when I managed it last year, I was safe in a quiet cubicle. Second, I need to focus more on The Willows before I devote the bulk of my energy to another novel; we're expanding at a rate I can scarcely manage--which is the sort of trouble known as "good problems." Finally, I had an epiphany about the way protagonists in horror are written; it's changed the way I approach characters, and I'll cover it in an article soon.So, as you may have guessed by now, I did not finish NaNoWriMo this year. I did not approach viewing distance of the finish line. My second novel, I learned, needs some time to gestate.
But enough about my (dearth of) adventures. Today I'd like to discuss an aspect of writing to which some authors cling with desperation, while others sneer at it: the formula. One formula in particular, actually; a set of three points which must intersect at certain angles to produce an enjoyable tale. Since math is my sworn mortal enemy, we'll approach this verbally.
The essential premise here is that most of us will read a story about a topic we're quite interested in, whether it's particularly well-written or not. We'll enjoy a story that's brilliantly written, even if it concerns a topic of little interest to us. And we'll usually take the time for a story well-told, even if the grammar and topic are a bit undesirable to us.
In short, the best writing encompasses...
1) A good story
2) Well written
3) About a topic interesting to the reader
The first condition is not as simple as it sounds; a tale can be action-packed but remain dull. This tends to arise from lack of interesting ideas, and a padding of repetitive fights or chases. A good story, then, is a worthwhile idea or series of ideas, presented in a unique way. The Epic of Gilgamesh was a unique story when it was first told. So was Frankenstein. These days, the author is under more pressure than ever to assemble ideas that have undoubtedly been explored before, and synthesize them into unique concepts.
Condition two is a bit more obvious, but good grammar is only the beginning of quality writing. This condition encompasses everything we monitor at the sentence and paragraph levels: are our metaphors ham-fisted? Does each sentence in a paragraph flow in easy rhythm? Are we varying our word and punctuation choices? The less a reader is forced to struggle through sloppy writing, the more likely he or she will be to ride along until the end of the story.
The final condition seems the most evasive. As all authors know, good stories spring from our own passions and discoveries, not from a desire to appease a demographic (we leave that to our publicists). The best one can hope for in this department is an idea worthy of consideration, with enough implications to carry a narrative. Not all ideas will; we've all experienced moments of "that phrase would make a great story--but a story about what, exactly?" Nevertheless, a great idea alone can make for a splendid piece of flash fiction, or a moving poem.
Now for the clincher: if one of these values decreases, the others must increase accordingly. Once, I wrote part of a story while polishing off a bottle of Jameson. The next morning when I read what I'd composed, I found I'd addressed some intriguing questions about societal propriety, religion, and the afterlife, all packed into a rambling series of incoherent scenes and horrid dialogue.
You may have experienced something similar (perhaps while stumbling drunk, like me): your conceptualization may have been wonderfully out-of-the-box, but your storytelling was nonexistent--yet you may have experienced an urge to finish the tale and polish it into readability. In that case, you've witnessed the pull of the conditions on one another: the storytelling itself was lacking, but your topic was intriguing enough to pull you through.
Other permutations are common. We've all read a ripping pulp yarn that was filled with Tom-Swifties and said-bookisms, but held our attention throughout. JK Rowling's prose is utilitarian at best, but her concepts have revolutionized modern fantasy. Stephen King's descriptions are clunky, but nearly every King book I've ever opened has kept me wide-eyed long after bedtime. As readers, we're often willing to stick it out through hundreds of pages, trapped in place by sheer suspense.
Ideally, of course, we'd like our work to uphold all three conditions, but for the purposes of this article, it's their interrelationship that's more interesting. The bottom line is that if we want readers to continue returning to our tales, we must repeatedly create a sense of flow; the reader must feel that reading what we write isn't a labor. We use a bewildering variety of methods to achieve this flow: some of us hold the reader in suspense, some of us make them laugh out loud, and some of us make them sleep with the light on. Writing in any genre, however, boil down to these three principles: a good story, well told, about a topic interesting to the reader.
