Tips from Bob Mayer – #1
I’m currently reading The Novel Writer’s Toolkit by Bob Mayer. I picked it up a couple weeks ago in the Writer’s Digest Book Club Buy-One, Get-One-Free, Rinse and Repeat sale. (It wasn’t really called that, but it was a fabulous bargain, so I bought a LOT.) I loved Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie and Bob and decided to try out his book on writing. There are some good nuggets in here.
Today’s tip: Write down the original idea for your story. Say it out loud, write it down, post it near your writing space so you can keep focused on it. Beginning writers tend to wander all over the place in their story and start too many subplots that go nowhere. Staying focused on the original idea will help you write a more focused, coherent story.
A key to making the original idea work is to keep it generic… and specific. How’s that for conflicting advice? He gave an example. “What if Mary had to stop a band of terrorists?” You can improve it by substituting “a housewife” for Mary. This is making your idea statement more generic–not a particular person, but a role/occupation descriptor. “What if a housewife had to stop a band of terrorists?” Now you’re not locked into a particular character. (Just in case Mary turns out to be a Mary Sue and you have to ditch her for Carrie Lou.)
The second improvement we could make is to make the idea more specific. What are the terrorists trying to do? “What if a housewife had to stop a band of terrorists from assassinating the President?”
These two changes open up a lot of possibilities for your story and allow you to change different details of your story while still maintaining your original idea.
Do you have a one-sentence idea for the story you’re working on?
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2 comments
Eliza Wyatt (2 comments.) on September 10, 2008 at 4:47 pm
I’m not a fan of the rhetorical questions as story premises. Even so, figuring this out is a good exercise; just like writing a query letter well before my book was finished really focused the plot.
So. Here’s mine.
“A political hostage meddles in politics when she protects her father from her vengeful uncle.”
Cheryl on September 10, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Writing the query letter before finishing the story… what a good idea. It would definitely help me make my story more coherent. It’s kind of rambling around, lost in sub-plots, at the moment.
Your story idea sounds very interesting. A good example of the one-sentence idea.