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Read Part II of “Writing Good Stories” here.

What constitutes a good story? The debate rages. Is it a great plot, or interesting material? Is it climbing inside the reader’s head with well-crafted character studies and globe stopping themes? As any published author can tell you, if you have a good subject, a well-defined theme, a detailed plot and a battery of super-characters, you will probably write the great snooze work of the century. Well, perhaps not, if you know what to do with most of these elements, which in most cases is to trim, muddle, blur and curtail them. As J. R. R. Tolkien said in his introduction to The Lord of the Rings, “This story grew in the telling.” That is how good stories are born-in the telling.

If you now are shaken because you have researched materials for five years and have enough elemental surplus to populate seven novels, be of good cheer. All you need to make it work is to tell a story. Remember, you have material, characters, plots, images, and dare we say, themes. But, in the long run, unless your readers are bored literature professors who are looking for thematic prevalence, all you need to do is tell your story and, most important, engage the reader.

Engaging the reader is the most important key to commercial and literary success. If you fail to engage your readers, you lose your readers. With no readers, you have library shelf dust. Is this pandering? No. You need to know who your potential readers are and, especially in genre fiction, if it is a specific readership slice that requires particular treatment. For example, if you are writing in the Slice of Life genre, you know your reader needs some emotional impetus; while, a mystery/adventure needs puzzles and solutions. However, no genre is so grounded in itself to exclude a variety of story telling techniques to the exclusion of a more general readership. It is true that if your subject material is Bloodletting in Medieval Malta, you may exclude a portion of potential readership. However, story telling begins after the reader is seized between the covers, not before. It begins on page one, and must engage, engage and continue to engage until the end.

There are five sound story-telling techniques discussed here, which can be used to engage the reader in most genres. There are others to be sure. These are shared with the buoyancy that, hard and fast rules make for grammar, not style. These five techniques are easy to remember, especially when reviewing your work prior to an editor’s touch. Remember that your editor will shine you up more if you have applied as much polish as you can before submission. These techniques are: twist, resonate, image, seed and move.

Twisting is something we generally lose when we gain clear sight of characters, plots and themes. We may have planned a great plot twist, but we fail to remember that twisting is an old story telling technique, a technique key to every campfire since stories have been told. From the tall tales of Homer to the great yarns of Mark Twain, twisting the story is the great differentiation. Such twists, of course, need to be carefully considered. In fact, twisting may be an exercise you engage before you write. You do not need to bother the reader with all your twists, only the results-the engaging results. Here is an example.

You have a scene set on a lonely road. A main character drives up and stops, obviously lost. He walks about his car looking at a map. Suddenly, he sees a farmhouse nearby. Driving to it, he knocks on the door to ask for directions. An old man emerges and gives him a glass of water and advice. The main character thanks him and drives away.

Thinking about the above scenario, it is part of a larger story, and in fact, a necessary piece as it establishes the remoteness of the final destination. However, it seems like filler, a technique to give a sense of time and distance passing. It would occupy, when written, a paragraph or two. Surely, the reader would not nod off here, their books crashing down onto their heads in bed. Surely, they would! So, add a twist to your original thinking. Make the place even more desolate and dusty. Make the main character even more lost and desperate. He has no map. He sees, not a farmhouse, but a campfire. There, before the fire is an old woman-a Native American woman, who knows him by name and knows where he is going. Startled, he retreats to his car, only to tumble into a ravine, his leg injured. He gets to the road, where the old woman awaits. She drives him to his destination.

Now, with a twist in the original scenario, you have a better canvas to keep the reader engaged. Before you write it, you might add a pet dog or coyote. Perhaps, this woman speaks only Cherokee, an interesting challenge for dialog; or perhaps, not. In any event, twisting needs to be carefully considered. Your imagination should shine through, and twisting is the product of your imagination. The only caution is to avoid twisting to excess. You can tell when the twist becomes incredible. In fact, incredibility is a good way to disengage the reader, making twisting a technique bordering on art. With such genres as Adventure and Speculative Fiction, you have a wider boundary of incredibility. However, even in those genres, the art is presenting the big twists and making them feel like reality. In that respect, the second technique plays an important part-Resonance.

Resonating with the reader is important. Resonation is a musical term where the listener becomes tuned to the mood and tones the composer sets. A listener may not be able to name the difference between C major and E minor, but they certainly can feel it. For an author, words go beyond their intrinsic meaning for their sound and cultural value. Sound value, both the mode of the sentence and the sound of the word, frames the reader. Changing to the passive mode, for example, will lull the reader; while, the active should be stirring. Mix the two together and you can orchestrate frustration and confusion (with skill). Choose soft words for rain and snow-harsh ones for heat and pain. Sound, in this case, is very much like poetry without the cryptography. Dickens, for all his prose, was a fine poet within his prose, setting moods and resonating with his readership. Some of that resonance is lost today as we are not his readership and need a cultural guide to value the full weight of this resonance. That does not mean we should disregard the lesson taught.

Here is a use for all that researched material. As you introduce interesting facts and points, make them feel less absurd or less like classroom intrusions by resonating with the reader. Use a modern cultural reference or perhaps a cuss word. Introduce facts through dialog, where the reader can take up one of the character’s roles and be included in the conversation. Invite the reader to the party. Engaging the reader-that is, telling the story, means resonating with the reader’s knowledge base allowing your reader to participate as a collaborator. Give your reader credit for brains. Do not insult their intelligence with details that the reader can fill in as obvious extensions of the story’s activity. If a character is on an airborne plane, there is no need to mention that they are flying. If they drink, there is no need to describe the glass (unless it is the murder weapon). You bring the resonance and the necessary skeleton. The reader will bring the bric a brac.

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The above is an excerpt from Mr. Patterson’s book, Are You Still Submitting Your Work to a Traditional Publisher? The book is available in both print and Kindle format via Amazon.com. Mr. Patterson is a successful Independent Author who has published 11 books so far, all top sellers on Amazon.com. His latest is The Academician, and is available from Amazon.com, Mobipocket.com, and Smashwords.com. Please visit Mr. Patterson and check out all of his works at his website, Dancaster Creative.

Part II of this article will be published next Friday, so please stay turned! If you have some authorly wisdom to share with your fellow Independent Authors, drop us an email at “press <at> bddesignonline <dot> com”, and we may publish your article here to be shared with the world.

Posted on March 13th, 2009 by admin
Filed under: Write Talk, Writing