The critical fictional element

Whenever I talk to a writers’ group I always ask, “What one element MUST all good fiction, and even most nonfiction, possess?”

Usually I have to give a series of hints before getting the right answer from somebody.

The correct answer is CONFLICT.  And it follows that the more intense the conflict—the more that’s at stake for the protagonist—the more interesting the fiction (or nonfiction) will be.

Why is this true?  It’s because each of our lives is a series of conflicts.  We want to attend two conflicting events on the same evening but we must choose only one.  Or we have the choice of two job offers, or two or more potential homes or vehicles to buy.  We need to get to a distant city fast, but we fear flying, posing a possibly intense conflict.  We have a hard time getting along with a person at work, a common stressful conflict.  We want to live as long as possible, but we know we must die one day—the ultimate conflict we all face.  Each of us is constantly confronted with conflicts ranging from minor to major, and how we resolve those conflicts is largely the measure of us.

Thus it’s understandable why we’re endlessly fascinated by conflicts others must face and resolve.  It’s why we follow the news each day, why we root for sports teams, and why we can’t ever get enough of good conflict-based fiction in books, movies, and TV shows.  It’s why we love to see our heroes and heroines overcome long odds to prevail.

There are only three broad categories of conflict.  1.  Person against person.  (A sporting match, a political contest, a love triangle, a protagonist against a villain, an activist against The System, any war ever fought.)  2.  Person against nature.  (An attempt to scale Everest, an epidemic, a farm family contending with drought, a trek through a desert or jungle, a dangerous voyage.)  3.  Person against self.  (Someone fighting addiction or mental illness or doubt or fear or despair.)

If you want to write a riveting short story or a novel, choose one of these categories and pack it with as much conflict as you can conjure up.  It’s the surest way to build wide readership.  The only constraint is believability.  The conflict must always be plausible within the story context. And of course the conflict must, in the end, be resolved.

Phil

Three tips for writing well

1.  Read The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.  Though slender, it’s the finest book I’ve ever seen on using the language accurately and effectively.  The book will give you most of the basic mechanics you’ll need as a solid foundation to succeed.  If you’re already producing publishable work, go back and re-read this book anyway.

2.  Read 20 Master Plots and How to Build Them, by Ronald Tobias.  It’s one of the better books I’ve come across about structuring fiction (and even good non-fiction).  On Writing by Stephen King is another worthwhile book.

3.  Shun adverbs (those words ending in ly) and don’t use too many adjectives.  An adverb is a lazy “tell” word, and you should always be showing the story to the reader.  Show a character to be excited, for example (instead of saying “she exclaimed excitedly”), maybe by her nervous mannerisms or by her flushed complexion.  On a related note I never use the lazy exclamation point, and many top writers don’t, either.  It’s nothing more than a punctuational adverb.  If your words are not powerful enough in themselves to convey your meaning, an exclamation point isn’t going to save the situation.

Phil

  

A dozen things you probably never knew

1.  The Eisenhower Interstate system required that a mile in every five be straight for emergency runway use.  (When flying a light plane I always liked to have an Interstate nearby.)

2.  All but one percent of the public roads in the USA are paved, while in Canada only 25% are paved.

3.  Nobody owns Antarctica, and although it’s covered in ancient ice up to three miles thick, locking up 90 percent of the world’s fresh water supply, it’s the driest continent on the planet.  It’s also the coldest, windiest, and highest.

4.  The flow of the Amazon is greater than the next eight largest rivers on our planet combined, and is three times the total flow of all United States rivers.

5.  Canada has more lakes than all the rest of the world combined.

6.  Ohio has NO natural lakes.  Those they do have are man-made.

7.  Damascus, Syria, is the oldest existing continuously inhabited city on Earth.

8.  Istanbul, Turkey, is located on two continents, Europe and Asia, separated by the Bosporus Straits.

9.  Pitcairn is the smallest island country at just 1.75 square miles.  (Not a lot to do there.)

10.  Siberia has more than a quarter of the world’s forests.

11.  In New York City there are more Irish than in Dublin, more Jews than in Tel Aviv, and more Italians than in Rome.

12.  No matter where you are on our planet, no matter how clear and dark the night sky, every star you see with the naked eye lies only within our own Milky Way Galaxy.  The nearest of those, Alpha Centauri (actually a triple star), is some 24 trillion miles away.  And there are billions of other galaxies--other swirling star cities--out there flung across the universe.

Phil

Bookstore names

We writers have lamented the demise of several top bookstore chains across the country, but thank goodness independent bookstores are still alive and thriving everywhere.  I was scanning a list of those in the southeast and was struck by their many creative names.  A few:

Hooked on Books (FL)  Tomes for anglers?

Over the Moon Bookstore (VA)  They must sell only those high-dollar hardbacks.

Square Books (MS)  No rectangular volumes allowed.

Between the Lines (LA)  For those who like to figure it out for themselves.

My Sister’s Books (SC)  Apparently she sold off her parents’ library and now she’s working on

   her siblings’ collections.

Writer’s Block Bookstore (FL)  Not a lot of content here.

Fiction Addiction (SC)  That’s pretty much me.  Maybe they offer a twelve-step program?

I found several candidates for just plain cool names, like A Novel Experience (GA), Little Shop of Stories (GA), and Tall Tales (GA again).

But one of my favorites is simply Joe’s Place (SC)

I wish I could visit them all.

Phil

Big money for short stories

Dozens of movies have been made from short fiction, earning their authors nice rewards.  Sometimes a brief story has inspired more--even many more--than one movie.  Examples:

          Story and Author                                          Movie(s)

“The Bicentennial Man” Isaac Asimov       Bicentennial Man (1999)

“The Sentinel” Clarke                                  2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

“The Birds” Daphne duMaurier                   Same name (1963 Hitchcock)

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” Truman Capote      Same name (1961)

“Octopussy” Ian Fleming                             Same name (1983)

“It’s a Wonderful Life” Philip Van Doren    Three movies (1946-1990)

“The Fly” George Langelaan                        Five (1958-1989)

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” Irving        Nine (1922-2004)

“A Christmas Carol” Charles Dickens          At least twelve (1912-2008)

“The Fall of the House of Usher” Poe           Fourteen (1928-2008)

“The Invisible Man” H.G. Wells                   Eighteen (1933-2013)

“Zorro” Johnathon McCulley                        Twenty-two (1920-2005)

“The Turn of the Screw” Henry James          Twenty-three (1957-2013)

Several of Stephen King’s short stories have become movies including The Mist (2007), The Langoliers (1992), Maximum Overdrive (1997), Children of the Corn (Several 1984-2009), and The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

Why is this so?  I think it’s because good short stories have lasting reader impact.  In many ways they demand the finest writing--succinct character development, vivid scene-setting, astute word choice, and tight plotting.  I can still remember some I enjoyed as far back as college, like “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane, and Hemingway’s “The Killers.”  I also loved the series featuring Tugboat Annie in The Saturday Evening Post, which also made the movies.

If you’re a writer or aspire to be, short stories can be fertile ground for your efforts.  And creating a good one could reap a lucrative harvest.

Phil

(Give my story collection, Dagger and other tales, a try.  It’s on Amazon, and includes yarns gleaned from a lifetime of writing, even one begun by Stephen King.)

Hail the vernal equinox

Today signals the advent of spring for the northern hemisphere and fall for the southern hemisphere, with both receiving equal light from our star.  Because our planet is tilted 23.5 degrees from the ecliptic (the orbital track around the sun), which of course creates our seasons, there are only two times during each year that an equinox happens.  As our planet rotates on these two days six months apart, the sun appears to rise from due east and set due west, and the hours of daylight virtually equal the hours of darkness almost everywhere on earth.

For us northern-hemisphere dwellers above the tropics, it’s a time of celebration as each day now begins to grow a little longer with the sun’s track edging northward, flowers and trees miraculously come back to life, migrating birds return to familiar nesting grounds, we open up our homes to benign breezes once again, and our souls welcome yet another pleasant restoration from gray winter.

Phil

Instigating Inspiration

"For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can.  Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”       —Ernest Hemingway

          I’ve learned you can’t sit around waiting for inspiration to magically descend upon you like an invisible cloak out of a fair-weather cumulus cloud that resembles Tinker Bell.  Or for your muse to whisper excellent plotting suggestions and lyrical phraseology in your ear as you sleep, perchance to dream.  Try that philosophy and you could be hanging around taking up space for years, not getting anything at all written.

          There is such a phenomenon as inspirational magic, though, and when it happens it’s a fine experience.

          For some years I played fiddle with a group (violin is the same instrument, only it’s played in more sophisticated circles).  We got together weekly in a drafty garage and worked up a play list of classic country stolen from Nelson, Jennings, Colter, Gosdin, and Zevon, along with popular favorites from Buffett, Seger, Santana, Madonna, and Kristofferson.  We played at small receptions, at big charity affairs, out on the deck of a hotel/marina, at posh and not-so-posh private parties, once even in a dewy field on a cold night during a deer-hunting contest barbecue.  Our fingers kept going numb, and a couple of our members were surreptitiously sipping high-octane moonshine to ward off the chill.

          When you play in public for a client, you have to begin at an appointed time, no matter whether you feel particularly musical just then or not, and you have to keep at it for an agreed-upon interval of from one to several hours.  It’s not always the thing you’d most like to be doing.  Sometimes it was a real struggle for all six of us to keep correct and steady time, get all our amplified volumes balanced, start and stop each tune together, and sync the harmony.  But there’s no alternative except to keep flailing away at it, at least if you want to get paid at the end of the gig.

          Then there are those rare and wonderful times. Like one night in a smoky bar in the military town of Jacksonville, NC, where the crowd was well-lubricated and boisterous, singing along and giving us excessive ovations.  Around eleven o’clock, my fiddle began almost playing itself, the tones sweeter, the pitch perfect, the gliding bow vibrating the strings without effort.  I could feel all of us playing flawlessly together, far better than we had in months.  It was magical, and the crowd seemed to sense it.  The gig was supposed to be from eight to midnight.  We didn’t reluctantly quit until two.

          A similar magic can happen in writing, when the words seem to be floating in out of nowhere and fitting together seamlessly, emotively, powerfully.  The feeling is exceptional.

          But the only way to have any hope of achieving that wonderful magic, I believe, is to plug away at our writing as best we can hour after dogged hour and every possible day.  Until, one day, we happily find ourselves writing better than we can.

Phil