Three Notes To Self from The Writer Unboxed Unconference: Risk Aversion, Agency, Make a Mess

Earlier in November I had the great good fortune to attend The Writer Unboxed first ever UnConference. It was mind-blowingly awesome and my take-aways were many, but three in particular keep rolling through my system a couple of weeks later. As Lisa Cron would urge, it's time for me to get specific:

Risk Aversion:
Meg Rosoff led a session on voice that consisted of 40 questions to ask yourself. Ranging from What is something you really love, to If you died tomorrow, how would you spend your night, to Is there a person you'd like to change places with, the questions were designed to drill down into issues and themes that resonate deeply within you and which you could use consciously to inform your writing. What you choose to write about is as important as the words you string together. Voice is more than vocabulary and syntax.

One question we spent some time in the session on was Name a turning point in your life. In sharing a catastrophic event from my early adolescence, I realized not so much that it still affects me today (I knew that) but HOW it affects me. I am a risk averse person. That shows up in my writing in characters who avoid conflict. Ah! Epiphany-ville!

Who wants to read a book with no conflict? Not me.

Note to self: Beef up your conflict.

Agency:
Time and time again, session after session, in group chats or tete-a-tetes, the same encouraging message was shared. Only you have the power to prevent forest fires. No, seriously, the message was only you can write your book and if your draft is currently broken, YOU CAN FIX IT. You've got the power (and so does Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty).

Nora Roberts says she can fix a broken page, she can't fix an empty one. Well same here and same for you too.

Note to self: You can do it!

Make a Mess:
The last day of the conference, Donald Maass presented his Writing 21st Fiction Century workshop (totally fab, if you ever have a chance I recommend taking it). His take on writing? If it's tidy, you're not playing. Make a mess. Don't be afraid to turn your characters' lives inside out, squeeze out all the layers of emotion, really get into your stories' guts and twist them (but let that be the only gut twisting allowed anywhere near your MS. As Mr. Maass rightly decrees: telling your reader about a character's guts twisting is not the same as making your readers' guts twist FOR the character).

Not to self: Go make a mess!

Are you ready to make a mess?

Creatures of Story: Hardwired for Story - Part II

 

This week we’re revisiting the idea that as humans, we’re hardwired for story and that when encountering story, we have certain expectations.

 

Lisa Cron, in her book Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence, says that readers look for patterns. Since the beginning of time, humans have searched for pattern in everything from the stars in the nighttime sky, to weather, to crops, to animal behavior and predatory habits. We each have a built-in “passion for patterns.” It’s recognizing these patterns and disruptions of patterns that has allowed us to survive as a species. “From the moment we leave the womb, [our brain] begins charting the patterns around us, always with the same agenda: What’s safe, and what had I better keep my eye on.” She argues that story is something we keep an eye on because stories often begin at a moment in a protagonist’s life when the pattern stops working or has been disrupted. It’s the day everything changed.

For readers, information gathered in a story is evidence a pattern exists, and the excitement they draw from reading comes from recognizing patterns and piecing the meaning of the pattern together. They engage and they feel smart when they’re proven right. “When a story meets our brain’s criteria, we relax and slip into the protagonist’s skin, eager to experience what his or her struggle feels like, without having to leave the comfort of home.” Readers believe that everything authors include in a story is there for a reason. A story is an interlocked pattern that will lead them somewhere meaningful.

In The Beginning
In a story, a reader expects three things: a setup, a payoff, and the road between the two situations. A reader wants a pattern to begin to emerge that tells them the elements of the story. They want to see the plot--what happens, the protagonist--the someone it happens to and how she changes because of what happens to her, and the story question--the goal.

But why is it necessary for us as humans to engage with story and put the pieces of the pattern together? Why do we even care? This story we’re experiencing hasn’t happened to us, it’s happened to some fictional protagonist. So what’s the draw?

Cron says we care because “[s]tories are about how we, rather than the world around us, change. They grab us only when they allow us to experience how it would feel to navigate the plot. Thus, story … is the internal journey, not an external one. … All elements of story … work in unison to create what appears to the reader as reality, only sharper, clearer, and far more entertaining, because stories do what our cognitive unconscious does; filter out everything that would distract us from the situation at hand.”

And it’s on this search for pattern that the reader will identify with your protagonist to navigate the rough waters of your story to find truth, meaning, and/or an entertaining experience.

Cron asserts that the three things readers look for on the first page are:

1. Whose story is this?
Who is the protagonist? “[W]hat the reader feels is driven by what the protagonist feels. We climb inside the protagonist’s skin” and we feel what she feels. Give readers a visceral experience.

2. What’s happening here?
Big picture clues in the first few pages tell us what’s happening and what issue the protagonist will struggle with for the full story. We want to immediately understand the pattern of her life and what has disrupted that pattern as the story opens.

3. What’s at stake?
Something important hangs in the balance for the protagonist, something specific to this protagonist’s quest. What is it? The reader needs to know the stakes to invest in the story.

In the End
In the end, it’s on this internal journey “along the road from setup to payoff, the reader always has the sense that it might go either way. What keeps us reading is the building desire to find out.” The internal journey creates an anticipation that readers love and keep them following the story and the character arc and it gives them an emotional payoff by the end.

Therefore, to meet these reader expectations that readers often don’t even know they possess, as writers, we need to follow three rules:

1. Provide a clear path between the setup and the payoff.
2. Create a road or journey that unfolds for a reader on the page.
3. Give the reader (and the protagonist) a payoff that is not logically impossible.

Readers are smart. Once they spot a pattern, readers will test it against their own knowledge of the world. If you, as a writer, don’t think about the road between setup and payoff, take them on a meaningful journey between the two, and give them a logical payoff in the end, they’ll walk away unsatisfied. And there’s nothing worse for a Creature of Story than to walk away dissatisfied from something they were hardwired to crave and use to find meaning in their own lives. Give them a worthy setup, a good payoff, and the emotional journey between the two.

It’s what readers deserve. It’s what they expect. It’s what they need.