By P.J. Parrish
Imagine you have just bought a novel. You haven’t read this author before but the cover was enticing, the back copy juicy. So you took a chance on a new writer. You are ready to be thrilled, chilled and transported to a place you’ve never been before.
Then you begin to read Chapter One. It’s written in the first person so the protag is identified only as “I.” I love first person novels because the reader-writer-protag bond is immediate and intense. Remember how Steve Hamilton opened his first novel A Cold Day in Paradise? – “There is a bullet in my chest less than a centimeter from my heart.” You gotta read more after that, right?
But what if you read page after page, chapter after chapter, and you never find out who “I” is? You never get the protag’s name. You don’t even get what gender “I” is. The only thing you finally learn about “I” is that “it” is a PI. And what if this goes on for the entire book?
It gets worse. What if you are never told where the story takes place? Or what year (or century!) it is. How long would you follow “I”? And how transported would you feel?
Okay, this is not a hypothetical. This is a real author. When I asked why this author chose to take this approach the author told me, “I did it on purpose. I didn’t want the reader to know his name or where it was taking place.”
Why? I asked.
The answer: “I’m trying to do something different because I want to stand out from the crowd. I didn’t want it to be the standard PI story.”
Well, this author had a point. It has always been hard to get noticed and get published traditionally. It’s even harder today. And it’s hard, even if you are self-pubbing via eBooks to get heard over the noise. And even if you do get published, it is hard to distinguish yourself in crime fiction as an original voice.
So where did this author go wrong?
This is just my opinion but I think it boils down to something very basic. This author tried to break the rules before he/she even understood them.
Quiz time. Who painted this:
Yeah, that’s a hard one. Here’s an easier one. Who painted this?
Anybody guess Picasso? Well, he painted both. The first was done when he was sixteen. The second when he was fifty-six. My point is, obviously, that even Picasso mastered all the basic elements of his art, got his craft under firm control, before he was able to find his unique innovative style. When he himself said, “It takes a long time to learn to be young” he was not taking about finding his joie de vivre. He was talking about absorbing the rules and then finding the courage to throw off their shackles.
All artists know this. The great choreographer George Balanchine created traditional story ballets in the style of “Swan Lake” before he developed the plotless style that revolutionized dance. Acting teacher Stella Adler famously said, “Craft makes talent possible.”
But let’s get back to our author. I so understand his/her impulse. We all want to believe we are different. But one of the points of fiction – maybe the main one – is to communicate and connect. And if you break that rule, you have broken the near sacred bond of fiction.
Yes, rules are made to be broken. And no, you should never ape someone else or slavishly cleave to the dictates of a genre. But until you know the rules of good craftsmanship, you will never be able to, in Picasso’s words “learn to be young.”
Can I leave you with one more thing on this subject? The following comes from Emma Coats, a Pixar storyboard artist. They are “rules” and I found them really inspiring and pretty darn useful for us bookish types. Read, digest and talk amongst yourself!
Pixar’s 22 Rules of Phenomenal Storytelling
1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
2. You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience NOT what’s fun to do as a writer.
3. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about ’til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
4. Once upon a time there was______________. Every day____________. One day__________. Because of that__________________________ until finally _____________________________.
5. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it actually sets you free.
6. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
8. Finish your story and let go, even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what wouldn’t happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you, you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, that perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
12. Discount the first thing that comes to mind and the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth. Get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
13. Give your characters opinions. Passive, malleable might seem likeable to you as a writer but its poison to the audience.
14. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of. That’s the heart of it.
15. If you were your character in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against them.
17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on. It’ll come back around to be useful later.
18. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it is cheating.
19. You have to know yourself. The difference between doing your best and forcing the story is testing not refining.
20. Here’s an exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How would you rearrange them into what you DO like.
21. You gotta identify with your character’s situations. You can’t just write cool. What would make YOU act that way?
22. What’s the essence of your story, the most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
Wow. Incredible post, Kris. Love all the gems in your list at the end. Tons of takeaway from this. Thank you.
I believe an author should push the envelope on genre, to incorporate a combination of elements in subgenres that mix things up. In YA, this is called the speculative fiction mash-up. I used to call it cross-genre. It’s essentially the same thing.
When people were writing pure romantic suspense, I chose to add thriller elements into my stories to stand out. I called my books romantic thrillers in proposals. I wanted to create books that I wanted to read. In my YAs, I would add thriller writing craft (combining first & third person POV, fast paced scenes. multiple characters, subplots, for example) or cold case murder mystery elements to my teen stories, mixing in my take on the paranormal and that worked too.
Basically, I would rather start a trend or craft style than try to chase what everyone else is doing or what’s popular at the moment. By the time you get a book out there that is trendy, that ship has usually sailed.
As for rules, I think you should understand them before you pick and choose which ones to break. I love breaking rules. On my writers loops, if I ever heard “you can’t do that,” I’d find a way to prove them wrong, quietly smiling when I sold those stories. That’s fun for me.
Jordan,
“You can’t do that!”
Don’t those words just rot your socks? Yet it is a common trope in writers groups. Wrongly so.
In groups, we can be our own worst enemies unless an author has a strong sense of their own ability to tell a story or has a rebel spirit. It’s not easy to be a new writer.
Nice post, Kris. All useful info. My favorite writing rule: never do anything that will piss off the reader.
Joe,
But that’s a rule we all love to break, no?
Kris – With all the millions of books, it’s pretty hard to do some “thing” that’s original anyway. I hate to tell your writer guy, but Dashiell Hammett wrote quite a few stories in first person featuring an unnamed P.I. – known only as The Continental Op – back in the 1920’s.
It’s not a question of what you write, it’s how you write it. And most of those Pixar Rules of Storytelling are about the “how” not the “what.”
Part of that mastering the basic elements of your art, in the case of writing fiction, has to do with reading. Don’t you just love the folks who want to stand out from the crowd, but they haven’t read “the crowd”?
Ha! Love your last comment Christine. Yeah, it’s amazing how badly read some “writers” are. I don’t get it. I mean, when I was first starting out, I hadn’t read widely in our genre. But I understood I needed to. Still making up for lost time.
But one of the points of fiction – maybe the main one – is to communicate and connect.
That’s the nut graf, Kris. It’s fine for a writer to ignore “rules,” so long as he knows that the further one strays from the fundamentals (which are in place for a reason) the more likely he is to frustrate (see Joe’s comment, above) the reader. If the style becomes an issue that prevents, rather than helps, connection, the reader is usually not going to think, “This story is a drag, but by golly this writer is an artist. I shall read on!”
Lajos Egri, in his book The Art of Creative Writing, got me early on with his observation that true originality in fiction comes via characterization. That holds a universe of possibilities. But the form of the narrative, for Egri, was immutable. Form is what helps the reader connect to the story.
“True originality in fiction comes via characterization.”
Wow…so very true. My sister and I were talking about this just yesterday as we were driving to a signing. We were trying to find a way to tweak one of our characters so he was original, against the grain and non-stereotype without being idiosyncratic for the SAKE of being idiosyncratic. If that makes sense…
My protagonist in “Lethal Injection, The Seed” was a male in first person POV, and I think the only indication of his gender was he had a penis, but it’s a short story, so hopefully not too annoying. I’ve received good feedback. 😀
ROFLOL! I’d say you found a unique way to ah…insert the gender gracefully.
Love the Pixar list and totally agree that a writer needs to master the craft before breaking the rules (unless you’re a genius!). In a MS I completed a few years ago I tried hard to ‘break the rules’ and had one character (in first person) who at first, as a reader, you think it must be one character only to discover it was another. My agent really didn’t like this as he felt betrayed when he discovered who the “i” really was – so I changed it to make it obvious from the start. He was right too – not because I couldn’t ‘break the rules’ but because it just pissed off the reader and it stopped the reader from feeling connected to the character. Still working on this MS on and off while finishing others but I really feel I was trying to be clever for clever’s sake and lost sight of the storytelling – luckily I got back on track:)
Clare,
I think your experience goes to the old point of “playing fair” with the reader. Misdirection is a wonderful and effective writers tool. But when it veers too far afield all you do, as you note, is piss the reader off. At a signing yesterday up here in Michigan we got into a huge discussion of Lehane’s “Shutter Island.” The unreliable narrator and how Lehane manipulated the ending really pisses a lot of readers off. I liked the story…alot.
Excellent advice, every word. My number one writing rule came from Bill Hosokawa, a longtime columnist from the Denver Post. “The reader is your friend. Do him no harm.”
The author of the unnamed novel that opens this post asked the wrong question. Instead of asking, “How can I be *different?*” he/she should have asked, “How does this help me tell the story?” That’s really the only question that matters.
Amen John. Give me a well-told clear linear story any time. (Am reading Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth” speaking of good storytelling technique.
Great post! Moral of the story: to break the rules, you have to have lived by them for a substantial length of time.
One of the greatest rule-defying books I ever read was Tom Piccirilli’s EVERY SHALLOW CUT, a novella from 2011. It’s supposedly noir, yet it goes way beyond the limits of that genre. Not only does the central character have no name, but neither do any of the other characters. Plus you’re not sure where the story is taking place. Info-dumps, backstory, lack of dialogue…it’s all there.
Yes, it violates every “rule” of writing known to man, and not only succeeds, but achieves greatness. I wrote a detailed review on it for my website about a year and a half ago. Here it is:
http://mikedennisnoir.com/review-every-shallow-cut/2709/
Thanx forthe link Mike. Yes, rules can and should be broken. But not everyone has the chops to do it.
Bill Pronzini has a whole series based on his nameless detective, and he started publishing those in the Seventies.
There’s no such thing as a unique hook.
Good pt Marilyn. Which makes you wonder if my author friend had READ enough in the genre let alone knew the rules. You actually absorb the “rules” by reading good writers like Bill.
Fabulous post! It reminds me of ‘Hooked’ by Les Edgerton. (He’s great at explaining why certain rules work in beginnings and why the exceptions work when skilled writers change things up for specific reasons.) Thanks for the 22. Love them. It’s like a chef in a kitchen combining ingredients in a new way, but because of his sensitivity to individual flavors and how they compliment each other, he comes up with a wonderful dish. (The novice just comes up with a frightening hobo stew we’re afraid to eat.)
Beth:
Speaking of good food metaphors…
I am up in Michigan in my sister’s lovely small town of Elk Rapids. Today I walked to downtown and in a tiny mom and pop cafe had the single best omelette I have had in my life. The usual ingredients but the way the cook put them together just made the thing unique. Same old formula but magic in an artist’s hands!
Excellent post, PJ! If I were reading that story in the first person I’d have thrown it across the room in frustration by the second page! And never read another book by that author!
And thanks so much for Emma Coats’ 22 Rules – love them!