Many writers draft an entire manuscript before learning the fundamentals of the art form.
When they come to me looking for editorial advice and discover their characters lack an arc, and/or the book’s theme is murky, and/or both their scenes and story as a whole lack structure, and/or the story doesn’t demonstrate clear causality, and/or any other of a number of common problems that can emerge in a first draft, they are often startled.
After all, no one becomes an artist because they want to follow rules.
And no one wants to write a story only to be told they are doing their art “wrong.”
But creative writing, like all art forms, has fundamentals.
Many writers see these fundamentals as “rules” limiting their creativity, and the question thus becomes:
Are there actually rules to writing and, if so, can you break them?
That’s the question we tackle in this episode of The Writing Coach podcast.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host as always writing coach Kevin T Johns here.
I am recording this episode Saturday afternoon. I got a good sleep last night. I’m feeling pumped, I’m feeling energized. And so are the kids. They’re in the background right now, screaming their heads off. You probably won’t be able to hear it, but if you do happen to hear children screaming maniacally in the background, that’s just the kids having fun. <laugh> All is well. And no one has been injured or run over by a car or anything like that.
What I want to talk to you about today dear listener is the idea of following rules when it comes to the art and craft of writing.
Now, if you’ve listened to the last couple of episodes of the show, you might have heard me talk about my free program STORY PLAN INTENSIVE. This is a program all about helping people learn the fundamentals of story craft while simultaneously planning a rock-solid outline for their book. All in a month’s time.
It’s a great program. If you’d like to participate, head on over to my website and get signed up.
Here’s the thing though, as a writing coach, and especially as a one-on-one writing coach, most people don’t come to me the way they do via STORY PLAN INTENSIVE with the concept of saying, “Hey, I want to write a book. Where do I get started?” For my one-on-one people, most of them come to me with most of a manuscript completed, if not a completed manuscript. People spend months or years working on a first draft of a manuscript. They finish it. They look at it, and they say, “Huh, this isn’t good enough, but I’m not quite sure why, and I don’t know how to make it better.”
So they start Googling around. They start looking up writing coaches, and they find their way to me. And what happens most of the time is I take a look at their manuscript and within the first few pages, the first scene, I almost always can immediately spot the issues in the problem. And it’s almost always the same problems, time and time again, because the thing is people who write manuscripts are people who love books. Most of them have spent their entire lives, reading books, devouring stories, and absorbing story craft. And so when it comes time to write their book, they sit down, and they write a book, largely intuitively relying on their instincts. Based on years, if not decades of being readers, they pour their creativity onto the page, but they’re missing the fundamentals of the craft.
And so when I pick up their manuscript, I can easily see, they don’t fully have their head wrapped around concepts like:
genre story structure;
story the structure;
character arcs;
point of view;
causality;
theme and controlling idea;
stakes; and,
world-building.
Sitting down and writing a book without understanding these fundamentals and how to execute on them is kind of like saying you want to write an album of music on guitar without first learning any chords.
Can you pick up a guitar and <laugh> make some noise with it?
Absolutely. Yes, you can.
Will it perhaps express your creativity?
Sure.
Will it be good?
Probably not, because it’ll probably be filled with tonal dissidents, certain notes, musical notes sound good.
When played together, we call these chords. Most strumming guitar songs are made up of riffs. Riffs are a series of chords that sound good together when played in sequence and these sequences need to resolve properly, which means they need to end on the right note or it won’t sound right to their listener. And most popular songs have things like verses and choruses and a bridge near the end. These are the fundamentals of songwriting on a guitar.
And it’s the same with writing.
As a writing coach, I’m a huge believer in understanding the fundamentals of writer’s craft. That said, I completely understand that most people don’t become artists because they want to follow rules. Nobody wants to be told that they’re doing their art wrong. Lots of artists want to break free from tradition or do something that’s never been done before.
I think often of Pablo Picasso.
Picasso’s widely known for pioneering a new style of painting in the 20th century, known as cubism. Cubism is probably what you think of when you think of a Pablo Picasso painting. Some people even think that cubism is where Pablo Picasso started, that he sat down, picked up a paintbrush for the first time and Cubist art is what poured out of him.
But on the contrary, Picasso learned the basics of painting long before he started getting experimental with his work. You could go to Google and just type in “Picasso’s Blue Period” and click on Google Images. And what will come up is a series of largely traditional portraits with blue backgrounds. These were the paintings that Picasso was doing prior to developing cubism. So he mastered the basics of his art form and then went forward to pioneer something new.
Unfortunately, a lot of writers seem to want to skip this period of time where they learned the basics of the art form.
Now, do you need to follow rules in your writing? Do you need to follow the rules of writers’ craft? Do you need to do the same thing as the authors who came before you?
No. <laugh> Of course, you don’t.
There are no rules to art.
That’s one of the beautiful things about self-expression.
But to master your craft, you do need a deep understanding of what techniques you are employing and what impact those techniques are going to have on your readers. I’m all for breaking rules. I’m still punk rock at heart, but only if you understand what you’re doing in the breaking of those rules.
My novel M School is not a traditional mainstream novel. It doesn’t have a hugely likable protagonist, and she doesn’t go on a huge change arc. This was always going to limit the audience of that book. I knew in making that choice, that certain people weren’t going to like the character and thus weren’t going to like the book. But the point is I made that choice. I knew that making that choice would have a specific impact on readers. I did the thinking ahead of time on what I wanted to accomplish artistically and what I wanted to say with this story. And then I chose the techniques that allowed me to execute on it accordingly. I didn’t pick up a guitar and start banging at the strings without ever first learning a chord. I knew I was using dissident chords, and that’s what I wanted to achieve in that particular work.
I would be the last one to say, “You need to follow rules,” but I am a huge believer in learning the fundamentals of writer’s craft if you want to write a novel that people are going to like.
And that’s why these fundamentals, these core elements of fiction writing are what I cover in STORY PLAN INTENSIVE, the free program I mentioned at the beginning of this episode.
STORY PLAN INTENSIVE is a four-week program with weekly training videos and homework that is going to teach you the fundamentals of writer’s craft, but it’s going to do it while simultaneously helping you to craft a rock-solid outline for your novel. You’re going to be making progress on your writing and creativity while also learning, and then executing on the fundamentals that are going to set your story up for success.
If you want to sit down just over a month from now at the beginning of November and start writing a book with the confidence that you’ve already learned and executed on the macro fundamentals of writer’s craft, then STORY PLAN INTENSIVE is for you.
I call it a challenge. I’m challenging you to up your game as a writer, I’m challenging you to learn these fundamentals, to execute on them, to do the creative thinking necessary and do the hard work to get a solid outline together for your book in 30 days or less.
We kick off Monday, October 3, 2022. That means now is the time to get signed up.
Head on over to my website, www.kevintjohns.com and visit the show notes for this episode. This is episode 139 of The Writing Coach podcast. And in the show notes for this episode will be a link where you can get signed up, and we can get an incredible outline for your book complete just over a month from now.
That is it for this episode. I can’t wait to see you inside of STORY PLAN INTENSIVE. As always, thanks for listening. I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
