Write!: Find the Truth in Your Fiction

Exercise

PREFACE

Thanks for choosing this book. It’s for anyone who wants to tell a story. Storytellers, that’s who we are. We dream up stories and write them down.

Why?

Because we want to tell the world a tale. We want people to gather around so we can entertain them and show them how we think and feel about life. We want to capture their imaginations and, if we can, even enrich their lives.

Why?

Because when we were young, we were captured by stories and taken away, swept into the magic, lost for a while, and loving it. And for us, this love turned into desire. What is it we wanted? It wasn’t easy to say it, even to ourselves. It was a big leap . Maybe we just whispered it the first time. We found ourselves wondering if we could create this magic. Could we? Could we create the fictions we so loved? Be the Storymaker? Why not try? And we did. We had to. We set out on our own adventure to dream our own stories and write them down.

How?

That’s what this book is about. It’s not a rule book. I don’t believe in rule books for writing or for any kind of art. This book describes how I make up stories and how I write them down. It gives examples because in my way of doing this strange and wondrous and difficult task, you may find something that is helpful to you. I think it’s worth a try.

1. INSPIRATION

My goal as a writer is to move readers through my storytelling, placing them inside moments of my invention. I don’t want them simply observing. I want them feeling something about it. I want them invested, involved.

If you’re writing an e-mail to a friend and you want to tell your friend the story of what happened to you at a party, you say, Listen to this. You’re about to report something. But if you create a story and tell it to your friend, you say, Imagine this. You’re creating something from your imagination, and this creation is one of the arts. Making art means making choices, even at the time of inspiration, even as the idea strikes you.

Where do your ideas come from? people ask. They just show up, bless them. I’m speaking of fictional storytelling, where the idea may come in the form of a what-if.

You can’t force ideas to show up. They appear when you are in the shower, on a walk, in your car, or even in the middle of a conversation when your eyes glaze over and your friend says, Hey, where’d you go?

Let’s start at the very beginning of a work, the moment a big what-if strikes. (I’ll be using a lot of writing samples that come from my own work because I was inside of it, and I can tell you what I felt and thought and how I made the all-important choices.)

I was taking a walk on a remote ranch I used to escape to in Sonoma County in northern California. This was in the nineties. I was struck by the question: what if somebody was the smartest person on the planet, what would he or she know? What lies at the far limit of human intelligence—if there is a limit? Intriguing, and it made me smile because, as the writer, I would be the one to say what was at the farthest reach of the human brain.

So far it was not even an idea, just a question, just one character being smart. This is where we apply our storyteller’s mind, and shape and reshape an idea into a viable framework for a story. Now, I’m going to explain how I did the reshaping of one particular idea into an outline, a story, and a screenplay, and it all began on this walk among the trees on a ranch in Sonoma.

At its simplest, a story is a journey. The protagonist sets out or is pushed into a journey toward a goal. This journey may be both an inner and outer journey, and our goal is to capture the reader so that he or she goes on the journey, too, and feels what the protagonist feels and learns what the protagonist learns.

It can be a journey toward revenge or understanding or the end of loneliness and the beginning of love. It can be a journey toward safety in a hostile environment, a gold medal, a new life, or a meaningful death.

So that’s why, as I walked along that old fire road among the trees, I asked myself some questions.

 1. What does this protagonist need, this brilliant guy?

 2. What’s in his way? Or…

 3. Where is the conflict?

4. What is the journey he must take in order to get what he wants?

This is the kind of investigating you can do when a new idea appears in front of you. First you study it, and then you want to go beyond idea to story, even the barest bones of a story. You want to begin to stretch the idea into a tale.

In this case, we’ve started with a protagonist, so, first, study this man or woman, study the protagonist and ask yourself, what does my protagonist need; what is he or she lacking? Maybe it’s just the need to be left alone. Maybe it’s someone he or she is attracted to. Maybe it’s a goal. Maybe, as in this idea, it’s a need to know how to handle his extraordinary mental powers and still be able to stay attached to other people, to have a normal, connected life.

Basically, you are asking yourself, what’s the conflict here and what is the journey? When you invent these two elements, you begin to stretch the idea into a story.

Right now, my super intelligent protagonist is just static. But wait a minute. How about if we see the change happening, see him becoming more intelligent at a rapid pace. I thought of a man (that’s how the character appeared to me) of, let’s say, thirty-seven (already making choices). Why thirty-seven; just arbitrary? No, because at that age he’s mature, but most of his life is still ahead of him.

Something happens to him, some sort of physical shock, and from that time on, we begin to see the amazing quickening of his powers of learning, solving, creating. I should make him an ordinary guy, right? Not an intellectual to begin with. That gives him more of a journey toward and beyond genius. High school grad. Blue collar guy. More choices so that the character serves the storytelling.

What do I mean by that? Well, you want your readers or audience to relate to this man. You want them to be thinking, what if this happened to me? So you make him not a rarified intellectual, but a man of the people, a guy with a high school diploma, who is skilled at something, makes a living, and is well-liked. Why well-liked?

Again, it’s not arbitrary. You shape this man into a well-liked member of his community so that (1) the readers/audience are drawn to him; they identify with him, and (2) he has more to lose. When people in the community begin to be frightened, worried, or put-off by the changes he is going through, becoming so smart, and suddenly so curious, full of ideas, solving problems, and inventing…these people may draw back from him. On the other hand, if he starts out as a loner with no close friendships, he doesn’t have much to lose and the readers/audience won’t be as invested in the character.

What happens to him? What does he do? How does his new super intelligence begin to show itself? We’ll have to think of those pieces later. We can’t stop to try and figure everything out now. Let’s keep moving. Let’s stay with just the bones, the feel of this newborn story.

You can make choices even at this stage, by investigating yourself and how you feel when you think about your new idea. Do you want this to be a dark, intense tale or a lighter and more hopeful one, even funny maybe, and meaningful?

So, how did I feel at this point? Did I want to tell a wide-focus story? No, I wanted to keep the focus tight. No intruding media, no viral Internet fame. I didn’t want the story to grow so far and wide as to lose the audience identification, so that the reader is standing back and watching instead of being inside the tale, inside of this man.

Keep it smaller, I thought. Keep it small town. Well-liked guy in a small town, somebody we can relate to. We need to be this guy as he’s swept up into the wonder and fear of what’s happening to him, and, as I said, if he’s a well-known, well-liked guy in the town, then he has much more to lose than if he is an outsider.

This is what I call more shaping of the character to best serve the storytelling. As a popular guy, he’s used to having people like him just as he is. What will they feel as he begins to change? What’s at stake?

I just said above …as he’s swept into the wonder and fear. Wonder and fear. Now I began to feel something more about this idea. My emotions were involved. These changes would be scary for him, and there would be a price. People might believe he was going insane. Maybe they’d shy away from him, afraid of him now. The emotion was rising, and I was drawn to that. It could be poignant, could be…wait. What if this thing that was changing his intellect, making him more intelligent, was also killing him?

High Stakes

…was also killing him. I felt that in my body, in my chest. The stakes just went up. Good. This idea had power for me, had weight. It had high risks involved.

Even if you’re working on a deep, reflective novel where the pace is slow but the reader is carried along by the language and the penetrating insights, there will still be, perhaps beneath the surface, something at stake, something being searched for, something needed to make the protagonist whole.

However, if you’re writing a story with swift movement, with a lot happening in the exterior world as well as the interior, then you need to be keeping track of stakes even more and asking (1) what’s at stake here, in this scene, this chapter, this moment? And (2) are the stakes clear to the readers/audience? This is true in a comedy as well as a drama or thriller. You keep yourself aware of the stakes. You don’t let your stories flatten out with a loss of conflict, not for long.

So back to my walk in the woods and the idea of an ordinary man becoming a genius. The drama within this idea had escalated with the addition of that double-edged sword—his new intelligence that was both a blessing and a curse, and the story that was now strongly affecting me. It doesn’t mean I started to write, not quite yet.

Don’t we often carry several ideas around, each one poking us, trying to get our attention? Okay, this one was poking harder, shouting at me. Still, I had to mull. I had to test it and test it again, test it as a journey. What does he learn, what does he feel, what does he have to overcome? Once I said, yes, this is the one, it meant that months or even years of my life would be taken up by the creation of this story, and I had to ask myself, can I make it mean something to others? Mean enough? What would it really be about at its core?

In this case, what is the message and meaning: The cost of being different? The price of leading people forward through their fears? The growing power of what it is he has to share with us? The fight to hold on to himself, his friends, his girl, in the midst of all this? And what storytelling form did it best fit into? How best could I play this out—as a film, a play, or a novel? I still had many, many choices to make.

For instance, who shares this man’s life? Who else is within the tight focus of the story? I wanted to give him a close friend, someone who knows him well and sees what he’s going through so that their talks will help explore this gift and dilemma, someone who will stand by him through it all.

I wanted him also to have a love interest, not to be married and settled, but reaching toward a woman. That felt more poignant. Who else would be important? I began to shape the idea of the town doctor as a friend and mentor who has known the man all of his life.

Why that choice? Because it felt organic. Because in a small town (I grew up in one) who do people go to when they get insomnia or lose their energy or clarity: the doctor. He’s the doorway to the outside world, a kind of seer, and a man of knowledge who will be shaken by what’s happening to his friend and patient.

Who else? Let’s see…there is always a mayor and likely some town drunk and the newspaper editor and…Stop. Stop a moment. Remember to build around your protagonist, as we’ve been doing, without overcrowding your story with characters and subplots. It doesn’t matter if you have an interesting take on a town mayor. Does it fit and feel organic to the protagonist’s story? If it doesn’t, then pass on it. Keep the focus tighter than that.

The form will also determine the choices you’re using to tell your story. Will it be a sprawling novel, a tightly focused play, or a film?

I decided to write my story as a screenplay. Why? Because I began to see and feel it as a film. What does that mean? Well, in part, it means I was seeing images of nature. I found myself picturing not only the small town but also the elements of nature near this town. I had a feeling that the rapidly unfolding intelligence of this man would somewhere intersect with the natural world, and his knowledge would not be all numbers and theories but a deeper understanding of man’s place in nature, and it could be expressed by the forests and fields, hills and rivers of the very land I was trodding on that day—California’s Sonoma County.

A deeper understanding of man’s place in nature. See? I’m talking about thematic material already, and I was only at the very beginning, at the idea stage and the early, bare-bones storytelling. But the mind hurries ahead, and feelings come rushing in, and I began to feel the emotions I needed to write toward and to convey, and in my mind I was already seeing these images on the screen.

So I wrote it as a