Tribal Writer

The middle act is a bitch.

The middle act defeats many a formidable writer.

I’m approaching the middle of my own novel-in-progress THE DECADENTS. I was reading James Scott Bell’s book PLOT AND STRUCTURE and it occurred to me that I need to think of the middle act as a crucible.

A ‘crucible’ is a melting pot: a vessel made of material that is used for high temperature chemical reactions. It makes me think of disaster films. I always like the idea of disaster films (even if the films themselves tend to suck): a group of people, usually strangers to each other, get trapped in a burning building or sinking ship or remote island and have to work together to survive.

The point is, they are stuck together. They can’t go back to before the disaster. They have to move forward and deal with the situation, and whatever obstacles and confrontations it throws at them, in order to find a way to safety.

This is what a middle act is. It’s like a vessel that contains all the characters and forces them to deal with each other (and themselves).

When you read about story structure, you come across various terms like ‘inciting incident’ and ‘plot points’ and ‘call to adventure’ and whatever.

Bell uses the idea of doorways. The beginning of the story is about set-up: introducing the characters, establishing their ‘ordinary world’ and then introducing the first signs of change. This change might at first be very subtle, but it’s a threat to the status quo. This is known as ‘an inciting incident’ or ‘call to adventure’ or what Bell calls ‘a disturbance’.  The crucible starts to form. In a disaster film, this is the first inkling of trouble that the characters might or might not notice (but the audience certainly does). The characters might react to that change, but it hasn’t trapped them in a situation yet. They can still walk away. They still have options.

Then something happens that pushes or pulls them through the first “doorway”. The “doorway” is the transition point from the beginning to the middle, and it happens when the characters pass a point of no return. In a disaster film, this is usually when the disaster happens. In a more subtle type of story, it can be anything that compels the protagonist to make some kind of decision or commitment (whether voluntary or not) that puts all the established elements into play and sets the course of the rest of the story.  The crucible is complete, and the story is what it is: the protagonist is forced to move through it in order to find a way out.

(The crucible, by the way, has to do with the structure of the story. The plot is what happens inside that structure.)

The protagonist is never alone inside the crucible. There are other people in there with him — including the antagonist(s). This is when group dynamics emerge, characters are revealed and relationships form, strengthen, or come apart. But the point is that the main characters, including the antagonist, are trapped in the situation. Nobody can walk away. Everyone is forced to deal with each other and their conflicting agendas. The protagonist and the antagonist (defined as anything and everything that blocks the protagonist’s pursuit of his goal, whether it’s ancient Mayan treasure or personal enlightenment) are locked in what Dara Marks calls “a unity of opposites”.

After all, if the characters can just walk away from the situation, or each other, where’s the story?

This was the big mistake I made in my first post-university novel, a psychological literary effort called SWAY, which landed me my first literary agent but was rejected by all the major houses. Editors liked the characters, thought I had talent, yadda yadda, but said the book “lacked structure” or “unfolded awkwardly”. I realize, now, that the book had a promising first act, but then slowly fell apart because the writer never applied what Bell calls ‘adhesive’: any reason that would glue the characters to each other and prevent them from leaving the situation.

There was no unity of opposites.

There was no transitional doorway, no passage into a crucible.

There was, in short, no crucible: the protagonist was free to walk away from the situation at any time, and the fact that she didn’t, as my agent commented, made her seem “kind of crazy”. It also screwed up the rest of the novel.  Because it was a literary novel, a genre that places such importance on language and characterization, it limped along as far as it did.

Bell talks about “the second doorway” (or what screenwriters would call ‘plot point two’): it’s when something happens that changes the situation and swings the story toward the big showdown, the final resolution. The characters are out of the crucible — the middle act — but now the elements are aligned and the momentum so strong that all they can do is rush toward an ending that will seem, to the reader, inevitable (yet somehow unpredictable).

Going back to my crucible analogy, I would say that this is when the temperature heats up (the stakes rise, the confrontations get more serious, the problems deepen, the conflict escalates) until finally the crucible can’t take it anymore. The “second doorway” is the point when the crucible shatters. The characters are free of it — they’re in act three now — but everything that got established inside the crucible must now play out to its inevitable conclusion.

What do you think?

1. Make the character exceptional at something.

Give your character a trait or skill that makes him or her admirable in some way.

It doesn’t have to be anything over-the-top. Maybe she’s an office manager…who is an amazing cook. Maybe he’s a rebellious teenager…who is unusually perceptive.

As soon as that character is really good at something, the reader perks up. The reader gets interested.

2. Make the character care about someone other than herself.

This is so effective that screenwriters often use a “save the cat” scene (and the better the screenwriter, the subtler the scene) near the beginning of the screenplay to make the audience like and identify with the character. That character might be a hard-drinking, womanizing, self-absorbed prick….except on his way out the door he stops to pet a dog and give him a treat, or get a cat out of a tree, or send money to his mama. Boom. We like him.

As soon as you show the character genuinely caring about the world, the reader starts to care.

3. Make your good characters do bad things and bad characters do good things.

Hands-down, one of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever received in my life.

4. Give your character a unique voice.

I’m not talking about dialect or verbal tics or anything gimmicky. But everyone has their own natural, signature way of talking and writing. Your characters should not all sound the same. If five different characters give five different speeches, the reader should instantly identify which character is giving which speech.

5. Give your character a life that bleeds beyond the page.

Your characters might exist for the sake of the story…but you need to create the illusion that they don’t.

This is where a character’s backstory comes in handy, often through casual references to things that are relevant enough to get mentioned, but not worth going into detail about (“the stainless steel Rolex that her Aunt Lydia gave her for her twenty-first birthday” – who is Aunt Lydia? Who cares? It’s just good to know that the character has one, it roots her in a deeper broader context).

George Lucas made the observation that science-fiction filmmakers will often make the mistake of showing too much of the new world/culture at the expense of the actual story. They spent all this time developing that world and want to show their work.

But what the reader sees should be the tip of the iceberg that suggests the bulk below the water. The reader may only need glimpses, shadows, to know the rest of the iceberg exists…but the reader needs to believe it exists in order for the writer to have real authority.

I’ll be honest: a lot of those ‘relevant details’ (like Aunt Lydia) you can make up as you go along. But it helps to have a backstory. Just don’t bore the reader with the backstory! Use it when relevant to create that sense of depth and support.

6. Give your character a passion.

Passionate people are interesting. They just are. They are dynamic and active, they care about something other than themselves. And often people are passionate about things they are naturally good at, which hooks back to #1 above.

7. Give your character an obsession.

Obsession is interesting. It just is. An obsessed character wants something – or someone – in a way that creates drive, urgency, potential conflict, story. An obsession also reveals a lot about character.

8. Know your character’s psychic wound.

The past is alive in all of us. The past has trained us to react in certain ways. If your character was used or shamed as a child, that’s going to affect him as an adult: he might seek solace in a fantasy world, he might fear intimacy and pursue novelty and intensity instead. Stuff like that.

The more you know about your character’s past, the more you know about how your character reacts to the present. And this is relevant to the story.

9. Give your character an attitude. Understand how your character relates to other people.

No one lives in a vacuum. She thinks she’s inferior, or superior; she’s trusting, or she’s not trusting; she’s introverted, she’s attention-seeking; he’s chivalrous, or he resents that women get “special treatment”, or he’s chivalrous in order to seduce women while quietly resenting that they get “special treatment”….etc.

How does your character treat people, and how do people treat your character in return?

10. Know what your character wants the most.

Desire rules us. We go after the things that we want. That’s where ‘story’ lives.

11. Know what your character fears the most.

And then force your character to confront that fear in order to get what they want.

12. Think about how your character’s appearance impacts his/her life and personality.

Physical description in and of itself is static and boring; it becomes more interesting when you use it to suggest, imply, and reveal character.

Our appearance is our interface with the world. We shape and are shaped by it. If your character is unusually good-looking, for example, give some thought to the consequences of that. I know a man who gets so much attention for his looks that he deliberately dresses down, and refuses to fix his teeth, because he’s concerned that people won’t take him seriously. That, to me, is more interesting and says more about him than some throwaway line about piercing blue eyes and a chiseled jawline.

13. Give your character some ‘blind spots’.

There are things we know about ourselves, and that other people know about.

There are things we know about ourselves that other people don’t know about.

There are things other people can see and know about us….that we actually don’t know about. The character might think he’s being clever and manipulative, for example, when actually he’s quite transparent. People will often be polite and play along in order to avoid confrontation.

That gap between self-perception, and the perception of others, can lead to some interesting dramatic moments.

That’s it for now. Feel free to add anything that I’ve missed.

Subscribe?

Part One is here

1. READ.
Reading is so non-negotiable that I wrote what is practically a manifesto about this– and I’m not talking casual, three-books-a-year reading, or even three books a month. John D MacDonald put the standard at three books a week (tip: it helps to get rid of your TV set). Stephen King says that reading “is the creative center of a writer’s life.”

Read books. Lots of books. Especially the type of books you think you want to write.

And honestly, so few aspiring writers actually do this — read enough — that to commit yourself to this kind of reading will give you a huge competitive advantage. Huge.

2. WRITE.
Okay. I’m stating the obvious here, but everybody who wants to write knows how easy it is not to do it. I am no exception. I procrastinate like hell. But writing is like sex (or at least good sex): the more you get, the more you tend to want. Find the time. Write around “the edges of your life” as one successful novelist put it. Work it into your schedule and make it part of your routine, so that sitting down and starting to write becomes as reflexive as any other habit. Establish rituals that will anchor you. I write at the same place every day and listen to music. As soon as I’m at my desk, confronting my laptop, and turning on iTunes, I can feel my writingmind leap to attention. It knows it’s bidness time.

There are two elements to your writing practice:

a) Voice.
The more you write, the more you develop it, and a fresh, killer voice is what editors want and need. Your voice is your signature. It stamps everything you do. The great thing is, you don’t have to struggle to ‘learn’ your voice – you shouldn’t be consciously thinking about your ‘voice’ at all. Your voice is everything you read and think and dream about filtered through the unique prism of your personality and developed naturally over the course of (say it with me boys and girls) ten thousand hours. Any type of writing will help you find your ‘voice’, whether it’s journaling, blogging, commenting in online forums, even emailing (one reason why I adore my writer friends: they give great email).

b) Storytelling.
Good writing and good storytelling are two different things. Writing is the medium through which the principles of storytelling make themselves manifest; writing is the how, and storytelling is the what. If you put in ten years of journalism or business writing, you might have developed an ease with language and a distinctive voice, but it doesn’t mean you’re experienced in the ways of plot, character, tone, pacing, etc. If you want to write fiction, you need to be practicing the art of writing fiction. There is no substitute.

3. SEEK OUT THE BEST CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM. REVISE ACCORDINGLY.
Most aspiring writers don’t or can’t do this. Which, like reading, is a chance to vault yourself into a subset of aspiring writers who have a much greater chance of success.

Show your work. Learn to take criticism. Learn to love criticism, because great criticism is probably the one and only ’shortcut’ (I use the word loosely) to becoming a much better writer.

Do yourself a favor and be ‘teachable’.

Criticism itself is a skill. Your ability to give constructive criticism, to identify why a piece isn’t working and how to change that, grows with your knowledge of craft (and vice versa).

You also need to learn how to absorb the criticism you receive. You must recognize what is relevant to your work and what you can safely cast aside. Although a lot – if not most — of the criticism will indeed prove fairly useless, the ego throws up all sorts of defense mechanisms that can obscure your judgment and enable you to create these deluded explanations about why your piece is perfect and other people don’t know what they’re talking about. I once watched a writer receive what I thought was excellent advice from a prominent agent regarding his manuscript, that nonetheless would have required a massive rewrite he didn’t want to do (he “didn’t have the time”). He rejected the agent’s advice, saying that he was following his own artistic vision and refused to compromise, yadda yadda. Did the agent represent him? No. Did the book sell? No. Did the book deserve to sell? In my opinion, no – but it had amazing potential, and if he had opened his mind to the agent’s advice I think he would have had something remarkable.

The ability to write well includes the ability to revise – to treat your work as fluid, shifting, organic. Your original vision is never set in stone. Allow me to emphasize this: IT IS NEVER SET IN STONE.

Revision = re/vision = re/envisioning your manuscript. The best ideas are rarely if ever your first ideas. Give your story a chance to surface the real, true vision of what it needs to be.

4. RINSE AND REPEAT.

Self-explanatory.

And, because this is 2010, I would add a fifth step:

5. BLOG.

If you want to be a successful writer, do you need a blog? In a word, yes.

The future is here, and more future is coming at us fast. There will no doubt be exceptions that prove the rule, but success will go to those who can connect with their readers online (and continue to grow their readerbase). When I discover a new writer I like, I find that I now expect him or her to have some kind of online presence – and if they don’t, I get annoyed. I feel unloved. And I’m not the only one.

Blogging is a skill and an art all its own, and a great fiction writer who becomes a great blogger, and knows how to move around online, will be mighty like a Jedi. Blogging is also so new that you don’t have to log 10,000 hours to become among the best at it. But, like anything else, it has a learning curve, and requires practice.

I might be biased because I love to blog almost as much as I love to write fiction, but I also think blogging helps you write better fiction. That, however, is a post for another day.

Subscribe?

Tweet This!

You might love or hate Malcolm Gladwell, but since his book OUTLIERS came out the idea of “10,000 hours” has entered mainstream culture.

Gladwell argues:

When we look at any kind of cognitively complex field — for example, playing chess, writing fiction or being a neurosurgeon — we find that you are unlikely to master it unless you have practiced for 10,000 hours. That’s 20 hours a week for 10 years.

I first heard this idea not from Gladwell but a writing teacher over twenty years ago, when I was 13 (and just starting to form some serious ambitions of my own). “Fiction writing,” she told me, “has a ten-year apprenticeship.” Years later, attending a workshop in San Diego as an unpublished writer, I heard this echoed in the words of a published novelist I went to dinner with: “It takes at least ten years to figure out what you’re doing,” he told me, “and in many cases, fifteen.”

Ten thousand hours equals…guess what? Ten years.

‘Practice’, though, turns out to be too general a term. If twenty years of experience can mean the same year of experience times twenty, then Gladwell’s rule can mean the same hour of crappy, half-hearted practice times ten thousand.

And that won’t get you very far.

It has to be the right kind of practice.

It’s called “deliberate practice”.

And according to Geoff Colvin,deliberate practice matters way more than talent (hence the title of his book about peak achievers, TALENT IS OVERRATED):

Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, “The evidence we have surveyed … does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.”

To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness.

What separates the great from the rest is no secret. It’s like your mama told you. Nose to the grindstone.

….even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule…and as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, “The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.” In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith.

Except it has to be a particular type of grindstone.

Cal Newport has an excellent post at his blog Study Hacks that lists the characteristics defining DP, which he regards as “the most important (and most under-appreciated) step toward building a remarkable life.”

THE SIX CHARACTERISTICS OF DELIBERATE PRACTICE:

1. It’s designed to improve performance. “The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice.”

2. It’s repeated a lot. “High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.”

3. Feedback on results is continuously available. “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.”

4. It’s highly demanding mentally. “Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it ‘deliberate,’ as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.”

5. It’s hard. “Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.”

6. It requires (good) goals. “The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome.”

(The characteristics of deliberate practice, as I pointed out in a blog post of my own, feed directly into ‘the zone’ or ‘state of flow’, where time disappears and you lose yourself in what you’re doing…which makes those ten thousand hours fly by a lot faster.)

Newport observes that

“most active professionals will get better with experience until they reach an “acceptable level,” but beyond this point continued “experience in [their field] is a poor predictor of attained performance.”

It seems, then, that if you integrate any amount of DP into your regular schedule, you’ll be able to punch through the acceptable-level plateau holding back your peers. And breaking through this plateau is exactly what is required to train an ability that’s both rare and valuable

Because as Colvin observes: “…. the opportunities for achieving advantage by adopting the principles of great performance are huge.”

So what does ‘deliberate practice’ look like if you want to be a fiction writer in the twenty first century?

I sold three novels to two major publishers (Penguin and Simon & Schuster) and I’m still putting in a lot of deliberate practice of my own. I wrote my first novel when I was 14. I am now 37. And I’m just beginning to feel confident that I know what I’m doing.

If I could go back and give my younger self a blueprint for DP, it would look like the following. Some of this, I always did. Some of it, I could have done sooner and more often, and I would now be further ahead as a result.

–CONTINUED TOMORROW–

Subscribe?