You’ve likely read or heard me go on and on about how your people (your characters and/or your Ideal Reader) come first when preparing to write a book. As I’ve posited many times over, once we know our people DEEPLY, the plot starts to reveal itself.
But what about story? How does it figure into the process of getting our people from the beginning to end of their adventures? And what is story, anyway?
Kurt Vonnegut clarified traditional, recurring story forms to help us comprehend the concept of story by visualizing them in shapes.
Here’s how I think of it.
First, plot is the container within which your characters and their stories live and breathe. I think of it as the body that holds all the parts—the locations your people occupy, the scenes they live out, and the exposition that reflects their experiences in their adventures, conversations, and conflicts.
Story, on the other hand, is the heart of it all. Story pumps the blood within and throughout and gives life to your people’s thrills and tribulations—the plot. Or, the path your people will follow throughout the story.
Story is what makes your readers care and keep turning the page.
This likely sounds vague and intangible. And it is, in a way. It’s what we, as writers, feel within us when we conceive of a protagonist and care enough to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Likewise, it’s what makes our readers stay engaged throughout and, in the end, feel they’ve had an experience that goes beyond simply reading words on a page.
So how do we create story?
Just like a body is made up of many parts, so is story. And just as with all the many parts of the body that keep it running smoothly, we can think of the many parts of story in the same way.
Without understanding these important and essential features, it can be difficult—if not impossible—to begin and keep moving forward.
Opening scene This scene puts your reader right in the story world by showing her who your protagonist is, what her status quo life looks like (before the inciting incident), and what she might need or want to change. That thing she desires.
Inciting incident This scene happens in a ways (I always tell my clients to use three chapters or 45 pages as a guide… this can always change as the writing and story evolve). It’s the event or situation that happens and is out of the protagonist’s control. It’s what sets her off on a new trajectory that serves as a path for the story’s unfolding.
Sensorial experiences Using vivid descriptions—including setting and place—that create a lucid, true-to-life sensorial experience for your reader is essential. When you help her see, smell, taste, touch, and hear, as well as sense, the details of your story world, you infuse her real-life world with wonder, which makes her want to keep invest in your protagonist and your book.
So, what then, after these elements of the story have been determined and written?
We keep checking back in on what we discovered about our protagonist’s deepest desire, wound, and fear. And we write scenes that build on and connect with each other, that suture the protagonist into the reader’s heart, that offer a means to understand this particular human’s—your protagonist’s— inner world.
“Writer’s block” is a widely embraced ideology, not just in writing circles, but in time-honored narratives around the writing process. We don’t hear about painter’s block or composer’s block or dancer’s block. While painters, composers, and dancers may, indeed, experience periods of time when the flow of their work is more challenging than usual or when it comes to a halt, writers are the only creative demographic that get a name for this struggle.
Writer’s block, I acknowledge, may be a legitimate experience for some writers (Psychologist Edmund Bergler said it has something to do with blocked emotions, but more about that in a future post). Lately, I’ve been thinking that writer’s fear is a more appropriate word for the thing that stops many writers from writing. Or from writing freely and honestly.
Fear of what they don’t yet know—the subconscious can be a scary place until we make friends with it, and rooting around in one’s own darkness can unveil all kinds of startling discoveries.
Fear of what they already know—we’re indoctrinated at a very young age to fall in line with cultural norms. When we don’t shame is a significant detractor in being true to ourselves.
Fear of what others will think—our need to be accepted and not abandoned is an inherent human need.
I had a conversation with a group of writers the other day about feeling that tug of holding back when writing, thinking about what other people—family members, in particular—will think.
Not wanting to make waves and jeopardize our connection with our Tribe—our connection with the people who gave us life and shaped us: parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—is understandable. Our history can feel like a lifeline, and our culture tells us these blood ties should be maintained at all costs.
But I disagree.
Virginia Woolf wrote about the angel in the house in her paper, “Professions For Women.” According to Woolf, the angel was the voice of society that sits on the shoulder of every female writer with its great white wings and whispers in her ear about what was acceptable and not acceptable for a woman to express on paper. She wrote about killing her angel by clocking it in the head with her ink well.
One of the first things I do when I work with clients and students is ask them to write a letter to their angel—or angels (some of us have many). The purpose of this letter is to create a story that allows for the killing of the angels so the writer is free to move forward with her writing project, unfettered of the ignorant, uninformed, narcissistic yammerings of the voices inside her head, which usually belong to the writer’s culture and/or family.
I can tell you from experience that doing this exercise will piss you off and getting pissed is essential to not caring, a skill all creative people, and maybe especially writers, must acquire.
“Why get pissed?” you might ask.
Every time someone reacts to your words, every time someone whines or shames or cries or yells at you for what you’ve written or what you’re in the process of writing, it is an attempt to silence you. They may not see it that way, but it is.
And if that doesn’t royally piss you off, it should. It should offend you. It should rile you. It should make you want to come out punching and jabbing, metaphorically, of course. And what better way to punch and jab at the world and its attempts to keep you in its tidy little box—so no one has to feel uncomfortable, so no one has to encounter a truth other than their own—than to use your exquisite voice?
This isn’t easy, especially when we love the people who react to our work. If a stranger calls me out on my content, I really don’t care. If someone I love calls me out on my content, I still don’t care (which is different from not caring about the person), but there’s the complicated tug of knowing someone I care about isn’t able to take in my work, isn’t able to celebrate the thing that means the most to me. Ultimately, it means that they aren’t able to see me.
It’s a shame, to be sure. But hear me now, dear writer. We are not here to pet the boo boos of others. We are not here to hide ourselves so other people can maintain the comfy little personal world they’ve created for themselves. We are here to utilize the gift we were born with—to use words to make meaning of life, and in doing so, to make the world a little bit better.
A family member once accused me of “making fun” of our family. The piece they referred to was actually doing the opposite—honoring what I come from and realizing that, despite my attempts to “rise up” and out of the blue-collar existence, I had, in that moment, come full circle and found myself square in it: cleaning houses for a living with four college degrees. Oh, the irony.
A friend once wrote to me and said, “I’m worried about you,” when she read a blog post I wrote that discussed the certainty of death. How gauche of me.
And I’ve had family members experience anxiety when they believed my stories hit too close to home, when they believed they recognized themselves or other family members in the writing.
As Ann Lamott once wrote, “If people wanted you to write warmly of them, they should have behaved better.” AMEN.
Part of this problem comes from non-writers not understanding how a writer’s mind works, how the creative process—specific to writing—works. They don’t understand the spark that may, in fact, come from a lived experience can morph into a fictional story about a fictional character who is not the writer or the writer’s child or partner or ex-partner or parent or whomever the hell. They don’t understand that while we may—oftentimes, subconsciously—model characters after real-life people, we’re not writing about the actual people. We’re likely making sense of our lived experience that could, possibly, include someone else’s stupid bullshit behavior.
A friend, also a writer, once told me a story about a writer friend of hers who published her first novel. She was nervous about her mother seeing herself in the shrewish mother in the story. When her mother read the novel, she did see herself… but not in the mother. She saw herself in the kind and loving aunt. So, it seems that people will see themselves in our work the way they see—or what to see—themselves in life. They will feel exposed by our work no matter what we do. Bottom line: We’re all narcissists to some degree. Some people want to put themselves at the center of our world. They can’t imagine this not being so.
Not all resistance is to our writing is about perceived exposure, though. Sometimes, it’s because we’re touting beliefs that run counter to what we were taught. In my mind, this is very simply, a phase of growing up. Of individuating.
When I teach my Writing Through the Body™ workshops and we discuss the traits and expressions of the Root Chakra, we talk about how sometimes the Tribe doesn’t have the capacity to allow the individuals within it to transform into their own unique persona. Sometimes, this requires breaking from the Tribe in some way.
In the workshops, we’re applying these traits and expressions to characters, but they apply to us as well. (In fact, they applied to us first.)
The truth is: people will do what they do, and they’ll think what they think. Our job is to mine the narratives of our lived experience to make meaning of the human condition. Nobody said it would always be pretty. Nobody said it would always be fun. But one guarantee is that when we have the courage to step out of the tiny, suffocating box our culture and our family has constructed for us, when we have the courage to set our bizarre, ghastly, taboo, crazy, kinky, beautiful thoughts free, they have a chance to find connection with other people who have the same bizarre, ghastly, taboo, crazy, kinky, beautiful thoughts, we find our people. Because it’s very possible that the people who brought us up, who shaped our identities are not, in the end, our people.
If you’re faced with the fear of offending family, making someone mad, or hurting someone’s feelings, try this letter writing exercise.
Give the voice a name and a shape. (If you can put a live person to the voice, use them, or if, after reading the rest of the exercise below, you aren’t comfortable doing that, make up a name and give it a shape. It can be anything.)
Describe to the voice what it says that stops you.
Tell the voice how this affects you.
Tell the voice what it takes from you.
Tell the voice why you won’t allow it to stop you anymore.
Tell the voice what you’re going to do to stop it.
Write, in great detail, a descriptive passage of you squelching the voice—killing the angel in the house. Be as graphic as you like. No one will see this but you.
Finish with a “now that you’re gone” passage. What will your writing life look like moving forward?
Give a try and let me know in the comments how much weight you shed. I’m pulling for you, creative soul.
I’m off now to write something that will bring discomfort to someone, somewhere.
I gave up on writing groups many years ago because I was rarely part of any that felt like the right fit for me. I had no patience for poorly run groups that met irregularly, got too big and didn’t allow for ample time for feedback, didn’t have clear parameters, and allowed egos to offer suggestions free-for-all style.
But after years of writing in isolation, all the while recognizing the value in and power of giving our stories breath by sharing them with others, I reached out to a lovely friend of mine about starting a writing group of our own.
She loved the idea, so we did it. But before we officially formed the group, we met and discussed five considerations to ensure our group’s success.
Feel free to use these when forming your own writing group.
Setting the group’s parameters.
How large will your group be? We agreed on no more than four people to allow for ample time for feedback for each person. We also agreed the remaining two slots would be filled by invitation – one from each of us – rather than putting out a general call for members.
When and how often do you want the group to meet?
We formed a weekly group to create a consistent incentive for us to produce new pages on a regular basis.
We decided on a two-hour meeting to allow for a full half-hour for each member’s feedback.
Where will you meet? We started our group during the COVID-19 pandemic, so we’re meeting online, with the understanding that when it’s safe to be circulating again, we’ll meet in person once each month at a wine bar or some other luscious or nurturing space to add a little fun and self-care to the mix.
Will your group have a name? To encourage a sense of unity, we created a group name. We’re the Storytellers Writing Group because we wanted our focus to be on fiction and memoir.
Set the group’s objectives.
What do you want the group to accomplish? We’ve deemed support and compassionate, constructive critique as the most important objectives for our group. To clarify what that will look like, we created a Mission Statement for the group.
What values do you want the group to represent? We felt compassion and kindness were two of the most important values for our group. We believe we can support each other and provide valuable feedback while maintaining positivity and lifting each other up.
Establish clarity
How will feedback be delivered? We created a Feedback Request Form for, which allows us to indicate the kind of feedback we want with each submission: meaning-focused (E.g. does it make sense?), positive feedback (E.g. what’s working well?), form-focused (E.g.. is it well-organized?, does the story lag?), and experienced-focused (E.g. how does it make you feel?), as well as how we receive the feedback (E.g. within the document submitted or on a separate comment sheet, in addition to our verbal discussing during the meeting).
Will there be page limits on submissions? We agreed on a weekly submission of around 10 pages (with wiggle room to allow for both low- and high-production weeks).
How and when will pages be submitted? We submit our pages by email every Monday prior to the Thursday meeting of that week.
What’s the format of each meeting? We start the two hours off with a brief check-in followed by about 30 minutes for each member’s feedback.
Be open to change.
How often will you check in and re-evaluate? We are open to our Feedback Request Form and the overall format and functioning of the group shifting and changing as time passes, all in the interest of maintaining an integrous environment in which to support each other’s writing practices and moving ourselves and each other toward submitting our work for publication.
Maintain transparency and respect.
What tone do you want the group to have? Compassion, kindness, and professionalism are important to us. We hold the group sacred with the understanding that anything discussed in the group stays in the group.
How will you handle missed meetings and re-scheduling? We understand that life happens and respect the fact that one of us may need to meet later than planned, may occasionally need to miss a meeting, or that the group may need to skip a week or reschedule. But the overarching intention is to maintain consistency. We want to feel we can depend on each other.
Creating a writing group is much like creating any kind of relationship. Introductions are made, intentions are stated, and trust is built over time.
Sharing our work is an act of vulnerability, one that ought not be taken lightly. Take care in creating your group. Hold it to the utmost level of integrity because it will have an impact on your practice, on your work, and ultimately, on your success.
I’d love to hear about your experiences with writing groups. Please leave a comment below about what has worked and what hasn’t. I’m always interested in improving and sharing insights.
A common expectation from readers is that we show them the development of our characters. Readers want to see characters learn and change. They want to see witness the transformation.
This applies to fictional characters in novels and screenplays, and it applies to real-life characters in memoir. In the case of the non-fiction book in the self-help/how-to category, it also applies to the readers themselves – your Ideal Readers – who may consider buying your book because they want to see a change in their own lives. They want to be the one who’s transformed.
A common method for creating this expected arc is to create plot points that put characters in situations that will challenge their modes of operation, create friction, and require new decisions to surpass the obstacle and reach their desires.
When we embrace the elements of the third – the Solar Plexus – chakra, we can begin to look at our characters, our people, in a more complex way. We can use the awareness our characters gained about themselves in relation to others through the lens of the second – Sacral chakra – and begin to think about how they behave and act (or don’t) in the world.
The Solar Plexus chakra is where self-awareness comes from, which informs a character’s sense of agency in the world, their ability to take bold action to realize their dream or desire. No matter the kind of book you want to write, your people’s sense of agency is what drives everything. It’s what shapes the story and, in turn, the plot points in many storytelling scenarios.
If you’re telling a fictional or real-life story your readers want to experience the journey of becoming right alongside your protagonist. If you’re writing a self-help/how-to book, your reader wants to experience that sense of becoming firsthand by living it.
As writers of stories (in fiction and memoir) or inspiration and instruction (in self-help/how-to non-fiction), we need to be able to discern what we know about our people and what they know about themselves, and we need to be able to impart those differences to our readers.
What do your characters know about themselves, and what do you know about them? Does your protagonist or Ideal Reader have a full or depleted sense of agency? That is, does she/he take action or just let life happen? When and in what ways does your protagonist take action or recede?
Please leave a comment below. I’d love to know what you discover.
