Writing with Your Ego on the Backburner
by Louise Bohmer © 2009 All Rights Reserved
If you’re anything like me, you decided to try the writing game because you love a good story, and you want to try telling one. Writing a good story takes time. Much like a sculptor or painter, the first story you produce is likely to be crap. To paraphrase what I once read from a fellow author: “You’ll write a million terrible words before you produce one good story.”
I’ve met writers who are more concerned with ‘making a name for themselves,’ while their stories still require a lot of improvement. Before you make a name for yourself, you need to know how to construct a decent story, at least. Sure, you can ‘just write it,’ but eventually you’ll need to learn how to shape it into an engrossing story that will hold readers.
Stories are the writer’s children in many ways, but we can’t be so precious about those stories we refuse to improve. Constructive criticism is vital to the writer, and it’s in a writer’s best interest to take constructive criticism—whether it come from critique groups or beta readers or editors—and try to learn from it. If eight people read your story and at least five say the same thing, it doesn’t hurt to pull up that section of the story, analyze it, and see if the comments really do justify need for improvement. Chances are they do.
As a writer—particularly if you’re a new writer like me—it pays to listen to the longtime pros. Take advice from those who’ve walked this path twenty or forty years plus. Read Storytellers Unplugged, Robert McKee’s Story, and Mort Castle’s On Writing Horror. Absorb all the knowledge you can. Put your ego on the backburner, if you truly love the feeling you get from a good story—not just reading them, but writing them also.
No matter how fantastical your story, or how mundane, research it. I don’t care how well you think you know your chosen subject, you can always know more about it. Researching elements you want to incorporate into your story broadens your knowledge, insight, and understanding of those elements—gives you new ways to think about your themes and new ways to approach them in your story. Research will make you a more confident storyteller. A confident storyteller tells a confident story, which makes the tale more realistic to the reader, effectively suspends their disbelief, and makes your premise believable for them. Most readers can spot a bullshitter, at least most well read readers can. A poorly researched story will show through whether the writer realizes it or not, because their lack of understanding of the themes, characters, settings chosen / developed will result in vagueness, stereotypical characters, flimsy settings, and a poorly built reality.
Here’s another aspect to remember: millions of books have been written. If you don’t educate yourself somewhat on what’s come before you, how do you know you’re not duplicating someone else’s novel? Granted, nothing is truly original or unique anymore, in a world that’s been saturated with entertainment in one form or another (books, television, film, music, paintings, etc). But do you really want to get charged with plagiarism because your new, thrilling exciting novel (as you’ve dubbed it) uncomfortably mirrors something another writer just had published? It pays to know your genre, and not just your genre, but well beyond it.
Don’t live in a vacuum. Don’t make the writing all about you and your ego, and how your potential bestseller might get you mentioned in the New York Times. Chances are that won’t happen with your debut book. And don’t whine about how the big houses just won’t give you a chance because you’re too controversial or cutting edge. Most controversial or cutting edge writers never called themselves that, nor did they set out to be controversial. They became dubbed so over time because their writing naturally pushed some boundaries, and the reviewers, readers, and media labeled them as such. Nothing is more egotistical than tooting your own horn as the next great cutting edge novelist who is going to blow the industry away.
Step back from yourself, put your ego in a jar, and stop thinking about ‘memememe’ for a moment. Ask yourself why you first picked up the pen, or sat down at the keyboard. Did you do it because when you read your favorite author(s) for the first time, the story blew your mind, and something deep within you said: “I have to write a story that good one day. I want to invoke the same reaction I just had with this book in other readers, through my own carefully crafted words.” Or was it a case of “Oh, I really want to appear on Oprah one day. Having all those cameras on me would be divine!” Regardless of your answer, you still need to learn to craft a good, entertaining story, and to some extent that means forgetting about you and concentrating on learning the elements of crafting a story.
Granted, you should be writing for you. Because you want to write. Because something in you is addicted with every bone in your body to telling a story, for better or worse. But you need readers if you want to develop any sort of successful career. Ultimately, you have to make your audience believe that tale, enjoy that tale, whether it be a sweeping saga of 18th century Russia, or a tale of giant spiders eating people in a subway. You need to learn how to effectively suspend disbelief, how to develop characters so people actually care they might be eaten by a giant spider, and you need to have rising and falling action—some semblance of a plot or anti-plot—so readers aren’t just reading a sequence of events with no real connection at all. Showing—dramatization—rather than telling the story, not to mention what words, scenes, characters to keep and which ones to cut, are all crucial elements that go into writing an enjoyable tale.
Don’t be so concerned with being the next big thing in horror, or whatever genre you write in, that you forget telling a good story takes time and constant learning mixed with constant practice. Don’t get blindsided by the ‘fame’ factor. I’ve been at this, starting out as a hobby writer to trying my hand at the professional ladder, for almost eight years. I know I still have a ton to learn about crafting a good story, and I’ll never stop learning, even if I ever crack the bestseller list. Much like any other art form—painting, composing a song, sculpting, script writing—writing a great story is a never-ending evolution. If you’re too focused on yourself and the name game, you’ll forget the importance of the story, and you’ll lose out on the chance to learn innovative, masterful ways to tell it.
* * * * *
Louise Bohmer is a freelance editor and writer based in Sussex, New Brunswick. Her debut novel–The Black Act–was recently reissued by Library of Horror. You can read her short fiction in the upcoming Courting Morpheus, Ladies of Horror, and Into the Dreamlands. Her poetry can be read in Death In Common. (from her website)
If you enjoyed this post, check out her other posts at Scott Colbert’s and Jodi Lee’s blogs and watch for posts by Louise at Jude Mason’s and Kody Boye’s blogs