A thought exercise for writers. Not all stories are simple adventures or romps. Stretch your Muse and consider what story mind include this moment:

His face lined with pain and compassion, the hand he reached out to caress those he loved instead crushed the life from them while he watched, unable to control the betrayal of his own limb and impotent to turn away.

1.  WRITE!

What makes you a writer?  Writing makes you a writer.  Being a writer says nothing about how good you are, how prolific you are, whether you are published or not.  When you write you are a writer.  When you don’t, you aren’t.  So practice your craft and proudly call yourself a writer.

2.  You are only as good as your own talent.  GET OVER IT!

You have a gift.  Maybe its a grand one and maybe you wish you could exchange it.  But you can’t.  It’s your gift and its only as good as it is.  Sure, you can learn technique and structure and vocabulary, but you can’t be any better than you have the capacity to be.  So grow up, deal with it and write fiercely.

3.  Don’t try to be Shakespeare; he didn’t!

Every human being has a unique set of experiences so every writer has a unique perspective and a unique voice.  Don’t try to copy someone’s style or subject matter or message.  Tell us what you think, what you feel, what you see.  There is a place in the universe for every individual mind.  If you try to copy the shape of someone else’s spirit, that place will have already been taken.  Be yourself and your place in the grand scheme of things is waiting.

4.  Write from your passionate self

We all wear a mask to protect us from hurt in the world.  It also blocks the light of our vision.  As children, we quickly learn which behaviors are praised and which are punished. We learn to act other than we really feel to maximize our experience.  In time,we buy into that mask, believing it is who we really are.  But the mask evens out the peaks and troughs of our passion, leaving us afraid to explore the depths of our passion and reveal our true selves in words.  To speak with a clarion voice, you must shatter the mask, discover your actual self, and thrust it into the world.

5.  Be a Story Weaver – NOT a Story Mechanic!

Structure is important but not at the expense of passion.  No one reads a book or goes to a movie to experience a great structure.  Authors come to a story to express their passions and readers and audience members come to ignite their own.  While structure is the carrier wave upon which passion is transmitted, without the passion, it’s just noise.  Conversely, passion without structure can be full of sound and fury yet signifying nothing. So find the proper balance.  Let passion be your captain and structure be your guide.

6.  Let your Muse run wild.

The easiest way to give yourself writer’s block is to bridle your Muse by trying to come up with ideas.  Your Muse is always coming up with ideas – just not the ones you want.  If you try to limit the kind of material you will accept from her, she’ll shut up entirely.  So let your Muse run free.  When she gives you an hysterical moment with a polka-dot elephant while writing  a serious death scene, consider including it, perhaps as an hallucination.  Give it a try, it might liven up your death scene!  And after you’ve written it, if it doesn’t work, then save it in a file for later use.  It may seem like a waste of time, but your Muse will know she has been treated with respect, and will likely now give you just the idea you need.

7.  Don’t be a slave to convention

Beginning writers often look to other successful stories to learn how things ought to work.  But so do all the other beginning writers.  A book editor, agent, or script reader sees hundreds of manuscripts every year, all made up of the same pieces and hitting the same marks.  You’ll never get noticed in that crowd.  If you want your work to be discovered, break format, shake it up, do something different.  Make your sheriff 8 years old, make your two lovers twins, set your gothic romance underwater.  You’ll never be noticed if you don’t stand out.

8.  Be your own critic without being critical

Write something.  Do it now.  Now look at it not as an author, but as a reader or audience and ask questions about it.  For example, I write, “It was dawn in the small western town.” Now I ask: 1. What time of year was it?  2. What state?  3. Is it a ghost town?  4. How many people live there?  5.  Is everything all right in the town?  6. What year is it.  Then let your Muse come up with as many answers for each question as possible.  Example: 6. What year  is it? A. 1885  B. Present Day  C. 2050  D. After the apocalypse.  Then repeat: D. After the Apocalypse.  1. What kind of apocalypse?  2.  How many people died? 3.  How long ago was the disaster, and so on.  By alternating between critical analysis and creative Musings, you will quickly work out details about your story’s world, who’s in it, what happens to them and what it all means.

9.  Avoid the Genre Trap

Too many beginning writers see genres as checklists of elements and progressions they must touch, like checkpoints in a race.  But a genre is not a box in which to write.  It is a grab bag from which to pull only those components you are truly excited to include in your story.  Every story has a unique personality, you build it chapter by chapter or scene by scene with every genre choice you make.  By drawing on aspects of many different genres and combining those pieces together, you can fashion an experience for your readers or audience unlike any other.

10.  WRITE!

No matter what your natural ability, you will never approach your potential without exercise.  Jot down every idea.  Carry it as far as you can before it runs out of steam.  Do it again, and again: as many different ideas as far as you can take them.  Write nonsense words.  Write your concept of a villain’s shopping list for the supermarket (they have to eat, don’t they?) Write about anything.  Write about nothing!  But don’t stop, not now, not ever.  You are a writer aren’t you?  Then for God’s sake, WRITE!

Narrative isn’t everything.  Many experiences in fiction and real life have no narrative at all.  While movies are often thought to be one of the most story-oriented media, here is a film clip that has no story, yet has tremendous meaning.  It was shot in San Francisco in 1906, just six days before the Great Earthquake.  Though there is no narrative, we cannot help but wonder what stories unfolded for the people we see just one week later.

As a good writer’s exercise, pick a person or two that you see in the clip and write a short article that might have been published in the newspaper a week after the quake about their experiences.

Just finished reading the first of the twenty Aubrey/Maturin novels, Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian. One down, nineteen to go. Fascinating are the extremely long and convoluted sentences that yet somehow work due to their energy, enthusiasm of subject and uniqueness of topic: sentences not unlike this one, meandering leisurely through verbiage and speculation and punctuation; a sentence including (like this one) both a colon and a semicolon.

Excerpted from:

50 Sure-Fire Storytelling Tricks!

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Available in Paperback and for Kindle

The old expression, “A Red Herring,” means something that is intentionally misleading. In storytelling, a red herring is a scene, which is set up intentionally to mislead an audience.

One example is in the movie, “The Fugitive,” with Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble. He escapes from the prison bus, gets some street clothes, and is on the run.

He waits under a bridge and when an associate that he worked with stops his car for a red light, Kimble steps out and pretends to be a homeless person trying to wash his windshield for a buck. He uses this action as a “cover” while he holds a conversation with the associate to get some information and help.

In the background, out of focus, a police car slowly approach behind the associate’s car. You don’t see it at first because you are concentrating on the conversation. The police car stops. Suddenly, it’s lights and siren comes on. The audience is sure the jig is up. Kimble turns to look at it, and the police car whips around the associate’s car and takes off for some call it received.

The initial impression was that Kimble was about to be recaptured because the cops had recognized him. The “reality” was that they were just on patrol, got a call, and sped off with sirens wailing.

Red Herrings can be used for anything from the momentary shock value as above, to making a bad guy appear to be a good guy.

To make it work, you have to do two primary things:

1. Don’t leave out essential information or the audience will feel manipulated. Tricking your audience by misleading them is fun for them. But if you fool them by leaving out information they would legitimately have expected to be told about, then you are just screwing with them.

Red herrings are best accomplished by having information that is taken in one context and then the context is changed. This way, you aren’t holding back, you are just changing the perspective.

Your audience invests its emotions in your story. You don’t want to violate them. As an example, there is an old joke about a nurse in a maternity ward who comes in to a mother’s room carrying the new baby. She trips and falls and the baby hits the floor. Then, she gets mad at it for falling, picks it up, swings it around and bashes it against the wall. The mother is in hysterics. The nurse picks up the kid and says, “April Fool – it was born dead.” Don’t do this to your audience.

A better approach is to see a mom yank her child by the arm in a very abusive way while walking down the street. First reaction is she is an ogre and you run to stop her. Just then, you see the truck come whipping around the corner that would’ve hit and killed the child, and you stop in your tracks realizing the mom was saving his life. You look again, and the is hugging and holding him, and she is crying because he was almost lost, and because she startled him.
Psychologists call it “Primary Attribution Error,” and you can use it to your advantage. If done properly, they will love you for it.

2. Don’t change the rules of the game just to make things happen another way or the audience will feel that you lied to them.

The audience will give you their trust. They expect that what you tell them is the truth. They build on each bit of information, trying to understand the big picture.

You can easily change context to show something in a different light, but don’t tell them one thing and then simply say, “Oh that wasn’t true, I was just messing with you.”

That is a sure way to lose their trust, and once lost, you’ll never get it back.

Write your novel or screenplay step by step…

Excerpted from:

50 Sure-Fire Storytelling Tricks!

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Available in Paperback and for Kindle

Index cards (3×5 or 5×7 in size) are often used by screenwriters to plan out the sequence of events in their stories. Usually, a script has many different dramatic threads. The trick is how to weave them together over the timeline of the movie. For example, you might have several key challenges for your hero to overcome. You describe each of these on a different index card. You tack them up on the wall or lay them out on the table (or floor) and stand back and look at them. You see how the action seems to flow from one to another. Perhaps it seems that the ending is a bit anti-climactic, or that the build of dramatic tension isn’t right. So, you rearrange the order of the cards until you arrive at and order that feels the best.

Then, you may realize that you actually have a gap in the action that requires the creation of another challenge. So, looking at what comes before and what comes after, you determine the kind of action that is needed, and make a new card to fill the gap.

You might also realize that you have two challenges that are too much alike, or that would happen too close to each other, so you decide to lose one, or combine two into a single one that makes it all the stronger.

Then, you may know that you want a series of arguments between the hero and a love interest. In one creative session, you may work out how many arguments you want, and what each is about. You describe each of these arguments on a different index card.

As with the hero’s challenges, you tack up the cards and arrange them in the best possible order, filling gaps with new cards, and deleting or combining cards until the flow is right.

Since a movie generally focuses on one dramatic situation at a time, then intercuts among several different threads as necessary, your next job is to combine both the challenge thread and the argument thread into the overall timeline of your script.

You might decide to start with the first challenge card, then go to the first argument, and alternate. Or you might start with the first argument, have a second argument, and then two challenges in a row.

There are no “rules” as to how the two threads of cards should be shuffled together. It is purely a choice of how you wish to impact your audience.

You may even find that once you have blended the two threads into a single timeline, that combination highlights the need for an additional challenge or another argument, or perhaps the removal of one or the other. You might even be able to see the need for a whole new thread that is suggested once the first two threads are combined. So you create a third set of index cards, put them in order, and then weave them into the other two.

In this manner, many screenwriters work out the basic beats and flow of their stories so they have a loose blueprint from which to write, and therefore don’t get stuck in a logistic corner, or an emotional dead end.

Write your novel or screenplay step by step…

One of the biggest differences between a pedestrian novel and a riveting one are the clever little quips, concepts, snippets of dialog, and fresh metaphors.

But coming up with this material on the fly is a difficult chore, and sometimes next to impossible. Fortunately, you can overcome this problem simply by keeping a daily log of interesting tidbits. Each and every day, many intriguing moments cross our paths. Some are notions we come up with on our own; others we simply observe. Since a novel takes a considerable amount of time to write, you are bound to encounter a whole grab bag of tidbits by the time you finish your first draft.

Then, for the second draft, you refer to all that material and drop it in wherever you can to liven up the narrative. You may find that it makes some characters more charismatic, or gives others, who have remained largely silent, something to say. You may discover an opportunity for a sub-plot, a thematic discourse, or the opportunity to get on your soapbox.

What I do is to keep the log at the very bottom of the document for my current novel, itself. That way, since the novel is almost always open on my computer, anything that comes along get appended to the end before it fades from memory.

Also, this allows me to work some of the material into the first draft of the novel while I’m writing it. For example, here are a few tidbits at the bottom of the novel I’m developing right now:

A line of dialog:

“Are you confused yet? No? Let me continue….”

A silly comment:

“None of the victims was seriously hurt.” Yeah – they were all hurt in a very funny way.

A character name:

“Farrah Swiel”

A new phrase:

“Tongue pooch”

A notion:

‘Theorem ~ Absolute Corruption Empowers Absolutely”

“Corollary ~ There are no good people in positions of power”

I haven’t worked these into the story yet, but I will. And it will be richer for it.

Write your novel step by step…