, by Lawrence M. Krauss. Instead of telling us that warp speed is impossible or that we will never develop the ability to beam people from one place to another, Krauss takes an idea and tells us what we would have to do and the laws of physics we would have to deal with in order to achieve so-and-so. The difference in going from a negative spin to a positive spin on the same idea is a fascinating and imaginative adventure into the realms of higher science as opposed to spending time with someone who constantly tells you what can't be done and that there's no future in thinking it can be done.

  Once you have your idea, you are cultivating the germ, the first cell of an organism that eventually will take on a life of its own and become a book. That germ can end up being a major element in the story.

  For example, every day on your way to work or shopping, you pass an abandoned Quonset hut, and eventually you write a story about a homeless family that moves into that hut. The germ of the story can also end up being a small part of the story, for example, a heist story that climaxes when the police chase the thieves into an abandoned Quonset hut.

  The germ can also be something that never makes the cut into the final version of the story. For example, in the final draft of your heist story, you get rid of the Quonset hut and have your robbers run into McDonald's instead. It doesn't matter. The germ is just the thing that got you going.

  As you develop your idea, there are certain things about this germ, this idea of yours, that you should question. Ask yourself, Is it a good idea or a bad idea?

  WHAT MAKES A BAD IDEA?

  Let's look at the qualities of a bad idea first. Most bad ideas come into existence because the writer was drawn to them for the wrong reasons.

  There are three things that can tip you off that your idea is probably a bad one. Apply what Gary called his F.I.T. test:

  Familiarity

  Importance

  Truth

  Let's start with Familiarity. Students would come up to Gary and say things such as, "I've got a fabulous idea for a book. My cousin has a niece who has a brother who's robbed six or seven Laundromats. I'll write a book about him, and with all the money I make, I'll be able to pay for his legal defense."

  What's wrong with that? Well, unless you're related to Jeffrey Dahmer, O.J. Simpson, or someone equally notorious people are clamoring to read about, just because your cousin's nephew's aunt's brother did something "dodgy" that you know about doesn't mean it's a good idea for a book. Any good fiction writer could invent something like this.

  This also applies to narrative nonfiction, which (unlike journalism where the event itself is the important piece of information to focus on) is about the meaning of the event. It's what you make of the event, how it affects you as a person, that's significant.

  The second quality of a bad idea is Importance. An idea may be important to you because it comes from your life. But just because you have particular access to something doesn't automatically make it a good idea. A lot of times people will come up to me and say something such as, "I've spent twenty years in this company where they freeze-dry coffee. I'd like to write a book about this experience." Great. Apart from the fact that maybe you've got a permanent case of caffeine jitters, now what?

  A less frivolous example is the woman who watches her husband slowly waste away from cancer, and when he's gone she has this "great idea" and decides she will write about a woman watching her husband die of cancer for two years.

  This is a literary agent or editor's nightmare. You hate to tell somebody that a wrenching experience such as that or, more generally, the first twenty years of her life is not interesting enough to sustain even an article, let alone a good book idea. But the fact is, we've all been doing something for twenty years: making pizza, drilling holes in umbrella handles, whatever. Am I saying you can't write a good book about someone dying of cancer? Of course not. What I am saying is that because it is an important subject to you does not automatically make it a good idea. Such books are often a form of therapy (writers write, after all, at least partly to make sense of their lives), and the project will likely be doomed by the very sentiments that inspired you to write it.

  Certainly, any idea you want to write about should be important to you, but it doesn't automatically follow that any idea that is important to you is a good idea. Don't throw yourself into an idea on the basis of that.

  Which leads us to the third quality: Truth. Just because it's true doesn't make it a good idea. If editors and agents had a nickel for every time a beginning writer responded to criticism with a plaintive, "But it's true," we'd all be very wealthy people.

  "But my cousin Jake really was married nineteen times," you say. Well, sometimes an idea that's true isn't even necessarily believable. In any case, you could make up a story about a guy who's been married nineteen times and it really wouldn't get you very far.

  So remember, when you're working on developing story ideas, don't have a F.I.T.: Familiarity. Importance. Truth.

  What these three things have in common is that they are based on the writer's needs. They make it easier for the writer; he doesn't have to do research; he doesn't have to "make stuff up." None of them are based on the reader's needs or wants.

  Another test: Have you come across your idea in someone else's books or seen it on TV or in movies? If so, chances are it's not worth writing about because someone's beaten you to it. Occasionally, though, you can find ways to put a fresh spin on an existing idea.

  RESHAPING EXISTING IDEAS

  Jim, a student of Gary's, had the idea that a wildlife biologist (who was part Sioux and a student Native American shaman) would help reintroduce the timber wolf into the wilds of the United States. As is the case in many werewolf novels, people start dying in nasty ways, and it is found that among the wolves, there is a werewolf, the last of her breed.

  Now, even when done well, this is a fairly familiar idea, and Jim and I discussed various ways to spin the idea and make it fresh. What we came up with was this: Suppose, instead of the bodies of the victims being humans, the bodies were those of wolves. And that in order to protect and save the last of the wolves, a female, from the human predators, the shaman has to shape-shift into a wolf form. But having done so, he can't turn back. So in the end, while the hero gets the girl, in this case the girl turns out to be a female wolf and the hero had to become a wolf in order to fulfill his destiny.

  Clearly there was a lot more to Jim's plot than I mention here, and a lot more to the way we discussed reshaping it. The point is that we decided to shift around the idea until we ca
me up with a fresh angle on a potentially tired story and theme.

  So study your genre or your topic and know it well enough to be familiar with what's been done and what hasn't. What's fresh and new and yet familiar enough it can still fit into the main body of books published in this area? This is called looking for a hole, that is, something that hasn't been done quite that way before.

  Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, for example, is really a kind of Sherlock Holmes novel. What if Sherlock Holmes was a medieval monk and Dr. Watson was his student?

  Find a hole, and you will usually find a good idea in there somewhere.

  IDENTIFYING GOOD IDEAS

  So what exactly are the reader's needs? What are some qualities of a good idea that will encourage a reader to plunk down twenty-five dollars (or six dollars for a paperback) to buy your book?

  Here's another of Gary's acronyms: W.A.G.S. W.A.G.S. stands for World, Active, Goals and Stakes.

  World

  This is the narrative world to which you will take your reader. People read fiction and narrative nonfiction (such as biographies) to escape their lives. Strong stories, whether fiction or nonfiction, take you to new worlds and introduce you to new and interesting people and ideas. A guy who works at an insurance company all day long doesn't want to come home and read about an insurance company.

  This guy wants to read about how characters resolve high-powered ethical and moral dilemmas he hopes he will never be faced with but that call up powerful emotional responses: Do I save the three hundred people on the approaching train that will crash if I don't lower the bridge, and crush my six-year-old daughter who has crawled out onto the track and gotten stuck? Or do I save her and kill all the people on the train instead? Welcome to my world.