The bookshelves at your local brick-and-mortar bookstores are teeming with
how-to-write manuals. For the young fiction writer, there are classics such as
E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, plus
whole series devoted to specific prose concerns like plot construction and
character development. For the budding playwright, notable must-haves include
Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing, with its dialectic approach, and
Jeffrey Hatcher's The Art and Craft of Playwriting, with its more Aristotelian
approach. For the up-and-coming screenwriter, some selections would have to be
Syd Field's nuts-and-bolts Screenplay and Christopher Vogel's hugely influential
The Writer's Journey.
But what’s a person to do if they’re like me, suffer creative attention deficit
disorder, and want to excel in fiction, theatre, and film? Surely there have to
be some tools which apply to all three. And so over the years, I’ve distilled a
list of ten hard-and-fast principles which can apply to all forms of
contemporary storytelling, regardless of genre or medium.
Now none of these principles, these commandments, are original to me. They have
been collected and culled over years spent reading and studying craft, usually
while curled up on a soft warm surface and/or beside a soft warm animal.
1. Show, don't tell. Audiences (and readers) are always much more engaged in
action than they ever are in speeches. Show your characters in pursuit of their
goals. Show them succeed. Show them fail.
2. Keep it simple. Our most memorable stories are our simplest ones. Romeo & Juliet. Jane Eyre. It's a Wonderful
Life. Note the difference, pretty please, between simplicity and simpleness.
3. Even if you don't know where you are, always know where you're going. Would
you get in a car and drive aimlessly for three hours a day every day? Sitting
down to write without a benchmark in mind is nothing more than a creative
exercise. You must always have a goal (even if it's as mundane as Write for
Three Hours or Get Protagonist Off-Stage).
4. Begin late, end early. By which I mean this: always start your play at the
precipice of the exposition, right before the inciting incident. Give us a few
minutes to know your characters and then dump them head-first into your plot
pit. Or begin in medias res and force the audience to catch up. And by all
means, when your protagonist has achieved his objective, End Your Story.
Anticlimaxes are so...anticlimactic.
5. Nobody cares about someone who does nothing. No, Virginia, Hamlet is very
much not a play about a man who does nothing. The Danish prince in fact does
many, many things. He's just tremendously neurotic (which is why he was such a
perfect character for our tremendously neurotic 20th century). Always have your
main character in pursuit of a goal. Goncharev's Oblomov, perhaps the most
slothful character ever to carry a book, is assertively slothful.
6. Change is good. This applies to both plot and character. Keep your plots
twisting in an organic and ingenious fashion and your audiences will be
enthralled. Similarly, show your characters twist as well. Have them change
through the course of the tale. High Noon's sheriff is very much not the same
person he was at the beginning. Neither is A Doll House's Nora Helmer or Great
Expectation's Pip.
7. Save your best for last. Just as anticlimaxes are anticlimactic, climaxes
must be the absolute peak of audience engagement in your material. Save your
best lines, best moment, and best reversals for your finale. End with a bang.
Leave them breathless.
8. If you wouldn't want to read it, don't write it. Like most of these rules,
this is fairly self-explanatory. "Write what you know" is the mistaken form of
this adage. Write what you want to know. Write what you need to know. Just as
audiences love an active, engaged character, so will they love the work of an
active, engaged storyteller.
9. Plot = character = theme = style = setting = genre. This is my favorite rule
on the list, and the one most easily forgotten. Just as form should balance
content, content must in turn balance itself. It's no coincidence that the chaos
of A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place in a labyrinthine forest. In a great
work of literature, every element should directly relate to each other. It's not
linear; it's circular.
10. All rules are made to be broken. But you must understand why the rules work
in order to understand the circumstances in which they can be bent. James Joyce didn't write
Ulysses in a vacuum.
Finally, the best preparation any person can have to be an artist of any kind is
to be an audience. Read and view everything. Ask yourself what works. Ask
yourself what doesn't. And then ask yourself what's always the most important
question: why? Let curiosity lead your imagination and you will never, ever be
at a loss.
What kind of artist are you?
8 comments posted.
Music is my art. As much as I would love to be able to write, all I can do is read.
(Kelli Jo Calvert 9:07pm November 7, 2010)
Those are very powerful rules, yet somebody had to put them in Commandment form. They're also good rules to follow. I've always wanted to write a book, and have been encouraged to do so, yet haven't had the nerve to put pen to paper. Perhaps I will someday soon. Thank you for giving me something to think about. I'll have to read your book as well.
(Peggy Roberson 10:44pm November 7, 2010)
I whish I could write. Your Commandments are great and could work for any thing
(Vickie Hightower 9:22am November 8, 2010)