Category Archives: creative spark in fiction

The Wow Factor

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell

In a 1948 booklet, Pulp Fiction, Robert Turner gave straight-dope advice on what it took to break into the pulp market. In one section he explains what happens to a manuscript when it comes in to an editorial office. What he says here has, I shall in a moment contend, application to writers in the age of AI-slop.

There are, says Turner, two piles in the office. One pile is for authors whose names are “known.” However—

If your name is not known—which makes your stuff an unknown quantity—the script is put at the bottom of the other pile, which is often huge. This is called the “slush” pile. It consists, I’m sorry to say, of about 98 percent junk. This is the fault of the writers, please understand, not the editors. It is also an advantage to you, if you have anything on the ball, because your script will then stand out like a rose on a garbage dump and the editor will make happy little noises.

This is true today, as it has always been true in this game. Most writing is junk. That is an advantage to writers who want to step up their game (which is why TKZ exists!)

The busy editor, says Turner, will always go to the “professional pile” first, as the odds of finding a good story are greater than with the slush. But he adds this note about the pro pile:

The casualties here are often heavier than you would expect them to be. Nearly all of these stories are “useable.” That is, they are professional pieces of work, with not too many outstanding flaws. But the editor doesn’t want merely “useable” stories. He wants damned good ones. He wants to get hold of a yarn that hits him so hard while he is reading it that he can hardly sit still. When he finishes reading he wants to be able to say: “Here’s a hell of a good Smithers story!” This does not happen very often. It takes a wow of a story to get an editor excited. He’s seen them all.

That is true of readers, too. They want a wow story, which is the rarest kind. Add to that all the AI-slop, which is competent. But is it ever wow? Is it ever unforgettable?

Our job is to become the rose in the garbage dump. May I suggest doing a “wow check” at every stage of a project, starting with—

Idea

I have a large file of ideas, things I’ve written down over the years when I’m sparked. I know you get these, too. Don’t ignore them, record them. Revisit them from time to time, seeing what still excites you.

I used to have a box for newspaper and magazine clippings. When something jumped out at me, I’d clip it and toss it in the box. Every now and then I’d go through them, seeing what still had a spark. One of them was a story about cops in L.A. stopping a driver of a convertible. He was a 6’4” guy, had an open container of Jose Cuervo Gold, and was dressed only in a Santa Claus hat and a G-string. This I clipped and threw in the box. Later it became the opening of my Ty Buchanan legal thriller Try Fear.

Development

Idea in hand, I’ll proceed (like a movie studio) to development. My favorite technique is that suggested by the great writing teacher Dwight Swain. I call it “the white-hot document.” It’s a free-form letter to myself, writing down as many plot and character and scene ideas as come to mind, following random threads and rabbit trails. I write without stopping in ten-minute chunks. I rest my brain, then come back to the document the next day.  I highlight the things I like best, and write some more. I do this for three or four days. If I’m still feeling the wow, I move on to—

Structure

I’m a plot and structure guy, so I lay out my “signpost scene cards” in Scrivener, including the “mirror moment.” The mirror moment is, for me, the key to it all. When I nail that—when I feel it—I know what the through-line of the whole book is.

Beginning

Then the day comes when I start writing. The first leg of the journey! This is fun, the scenery is new and fresh. I whistle a tune behind the wheel. But I know at some point I will probably hit—

The Wall

I’ve written before about hitting a “wall” at around the 30k mark. Other writers I know report the same thing. I usually pause here and review my first act, making sure it’s got the death stakes solid and the first Doorway of No Return clear. I make sure my heart still feels the wow factor so I can push on to the finish.

Editing

And then there’s the editing process. I do a read-through in hard copy, make changes, give it to my exacting editor (Mrs. B), incorporate her notes, then off to a beta reader, more changes, a proofreader, then my final polish. What keeps me going at this stage is the opportunity to put in more heart. I know my story now, see the big picture, know the characters, and I look for ways to increase the emotional impact of the whole thing.

So why go through all that when I can just prompt Chat or Claude to do the heavy lifting? Because I need to feel the wow, for myself as a writer and for my readers. Because, as Robert Turner says in Pulp Fiction, “to entertain a reader—in other words, to write a good story—is to play upon emotions, through the things that you make happen to your story characters.”

You don’t get that from a machine, in my (mostly) humble opinion.

Comments welcome.

Ride the Lightning

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I got an email last week which I post here with the sender’s permission.

Dear Mr. Bell,

I’ve been reflecting on something I thought you might find intriguing, given your strong defense of flexible structure in storytelling and your view that both plotters and pantsers benefit from it.

I’ve come to think of it as The Paradox of Spontaneity:

Spontaneity feels wondrous because it bypasses conscious control. But it’s only possible because of preexisting order.

The metaphor that struck me is lightning. Rather than being random, it’s the sudden visible manifestation of a vast, invisible system of order, aka, the atmosphere.

It even goes a step further with what’s called the Schumann resonances, which describe how all lightning strikes worldwide combine to maintain a fairly steady “heartbeat” of the planet. Old-fashioned car antennas pick up on this. Watch closely, and they’re always vibrating, tuning in to this heartbeat like an AM/FM stethoscope.

The Earth and the ionosphere form a gigantic spherical resonant cavity, like the body of a guitar. Every year, roughly 1.5 billion lightning strikes excite this cavity, forming low-frequency electromagnetic waves. These waves settle at specific resonant frequencies, mostly around 7.83 Hz. Isn’t it amazing how so many “random” lightning strikes both originate from and sustain order?

And yet, people often say structure steals the heart of stories! They forget that even hearts must beat to an orderly drum, or they wouldn’t be alive.

It’s like we crave the romantic idea of “the pure waters of creativity” so much that we forget: without structure, you don’t even have water yet. Reminds me of a neat, little orderly formula called H₂O.

Since you’ve written so persuasively about structure as a friend, not a foe, to creativity, I thought you might appreciate the connection.

What a brilliant insight! Our world vibrates with a great cosmic heartbeat. It sends us signals, bursts, and we experience them as spontaneity. It is not chaos theory; it all comes from a connected web of structure and order, which is what holds everything together.

Imagine an Earth without gravity. We’d all be Starlink satellites. Gravity allows us to move around on the ground, to dance, to run for the end zone, to put our arms around each other and sing or pray or bring words of comfort.

All of this is wild and wonderful. Structure is beautiful.

Yet there seems to be a notion out there that a thing called “story” can exist apart from structure. That’s not possible. Heck, it’s not just impossible at the novel level; you can’t even write words, sentences or paragraphs without structure.

I write lehslitrr.

Oops, I mean thrillers.

As writers we all love to ride the lightning. Should we just wait for it to happen? Or are there ways to attract it? Let me suggest a few methods.

  1. The Bradbury landmine. Ray Bradbury’s brain was a lightning rod. It worked at night, sometimes in his dreams, but mostly at the subconscious level. When he woke up he’d record as quickly as possible anything that came to the surface—images, concepts, bits of a scene. Only later would he see what kind of structure was being offered.
  2. Outliners can use the “killer scene” method. One of the most enjoyable parts of my planning is sitting in a coffee house with a stack of index cards, writing down scene ideas which come to me in visual form. I don’t think about the outline at this point. I just ride the lightning. When I have 30 or 40 cards, I give it a day, shuffle the deck, and then start to assess what scenes I love and where they might fall in the story, or where they might be giving me new direction. With cards, it’s easy to move them around (which is why I like the corkboard view in Scrivener).
  3. Pantsers ride the lightning as they write, and do so right on through to a completed draft. Nothing at all wrong with that (it is simply a longer version of what outliners do in #2). At some point, though, structure and craft need to take a hand. I’ve read so many manuscripts (and more than a few books) by “discovery writers” that drag like a rusty anchor because they fail at the structural level.
  4. Ride when you’re not writing. You see an image, a billboard, a person crossing the street. Or you overhear a bit of conversation and find you imagination starts firing. Let it go.

(For ten more ways to “goose the muse,” see my TKZ post here.)

I was at a Starbucks once, looking out the window at the parking lot, when a scene from my WIP started playing on the movie screen of my mind. I have no idea how long I was like that, but at one point a man sitting in a chair across from me said, “Are you all right?”

“Huh?” I said.

“You weren’t moving,” he said.

“Ah,” I said. “I was working.”

“Working? What do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

He looked at me with that expression of wonder and pity we sometimes get when we give that answer.

Thinking back, I wish I’d said, “I ride lightning.” He probably would have switched chairs.

What about you? Do you ride the lightning? When does it happen for you?

Crazy-writer deadline syndrome

Posted on by

By Kathryn Lilley

I recently sent a note of apology to someone who had requested information from me. I had been extremely remiss with this person–not sending her info on a timely basis, and forgetting to respond to emails. In my apology note, I lamely mentioned that I’d just emerged from a writing deadline, which to me is the equivalent of a free-diver trying to surface from deep water without blacking out.

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were on a deadline, no problem,” she replied in her gracious response, as if the deadline totally excused my flakiness.

This poor woman has to deal with writers all the time, I realized then. She’s used to us.

Then I started thinking about all my other deadline behaviors that could be considered annoying, or even strange, by family and friends. My crazy-writer deadline behaviors include:

The Big Tune-out

It’s not that I deliberately don’t listen to people (Okay, sometimes it is deliberate), but I frequently tune them out. This mostly happens when I’m on a deadline, which means it happens a lot. I might even respond to someone during a conversation, but not remember it later. It’s kind of like brain on auto-pilot.

To Kill a Magpie

When I’m out and about with my husband, I frequently dive for a pen and write detailed notes about our surroundings: the full moon hovering between two palm trees at night, a bag lady sitting in a bus shelter, the timbre of silverware clatter–I take notes about anything I can use later in my writing. Inevitably, I have left my notepad at home, so I drag home notes scribbled on scraps of things: a napkin, a flyer, even the back of a business card. My husband must think he lives with a magpie.

Hair on Fire

It’s predictable: Six weeks before any deadline, I go on a tear. This means that I’m a) Constantly hunched over the laptop, muttering, b) Setting the alarm for 4 a.m., then groaning my way to wakefulness over the course of several Snooze cycles, and c) Bounding out of bed at odd hours of the night to tap out some problem-solving idea that struck me.

I do not talk very much during this time. And when I do, it’s not pleasant.

So there it is. I could go on, but the length of the list is starting to make me feel bad about myself. I would like to feel that I’m not alone in my crazy-writer deadline syndromes. Have you any to share?

Take the crazy-writer quiz

Just found a fun quiz that tells you what kind of writer you are. (You have to be logged into Twitter) I’m Tom Wolfe, per the quiz.