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A Hack for Getting to the Heart of Your Story—and Staying There

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When my younger son was in the first grade, his teacher gave the class a writing assignment that consisted of finishing this sentence:

“The most important thing about [insert your name] is____”

My son, Alex, wrote, “The most important thing about Alex is that he tries really hard.”

Now, eleven years later, as I read over Alex’s draft college essays, I realize that this “most important thing”—he tries really hard—was true about him then and is still true about him now. In fact, this simple sentence manages to sum up and describe so much about who Alex is, what his values are and what drives his choices and actions.  

Because it invites such an apt and succinct description of a defining characteristic of the person completing the sentence, this simple first-grade assignment also contains a brilliant nugget of writerly wisdom: at the heart of every character, every scene and every story lies one single Most Important Thing.  It could be a sentiment, a motivation, a mood or a source of tension.  But whatever it is, there is only one that’s most important.

In drafting stories, with so many strands of inspiration swirling around in our minds, it can be hard to sort out what really matters. Which characters, which scenes, which actions, descriptions, metaphors or dialogue lines are relevant. What lies at the heart of it all and how to stay centered amid the myriad possibilities pulling us in different directions is often nebulous because everything we create and imagine feels precious.

In my own fiction-drafting process, the phrase “the most important thing about X is____” is always on my mind—especially as I re-write, revise and cut.  X can be any number of things: a character as a whole, a character’s mood in a particular scene, the relationship between two or more characters, a setting, a prop, a conversation.  It may take multiple drafts for that Most Important Thing to become clear, but even in early iterations, I am constantly asking myself what it is. In the early stages the answer informs me about what direction to head in, what overarching choices to make, what to include and whether to continue at all. If I can’t articulate a Most Important Thing, is there a story worth telling? [Read more…]

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Missing Some Memories? I Might Have Stolen Them

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Remember when you were in high school and you told your mom you were going to Susie Straightlace’s house to study but you really went to Rachel Riskwhisker’s rager where you drank so much Grape Crush and vodka you had to crawl home with one eye shut and you peeked in your living room window to see if your mom was still up and you saw that she had removed her glowing, rutabaga-shaped brain from its cranial case and was recharging it with what you had once thought was a giant electric razor and … [Read more...]

Crafting Titles That Hook Readers and Optimize Success

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Short story titles are important. They are the sizzle that sell your story.  While novels have back cover copy and reviews to help sell them, short stories have only the title to grab a reader's attention. Take a moment to picture a reader flipping through an anthology. They’re looking at the table of contents, scanning the titles. If they’ve never heard of you, the title really has to intrigue them and pull them in. So how are you feeling, now? Horrified, because you consider yourself … [Read more...]

Flog a Pro: Would You Pay to Turn the First Page of this Bestseller?

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Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page. Here’s the question: Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents. So, before you … [Read more...]

Road, Neighborhood, Sky: A Three-Layered Approach to Writing a Novel

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During the launch events for Queen of the Owls, I was often asked: “What’s your writing process like?”  People wanted to know if I had a routine, method, daily word count, comfort food, or other habit that carried me from story idea to published book. Since I tend to avoid routine, I usually muttered something about ideas coming to me in the shower and the oscillation between frenzy and sloth.  In fact, “writing process” wasn’t something I thought about. I thought about what I was writing, not … [Read more...]

Managing Your Cast

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           If you believe mystery writers, an awful lot of murders take place in isolated country cottages or on ships at sea or on snowed-in trains.  This kind of isolation makes it harder for the killer to escape, but it limits the cast, which makes the writer’s job easier.  It limits the number of suspects, and readers know everyone from the beginning.  Some more of them may turn up dead before the end, and one or two may turn out to be long-lost heirs or imposters.  But the dramatis personae … [Read more...]

Writing Chapter Books for Young Readers

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A few years ago, I wrote posts for Writer Unboxed about writing middle-grade fiction,  as well as young adult fiction, and picture book texts. Today, as my new book, Four on the Run, has recently launched, I’d like to talk about writing chapter books. Chapter books are part of what may be loosely termed ‘junior fiction’, for readers between 5-9 years old. Readers of that age still read picture books, but they like longer stories, too, though many aren’t quite ready for that leap into the … [Read more...]

Love, Hope, and the Dystopian Dark

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I had one of those dread-saturated 3:00 AM awakenings last week. The initial panic resulted from a sudden awareness that all the most dire warnings regarding the upcoming election are virtually certain to come true. The Transition Integrity Project, a nonpartisan group of academics, journalists, and current and former government and party officials, has simulated the four most likely scenarios, and all but one results in widespread violence and a Constitutional crisis. [Note: I didn't … [Read more...]

Tangled Threads or Perfect Weave: Writing a Many-Stranded Story

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My first novel had a single first person narrator throughout. It was the ideal choice, since the book was loosely based on a fairy tale in which the central character is mute for much of the story (think Jane Campion’s wonderful movie, The Piano.) First person allowed the reader into her thoughts and feelings, and meant we could walk her journey alongside her. I kept the same pattern for the rest of that series, with a different narrator in each book. I love the immersive feel of a first … [Read more...]

Editing at Your Own Pace

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Writing is usually a fairly solitary experience, except maybe when your cats walk across the keyboard and add their contribution. But the publication process can be different, especially if you want to stand out among other authors and deliver a professional manuscript that can compete with the many thousands sent to publishers and agents every year, along with all the novels by indie authors and those already on the shelves. For many writers, a major part of that professionalization is … [Read more...]

Is Writing Work?

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I'm tempted, of course, to make this the shortest Writer Unboxed post in history. ("Is writing work? Yes." Done!)Writing is work. Hard work, sometimes. Frustrating and challenging and exhausting, yes, those too, all too often. It's work because we sometimes get paid for it; it's work even when we don't. It's work because it takes genuine effort, thought, focus. It's work because it isn't play.Except, of course, when it is.Have you ever had a work in progress you love so much, it feels like play? … [Read more...]

Writing While Black in Times Like This

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I’m sitting at my computer, but my fingers have lost their rhythm. They’re rigid. Mechanical. Impotent. It’s as if they know or have been here before and recognize the shackles that bound my Black ancestors are the same ones we wear today. History lacks originality, always emerging in new skin encasing the same old terror. I’m a writer and I’m supposed to bring eloquence to our coarse dialogue, a balm to our pain, beauty to our ashes. But there’s nothing new to say, nothing but what’s been … [Read more...]

Struggling through the Shitty First Draft

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Raise your hand if you’re working on a first draft. Yeah, me, too. I’m going to let you in on a secret: I used to hate drafting. There’s an expanse of empty white page. There are thousands of possibilities (holy overwhelm, Batman), and it takes an enormous amount of dynamic energy to create from nothing. That’s what a first draft is all about—creating from nothing. Well, nothing but a few nebulous ideas. Yet, something has happened to my feelings about drafting over time. Now, after … [Read more...]

Emergent Voices

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To Essay a Path Forward A new collection of very short, quickly readable essays has been released by PEN America. Titled We Will Emerge, these essays are available free of charge online and are the result of a project initiated by Wajahat Ali and Dave Eggers during April of this year’s pandemic spring. (That last link is to Publishing Perspectives, where we have a great deal of coverage of the pandemic has it pertains to aspects of the world publishing industry.) The collection is cast in … [Read more...]