Now offering free sample edits.
I’m returning to a previous practice in my editing services
offering—a free sample edit of the first five pages for people serious
about an edit. The purpose is twofold: to let them know what I would do
with their narrative, and to let me know if their writing looks like it
will reach a professional level.
The free edit includes line editing that is much more intensive and
deeper than what you see here on FtQ, and there are critique notes, too.
For details, please see the editing services section
of my website. As you may know, many agents suggest utilizing a service
such as mine before sending a manuscript out into the cold and cruel.
For a taste of what writers I’ve worked with think about what I did for
them, see their testimonials.
Here, from the
Storytelling section of my book,
Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is
“An engine named desire.”
During a Winter Olympics race, an American speed skater was
knocked down by a competitor who fell. The American slid blades-first
into the side barrier, on her back, clearly out of the race.
But even before she’d stopped slamming into the barrier she was
scrambling to regain her feet. The instant she was upright, her entire
focus went down the ice. The intensity in her eyes and the set of her
mouth were almost palpable, even on a television screen. She took off,
her desire still powerful, her determination everything, and my heart
and admiration went out to her. I was rooting for her. And respecting
her. And liking her.
If you can get a reader feeling that way about your character, you’re
on your way to compelling storytelling. So how do you do that?
With desire.
Screenwriting guru Robert McKee says that a story’s inciting incident
is an event that radically upsets the balance of forces in the
character’s life. But to what end?
He goes on to say that the character must react to the event, otherwise there would be no story. But react with what?
A desire. A goal to be achieved. The high-octane fuel that gives your story power.
In McKee’s approach, the desire is for the character to put his/her
life back into balance. Let’s say a character’s children have been
kidnapped. Of course the character doesn’t think, “Dang, my life is out
of balance. My desire is to regain my balance.” No, the desire would be a
specific goal, to get his children back from the kidnappers.
Is this right, then? A desire? Another craft instruction book tells
us that fiction is about trouble. And we’ve all heard the cliché: get
your character up a tree and throw rocks at him until he figures out how
to get down.
But the “trouble” model is a passive one. Oh, there should be
trouble, but it needs to come as a result of what characters do. Because
they have a desire. Because they take risks in striving to achieve
their desire.
It’s this pursuit of a desire that creates the “rooting factor” that
draws readers into a story, that gives them something to identify and
empathize with. Just as I did that Olympic skater.
The “strive” is the thing. Without it, your sleek vehicle of a novel
has no gas in its tank. One of my editing clients was a good writer.
He’d done his research well, the language was good. He’d created a
pleasant, likeable character. Smart. Pretty. Decent.
But the character just drifted through her life, reacting to things,
never initiating much, not striving. There was no tension. Nothing
compelling me to turn the page. My recommendation was to create a strong
inciting incident at the front of the story, to knock the character far
out of her happy life.
Why isn’t a happy story good enough? Why is it a good idea to trouble
our characters, knock them down, and then keep knocking them down as
they struggle? Why does that make them more compelling, more watchable?
Because, as human beings, we struggle too. In our ordinary
lives, we may struggle with things small or large, but struggle we must.
We understand how a character feels who has been knocked down. And
here’s the thing that a novel can do that lifts it from being mere
entertainment: show us something about how to be a human being.
Learning to be a human being has a lifelong learning curve, and we
can use all the help we can get because there aren’t many good
instruction books. Although novels are fiction, they can instruct us on
the truths of being human.
Fiction models behavior for us, teaches us what (in the writer’s
imagination) works, and what doesn’t work. We like to see characters
desire and yearn and attempt because it helps us understand, maybe, what
we can do in our own lives.
In thinking about my first novel after coming across McKee’s idea of
creating a desire in a character, I thought I’d failed to do that in my
main protagonist: it seemed to me that he mostly reacted to events.
But then I realized that, unwittingly, I’d done one of the things McKee talks about: created an unconscious
desire. My character’s inciting event really pulled the rug out from
under his life, but on the surface he seemed satisfied with the way
things were. He just wanted, it seemed, to keep on doing his work. But
unconsciously, it was the opposite.
My job as a writer is to learn to do it wittingly.
McKee says that a story is more powerful if a character has an unconscious desire that works in opposition to the conscious desire.
This is heady stuff for a simple guy like me, but I think I see how
it can work. For example, let’s say a man’s wife is kidnapped and a
ransom is demanded. His surface desire is to rescue her. That’s what
society, his friends, his peers, and he himself expects. Standard
thriller stuff, you’ve seen it a thousand times.
But what if he hates his wife? Then his unconscious desire, the one
that can’t be admitted out loud, is to somehow lose her. This may remind
you of the plot of the film Ruthless People, only Danny DeVito’s desire to get rid of Bette Midler, his wife, is far from unconscious.
In my novel, darned if my protagonist’s unconscious desire didn’t
affect what happened when he pursued conscious goals. Eventually his
conscious goal came to be the same as the unconscious one, and he grew.
Checklist for your narrative:
- Does it contain an inciting incident that throws your protagonist’s
life severely out of balance? (By the way, your antagonist might need an
inciting incident, too, such as the opposition of the protagonist.)
- Does the event create a conscious desire in your character?
- Does your reader know about it?
- Does your character immediately take action, take a risk to achieve a goal that springs from the inciting event?
- Optional: Does it create an unconscious, contrary desire?
These are the elements that not only create the engine that will
drive your story, they create the fuel. The horsepower of that engine,
and its power to affect the reader, depend on:
- How severely your character’s life is thrown for a loop, i.e., how damaging are the consequences, how high the stakes?
- The difficulty of achieving the desire that is aroused
- The size of the risks she must take to recover
For what it’s worth
RR
© 2010 Ray Rhamey
Not your ordinary vampire novel
Here, from the Storytelling section of my book, 
The
way the doc in this cartoon spins the facts reveals his bias and
agenda. Every few years, a political season inundates us with
politicians spinning each other’s words and positions in order to
distort and contrast them. I once hated the idea of spin…until it
occurred to me that spin is a terrific way to create drama in a story.
Spin comes from agendas, the intentions of characters. When characters
want something in every scene and words and actions are guided by
conflicting agendas, you automatically generate tension, and characters
boil with action and dialogue.
Writer/agent Donald Maass writes of a need for tension on every page. Every
page? Can’t a character have a happy time now and then? Not really, at
least not unmitigated happiness, not if you want to compel. If there
isn’t trouble in a scene, the reader must anticipate trouble to come. The ironic humor in the cartoon comes from the reader knowing about danger ahead that the characters don’t.
Here’s The inciting incident: story launch pad from my book, 
