Tag Archives: the craft of writing

Covid-Time Writer Craft: Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass

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Some two decades after its original publication, this how-to by an industry insider is still well worth a read.

While my 2001 edition has bits about the industry that are somewhat dated, there is a lot to be learned from this book.

I met Donald Maass, once. It was at a writer’s conference, a few years after he published Breakout — which gives you a clue about how long I’ve been at this crazy business. Amazon had not yet released the first Kindle. You had only two choices, if you wanted to become a working novelist. You could land an agent. Or you could send your manuscript to a publisher and hope it didn’t get lost in the slush pile.

I was at the conference in the hopes that I’d find an agent for Loose Dogs, and I managed to schedule a pitch meeting with Maass, which felt like a huge deal at the time.

He didn’t take me on. Therefore no, I’m not typing this on a solid gold keyboard. But I also attended a talk he gave that was based on Writing the Breakout Novel, and after I got home I ordered a copy.

And then recently, I picked it up again and realized (cliche alert!) that the book has stood the test of time.

Break-out success = word of mouth

My edition of Breakout was released in 2001; there are industry bits at the front of the book that are definitely dated. But there’s also plenty of material, even in the introductory chapters, that’s as true today as ever. For example, at the time two-thirds of all book sales were going to “name-brand authors” — but even unknown novelists could potentially achieve best-seller status, because, Maass writes,

The next biggest reason folks buy fiction is that it has been personally recommended to them by a friend, family member, or bookstore employee.

“Savvy publishers,” he adds, try to seed this process via ARCs, sending out sample chapters via email, websites, etc. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And uncanny. It’s exactly what self-published writers do, today, to prime the word-of-mouth pump.

Premise and Stakes

Once the book moves from “why write a break-out novel” to the how’s, Maass tackles what he calls premise, which he presents as more of a process than anything else — a process, by the way, that you should start before you begin writing your actual novel. Maass advises that you consider a number of elements that are key to the break-out novel, like originality and gut emotional appeal. It makes for a useful checklist that, in my opinion, can help us novelists become more clear-eyed about our work (and potentially help us avoid creating problems in our novels that will be a lot more challenging to fix 80,000 words in).

The next chapter is about stakes, another thing we need to understand because it’s so fundamental to conflict. Our characters need to care about what happens to them, and they care what happens to them because there is a price to be paid if they don’t get what they want.

Time and Place

Maass then does a chapter on what he calls “time and place.” And you might be tempted to think he’s just found a new way to say “setting” but it’s more nuanced than that. There’s a section on the psychology of place, for example–a concept that fascinates me and that I try to consider in all of my fiction; I think of it in terms of places being characters that impact my human (or humanoid!) characters.

  • Once Upon a Flarey Tale by Kirsten Mortensen
We interrupt this post to remind you that I have a new book out. And it’s the best book I’ve ever written. Available on Amazon for print or Kindle, or click here to browse other e-formats.

The next chapter, Characters, covers another handful of concepts that you’ll find in other craft books. For example, “dark protagonists” should not be two-dimensional, but have sympathetic qualities, and all stories are ultimately character-driven.

But there are some unique nuggets here, too. For example, one tip (which I’ve internalized since I first read Breakout) is to look for places to combine characters’ roles. In When Libby Met the Fairies (which I’ve revised and am re-releasing next month, now on sale for pre-order! $4 off!) I made Libby’s boyfriend her employer as well. That let me simplify the book in terms of cast of characters (I didn’t have to create a separate character to be her boss and work him into the plot) while also enabling me to add interesting conflict to the dynamic of Libby and Paul’s relationship. She was dependent on him for income as well as intangibles like emotional support. More better stakes!

Plot

The last third or so of Breakout mostly digs into plot. There’s a chapter on plot basics, one titled Contemporary Plot Techniques, one on elements like viewpoints and subplots, and one titled Advanced Plot Techniques.

In a way, I suppose plot is the real heart of the book, because one thing that is probably true about all break-out novels is that they are plot-driven. They are stories that grip readers from the first page and then keep them interested until The End.

And to my reading, this is where Maass’ background as a long-time industry insider pays off. For example, there’s some excellent material about types of plots (fable, frame story, facade story, visitation plots) that I’ve not encountered elsewhere. Depending on what kind of novel you’re writing, there’s some rich veins in the sections on subplots and advanced plots as well.

Theme

Which brings us to the closing chapter, which is on Theme.

“Have something to say,” Maass writes. “Allow yourself to become deeply impassioned about something you believe to be true.”

Which is interesting advice, considering that Writing the Breakout Novel is a book about crafting commercial fiction, and when we think “commercial fiction” we think about money, don’t we? We think about sales and bestseller lists and the sound of corks popping out of expensive bottles of champagne.

But it’s possible that we writers (with a lot of work and a bit of luck) can have it both ways: we can be commercially successful while also exploring Big Ideas that potentially enrich readers’ lives or even change hearts and minds.

Do you agree?

And have you read Maass’ book? What did you think?

Interested in more posts like this? Click here to read my review of Story by Robert McKee.

Covid-Time Writer Craft: Story by Robert McKee

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Writers gonna write.

But as long as we’re all stuck at home during this pandemic, we can do more than just put out words, right? We can also work on our craft.

Story by Robert McKee

So in the spirit of sharing w/ my fellow writers, I thought I’d share a bit about some of the books in my writing-craft library.

First up, Story, by Robert McKee.

This is one of the more recent additions to my library. I bought it last year as I began work on my current WIP, Once Upon a Flarey Tale.

As you can see from the pic, I use sticky tabs to mark parts that I expect I’ll want to review again–and there are a lot of sticky tabs in this book :)

What You Need to Know About Story (In No Particular Order!)

McKee is a screenwriter, not a novelist. But the building blocks of movies and contemporary novels are so similar that you shouldn’t let that put you off–you’ll find a lot of terrific information here that will help you tell better stories, regardless of the medium you use to tell them.

McKee is a teacher, lecturer, and consultant. Reading this book is a lot like attending an upper-level class on story-telling.

It’s hefty. 418 pages — there is a LOT here. Which is a good thing, IMO, because the more I learn about this craft, the better. Just don’t plan to finish this one in a single sitting ;)

It’s comprehensive. You’ll find everything in this book from the basics of the classic 3-Act story structure to how to develop character motivations to what makes a good title.

Story includes a lot of highly conceptual models for understanding how to make stories work. If you’re the sort of person who benefits by seeing concepts modeled visually, you’ll find a lot of tools to your liking in this book.

The Notes I Jotted Down / Passages I Flagged

In no particular order:

“Story values” are universal qualities of human experience — and they always have polar opposites. Examples are “wise” and “stupid” or “alive” and “dead.” Every scene will have at its heart some value; in ever scene, that value should change. And if the value doesn’t change, it isn’t a scene, it’s exposition — and it needs to be cut.

To avoid cliche, master the world of your story. This was a cool insight, I thought, because when you are completely immersed in that world and relating what you see, you won’t use other peoples’ commonly repeated words — you’ll use your own, the words you invent as you look around.

Research your stories in three ways: by unleashing your powers of memory; by unleasing your powers of imagination; and by what we usually think of as research — chasing down facts.

Create a finite, knowable world. “The world of a story must be small enough that the mind of a single artist can surround the fictional universe it creates and come to know it in the same depth and detail that God knows the one He created.” McKee comes back to this same idea later in this way: “design relatively simple but complex stories.” He then explains that by “simple” he doesn’t mean simplistic, but that we should avoid the temptation to proliferate characters or locations in an undisciplined way. Instead, constrain yourself to a “contained cast and world” and focus on building complexity within that world.

(Pssst … looking for a fast, free, fun read? My romcom caper novella, The French Emerald, is free on Amazon. Click the pic to get your copy!)

But at the same time, you need to create much more material than you will ever use–five times what you use, or even 10-20 times. An example from my current WIP: I’ve written fairly details timelines of each of my character’s lives, matching them to world events as well as personal milestones. Most of this will never make it into my books, but it gives me a wonderful send of fully knowing my characters.

Don’t be afraid to abandon your original premise if you discover, as you build your story, that it doesn’t work any more. (Phew!!! Because yes, this seems to happen to me a lot!)

Related: a story “tells you its meaning.” You don’t dictate the meaning to the story …

Inciting incidents should arouse unconscious as well as conscious desires in our protagonists.

“The most compelling dilemmas often combine the choice of irreconcilable goods with the lesser of two evils.” Related: “True character can only be expressed through choice in dilemma.”

Effective scenes operate at the levels of both text and subtext.

Progression in the story is built from cycles of rising action.

“When a story is weak, the inevitable cause is that the forces of antagonism are weak.”

“Never use coincidence to turn an ending.”

Character dimension springs from that character’s internal contradictions. But those contradictions must be consistent. “It doesn’t add dimension to portray a guy as nice throughout a film, then in one scene have him kick a cat.”

“To title is to name. An effective title points to something solid that is actually in the story.”

What I Liked About Story

This book is so obviously the culmination of many, many years of McKee’s work, teaching the craft of story-telling. There are countless nuggets in here that writers can grab and put to use to improve the quality of our novels.

What I Didn’t Like So Much

So much of what McKee conveys, he does so using conceptual models. The danger for me is that if I get caught up in understanding the model, I lose track of my most effective compass as a writer, which is based on feel: on how I react to something I’ve put down on the page.

How about you? Have you read Story? Do you have a favorite writer’s craft book that you would recommend?

UPDATE: Click here to read the next post in this series where I review Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass.

Can you think a good book?

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That’s a serious question.

I’m pondering it because of the explosion of writerly advice that crops up all over the intertubes these days.

Like this piece, which has a lot to offer, don’t get me wrong.

And goodness knows craft is important.

But I wonder sometimes.

For the first couple hundred years after the birth of “the novel,” writers didn’t worry about things like “structure.” Yet they managed to turn out very nice books.

How?

Okay, devil’s advocate. Maybe only *some* of them turned out very nice books. Maybe I don’t realize how many terrible novels were written by contemporaries of Fielding and Tolstoy and Dostoevski and James and Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Maybe there were hundreds or thousands of self-pubbed novels along the way that were such crap it was good riddance to them the second they were forgotten.

But that still doesn’t explain how someone working with pen and paper or typewriter could turn out an Anna Karenina or Great Gatsby without first having consumed a library’s worth of books on the craft of writing.

How could that happen?

Well. Maybe it has to do with oral story-telling.

Maybe great writers — in the classical sense — are (were?) actually great listeners. And I mean listening in the sense of paying attention to how how language — and more specifically story-telling — affects other people.

Can you tell, when you’re relating something that happened to you while you were at the grocery store last week, when your audience has begun to lose interest?

(Ooh, I hope so!)

It doesn’t have to be when you tell a story in the formal sense. We all constantly narrate our lives to other people. We’re constantly telling stories. When someone asks you how you’re doing, and you say, “I think I’m coming down with a cold,” you’re telling a story. A very dull story incidentally. Please spice it up next time. Give your story some structure!

I was about to walk out the door when my neighbor — you know, the one who can’t afford a car so she rides that ridiculous power scooter everywhere — asked me to look after her kid (again? are you kidding me???)  — five minutes she said, right, it was more like an hour, and the kid has this horrific cold, she soaked a box and a half of Kleenex easily before mom toodled back up on her scooter again, and of course three days later I wake up all stuffy, fever of a hundred and two, omg, please bring soup!

But that’s not all. If at any point during your tale about your self-centered neighbor and her snot-nosed urchin you notice your audience’s attention is starting to wane — you edit. Immediately. On the spot.

I was about to walk out the door when my neighbor — you know, the one who can’t afford a car so she rides that ridiculous power scooter everywhere — asked me to look after her kid (again? are you kidding me???) — well long story short, the kid had a cold, gave it to me, I’m miserable, please bring soup!

We’d get a lot closer to spinning good stories on paper if we paid attention to how our stories hold people’s attention when we spin stories orally.

So yeah. I think there was a time when writers honed the aspect of the craft we now label with words like “structure” by telling stories — or more specifically, by paying attention to the way people react as they listen to stories.

Tell you something else. When writers began to play with the novel as if it were a painting — moving words around as if they were objects, rather than written versions of oral language — and in that way devised what in its most extreme form we’d call experimental fiction, they began to separate the novel from the connection it once had with with oral story telling.

It amounted to a distortion, of course. So maybe one reason some people need to study “craft,” now, is because the “the novel” became so distorted that post mid 20th century writers are . . . not ignorant, exactly, but maybe the connection of the novel to oral story telling isn’t as obvious to writers today as it once was, and as it needs to be.

I’m not sure, however, that this is something that can be taught from the head. Which gets back, finally, to the title of this post. The ability to pick up on the non-verbal signals people give off, when they’re listening to a story, is not something you do with your intellect.

It’s something you do with your whole self — your body, your heart.

Imposing rules on a novel via your head might result in a novel that is well-thought-out.

But is that the same as “good”?

Reading Evelyn Waugh

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I need to update my sidebar. I’ve finished 2 more Waugh novels. Handful of Dust first. Freaked me out because I’d read Scoop and Handful of Dust is no comedy. It’s a flippin horror novel. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I just hated seeing the only decent character in the book come to such an unthinkable end. (Nice to have the background from his grandson’s memoir under my belt before reading btw — pretty obvious that Evelyn was processing the breakup of his first marriage, not to mention the rather monstrous way his father treated him.)

Next: Decline & Fall. Comic novel. Loved it.

Conclusion after Handful of Dust and Decline & Fall : the man was a masterful craftsman. The books are absolutely flawless IMO. The structure, pacing, character development, the weight he gives various aspects of the narrative — I didn’t notice a single wrong note. Haven’t been that impressed by a piece of fiction in a looong time. And all the more impressive considering D&F was his first novel.

Another not-original-observation — Evelyn considered becoming a cabinetmaker originally, and the books have a very constructed feel to them. You do feel like you’re experiencing something 3-dimensional, with drawers that you open and find something important inside, and depth & weight, and just the right touch of artful decoration here & there. Like the glimpse of an inside joke or a throwaway line about a minor character that makes the hair on your neck stand up, it’s so well done.

Reading Vile Bodies now. Enjoying it. Still in the first half. His first wife left him while he was writing it; I understand you can tell, the book changes midway through, where he stopped writing and then later picked it up again . . .