While I’m really all about beautiful words and poetry this month, I couldn’t help but realise that a post from The Blood-Red Pencil (great blog title!) was screaming at me. The post is from half-way through last year but came to my attention through Twitter this week and it’s called, simply and accurately, 10 Steps to a Better Story. Feel free to go away and read it now (as long as you promise to come back).
It is not a bang-you-over-the-head lecture, nor is it something unique and new that will amaze the socks off a writer, but it’s a list of things that I, for one, need reminding of pretty much constantly when I’m writing either a novel or short story. That your main character should want something AND do something – obvious, yes, but I sometimes don’t let the reader know what these wants are and then there’s not much motivation to keep reading, is there?! Also, the importance of introducing conflict early on is something I’ve often missed in my meandering opening chapters. I’m always at risk of spending too much time getting the characters and setting in there without giving the reader a reason to turn to the next page. And I excuse all that by saying perhaps I’m writing literary fiction, but surely there’s no real difference.
The final point on the list is for me, the most important, so I’m going to reproduce it entirely in case you didn’t go over and read it yourself:
The components of a novel that readers (and publishers) care about most are, in order: story, characters, theme, setting. If you have to sacrifice something, start at the end of list. Never sacrifice the story for anything else.
So, story is everything. I so often forget that. But I will keep trying to remember!
What’s your writing weakness from this list? And how do you remember to get around it?
(Thanks to kodomut for the great storytelling picture!)
