Donald Maass

About Donald Maass

Donald Maass is president of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. He has written several highly acclaimed craft books for novelists including The Breakout Novelist, The Fire in Fiction, Writing the Breakout Novel and The Career Novelist.

I’ve discussed before the role of narrative voice in pulling us into the dream state into which we fall when we read. The more I study it, though, the more convinced I am that the effect of narrative voice begins—or not—immediately. Narrative voice can lull us into the dream state within a novel’s first five lines. Dialogue and media res openings are not incorrect, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that when opening in those colder modes it takes longer to warmly lull readers into a story.

So, what are the elements that work such magic in a mere five lines? There are only two elements that matter and we can see them at work in the most durable and eternal of all openings:

Once upon a time, in a land far, far way…

Needless to say, that opening transports us back to childhood bedtimes and the wondrous fairy tales that followed. The soothing sound of our parents’ voices is as secure a safety zone as we probably have ever felt. However, let’s look a little more closely. The first clause of that phrase is richly sonorous. Say it out loud. It’s heavy with vowels. In the second clause, the repetition of the word “far” establishes a rhythmic pattern, a slow…tick…tock…that is almost hypnotic.

Thus, the first crucial element is language alone. When the words themselves soothe, seduce, delight or enchant us with their sound and rhetorical patterns, we are halfway to dreaming. The second element lies in the promise that we are about to journey to somewhere magical. By that, I do not mean settings that are strictly fantastic or fairy tale-like; I mean settings which are places where extraordinary things can happen.

Brute realism is okay, naturally, and there is nothing illegal about making a fictional place believable. However, it’s difficult to quickly put readers into a dream state when they are clobbered by a harsh and documentary immediacy.

Let’s take a look at how these two elements are at work in some actual openings.

Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013) is bound to be a novel in which extraordinary things occur. Hey, it’s Neil Gaiman. Have a look, though. Gaiman opens his novel with something that feels as much like an immigrant saga as a fantastic tale:

It was only a duck pond, out at the back of the farm. I wasn’t very big.

Lettie Hempstock said it was an ocean, but I knew that was silly. She said they’d come here across the ocean from the old country.

Her mother said that Lettie didn’t remember properly, and it was a long time ago, and anyway, the old country had sunk.

Old Mrs. Hempstock, Lettie’s grandmother, said they were both wrong, and that the place that had sunk wasn’t the really old country. She said she could remember the really old country.

She said the really old country had blown up.

Well, okay, that’s more than five lines, but not much more. First note the language: simple, sonorous, rhythmic. Notice the assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds. Ocean…old country…a long time ago … The sound of “o” predominates. The words “old country” repeat, as well. Also at work also is the Rule of Three, as in Lettie…her mother…her grandmother. One, two, three. Bing, bang, boom. Ready, set, go! Three is a powerful pattern. [Read more…]

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The Extraordinary World: How Soon and How Little?

April 3, 2019 By Donald Maass 26 Comments

Two months ago here on WU, I examined the concept of the “ordinary world”, familiar from the plot template of the Hero’s Journey, the early story phase in which the normal state of things is established, the platform from which a protagonist will depart for adventures and to which a protagonist will return when all is accomplished and the world is again set right. We found that the seemingly-humdrum world is, in fact, shot full of tension that presages the story to come.

On the other hand, what about story settings that are far from our own time and/or place? Different cultures, different countries, different periods of history and even made-up times and places, as in fantasy fiction, present another kind of challenge. Such settings need to convey to readers what is dissimilar to our familiar world, while simultaneously making the exotic world understandable and relatable, meaning in some way perfectly ordinary. How can that be accomplished smoothly, without infodump or a deep-end dive into what is bewilderingly new?

In some cases, a straightforward introduction to a different world is a good approach. Jenny Han’s P.S. I Still Love You (2015), is a sequel to her charming YA romance To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2014), the story of sixteen-year-old Korean-American girl Lara Jean Song, who writes secret love letters to the boys she’s crushing on, letters which she naturally keeps hidden. When the letters are mistakenly (?) posted to their unaware subjects, complications, as they say, ensue.

In P.S. I Still Love You, Lara Jean’s crush on hunky Peter is now widely known, as is a notorious interlude with him in a hot tub on a lightly-supervised school trip. As the novel opens, though, it is New Year’s Day, which entails special traditions in Lara Jean’s Korean culture. Dressed in a hanbok, she participates in one of them:

We get the bowing out of the way first. In Korean culture, you bow to your elders on New Year’s Day and wish them luck in the new year, and in return they give you money. The order goes oldest to youngest, so as the oldest adult, Grandma sits down on the couch first, and Aunt Carrie and Uncle Victor bow first, then Daddy, all the way down the line to Kitty, who is youngest. When it’s Daddy’s turn to sit on the couch and receive his bows, there’s an empty couch cushion next to him as there has been every New Year’s Day since Mommy died. It gives me an achy feeling in my chest to see him sitting there alone, smiling gamely, handing out ten-dollar bills. Grandma catches my eye pointedly and I know she’s thinking the same thing. When it’s my turn to bow, I kneel, hands folded in front of my forehead, and I vow that I will not see Daddy alone on that couch again next year.

Were you caught by surprise? Did the lonely couch cushion next to Lara Jean’s widowed father, and her kneeling before him, hands folded in front of her forehead, tug at your heart strings? Jenny Han knows how to slay us. Lara Jean’s compassionate ache for her father, and the absence of her mother, is something we can instantly relate to. Furthermore, Han is not coy about culture. She presumes that her readers are mostly not Korean-American. Why should she? Why presumptively limit the novel’s appeal? Han just goes for it: “In Korean culture…” What might have been self-conscious instead becomes a winning cultural pride.

What if a novel’s culture is not as charming or easy to like as that? What if a culture is actually a problem and a source of conflict? Angie Thomas’s YA best seller The Hate U Give (2017) is exactly that: a novel about a world of trouble, specifically the world of Black Lives Matter, in which unarmed young African-American men can be gunned down by police without consequence. Thomas cannily situates a sixteen-year-old African-American girl, Starr Carter, between two cultures. On the one hand, Starr lives in the crime-ridden neighborhood of Garden Heights; on the other hand, she attends a luxe private school for the privileged, Williamson Prep.

As the novel opens, Thomas must portray the world of this caught-between-cultures girl, as so we find her at an out-of-control party in Garden Heights with her friend Kenya: [Read more…]

Nasty, Menacing, Murderous: Protagonists We Love…and Why

March 6, 2019 By Donald Maass 27 Comments

I wonder what literary historians will make of the fiction of our times?

Dark times often produce light stories. After World War I, for instance, British crime fiction took a cozy turn. In contrast, economic prosperity can bring us tales grimly pessimistic. The year 1949 produced the novel 1984. The year 2008 gave us The Hunger Games. The economy crashed that year, true, but the novel must have been written earlier when high-risk mortgages and credit default swaps were like candy.

Currently, our economy has been on a path of tepid, unequal recovery for ten years—nothing to brag about but not wholly bad either—so you might expect that such a time would produce a literature of mild discontent. Nope. Our era has produced more unabashedly dark fiction than probably any other era in literary history.

Why now? I’ll leave the question to academics to answer, but dark fiction generally involves an element both puzzling and important for writers to understand: dark protagonists. Nasty, menacing and murderous protagonists are wildly popular. Go figure. Is it exciting for readers to vicariously enjoy being amoral?

Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night (2006) is the story of Edward Glyver, a Victorian booklover, scholar and murderer. His first killing is of a randomly chosen stranger, a murder for which feels no remorse—but for which he has a reason:

Now I knew that I could do it; but it gave me no pleasure. The poor fellow had done me no harm. Luck had simply been against him—together with the colour of his hair, which, I now say, had been his fatal distinction. His way that night, inauspiciously coinciding with mine in Threadneedle-street, had made him the unwitting object of my irrevocable intention to kill someone; but had it not been him, it must have been someone else.

Until the very moment in which the blow had been struck, I had not known definitively that I was capable of such a terrible act, and it was absolutely necessary to put the matter beyond all doubt. For the dispatching of the red-haired man was in the nature of a trial, or experiment, to prove to myself that I could indeed take another human life, and escape the consequences. When I next raised my hand in anger, it must be with the same swift and sure determination; but this time it would be directed, not at a stranger, but at the man I call my enemy.

And I must not fail.

Let’s think about that confessional passage. Glyver claims no remorse, and yet he describes the murder as “a terrible act”. He has no pleasure in it, sounding almost indifferent, and yet he calls his victim “the poor fellow”. Do you get the feeling that Glyver’s sentiments and words are at odds with what he’s done? They are.

Thus, we can discern the most fundamental trick of putting over a really terrible person: The dark protagonist who purports to have no conscience actually has one. Furthermore a “bad” protagonist, if palatable, is necessarily and somehow and in some way, to some degree, good. [Read more…]

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The Ordinary World: How Much and How Ordinary?

February 6, 2019 By Donald Maass 46 Comments

Even if you are not familiar with The Hero’s Journey, there’s a good chance you know that its first step is establishing the Ordinary World. That, commonly understood, is a baseline view of a protagonist’s life and location.

Establishing the Ordinary World is like playing the first chord in a musical composition: It’s the safe and satisfying sound to which we will long to return during the many variations to come. Until we know a protagonist’s “normal” we won’t know what order needs to be restored. We’ll lack the heart and home anchors that make a protagonist both relatable and motivated. We won’t meet the people who need to be protected and saved. A protagonist without an Ordinary World will be a hero without a cause, and so we need to spend some time there.

That, anyway, is the common idea; however, that idea is limited if not wrong. In too many manuscripts it leads to early pages laden with the domestic clatter of the daily routine. Characters do what they’d do on any ordinary day followed shortly, or so the theory goes, by an interruption that brings the first hint of trouble.

Even stories that begin with trouble—a dead body, say, or a special -ops mission—can retreat quickly to a “normal” atmosphere and tempo, as when a detective in Chapter Two goes home for a shower, or the team returns to base to debrief. Getting to know protagonists is important, obviously, but pouring cereal or joshing around do not automatically produce tension. In my experience, they almost never produce tension at all.

My colleague and friend Chris Vogler in The Writer’s Journey, his distillation and interpretation of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces for writers, elaborates on the utility and purpose of the Ordinary World. Chris explains that the purpose of the Ordinary World is multi-fold. It can create a metaphor for the story world and its problems. It can set a story’s context, which is to say the framework for coming conflict. The Ordinary World can feel tame compared to the Special World later on, but the seemingly tranquil base can nevertheless contain the seeds of trouble. The hero’s problems do not begin elsewhere; they are already present at home. Pretty obvious when you think about it.

The Ordinary World phase of a novel can also foreshadow the Special World and raise the story’s dramatic questions. Heroes makes entrances, certainly, yet they can also sweep in along with them all of their baggage and hang-ups. We want to like heroes, unquestionably, but there is also no reason that heroes’ lacks, flaws, needs, wants, wounds, burdens or yearnings need to wait. The story’s stakes and theme are likewise in the air already. How could they not be? Stakes are always present and any issue worth writing about is already with us now.

Thus, the seemingly placid surface of the Ordinary World is deceptive. The Ordinary World is anything but settled and safe. Dangerous currents exist in the water close to shore. Any life that appears serene is actually loaded with suppressed conflict. A routine that feels comfortable and easy is in reality a situation in which a protagonist’s weakness is only temporarily tolerated. Heroes are not yet heroic at home, and if we look closely that is immediately obvious. Heroes have growing to do. They need to be tested. All of that is made plain in the Ordinary World.

Look at in that way, the Ordinary World doesn’t seem so ordinary, does it? Let’s take a look at some Ordinary Worlds already on the shelves.

S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) opens with Ponyboy telling us about his world; in particular, the distinction between his social class and another: [Read more…]

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The Inner/Outer Balance

January 2, 2019 By Donald Maass 29 Comments

Do you talk a lot about yourself, or are you the bottled-up type? Which is better? Which type of person do you suppose is easier for others to know?

Talking a lot about yourself doesn’t necessarily mean that we know the real you. By the same token, being tight-lipped could well make you easy to read. Neither personality type is better, ask me, it is only a matter of how easily, and how well, we sense who you are. What you’re feeling. How you see things.

Thing is, we want to know you. Share your experience. Connect. Find out what we have in common. Know that we are not alone. Are you willing to let us in? Do you feel safe doing so? If you’re an open book, that’s great. If you need time to reveal yourself, that’s fine too. The point today is to understand yourself because how comfortable, and how quickly, you open up is connected to how you handle your characters on the page.

When reading a story, what we want above all things is to connect. Exciting plots and lofty prose are nice in a novel, but the deepest involvement we feel comes from those moments when our hearts fuse with your protagonist’s, and when something happening in the story feels like it is happening to us.

What happens in a story is not happening to us, of course. What characters are going through can seem like it is magically transferred to us but, actually, it’s not. What we read stimulates in us recognition. We associate story experiences with our own real lives and the wealth of feelings that we’ve banked. When an association is strong, we naturally—although incorrectly—ascribe what we feel to the story. Readers make comments such as, “It’s like the author was writing about me!”

Obviously not, but let’s focus on what produces that “as-if” feeling in readers. Back in November here on WU, Dave King gave us a terrific post on immersive POV, in which he edited a scene in which a wedding photographer is coaxing spicier shots from her bride-and-groom subjects. Dave shaped the passage to emphasize the photographer’s thought process, thereby immersing us more completely in her POV.

Today, my question is: How much immersion is effective? What’s the right balance of interior thoughts and feelings versus outward action? This question is often posed as show versus tell. That’s an accurate way to pose it, to a point, but framing the issue as show versus tell leads us to a false value judgment. Either showing or telling must be inherently better, right? (Mostly show gets the nod.)

The truth is that neither is superior, what matters is the effect you are having on your reader; whether your reader is experiencing recognition. Spelling out interior thoughts and feelings can do that, but so can implying those through outward action. However, not just any thoughts and feelings or action will work. There is a trick. Let’s turn to a couple of examples to examine both the benefits and pitfalls of either approach. [Read more…]

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Catastrophe Theory and Characters

December 5, 2018 By Donald Maass 19 Comments

Once in while, a new idea clobbers the brains of physicists and mathematicians. Suddenly, they are forced to look at the universe in new and sometimes counter-intuitive ways. Relativity. Quantum physics. Game theory. Chaos theory.

Abstruse stuff like that isn’t just parlor entertainment for members of Mensa. It has practical applications. Nuclear energy. Space travel. Computers. Even if we don’t get binomial distribution and math equations look to us like the number and letter stickers that my son has randomly plastered on his bedroom door, we should pay attention. Physics explains strange phenomena. Math orders what seems chaotic.

In the 1960’s, a French mathematician named René Thom came up with a way of understanding and describing sudden change. It was a breakthrough because ordinary math presumes that things are fixed and solid like number lines, triangles and cubes. Even the math of motion, calculus, conceives of moving bodies following smooth curves. Throw a stone or fire a rocket into the air and it follows a predictable and elegant path up and back down.

But not everything that happens is so smooth and elegant. The car ahead of you brakes sharply. A corn kernel in a pan of hot oil suddenly pops open. An old wall cracks. Such events may seem unpredictable, measurable only as probabilities. But every sudden change occurs in a particular moment. Think of a dome with a marble perfectly balanced on its apex. That marble isn’t going to stay there for long. At a certain moment, the marble will suddenly start to roll in one direction or another. Wouldn’t it be nifty to know when that moment will occur?

Okay, maybe knowing the precise second when a marble will begin to roll off a dome isn’t all that exciting. But what if math could tell us ahead of time when an airplane engine will fail, the day on which a depressed individual will commit suicide, or when prisoners will riot, or when a government will go to war?

René Thom came up with math which might predict such sudden changes, which he called catastrophes. His insights stirred hope that math could predict the previously unpredictable even in soft-science realms such as biology, psychology and social science. Catastrophe theory, it was thought, might illuminate things as diverse as animals’ territoriality, corporate decisions to raise prices, and humans’ behavior in paying taxes.

The key was Thom’s application of topology which, in plain English, considers what happens to invariant points when the set of which they are a part bends or stretches around that point. According to Thom, there are seven types of unstable curves, simple or three-dimensional, that show how a point will move “suddenly”—but predictably—according to how various forces are warping around it.

The seven types of unstable curves Thom named fold, cusp, swallowtail, butterfly, hyperbolic umbilic, elliptic umbilic, and parabolic umbilic. Don’t stress. There won’t be a quiz. Just have a look at this cusp catastrophe diagram that predicts when a tax scofflaw will suddenly decide to pay his or her taxes:

What you see above is that the space around a point (“A”) can bend and fold as different pressures effect it. When the fold becomes extreme enough, point “A” suddenly leaps from one spot to another. Point “A”, the tax scofflaw, in a startling instant becomes Point “B”, a dutiful taxpayer.

What Thom showed was that such behavior is not random, meaning that it will either happen or not. It will happen, math proves it, but to you and me the change that happens will look sudden and without immediate cause.

So, what has all of that to do with characters in fiction? Well, consider this: characters change. [Read more…]

What a Cathedral is Not

November 7, 2018 By Donald Maass 35 Comments

Have you ever walked into a Medieval cathedral? Architecturally speaking, they are engineering marvels. Heavy stone buttresses support soaring vault arches of many types: barrel, groin, rib, fan.

Cathedrals have many parts, each offering a different experience of the divine. There is the narthex in which to grow quiet and prepare. There is the nave in which to sit and kneel in common with others. There is the choir from which celestial music emanates. There are the altar and the communion rail. Around the cathedral’s perimeter are little alcoves where one may venerate the Madonna or saints. There is a baptismal font and a little curtained booth, partitioned inside with a tiny window between the halves, where one may confess sins and be forgiven. Various notables may be entombed around the place. In some cathedrals you may walk the Via Crucis, or Stations of the Cross, a darkly gruesome but ultimately redemptive story told in serial fashion.

When you enter such a Cathedral, though, what is the first thing that you feel? Is it admiration of the way in which the load of the roof is distributed down to the ground? Is it pleasure in the acoustics? Do you intently study the map available in a wooden stand near the entrance, planning your tour around the interior? If you are like most people, those are not the first things that you experience. If you are like most people, the first thing that you experience is one gigantic and simple emotion. You raise your eyes upward and feel…

…awe.

That is the way that the Church and its architects wanted you to feel. The whole design of the cathedral is meant to give one the experience of faith, to grasp God’s cosmology, to reflect the tenants of Christianity and teach it precepts. Above all, it is an emotional experience. There are lots of little rooms inside the building in which to have more focused experiences, but the overall intent is for you to be blasted by awe.

When we talk about writing novels, why do we talk first and primarily about the buttresses and vaulted arches of the story? Why do we rush to decorate the radiant chapels and alcoves, hurry the choir into song, zip to the baptismal font and scurry to the confessional booth before any sins have even been committed?

I have nothing against plot. There is nothing wrong with scene structure. Sparkling style, protagonist back story and arc are all fine. And yet we labor to quickly put those elements into place, thinking that that if we get them just right then our readers will get religion. But a cathedral by itself is not faith, it only contains it. Faith is not a building but a feeling. By the same token, for readers a novel is not the plot but the feelings that the novel evokes, which in aggregate produce (we hope) an experience of awe.

Therefore, in creating a novel I recommend giving thought early on not just to its architecture but also to its effect. [Read more…]

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The Weight

October 3, 2018 By Donald Maass 33 Comments

Are you hiding something?

Did I just see you flinch? I won’t tell. In fact, you don’t even have to tell me what it was that just flashed through your mind. It’s enough that I know it’s there. You are carrying a burden, a weight that much of the time you can ignore but which nevertheless never completely goes away.

Guilt is like that. It persists. It’s a stab that doesn’t stop. Until it is spoken and absolved, confessed and forgiven, it remains real. Now, what’s that you say? You insist that you have nothing about which you feel guilty? Why do I not believe you? If that is true, which I doubt, then you have lived a life that is either lucky, pure or blameless. Either that or you have no conscience or empathy, in which case go seek public office.

Sorry, cheap shot. Back to guilt. It’s a primary emotion, primary meaning not only important but universal. We’ve all felt it. If our greatest offense was big enough, even if was committed long ago, we feel it still. The stab. What we have to feel guilty about may be something we said or did, or it may be what we failed to say or do. Remaining silent when a shout is called for can be as damning as anything.

What I’m talking about today is not the wound we feel, but the weight we bear. Characters too.

The Wound of late has been much discussed in the realm of fiction writing. It’s the backstory hurt or injustice that has shaped a character into who he or she is in the present. It is the root of yearning, the yawning hole, the empty bucket to fill, the unmet need that shapes and drives a character, producing a false belief and an anguish that demands relief.

The Wound is a fine and important aspect of character development, one entirely fitting for our era. The hurts we feel must be healed, and when met by a lack of understanding, ownership or apology, those hurts do not go away. They burst forth as anger. Those treated unjustly demand justice. They shout. They march. Our current Age of Resentment has its origins in complaints both direct and indirect, sharp and long-standing. The public clamor going on these days, ask me, is healthy. It is our society trying to heal. It’s our collective story and a fundamental aspect of the stories we tell.

The Weight is different. The Weight drives us in other ways. The Weight may lead to avoidance and denial, or it may cause us to project our own guilt onto others. If you have ever gone on a bender, taken a joy ride, or run away from a situation, or have too quickly pointed an accusing finger at others, then you have felt the displacement of The Weight. Guilt spills over, like water when a stone is dropped into a brimming beaker. Guilt has to go somewhere, and that usually that is into blaming others. Our hope is that when the burden of guilt gets strong enough, it will lead to change. If you have ever resolved to be a better person, then you have felt that effect. [Read more…]

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Stuck

September 5, 2018 By Donald Maass 51 Comments

WU is not a blog on which I expect to find upsetting posts. However, I was upset upon reading Julia Munroe Martin’s recent post Confessions from a Weary Writer. Julia’s raw account of discouragement got to me. It has stayed with me. No writer should feel that pain. I understand it, yet I wanted to hug. To help. Is there help? I hope so.

Julia reports having lost the joy in writing. She feels a fraud and fears never being traditionally published. She’s been up to bat a few times and struck out. She hasn’t quit, though. (Hooray!) To nurture herself she practices kindness to herself, mindfulness and acceptance of her fears. Just thinking is okay. She draws positive friends close and pushes away social media. All smart and effective ways to tend to oneself when writing is hard.

Except. It isn’t the writing that has led to discouragement, but the results. (So far.) Slamming into the thick outer wall of the industry fortress is enough to clobber anybody’s spirits, and that in turn can sap the joy juice out of the creative process. I get it. I do. Yet the writing itself did not start out that way. For most, in the beginning writing fiction is fun. It’s a process overflowing with potential, a visit to a land of enchantment, a shoulder tap with a magic sword conferring storytelling power. The story itself is real, happening somewhere apart from the kitchen table, its people fully formed and alive, all one must do is dream their dream and capture it in words.

Stories don’t get discouraged, only writers do.

Which makes me think that another avenue of help for discouragement may be not on the yoga mat but in realizing that even when you are down, a story and its world are always up and running. A story doesn’t care how you feel. It doesn’t have time for that. It’s too busy. Stuck? Your characters are not stuck. Your story world is not static. Why are you not having fun? Your story world is an amusement park. Roller coasters. Haunted houses. Tunnels of love. People there are having a great time, screaming in terror or making out in the dark.

Your story world is also a place of beauty. It’s a world in which words gush like mountain streams during spring thaw. There are slow-motion sunrises and blazing sunsets. People are kind—or cruel. Rusting red trucks on cinder blocks in backyards dream of old adventures. A secret is holding its breath beneath the surface of the lake. Someone is going to change. Something malign is going to die.

In a way, regaining the joy in writing is nothing more complicated than getting out of your own life and taking a vacation in the world of your story. That’s not so hard. It only takes ten deep breaths. It’s as simple as a walk down to the harbor. It may not seem that there is time for that. If you feel so, let me ask you this: Is there anything more important to do with the next two minutes than to nurture your soul and dream your story’s dream? [Read more…]

Words When There Are No Words

August 1, 2018 By Donald Maass 12 Comments

Some things cannot be captured in words. The high of a rock concert. The terror of teetering atop a cliff. The dreamy wonder of a distant train whistle at night. The arms-in-the-air elation in a stadium when the home team scores a goal. Finding faith. Such moments outrun the utility of language. They are too big for tiny little words.

Yet capturing the intangible and getting down concretely what is beyond description is part of the job for fiction writers. Without that skill, novels are limited to what is tactile. Human experience is more than the five senses, though. It is grasping what cannot be held, seeing what is invisible, walking where there is no road, dwelling in spaces that don’t exist.

Is it possible to transcend words even while using them? Certainly. Authors do it all the time. Today let’s take a look at the method.

Intangible experiences include: fashion moments, listening to music, battle lust, circus thrills, forest solitude, sports contests, a wedding ring slipping into place, holding a newborn, knowing you will die. There’s no way to fully capture such things by summing up sights, sounds and feelings. Therefore, we must find a different approach.

Writing About Winning Means Losing…What?

The method I’m talking about today boils down to this: When you can’t describe something, don’t. Describe the experience instead. In other words, focus not on the intangible that can’t be captured but on the person who can.

Walter Tevis was one of the most versatile novelists of the 20^th Century. You probably recognize his name but did you know that he wrote novels as different as The Hustler (1959), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963) and The Color of Money (1984), all of which became iconic movies?

Lesser known but equally accomplished is Tevis’s 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit, which tells the story of American girl Beth Harmon who in the basement of her orphanage, the horrible Methune Home, learns the game of chess from the janitor, Mr. Shaibel. The game sharpens her drug-dulled mind and by the age of sixteen she is competing for the U.S. Open championship. Later, she will challenge the Russian grandmasters.

Chess games are a huge part of the novel, obviously, but Tevis portrays them without ever once actually explaining the rules of the game or how individual pieces move. Quite a trick! However, Tevis realized that technical details are not what make the game dramatic.

In an early scene, Beth learns about chess openings from the maddening Mr. Shaibel, who is stingy with information:

She leaned forward. “Show me.”

He looked down at her. “No. Not now.”

This infuriated her. She understood well enough that a person likes to keep his secrets. She kept hers. Nevertheless, she wanted to lean across the board and slap his face and make him tell her. She sucked in her breath. “Is that the Sicilian Defense?”

…

But when they played a real game afterward, he pushed his queen’s pawn forward, and she could see immediately that what he had just taught her was useless in this situation. She glared at him across the board, feeling that if she had a knife, she could have stabbed him with it. Then she looked back to the board and moved her own queen’s pawn forward, determined to beat him.

He moved the pawn next to his queen’s pawn, the one in front of the bishop. He often did this. “Is that one of those things? Like the Sicilian Defense?” she asked.

“Openings.” He did not look at her; he was watching the board.

“Is it?”

He shrugged. “The Queen’s Gambit.”

She felt better. She had learned something more from him. She decided not to take the offered pawn, to leave the tension on the board. She liked it like that. She liked the power of the pieces, exerted along files and diagonals. In the middle of the game, when the pieces were everywhere, the forces crisscrossing the board thrilled her. She brought out her king’s knight, feeling its power spread.

In twenty moves she had won both his rooks, and he resigned.

As you can see, the contest portrayed in this scene is not between the pieces on the chessboard. On one level, the contest is between Beth and Mr. Shaibel. On another, the struggle is played out not on the chessboard but through Beth’s emotions. The thrill of battle is all internal, not external. [Read more…]

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Black, White, Gray, Rainbow: What is Heroism Now?

July 4, 2018 By Donald Maass 35 Comments

In fairy tales, characters are extreme. Heroes are very, very good. Villains are very, very bad. This suits the sensibilities of the audience for fairy tales: children. Black and white works for them. It’s simple. As adults, we know that people aren’t so simple.

That is not to say that we adults sometimes do not cheer for—or, for that matter, write—black and white heroes and villains. Think of superheroes. Think of Conan. Alex Cross. Jo March. Nancy Drew. Arya Stark. Clarice Starling. Solid gold heroes and heroines are strong, noble, moral, smart and plucky. Their appeal is enduring. We aspire to be like them. They are perfect. They are pure.

Still, as grownups, we know better. People aren’t like that. People aren’t pure and to the extent that we try to perfect we will be unhappy and probably fail. For characters in fiction to resonate with us, they can’t be simplistic. For that human reason, perhaps, as well as historical ones, the tide of 20^th Century fiction ran in the direction of anti-heroes: flawed, suffering, alienated, cynical. They are still written today.

If characters like that become heroes or heroines, those roles are often accidental or unwilling. They may also be characters to whom things simply happen, making such heroism a matter of endurance. Phillip Marlow. Holden Caulfield. Yossarian. Thomas Covenant. Roland the Gunslinger. Esther Greenwood (The Bell Jar). Carrie. Lisbeth Salander. Katniss Everdeen. The list of protagonists who are in some way disaffected is very long.

Beyond that we have post-modern heroes and heroines: morally neutral, self-mocking, ironic, utterly contemporary. Slothrop (Gravity’s Rainbow). Jack Gladney (White Noise). Odilo Unverdorben (Time’s Arrow).

More recently we have, ask me, entered an era of multi-cultural or rainbow protagonists. Such characters challenge us to dwell in different contexts and gain a different understanding of what is heroic. Sethe (Beloved). Oscar Wao. Sue Trinder and Maul Lilly (Fingersmith). Kimberly Chang (Girl in Translation). Binti. When such heroes or heroines shine it is not just because they are different but because in their different worlds they stand out. They are extraordinary.

Thus, heroes and heroines can be good, gray, enduring, different…really, anything at all. They can be pure or imperfect. They can be proactive or set-upon. They can be hopeful, cynical or indifferent. They can be admirably virtuous or abdominally the opposite. There is nothing in the makeup of a characters that automatically qualifies or disqualifies them as heroes or heroines.

What, then, is at the core of heroism? Are there universal defining qualities which cause us to feel that characters are heroic, regardless of their natures? When strength, goodness, smarts, esteem, good looks, great purpose or any other qualities commonly called heroic are not required for heroism, then what is required?

Is there a secret formula? [Read more…]

The Reason to Build a Box

June 6, 2018 By Donald Maass 33 Comments

I’ll admit, that’s a strange post title for a site called Writer UN-Boxed. But stick with me. In certain circumstances, you may want to write inside a box.

By that, I do not mean a box of expectations, as in slavishly following storytelling “rules”. Strict adherence to genre rules, for instance, might seem to please genre fans, but actually only results in cookie cutter novels. Universal story templates such as the Hero’s Journey or three-act structure are meant to inspire but, treated too rigidly, can also constrain. Really, any kind of imitation results only in routine novels.

To be effective, fiction must to some degree be original. Thinking outside the box is helpful, no question. That said, I sometimes meet writers who are overwhelmed by their choices. They have a buffet of possible projects and a plethora of intentions. They agonize over what to write and swim in a sea of directions in which to take their stories.

For such writers, there are too many possibilities. They are paralyzed, unable to choose. They have fallen prey to a phenomenon that social scientists call maximization. It’s a kind of fear: the fear that there are better options. Examining every last possibility might seem to be a virtue, a smart sifting, but while agonizers do tend to make better decisions they also are less satisfied with what they ultimately select. They are haunted by the possibilities still lingering. What if they missed out on a better choice?

(If you’re interested in the science behind the common sense, you can find it here.)

In daily life, the solution to drowning in possibilities lies in determining what is the minimum positive outcome of a given decision. More simply, instead of wondering what would be perfect, instead decide what would be good enough? [Read more…]