Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (35 page)

Don’t believe me? What about John Irving, who said, “Half my life is an act of revision.”
⁶
Or Dorothy Parker, who said, “I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”
⁷

Or Caroline Leavitt, author of
Girls in Trouble
, who rewrote her ninth novel several times before showing it to her agent, then rewrote it four more times based on the agent’s notes. The book sold immediately. And then she wrote another four drafts, this time for her editor.

Or literary young adult author John H. Ritter, who estimates he rewrites each novel fifteen times before publication. Or UCLA screen-writing chairman Richard Walter, who reports that former student and exceedingly successful screenwriter David Koepp will happily rewrite for the studios until about the seventeenth draft, at which point he gets a little cranky.

To sum up the point these writers are making, let’s turn to Ernest Hemingway, who, with characteristic blunt eloquence, so famously said, “All first drafts are shit.” Which doesn’t let you off the hook. It’s not a license for unbridled self-expression, or not to try hard from word one because it doesn’t really “count.” It does, big time—because from here on out, it’s the raw material you’ll be working with, straying from, reshaping, paring, parsing, and then lovingly polishing. First drafts count, even if they’re usually pretty bad. But remember, there’s a huge difference between “trying hard” (which you want to do) and “trying to make it perfect from the first word on” (which is impossible and just might shut you down). The goal isn’t beautiful writing; it’s to come as close as you can to identifying the underlying story you’re trying to tell.

So whether it’s your first draft or your fifteenth, relax. Instead of thinking each draft has to be “it,” just try to make your story a little bit better than it was in the previous draft. After all, stories are layered, and everything that happens affects everything else—and on every level, no less. That means when you remedy one problem, you’ll most likely have shifted something somewhere else that will then need to be addressed, and so on. The point is, it’s impossible to address every trouble spot in a single draft, so why make yourself crazy trying?

However, writers have a hardwired advantage when it comes to keeping track of who does what to whom and why. It may not be a super power, but it comes in pretty handy, especially as you begin your rewrite. Let me explain.…

Recently, evolutionary psychologist Robin I. M. Dunbar asked himself the question we’ve been wrestling with from the beginning: considering that the ability to appreciate a story is universal, why are good writers so rare? His research reveals that one of the key factors revolves around something called “intentionality.” This boils down to our ability to infer what someone else is thinking. In a pinch, most people can keep track of five states of mind at once. Says Dunbar, “When the audience ponders Shakespeare’s Othello, for example, they are obliged to work at fourth order intentional levels: I (the audience)
believe
that Iago
intends
that Othello
supposes
that Desdemona
wants
[to love someone else]. When Shakespeare puts the play on stage before us, he will, in critical scenes, have four individuals interacting, thus obliging us to work at fifth order level—the very limits to which most of us can cope.”
⁸

What makes good writers different? We can hold in our minds what we know and what our characters believe and at the same time keep track of what our readers believe, sometimes to the sixth or seventh level. Sounds like a video game, doesn’t it?

So, especially during a rewrite when you’re digging deep, it helps to keep track of each character’s version of reality.

As the author, you know the big picture. You know what’s
really
going on. You know where the treasure is buried and where, no matter how diligently the protagonist searches, she’ll come up empty. You know who’s lied to the hero and who’s told the truth. You know which facts are true and which are not.

Your characters, on the other hand, often have no idea of what’s
actually
going on, which means that they’ll do things that presuppose an entirely different world than the one they’re living in.

As writers, this is something we sometimes lose sight of. Because
we
know what the truth is, and what the future will be, we forget that our characters don’t. And no wonder—considering that at any one time there may be four or five worlds in play.

What does that mean, exactly?

Well, there’s the real world, meaning the objective world within the story. That’s the actual, overarching world in which everything takes place, where things are as they are, sans interpretation or spin. Chances are
none
of your characters is completely familiar with this particular world. In fact, they couldn’t be, since it is impossible to know absolutely everything about everything (even in a fictional world). Thus each character knows only a portion of what is “really” happening. What’s more, some of what they “know” is probably very wrong—and this is often where the conflict comes from. On top of that, each character then puts her or his own personal spin on everything.

Of course, that doesn’t stop the protagonist from acting on the assumption that what he believes is true actually
is
true, and often he pays a big price for it. For instance, Romeo—fully believing that Juliet is dead when he returns, heartbroken, to Verona—pursues the only option he sees as viable. He drinks a vial of poison and very dramatically dies. He has no way of knowing that in two itty bitty minutes the potion Juliet swallowed will wear off and she’ll yawn and stretch. Then they could have hightailed it out of there and lived happily ever after. In this case, the “real world” and the world Romeo
thought
was real were, tragically, two very different places.

This brings us to a very helpful set of questions to ask yourself as you begin writing or rewriting each scene:

First, make a timeline chronicling what actually happens in the “real world” during the span of the story. For instance, Romeo meets Juliet; they fall in love and secretly marry; she asks him to stop a fight between their houses; he tries and ends up killing her kinsman; her parents betroth her to a man who leaves her cold; Romeo, not knowing that Juliet has been betrothed, flees for the time being; Juliet, with the help of the friar, fakes her death to get out of marrying the other guy, sending a letter to Romeo explaining the plan; Romeo doesn’t get the letter,
rides back to Verona, finds the drugged Juliet in a crypt, and thinking she’s dead, kills himself; Juliet wakes up, realizes what’s happened, and does likewise. Their chastened families make up.

Beneath
your
overarching timeline, make a corresponding timeline for each major character, charting what they
believe
is true throughout the story. This will not only reveal exactly where and when characters are at cross purposes, but also help you make sure your characters’ reactions are in accordance with what
they
believe is true in the moment.

Finally, there is one more person whose shifting beliefs you want to chart: the reader. Ask yourself, scene by scene: what does the reader believe is happening? This question is so important that you might even want to close the laptop, get out of your PJs, and head into the real world to test the waters. After all, you now know exactly what readers are hardwired to hunt for, so you can use them to do reconnaissance for you.

Before you begin asking for gut-wrenching critiques (anything short of “It’s the best thing I ever read! Where can I buy a copy or, better yet, a case?”), there’s an incredibly helpful type of feedback you can request at just about any stage without having to weather anyone’s actual opinion. What’s more, the info it yields tends to be clear, concise, and specific, and even your old Uncle Rolly can give it. Ideally, it’s best to recruit friends and family who don’t even know what your story is about. All you have to do is ask them to read what you have and at the end of each scene to jot down the answers to these questions:

Their answers will be extremely helpful in figuring out how much of the story hasn’t quite made it from your head onto the page. Not to mention turning up plot holes, logic gaps, redundancies, digressions, and long flat stretches that stop the story cold. But be sure to tell them this is
all
the feedback you want right now. If you give Uncle Rolly carte blanche, you might have to hear his theory on how much better it would be if it was set on the planet Zelon instead of in Cleveland, if the hero was an intergalactic warrior instead of a kindergarten teacher, and if lots of big things blew up instead of that one measly fight when Wally threw a handful of sand at Jane during recess.

But at some point—on draft three or six or twenty-seven—you will need to let other people read your story for real. This is because, no matter how painstakingly objective you are, how ruthless when it comes to ferreting out digressions, how willing to subject everything in your story to heartless scrutiny, it’s still, um,
you
doing it. And no matter how accomplished you are, the one thing you can’t do is read your story as if you’ve never heard it before. It’s already there in your mind, fully realized, before you start reading. Since you know what everything means and where it’s
really
going, how can you possibly tell whether the words on the page are capable of conjuring the same thing in someone else’s mind? Someone who has nothing
but
the words on
the page to go on? Remember the Heath brothers’ “Curse of Knowledge”? You can’t tell your story’s effect on a fresh reader, because you know way too much.

That’s why you have to subject your story to the most merciless thing on earth: a reader’s eyes. It could be those of a trusted writer friend, a writer’s group, a paid professional, or even better, all three. This can feel a bit like asking the entire neighborhood to take pot shots at your children while they’re playing in the yard all by themselves. And guess what? They will. Readers are more than willing to take a whack at our darlings, because to them, they aren’t darlings at all. They’re merely the things that get in the way of the story.

As humorist Franklin P. Jones famously said, “Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.”

The importance of getting outside feedback—
and then actually listening to it
—can’t be overstated. What’s more, and trickier still, you want to be sure that the person giving you feedback is capable of it. This doesn’t just mean they have the ability to zero in on what pulled them out of the story, but that when they see it go off the rails, they’ll tell you.

Consider the story of a woman we’ll call Zoe, who had written a memoir. She grew up in a small community where her mother was a local celebrity, thrusting Zoe into the limelight from kindergarten on. Even more compelling, her personal life sounded like a very successful movie of the week—the kind that makes you laugh, makes you cry, and leaves you with an authentic sense of hope. The trouble was, she did not know how to tell a story. Without a genuine narrative thread (read: no story question, no internal issue), the book didn’t build. So it wasn’t long before what little momentum it started with dissolved, leaving in its wake a series of disjointed vignettes. Somewhere around
chapter 3
it went flat, and it stayed that way. It didn’t matter that each individual
scene was well written, because without an overarching context to give all the scenes meaning, the reader didn’t know what to make of them or where the memoir was headed.

But Zoe did. She saw it very clearly. Why wouldn’t she? She’d lived it. She’d shown the manuscript to close friends and an old college professor, all of whom told her how much they loved it and how well written it was. So when her agent gave her specific notes for the rewrite, instead of listening, she spent hours explaining why each suggested change was unnecessary and why everything that seemed to be missing was actually there. She felt it was good enough. She was a very likable young woman who had been through a hell of a lot (as her memoir attested). And it soon became clear she wasn’t going to back down. So the manuscript was submitted, as is, to editors at twenty publishing houses. These editors didn’t know her at all, nor had they heard her lengthy explanations for the things that they instantly saw weren’t working. Every editor it was submitted to turned it down, each rejection letter echoing the notes the writer had already heard from her agent and blithely dismissed.