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7 Sneaky Ways to Spotlight Story Wisdom

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photo adapted / Horia Varlan

The Truth that resides in the beating heart of a novel is sacred to its author. Its pursuit called the writer to the page and inspired the perseverance to publish against daunting odds. Once your story feels deeply true, you long to share it—and your target audience will long to read it.

Even though your main reason for writing fiction is illustrative more than prescriptive, you can offer a meaningful by-product through quotes that have the potential to spread your novel’s influence. Yes, your novel’s wisdom can serve as an effective marketing tool.

This notion may come across as crass—or at times, even pointless. In a society increasingly influenced by marketing swagger, it can seem it no longer matters what we know to be true, as long as we can convince people to buy what we’re selling. Writing so that our story’s wisdom can be readily fashioned into a marketing meme may be the antithesis of why we write. And yet if your storytelling has struck on a universal truth, and you can deliver it in a fresh way, your readers will share it even without your blessing—through Kindle highlighting, underlining in shared paper copies, and broadcasting through memes on social media—and in so doing, plant seeds of truth in an increasing number of readers. Pulling quotes is so ubiquitous that Goodreads has a section for this on each novel’s page, where readers list their favorites.

Mainstream media loves quotes too. In August of this year, in honor of the film’s 20th anniversary, Parade.com published 20 Classic Forrest Gump Quotes. Tell me: when Forrest first spoke of life’s box chocolates, did you roll your eyes and say “how blatantly commercial”—or were you charmed?

And or course authors are readers too. Hungry for nuggets of wisdom that will inspire their own imaginations, other authors may laud your insight by featuring one of your quotes as an epigraph in their own work. In the novel I just finished reading, The Favorite Daughter, author Patti Callahan Henry featured quotes about memory at the top of each chapter as her characters grappled with the implications of their father’s increasingly troubling dementia. The epigraph for Chapter 23 was from Pat Conroy’s Beach Music: “Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.”

Readers love such quotes, that they can print out and hang on their wall. Just look at the number of “highlighters” that litter the pages of your Kindle. Here’s one from Roland Merullo’s novel, Breakfast with Buddha: “When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable.” Great quote, right? Turns out 1200 others (and counting) agree with you.

Let’s play a game. Do you know which authors generated these quotes? [Read more…]

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Retention and Seduction: The Art of the Chapter Break

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A chapter break, with its span of blank page, is the perfect place for a reader to stick a bookmark so he can take a break to watch TV, cook dinner, or fall asleep. Hmm. Do we writers really want to be releasing our readers so easily? Not a whole lot is written about how to divide a novel into chapters. It’s not hard science. The practice hasn’t always existed—in ancient times, the length of a book segment was limited to the length of the scroll it was written on. In Victorian England, books … [Read more...]

5 Random Ways to Trim Your Manuscript

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I have just finished a concision edit on my work-in-progress that I didn’t exactly aim to do. Mainly, because I’d already done one. After my last full read, I’d finally captured the full emotional thrust of the story I’d always been going for. The cause-and-effect trajectory was all there, the turning points that solder arcs of change for the main characters were there, the stakes were high, the premise was fully explored. Its identity, tight. But not tight enough. I was over my desired word … [Read more...]

5 Ways Paragraphing Supports Story

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If the last time you thought about paragraphing was when you learned that a paragraph was comprised of a topic sentence, three supporting sentences, and a conclusion, listen up: that staid structure will not have the power to draw readers into your story. A paragraph in fiction is rarely used to convey information, as our earliest grammar school compositions were intended to do. The reader didn’t come to your novel to find out what kind of cattle produces the juiciest steaks; she can google … [Read more...]

A Quiz Actually Helpful to Writers

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If you have a Facebook account, you’ve no doubt had the opportunity to take a plethora of quizzes. Which Disney princess are you? What Mexican food are you? What is your stripper name? Amusing? Perhaps. Creative time-wasters? Down to the last one. Here’s a quiz, however, that will actually help you with your writing process. It was constructed by a highly qualified friend of mine, Dr. Katherine Ramsland, who holds graduate degrees in clinical psychology, forensic psychology, criminal … [Read more...]

Hook and Inciting Incident: The Power Couple of the “Must Read Now”

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When I set out to write a “body of work,” I didn’t intend a “string of failed proposals” to define its completion. I had hoped to leave a legacy of, well, you know. Actual written novels. Yet it was time to try again. From a fresh page, my cursor blinked at me; I cursed and blinked right back. Where to go from here? My attention strayed to my bookcases—in particular, the way I’d organized them. The one on the left holds a couple hundred new and used novels that piqued my interest. I plan to … [Read more...]

Identifying and Crafting Your Inciting Incident

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You are circulating at a gathering of fellow mountain climbers, listening in before joining the most interesting conversation. Martha speaks: “Did I ever tell you about the time I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro at the age of sixty?” (You think: Wow, there goes Martha again, bragging about her world travels and her fitness level. You keep walking.) Dot speaks: “Did I ever tell you that when my husband died, just three weeks before our fortieth anniversary climb of Mt. Kilimanjaro, I went … [Read more...]

6 Ways to Incorporate a Dash of Foreign Language

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After speaking English for soixante-trois ans, I am learning French. This is a particular challenge for me, because while my eighth-grade classmates were flocking in droves toward French, I was drawn to the challenge of learning a new alphabet. So I took Russian, continuing in college for a total of семь лет. I still have the Slavic rolled “r” positioned against my hard palate, forgetting to send it throat-ward for the gargle needed in French. At long last, I understand the linguistic … [Read more...]

8 Ways to Unblock Your Scene’s Potential

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The verdict is in: one of the most important scenes in your story has fallen flat, and you've been told to either deepen it or cut it. As an editor, I've attached that note to a number of scenes one might expect to be inherently dramatic—among them, funerals, weddings, childbirths, battles, and first sexual encounters. But even as expectation runs high—as a reader, I'm right where the author wants me to be—the author loses his path into story while unspooling generic action. To deepen the … [Read more...]

Delivering the Ring of Truth

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My engagement was memorable to owners of jewelry stores within a two-hour driving radius of my home. I’m no celebrity, but apparently I'm a well-recognized…type. As unforgettable as the feel of grit on sandpaper, some might say. I didn’t set out to earn a reputation. I’m simply a person who struggles to find meaning, and since there isn’t an occasion more meaningful than a wedding, I struggled a lot. In public. Perhaps the jewelers would have been more empathetic if I’d told them the whole … [Read more...]

Let Your Protagonist’s Light Shine

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A novel's protagonist is the reader’s gateway into the experience of your story. As with all things creative, there’s no one perfect way to construct that gateway. We just want the protagonist to show us why this story matters. Let’s dissect a few alternative approaches for the attributes that are bound to be most convincing—this character's motivation, a compelling desire, a goal-oriented perspective, and an inner conflict that is itching to be resolved.   1. Show your protagonist … [Read more...]

7 Ways to Overcome Story Implausibility

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While preparing last month’s post with examples from Cutting for Stone, I was once again awed by author Abraham Verghese’s ability to help readers suspend disbelief. I mean seriously, the story's opening 131 pages are devoted to the main character, Marion, sharing the circumstances of his own birth in amazing detail. Can you recall yours...at all? As the novel continues, Marion serves as both a first-person protagonist and the narrator of events to which he was not privy. He even relates … [Read more...]

Bridging Temporal Story Gaps

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Slowing and speeding up time can effectively enhance our stories, as my last post showed. It seems apt that this January post should discuss the mechanics of such manipulation. Just nine days ago felt like last year! First, a confession. When I attempted my first novel, I wrote down everything my protagonist did, every hour of every day. How she woke up (oh, how I varied it—alarm clock! Rooster! Someone barging into her room!). Everything she ate (conflict—she didn’t cook!). You get the … [Read more...]

Manipulating Story Time for Maximal Effect

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Time is a trickster. It expands and contracts, often against our will. This observation holds so much truth about the human condition that I urge you to think carefully about how it affects the characters in your work-in-progress. In thinking about how to structure a novel about my first husband’s suicide standoff, one truth kept coming to light: my life would be forever divided by “before the suicide” and “after the suicide.” To underscore that effect, I wanted to structure the story … [Read more...]