Immediate Fiction (3 page)

THE RULES

You will make a mess.
Creating stories is never a neat, orderly, or predictable process. Mess is inevitable. You make a mess. You clean it up.

You lose your way. You find it again. Your writing veers away from the story. You rein it in, or you follow it to see where it takes you. You do this many times until you get where you want to go. So, accept the mess as inevitable and good, let it happen, work with it, and you will get there a lot faster.

You must write badly first.
Trying to get it perfect right away will only get you blocked, because the bad comes first. No one does it on the first draft. Writers write many drafts to get it right. Hemingway, in typical macho style, said, "The first draft is always shit." If Hemingway's first draft was shit, why should you expect more? Once again, bad is good. Believe it or not, you'll do better if you
lower your expectations.
By not expecting so much, you'll give yourself the space, the slop you need, to work. So, don't hold back. Gag the critic in you, and dare to write badly. It's the only way.

Mistakes lead to discovery.
This is a game of mistakes. Art begins in error. Mistakes and uncertainty are good. They create new combinations and possibilities. Penicillin, the lightbulb, the Slinky were all the result of mistakes. Creative people have a lot more good ideas than other people do, and they have a lot more bad ideas. They have a lot more ideas because they
let everything out.
They know the good and the bad go hand in hand and that
letting yourself be bad is the best way to become good.

Here's an old writing anecdote that expresses this well: The beginning writer writes his first draft, reads it, and says, "This is awful. I'm screwed." The experienced writer writes his first draft, reads it, and says, "This is awful. I'm on my way!"

THE FIX

Writing badly may not be fun (although it can be once you stop worrying about it), but the great thing about writing is
everything can be fixed.
And fixing makes exciting things happen. Writing is rewriting. Everything can work, because you can add, subtract, make changes and adjustments until your story comes alive. There's always a way. The way is
technique
—story
craft.

In all of this, a relaxed, unhurried attitude will get you there faster. But that's hard to achieve when it's so important to you, which brings us to the next point.

THE UNIMPORTANCE OF IMPORTANCE

What I'm saying is,
The less you care, the better you write.
But how

can you make yourself
not
care about something you're pouring your heart into? Well, it can be done.
Practice
is always the first step—
writing
and
writing
and
writing
until you let go of the tension and relax, until you no longer have the strength to be uptight. When you just dash it off to get it over with is when the best things happen.

Another thing to keep in mind is,
Everything that happens is OK.
No matter what problem you have (confusion, worry, self-doubt, panic, emptiness, paralysis), it's OK. It's no reflection on you or your ability. It's all a
natural part of the process
—what
every
writer must face. You're not the only writer who's ever had these problems. You'll
feel
you're the only one, but I can tell you that you won't be inventing any new writing miseries. They've all been experienced before—and dealt with successfully. So, try not to blame yourself or punish yourself. And keep the following examples in mind.

The famous French writer Gustave Flaubert
(Madame Bovary)

struggled for three days, threw a monumental tantrum, rolled on the floor, chewed the rug, and bashed his head against the wall to get eight sentences on the page. Oscar Wilde
(The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray)
said, "I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon taking it out." All writers are susceptible to such misery. So, when you get into this kind of a jam, remind yourself tha
t you're in good company.
Then get your mind back on the craft and technique you're going to learn, and you'll get out of your funk.

THE JAGGED SLOPE

Progress is never even.
In everything you do, some days you're a whiz, and other days you're a dud. Writing is no different. It's like everything else in life. So, when you have a bad day, don't despair. Just keep plugging away, because how you handle your slumps is what makes you or breaks you. And it's not all bleak because
it will get good again—always.
You will bounce back.
I guarantee it. Not only will you rise out of your slump, but you will reach your best level of writing, and you will
exceed
it—if you keep at it. Then you will dip down—and rise again. You will always lose it,
and
you will always get it back—
and then some.
Think of writing as a relationship with another person. It's at least as
thrilling
—and at least as
miserable.
You don't get one (thrill) without the other (misery). But in writing, the thrills make up for the misery.

Speaking of misery: Some writers take years to write a novel. Joseph Heller took 10 years to write
Catch-22.
Tom Wolfe took 10 years to write
A Man in Full.
That's one end of the spectrum. At the other end is Nabokov, who wrote
Lolita
in three months. James Hilton wrote
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
in four days. Now,
Goodbye, Mr.

Chips
was a slim little novel, but at the rate Hilton took to write it, Heller would have finished
Catch-22
in a month or two.

So, what accounts for the difference between the 10-year novel and the four-day, four-month, or 1-year novel? Well, I can tell you that Heller and Wolfe were not banging away eight hours a day, five days a week, on their novels for 10 years. No—they were struggling, straining, spinning their wheels, doing all kinds of things
other than writing.
The difference between them and the writers who do it in days, weeks, or months is not how much time they
spend writing,
but how much time they
waste trying to write.

Wasting time and energy is what you're going to learn to avoid. The point is:
it's easier than we make it.
But
it's hard to make it easy—
unless you know how.

Of all the advice writers give out, there is only one thing they all agree on. They all say: Stick to it. Don't quit. Don't give up.
Keep writing no matter how awful it feels.
Do your daily writing. Remember, it's no different from the rest of your life, with its ups and the downs.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
Not quitting is vital. The other equally important factor is
guidance.
Sadly, 99 percent of all writers never publish. It's not that they quit or don't try or don't write their hearts out or don't do what the writing books and courses tell them. They don't make it because they have
no guidance
or
poor guidance.
Sadder still, they could publish—
if
only they learned their craft. Craft is the key, but you can't learn it on your own. You can teach yourself golf, tennis, or basketball—up to a point. On your own, you can learn enough to get around eighteen holes, hit a ball over the net, or make a basket, but how many successful athletes learn on their own without lessons or coaching? How many teams play without a coach? None. Professional athletes are on teams getting coaching and lessons for years before they make it.

For writing, guidance and coaching are just as important. As in any discipline (sports, music, dance, painting), you need to practice until it's a part of you, until it's reflex, until you perform without thinking. Again, my personal estimate is, the right guidance will get you there at least
ten times
faster. Guiding you and giving you
the tools to guide yourself
are the goals. This course is designed to make a short trip out of what can otherwise be an endless journey.

What you'll learn is technique—
how
to do it. Technique is neutral. You can use it to write any kind of story you choose (science fiction, romance, adventure, fable, fantasy, mystery, crime, literary). With proper technique, whatever you write can be shaped into a complete story. The
complete
story is what all great story writers write (Shakespeare, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald). A complete story is the most fulfilling, because it has
the shape of our most meaningful experience.
Whether it's comedy or tragedy, it gives us what we need from experience. What we need from experience and stories, along with how to put together a story that fulfills that need, is what the next three chapters are about.

[2]
Theory

What is a story, and how does it work? That's where we're headed. If you're in a hurry to get there, to get the tools so you can jump in and get started immediately (this is
Immediate Fiction
, after all), then skip ahead to chapter 3. Come back when you have time. But if you want a fuller sense of why we have stories and what they do for us before you start, then stick around. The deeper your understanding, the better you'll write.

Stories happen not only in movies and books and on TV. Stories are playing out in us and through us continually. And they didn't arise because someone sat down one day and said, "OK, everybody, we're going to have stories. This is how we're going to do it." No, stories were here at the beginning. They were here when the caveman started scratching pictures on the walls of his cave. They evolved right along with us. More than anything else, they're an expression of who we are and how we work. They're our way of keeping in touch, of finding meaning and understanding. That goes for all genres—tragedy, adventure, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, comedy.

PROCESS

A story is not just a thing, but a process—a process that connects us to each other. If someone you work with sat down across from you and said, "I brushed my teeth this morning," you'd look at him waiting for more, for the connection. "So?" you'd say. "What's the point?" Even if he embellished his story with, "I got this great new curved bristle brush and mint-flavored, baking soda and peroxide toothpaste. I really got in there. My mouth has never been so clean," you still wouldn't be related or connected—unless you were wondering, "Why's he telling me this? Is he losing it?" You wouldn't be relating, because his story didn't
get to you.
Stories are about what gets to us. A good story is like falling in love. You don't think, "How do I really feel about this person? Do I love her or him or not?" No, you're bowled over, swept away, knocked out. Good stories involve the same process. It's chemistry. It goes straight to the heart. You respond whether you want to or not. Stories are the most personal and fundamental form of communication we have.

Now, if the same guy came in, breathless, and said, "I just got mugged in the elevator," he'd
get to you
instantly. You'd be totally related and certainly wouldn't be asking, "What's the point?" And on his end, he would be eloquent, dramatic, compelling. No one would say, "Too wordy," or "No passion," or "Lacks detail." He'd tell his story, and he'd know how to tell it, because it's who he is.

The difference between the two examples is story—THE STORY PROCESS. There's a story reason, a craft reason, why one left you cold and the other got to you.

Your coworker has his stories, and you have yours. We all have our stories. That's what's nice about this art. In order to survive in life, you must have skills—life skills. And LIFE SKILLS ARE STORY SKILLS. They both come from the same place. As I said earlier, that's the big

difference between this art and others such as music or painting. You don't have to know how to play the piano or paint a portrait in order to survive on the street, but you damn well better be aware of what's going on around you and how you feel about it and what to do to protect yourself. It's not just on the street. You have to have the same kind of social skills and awareness to get along in any personal relationship. So, with stories YOU HAVE EVERYTHING YOU NEED ALREADY.