A simple formula for writing

Someone asked me about writing this week, and I told her my formula for writing.  This won't work for everyone or for every genre, but it might work for you.  First, come up with a germ of a story, some concept or idea.  You can use my writer's net to brainstorm.  You can use a story starter.  You can look at your family history.  You can read a novel and get a germ of a story.  One way or another, you get the basic idea and write down a bit about your story and its characters.

The next step is prewriting.  If it's fantasy or sci fi, know the laws of the world you're writing in.  Invent them.  Know the map or the geography.  I then use a character theory like Meyers-Briggs or color theory or the enneagram to get to know my character.  Other people have done the heavy lifting on coming up with character theory.  You don't have to invent the wheel, just give your characters a sense of life and reality.  It helps if you know people like your character, so you can keep their voices in your head.  You may want to figure out the characters of all the major characters and their antagonists.  A story is only as good as its bad guys.  And most bad guys think of themselves as heroes of their own story.

Next, adapt the heroes' journey.  There are many versions of it, countless.  But most of the best stories, especially adventure stories, from Star Wars to modern Star Trek to Harry Potter to anything Pixar and modern Disney take a cue from the heroes' journey.  If you are an outliner, outline the whole think as far as it works for you.  If you're a pantser --a by the pants, write as you go kind of person--just keep the heroes' journey in the back of your brain and/or keep it standing buy to give you a rough roadmap.

Then revise, edit, and send it off to your writers' group.  You may need additional editorial services.

That's it.  The better, the more unique your description, the fresher the voice, the more successful your story will be.  If you're running into walls, try it.  See how it works.

Creativity Net

I once wrote about this, but it was about a year ago and bears repeating.  One good way to defeat the power of the blank page is through setting out your creativity net.  What does this mean, you say?  Listen to conversations and take notes on how people talk.  Look around for odd things people do or strange events.  Watch the news for curious happenings.  Then invent your own why.  Once, I had three random strangers come up to me and give me little things over the course of a few days.  They were totally unrelated events, but it all led to a short story.

Grab your notebook and look around you.  Become a people watcher.  Become a thing watcher.  And let your imagination fly.  Spin whatever you see into a story of fantasy, science fiction, romance, whatever.  Come up with a germ of an idea then don't stop until it's written down.  Then turn it into a story with meaning and life.

Tighten your Writing

It's during the editing phase that you start to realize that you're a lot wordier than you thought.  At least that's been my experience.  And you, too, can do most of it without any help.

• You can catch your overwriting  and redundancies ["Hey, Grandma," I said to Grandma as I walked in the house.]  
• You can change those overly descriptive writing handles [she screamed angrily] into ones publishers will accept like said, shouted, asked, or whispered.  
• You can dump all amplifiers after you realize they amplify nothing [really hated doesn't convey nearly as much as loathed or even just hated all by itself.] 
• You can ferret out those pesky adjectives [beautiful woman] and turn them into vivid nouns [goddess].  
• Above all, you can hunt down those clunky adverbial phrases [stared stupidly] and swap them for strong verbs [gaped].  

Basically, you can take your gut draft, the draft you wrote just for you, straight from your heart, and turn it into something another human being will actually want to read.  You can change it from written vomit into a compelling story.

It helps to distance yourself from your writing, so you see it with newer eyes.  I went over an old short story recently I thought was so wonderful and found about half of it was filler.  It also helps to print out your writing because then you see it from another angle.  You can go at it with a pen.  It really helps to read it out loud to yourself, as well, because then you slow down your reading pace and see so many things you didn't see before.  You can also use the software's built-in spell/grammar check.

But there comes a moment when you realize you can do no more.  You need external eyes, someone outside your head, to which you can send it or read it.  That's when writers' groups online or in person come into play.  I've written about those recently.  That's when you can call in an editor like I did recently.  That's also when you can look into buying software like Grammerly or Autocrit, which help you do a lot of the things I've mentioned.  Most of editing can be done alone.  But almost everyone eventually needs help.  You are not alone.  If you're done with your heart draft [the rough draft], it's time to write the rest with your head.  It's time to tighten that writing.

Grammar-free Zones

Last semester, I taught an English class.  Granted, it was a very beginning writing class.  But I got to teach then expect grammar and writing skills--to a point.  I've now been asked to teach a class that is even more of a beginners' class.  And it doesn't look like I'll be teaching [or expecting] writing skills in the weekly paragraphs I'll be receiving.  This, for a grammar nazi, is called torture.  FaceBook causes many writers pain.  I am one of those writers.  I read the humorous grammar nazi's rule book Eats Shoots and Leaves for fun.

Now, I will be looking at and papers, unable to let my internal editor say a word.  Tell me, fellow writers out there, how much fun it is to live in a world full of [sometimes intentional] bad grammar?  How much fun is it to walk through those 20 Items or Less [FEWER, people, FEWER] lines and not say a word?  How many times do you have to look at signs and billboards and not say a thing about how much people must be smoking to spell that way, where kids are able to see and learn all the wrong things?  How many of us can watch Weird Al's "Word Crimes" and laugh knowingly while mentally looking for (and finding) errors even there?

People like me who enter situations like these have to remember to breathe.  We have to remind ourselves that the only reason we haven't been unfriended by 90% of those we know on social media is because we can control our red-pen impulses and just shake our heads in silence.  The only way to keep the job is to be gentle and view the heart of the piece, not the trappings.  The world will spell and punctuate [or not] as it will.  We will somehow survive the experience and move on. And be thankful to have a job.  

The Power of the Hero's Journey

This week, I watched the new live-action version of Disney's Jungle Book.  The original is cute, a classic.  Many people adore it.  But for me, it was never very exciting because it was my least favorite kind of story, milieu.  This means location.  The place is the main character.  Mowgli represents the audience as Baloo and Bagira act as tour guides to show off the quirky denizens of the jungle, who sing to display their personalities/philosphies.  Some of them are dangerous to the defenseless Mowgli.  But it is nonetheless not the story of a kid in a jungle so much as the story of the characters that people that jungle.

The new move has the same checklist of characters, for the most part.  However, the story as shown in the new movie employs the power of the hero's journey as described by Joseph Campbell. Mowgli starts in the normal world, in the wolf pack.  His call to adventure comes from Shere Khan, the tiger who threatens his family and home.  At first, he resists it, then he accepts it.  He then descends into the underworld of the unknown parts of the jungle and faces a number of dangers, including a father-figure's death.  The stakes are higher.  The choices are Mowgli's to make, not forced on him, and he grows as a character through them.  The movie takes one step further in becoming a bildungsroman, a coming of age story.  Because he fulfills the hero's journey, he emerges capable, master of both worlds.

A lot of writers like to write stories, but any story, whether it be a fantasy, a fairy tale retelling, science fiction, horror, or romance can benefit from the time-proven power of the hero's journey.  As I mentioned several weeks ago, many of Pixar's movies follow the same pattern.  People subconsciously expect it when they start reading an adventure yarn, especially.  When major parts of the hero's journey are lacking, people notice and feel unsatisfied.  I highly recommend that any writer researches and employs the hero's journey in their stories.

The Treasure

I found a treasure whose scope I didn't remember.  Two decades ago, I wrote my life's history--in some detail, as it turns out.  I just remembered writing it, not what was there.  I have started rereading it, and I've learned so much that I didn't recall.  I see teachers' names, classes I was in, things I did that was younger, and all sorts of details that, twenty years later, had disappeared from my memory.

I highly recommend that you write down your life to date because you never know what you will forget in a few years.  My memory isn't particularly good, but this kind of memory slippage can happen to anyone.  Write your life now, up to now.  Write about your early childhood, youth, and adulthood in as much detail as you can.  If possible, have others around you do likewise, especially older generations.  When my grandma was about to pass, I sat and interviewed her.  I'm thankful for what I learned.  One day, these writings may be your treasures and maybe your descendants' treasures, too.  

Rule #1: Make Me Care

I've repeated this mantra of writing before, but it bears repeating.  Before your audience/reader will truly get into your piece, you need to answer the "So what?" question and get your reader invested in your character.  That was the big flaw I saw with one of the most anticipated blockbusters of the summer, "Batman vs. Superman."

I think we've all heard that same review over and over.  At least I have.  It was strange that such a mixed review was repeated EVERYWHERE from Rottentomatoes to all my movie-going friends: Batman was well done.  Superman was blah.  Wonderwoman was squeezed in.  Lex Luther was dreadful.  I heard this same review from everyone, so I expected to have the same reaction.  I love comic book movies that are well made.

People seemed to more or less like this one.  So why shouldn't I?  I knew I wouldn't love it.  My expectations weren't sky high like they are when the reviews are universally wonderful.  But I expected to like it on some level.  Turned out I didn't like it at all.  Why?  Because the writers broke rule number one.  They didn't make me care about anyone, okay, except Lois Lane.  But Amy Adams is good with making the audience care.  How does she do it?  By so obviously caring about someone herself.  Her love for the Superman character here ALMOST had the strength to make me care about him.  If only he weren't so busy being inscrutable and above-it-all, so dark and brooding like all the rest of the characters, I might have succeeded in graduating past almost and into caring.  I needed to feel his humanity, but so much of the movie was bent on making him feel alien and inhuman to the audience.  Because I didn't care about any of the main characters, nothing they did or said mattered.  I didn't care if someone was in danger or someone died, got injured, whatever.  A nuclear bomb full of cryptonite could have wiped out all of humanity in this movie, and I would have felt bad about just Lois.  

I understand not everyone consciously reacted the way I did because not everyone is looking for that one thing in the main characters: a humanity and caring for something or someone that will make the audience love them.  It helps if there is humor as well, which was totally lacking here.  But you'll notice with the review above people weren't swept up into the story.  They were keeping their distance and analyzing it rather than just enjoying it.  If you as a writer break rule number one, people don't get swept up.  Even if they don't consciously notice they're not caring, they certainly don't get attached.  Just in the short bit of preview I've seen of the upcoming Justice League movie, I already care more about Batman than I did throughout this entire movie.  Why?  Because they do with it what was lacking here: they make the audience laugh and give the sense of Batman's humanity and his caring about others.

Keep rule number one--show the main character's humanity through love and optimistically some humor--and readers will follow your character and his/her adventures through the ends of the earth.  I know I would.