TECH: 101 Tips (21)

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting 3 June 2009

Writers' Digest, October 2004, pages 26 to 33, has a collection of short "nuggets of wisdom" related to getting published. Maria Schneider is the author of the compilation. Take a deep breath, and here we go:

"Art has shape and meaning, and life may lack both. Specifically, a story has a beginning (the setup), a middle (logical complications) and an end (a climax that implies something enduring about human beings). Real life may, unfortunately, lack all of these things. This means that for your actual experience to work as fiction, you must usually reshape it: adding events, leaving other things out, changing what really happened to what might have happened, all in the service of telling a better story." Nancy Kress

That's interesting. Real life may be too complex, may be lacking in connections and causation and motivation, but your story needs you to shape the raw materials. Somewhat like doing a sketch or a painting -- the real landscape is right there in front of you, but the art consists in leaving out the telephone pole, simplifying that tree with lopsided branches, making the whole thing vibrant. That's what we do with the story. Make sure that it says something, that it reaches into our hearts and lives and makes us feel.

Not just the facts -- better than that!
Write.

when you get to the part where he's breaking her heart...