plot

Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo

May 12, 2017 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” How can we be creative every day? That’s the question Pep Talks for Writers sets out to answer. And it’s an important one, right? I know you feel story ideas beckoning you to give them voice. You’ve felt the wondrous, magical rushes of creativity. You know how being creative can change the way you wake up, how you approach your work, how you connect with other people. Approaching the world with a creative mindset is wildly transforming—because suddenly you’re not accepting the world as it’s delivered to you, but living through your vision of life.

That’s the gift I see each November during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I witness thousands of people break down the barricades that prevent them from writing the novel of their dreams and take on the Herculean task of writing a novel of 50,000 words in just 30 days. Writing suddenly leaps up from the cluttered basement of their daily tasks to stand tall on the pedestal of life for an entire month. An audacious goal and deadline serve as creative midwives (and an occasional bullwhip), and writers are propelled by the scintillating rushes of their imagination and the galvanizing force of the huzzahs coming from what can seem like the entire world writing with them.

It seems like such a rollicking novel-writing party is never going to end, but then on December 1, the roars of rapacious novelists start to quiet. Suddenly, people are doing things like shopping for Christmas presents, studying for finals, or cleaning the mayhem their house has become. (Creativity gives the world many things, but it rarely provides a tidy house.)

The thing I hear most often after National Novel Writing Month is “I loved writing during NaNoWriMo, but I have trouble writing the rest of the year.”

It’s challenging to muster such energy each day. The galloping pace of NaNoWriMo is over, and it can be difficult to get up on the proverbial writing horse again. Urgent items on your to-do lists clamor for attention, and tackling those items is important, necessary work—buying groceries, washing dishes, fixing that squeaky door that has bugged you the last three years—so, really, how could you keep doing something so trivial as write? Suddenly, you start to feel creativity falling down on your to-do list. You know the joy it gives you, the life meaning, yet those slithering, pernicious beasts called “the demands of life” loudly yell what you should be doing (and I won’t even mention the siren calls of social media).

No one assigns us to be creative. And, what’s more, society usually doesn’t reward creativity, at least not unless your work makes it to the shelves of a bookstore, the walls of a gallery, or the stage of a theater. You might not think you’re a creative type, but to be human is to be a creative type, so one of the shoulds in your life should be to make sure creativity is not only at the top of your to-do list, but that you put your creativity into action every day. If you put off your dreams today, you create the momentum to put them off all the way to your deathbed.

We yearn to touch life’s mysteries, to step out into the world looking for new solutions to old problems, if not new worlds altogether. We need to tap into our vulnerabilities, seek to understand our fears, look at life through others’ eyes, ask questions, and open up our awareness of the wonders of the universe.

Each story is a gift, a door that opens a new way to see and relate with others in this crazy, crazy world. Stories are the oxygen our souls breathe, a way to bring the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable to life. Our creative lives shouldn’t be a hall pass from the stiff and forbidding demands of our lives. Writing our stories takes us beyond the grueling grind that life can unfortunately become, beyond the constraints of the roles we find ourselves in each day, to make the world a bigger place.

Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means. “Only art penetrates . . . the seeming realities of this world,” said Saul Bellow in his Nobel Prize speech. Leslie Marmon Silko says that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.” Jacqueline Woodson says writers are “the ones who are bearing witness to what’s going on in the world.”

For a writer, life hasn’t really been lived until one’s stories find their way onto the page. We exist in the flickers of a rift with the world, searching for words that will sew the fissure, heal it. A rupture, a wound, finds the salve of a story. If you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. If you don’t create, you hurt yourself. The signature of your self is formed by the work you put into your story. Making art tells you who you are. Making art in turn makes you.

So it’s your duty as a writer, as a person, to build a world through your words and believe in your story as a beautiful work of incarnation, to see it as a gift to yourself and others, as something that elevates life with new meaning—your meaning. Writing a story is many things: a quest, a prayer, a hunger, a tantrum, a flight of the imagination, a revolt, a daring escape that ironically leads you back to yourself. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning. Our stories are the candles that light up the darkness that life can become, so we must live in the warm hues of our imaginative life.

It’s not easy, though. The efforts of creativity carry angst and psychological obstacles that must be overcome. In this book, we’ll explore 52 different approaches to being creative every day. Each pep talk will include ways for you to explore your creative notions and angles, because life and writing are really ongoing creative experiments. Some pep talks may sing out to where you are now, while others might become relevant later in your writing process. The important thing is to keep your creative life at the forefront of your thoughts and actions.

We become the things we do, and I can promise you, if you excavate your life to make room for your imagination, if you open up time to keep writing, you won’t just finish your novel, pen the poem in your head, or submit a short story you’ve worked so hard on, you’ll change, because once you realize yourself as a creator, you create worlds on and off the page.

If you hear the whispers of a novel coming from the other room, or ideas for other stories caterwauling for their day in the sun, dive in. “The days are long, but the years are short,” some wise person once said. Your story can’t wait. It needs you.

Buy Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo.

Ian McEwan and the Art of Suspense

September 24, 2009 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

I’ve always thought of Ian McEwan as a sort of modern day Graham Greene. It’s not about their subject matter or their style, but the discipline, the concise and unwasteful approach they take to their narratives.

All of Greene’s novels seem to be more or less the same length, as do McEwan’s. Likewise, Greene and McEwan share an appreciation for a straightforward story, carefully plotted, with a keen sense of suspense.

Suspense. It’s an enviable narrative skill, no matter if you’re writing genre fiction or experimental fiction. McEwan, like Greene, is able to write challenging, thought-provoking novels while keeping you on the edge of your seat—just enough so.

The February 23, 2009 New Yorker published a nice profile of McEwan, focusing largely on his evolution as a novelist of scientific reasoning, but also capturing his thoughts on craft. One of his goals is to “incite a naked hunger in readers,” he said. To create this hunger, he gives a great definition of suspense: “Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.”

This approach stands in contrast to the more expositional “background” approach to characterization that is so often proselytized. Know your characters’ eye color. Know the way they soap themselves in the shower. Know if they had pets as children, etc., etc.

But this sort of background knowledge can not only bog down the story, but weigh heavily on the writer, killing the notion of suspense.

The profile calls McEwan a “connoisseur of dread.” “At moments of peak intensity, McEwan slows time down—a form of torture that readers enjoy despite themselves.”
McEwan can slow down and create tension in such a way because he’s Nabokovian in his ability to “fondle details.”

McEwan explained, “Writing is a bottom-up process, to borrow a term from the cognitive world. One thing that’s missing from the discussion of literature in the academy is the pleasure principle. Not only the pleasure of the reader but also of the writer. Writing is a self-pleasuring act.”

Gosh, how interesting. In other words, don’t think of your reader in Peoria, think of yourself.

I envy McEwan for his ability to strike this chord of narrative leisure while attenuating the action to such a degree. “McEwan believes that something stirring should happen in a novel. Though he is animated by ideas, he would never plop two characters on a sofa and have them expound rival philosophies.”

In fact, he keeps a plot book full of scenarios two or three sentences long. “Here’s one,” he said. “’A comedy of beliefs set in a laboratory. Into this realm comes a young Islamic scientist who is technically brilliant. The head of the laboratory is a secular humanist, and the two become entangled. Something short and vicious, like Nathanael West.”

I can’t say that I’d want to read that novel, but then perhaps McEwan could make it interesting.

For more on McEwan, read

On the Subject of Plot: Marilynne Robinson

November 8, 2008 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

Since I wrote a bit about the monstrous subject of plot yesterday–and seem to always be wrangling with it in one way or another–I thought I’d follow up with a good quote from Marilynne Robinson that helps alleviate the plot pressure an author can feel, especially if he or she is an inadequate plotter like myself.

“I don’t like plot very much–please contain your surprise. It becomes a big machine that carries everything after it,” Robinson said in a recent reading/discussion at the Los Angeles Public Library.

It’s true that plot is quite a brute. The kind of person that bullies into a room and takes over the conversation, interrupting the softer voices, the whispers, the telling pauses.

When plot becomes the absolute focus, all other elements serve it–but plot will never serve the other elements. It’s too much of a king, a dictator, a despot, muscular and imperious and unabashed. It often won’t suffer the time to hear the details, to allow a narrative transgression or even a little meandering.

And it’s in the meandering that an author, and a reader, find so much of the meaning they’re searching for. It’s all a search, after all; life isn’t meant to be contained in an outline.

So I suppose an inadequate plotter like myself should resign myself to that fate and focus on the things I can do better. Not every pitcher has a good fast ball.

Here’s a shaky clip of Robinson reading at the event:

The Concept of Plot

November 8, 2008 by Grant Faulkner 1 Comment

It’s difficult to know if the ability to plot a good story is something that is genetically endowed or whether it can be learned.

What’s certain is that it’s difficult to tell a good story.

Many can draw a compelling character, paint words into scenes that ring in your thoughts for days, or snap through the back and forth of expert dialogue.

But all of this still needs a storyline, even a loose one.

Take a look at this image from Norman Mailer’s plot for Harlot’s Ghost. It’s not the details that a novelist needs to consider, but the connections. Perhaps it’s worth plotting a story out before or during or even after writing, but what’s most important is keeping the concept of the connections in mind.

Steal This Plot

April 11, 2007 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

There are so many basic plots—ready to simply snatch as I’ve recently learned—but I’ll be damned if I can write a good one.

I’m not sure why I try. It’s a pity we’re not living in a more nouvelle roman era—since I specialize in what might be called the meandering existential novel, sans epiphany, sans much of anything but a lot of moping about—but we’re living in the age of increasingly short attention spans, data smog, and well, the overwhelming popularity of new narratives, such as video games, that are much more viscerally arresting. Let’s be honest.

I should ask, “Who needs plot, not to mention text?” and be done with it. But I like plot. And I like text.

Despite the slipping and sloping and pausing, the attempted dipsy-do’s and dipsy-don’ts, the outright boring and embarrassing maudlin pitches of my writerly sensibilities, I relish a good plot. I envy writers who can write good plots like I envied guys who could get dates in high school (is there a connection between the two?).

I also hate writers who can write good plots, just as…yes, of course.

So, after all of these years of reading relatively serious fare (Roland Barthes anyone?) I picked up Steal This Plot, by June and William Noble, in a dog-eared, nearly bankrupt used book store, and it turned out to be one of the better “how-to-write” books I’ve read.

The caveat is that very few in the literary how-to genre have done me much good. Steal This Plot at the very least offers some archetypal plot structures to consider when writing any story. You don’t have to steal the plot so much as you can think about the tendencies of your own storyline and consider the trajectory of other stories. If you’re an undisciplined writer, and one who prefers to write without an outline, then Steal This Plot will surely help bring discipline to your storyline, and perhaps tame any wild tangents.

With its distinctions between plot spicers and plot motivators, it offers even experimental writers something to think about when constructing a narrative. I have to say that I think this book if more helpful than Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer.

Here are the plot motivators: