Happy Holidays!

Hope you all have a safe and happy season for your upcoming holiday celebrations!

See you in the coming year.... 

Review: Wired for Story by Lisa Cron (Part 3)

Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence
by Lisa Cron

Genre: Nonfiction/Fiction Writing Skills

Publication Date: July 10, 2012

Source: paperback purchase

| Amazon | |Barnes &Noble |

Imagine knowing what the brain craves from every tale it encounters, what fuels the success of any great story, and what keeps readers transfixed. Wired for Story reveals these cognitive secrets—and it’s a game-changer for anyone who has ever set pen to paper.

The vast majority of writing advice focuses on “writing well” as if it were the same as telling a great story. This is exactly where many aspiring writers fail—they strive for beautiful metaphors, authentic dialogue, and interesting characters, losing sight of the one thing that every engaging story must do: ignite the brain’s hardwired desire to learn what happens next. When writers tap into the evolutionary purpose of story and electrify our curiosity, it triggers a delicious dopamine rush that tells us to pay attention. Without it, even the most perfect prose won’t hold anyone’s interest.

Backed by recent breakthroughs in neuroscience as well as examples from novels, screenplays, and short stories, Wired for Story offers a revolutionary look at story as the brain experiences it. Each chapter zeroes in on an aspect of the brain, its corresponding revelation about story, and the way to apply it to your storytelling right now.

  

Here's Part 3 of my very long review of Wired for Story. Read both Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven't yet to make more sense of this part of the review.

My Review – Part 3

Those who are famous for writing often say writing means going deeper in order to dig out the real core of who you are and what message you're trying to get across. In Chapter 5 of Wired for Story, you'll discover just how you can dig up your protagonist's inner issue that drives his every thought, word and deed.

The truth is, everyone of us can only see and comprehend the world around us through our own eyes. We simply aren't privy to any telepathic abilities or technology that allow for reading other people's thoughts, thus we see the world through our own filter. That filter got that way from our personal life experiences and upbringing. We can only see it the way we believe it to be at any given time.

And, so does your protagonist. He will interpret everything that happens to himself and anyone else through his own messed up filter. If he experienced a life-altering moment in his past, then everything from that realization on will be tainted by that shift in his perspective. What you need to do as a writer is pinpoint the moment when that shift in his perspective caused his whole worldview to go off the rails. That's how you dig up his 'inner issue.' And, it's how you will write your entire narrative.

When you develop your protagonist's bio, make sure you pinpoint this moment in his life as well as the time when he first felt the desire to accomplish his story goal. These may end up being one and the same thing. I'll use an example found in the book: in It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey's worldview gets skewed when he watches his father get beat down by the town misanthrope, Mr. Potter. He then believes he'll become a failure if he stays in Bedford Falls, thus spurring him to want to leave town and become the success his father never could be. The story eventually leads him to realize just how wrong he was, both internally and externally.

Even if you never show the reader that scene in real time or a flash back, it should be referenced or implied so the reader understands what motivates the character and shapes the direction of the story. And, when you can zero in on this motivation and its cause, you can lead your character to huge emotional growth by the end of the story. If you know anything ahead of time about how your story will end, it should be what your protagonist will have learned by the end. Give him an “a-ha!” moment of realization, thus knocking his worldview back into alignment, again.

In Chapter 6, the next important thing we learn about telling a gripping story is the need to be specific. The cognitive secret here is that we don't think in the abstract. “We think in specific images,” says the author. What it means is that anything abstract or conceptual must be made specific in order for the reader to care.

But, why is this? Our brains are lazy and will only think about things that matter to us. So, you need to make the general more specific in order to hook the reader to the emotional appeal of your story. If I said, “A lot of people died years ago in a country far away,” how much interest and emotion does this conjure up in you? Not much, I'm supposing. But, if I said, “280,000 people died in Indonesia in one of the deadliest tsunami/earthquakes in recorded history on the day after Christmas in 2004,” your ears perk up. You might actually care about news like that.

In what ways do writers write in generalities?

1. The specific reason a character does something is often neither implied nor stated outright. Without knowing reasons behind actions, those actions tend to fall flat.
2. The specific thing a metaphor is meant to illuminate is often too vague. Metaphors should be instantly grasped by the reader, or they get missed.
3. The specific memory that a situation invokes in the protagonist is sometimes left to the reader's imagination and, ultimately, never processed.
4. The specific reaction a character has to a significant event can be totally left out, leaving the reader wondering if the character is capable of human feeling and emotion.
5. The specific possibilities that run through the protag's mind as he struggles to make sense of what's happening are often absent so the reader can't even infer what the options are.
6. The specific rationale behind a character's change of heart end up completely omitted, so as to leave the reader wondering how Doug went from being a total wad to giving everybody at the office gift certificates to Starbucks.

Writing a good story is all about making the reader care about the story and the characters. But, keep in mind, less is more. If you clog up the story with too many specific, unnecessary details, you will cause your reader's brain to tune out. We can only process so many things at a time. How the brain functions and what its limitations are will determine how effectively you've crafted your story. And, when those specifics have nothing to do with your protagonist and his inner issue or goal, they will be treated like generalities by the reader. Ignored.

That's it for this part. Now, I'm halfway finished with this super long book review! Tune in next week for Part 4.

Have you noticed you have trouble getting to the heart of your story? Do you see areas in your writing where you could be more specific about why your characters act the way they do?

Week in Review (#10)

WEEK IN REVIEW

Okay, so what did I do last week...?


Last Week's Writing

I spent last week revising my 3rd draft of Pink Knight (my YA fantasy novella), mostly trying to clean up those annoying missing words and clipped sentences. I do both a lot and I thought I caught all my missing words in the 2nd draft, but I found nearly twice as many in my 3rd draft. (My eyes are rolling.) I also needed to add over 1,000 more words to it, but only managed about 500 more. Now, it stands at a total of 28,700 words. 

Last Week's Reading

I started and tried really hard to get into my ARC of Stormdancer by Jay Kristoff, but this book is super, super boring! It does have a few annoying misuses of the honorific "-sama," but only when the main character, Yukiko says it. Not anyone else, which is really weird. Does she not know her own language? 

I got so busy with so many other things, anyway, along with revising my 3rd draft, I decided to put Stormdancer on hold until next week. I continued to read The Click Moment by Frans Johansson, which I'm reading slowly. It is super good and I wish I could just read it all in one go! 

This Week

This week I have my critique partners reading Pink Knight, so I moved up to actually getting eyes on my work. Their feedback will likely come next week, or later, so I can just fret about it all week long. How fun! 

I hope to get Stormdancer finished and find something good about it, after all. But, slow reading is slow. I have a book on self-editing for writers that I also plan to get started on (Self-Editing for Fiction Writers). I seriously can never have enough books on writing craft. I'm always reading one and have been for the past two years straight. Many of them have been really helpful, so I'm glad I picked up this little habit. 


That's it for me this week. I hope you guys are getting your NaNo novels going and keeping up with your word counts. Any advice for how to deal with feedback on my manuscript? I'd love any help I can get there, since I'm nervous.   

Insecure Writers' Support Group (#4)

"Insecure Writer's Support Group" is a monthly meme host by Alex J. Cavanaugh for writers held on the first Wednesday of every month.

For this month's IWSG blog post, I don't really have a lot of writerly problems to share. I'm just getting the 3rd draft of my novella WIP, Pink Knight, taken care of, and hopefully will finish it by the beginning of next week. It certainly is challenging, as it should be, but not discouraging. I haven't received any feedback from anyone just yet, but I will soon, so I may be headed in that direction shortly.

Yikes! Receiving critiques is really scarey, so I just hope I'll be able to handle it well. I know I don't have to let it discourage me, and I won't, but I still hate that shock you feel when you see someone really picking apart your story with reckless abandon. Of course, if they didn't do this, I'd be worse off, so it's a good thing. Like going to the dentist, or getting a shot. Ugh. I hate both, but we all know these are necessary evils to endure because they are good for us.

All I hope for is that I will have tough enough skin to take it and roll with the punches. 


How about you? Do you get nervous before you receive feedback from your beta readers and critique partners?