Writing Excuses notes, Season 5

One perk of being a writer: I just watched a bunch of movie pep talks in the name of research. How many jobs involve stuff like that? Not many.

But on to my notes from my Writing Excuses course, Season 5, because there is some seriousness to this trade.

1. Love triangles work because they build tension that carries the reader through.

Butler on top, Wilkes on bottom, FYI.

Sometimes, I get tired of the love triangle thing. I don't like drama in real life, and it stresses me out in books, too. It was nice to hear that there is a reason for using them beyond wanting to be overly dramatic. Every subplot needs its own conflict, and love triangles are filled with conflict (meaning that I want something but something else stands in my way). Scarlett O'Hara loves Ashley Wilkes, who loves her but loves his wife more, meaning the wife is standing between Scarlett and getting Ashley. Meanwhile, Rhett Butler loves Scarlett and wants to marry her, and he is a tempting option, meaning she has a choice to make—and voila, there is tension in the storyline.

Also worth mentioning here is that a love interest needs to be intriguing from the start, because they need to catch your readers' interest just as much as your protagonist's. If the reader is to become invested and feel the tension you are trying to build, they need to like the love interest (Writing Excuses people said readers need to like them as much as the protagonist does, but I think that is only the case in a romance book).

2. Stories are good because people you care about are doing things you care about.

Otherwise, you just don't care.

3. Suspense comes when the reader knows exactly what will happen if things go wrong.

It's not that the reader is left hanging—it's that the reader is left hanging over a cliff with a great view of the ground thousands of feet below them. Even if you're trying to build a fear of the unknown, that only works because we have filled in the unknown with terrible possibilities. Give the reader those possibilities, and they will be on edge, wondering just what will happen.

And, for fun, makes some of those possibilities happen. Do the worst case scenario, and make it even worse than was feared. Increase the tension. Turn the screw, as Henry James put it.

How do you present possibilities without having your characters sit down and map them out, plain as day? Chekhov's gun answers that question. Chekhov (Russian writer, playwright) said (copying the wording from Wikipedia, FYI), "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

Hanging a gun on the wall is what the Writing Excuses people call a promise, which brings me to

4. Fulfill your promises.

If you say something that stands out, like a particular gun on the wall of a house that is not a hunting lodge, it is a promise. Your reader will remember that you said it, and you will need to fulfill it. If you spend a lot of time on something, that is also a promise. Fulfill it.

So in Titanic, when they talk about how this ship is unsinkable, that is a promise to the audience that the ship will sink at some point. They built up suspense for a possible disaster by saying, time and time again, that this boat is unsinkable. The time spent on it, as well as the intrigue caused by how lofty that claim was, made it a promise the audience would remember. That is how to build suspense, by making a subtle promise and leaving it there on the wall for everyone to remember until you fulfill it, taking the gun down and shooting your own father when you learn he slept with your wife.

A promise left unfulfilled will irritate the reader. When I read Society of the Mind, the opening scene involved someone undergoing testing before brain surgery meant to sever their corpus callosum (combines the two halves of your brain). Since I knew this book was going to be about a computer that gained sentience, I noticed this first scene and logged it away as a promise. After that, I was waiting for them to split the computer's consciousness in two halves. Was this the author giving away the ending? Yes and no. Does foreshadowing give away an ending? Not if it is well done, and not unless you are A) someone trained to look for it or B) rereading.

Other promises you may remember and probably didn't recognize as such: The White Rabbit's first lines are that he is late (for what?). Mrs. Bennet starts Pride and Prejudice by freaking out about needing to marry off all her daughters (challenge accepted, says Jane Austen). Fern rescues Wilbur from death the day he is born (not the first time he'll need to be rescued, it turns out). And so on.

Waiting for the fulfillment of a promise builds suspense. Just be sure to fulfill that promise with flying colors.

5. First draft is what you want to say, final draft is how you want to say it.

You need to get it down, out of your head, into reality. Only then can it be worked on, because only then is it concrete enough to actually have strengths and flaws. So write what you want, then work on how you want it presented. Writing poetry, plays, novels, short stories, nonfiction, whatever it is, it isn't a race. This is not a newsroom, with a 5 o'clock deadline to get that story written and in tip-top shape. So take your time, but don't go so slowly you actually stop the project. Writing is to create, editing is to perfect. Write first, edit second.