Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (36 page)

Sure, her friends thought it was perfect. But they were already familiar with her story, so they automatically filled in whatever blanks she’d inadvertently left. And, even more dangerous, they loved her. Which meant they were predisposed to like what she’d written, not to mention quite impressed that she’d sat down and written an entire book in the first place. In other words, what made it a page turner for them
wasn’t
her storytelling skill.

Does that mean that when they told her they thought it was a great book they were lying? Of course not. It means the standard they applied to her manuscript wasn’t the same one they use when they walk into a bookstore, pull a random book from the shelf, and start reading.

However, they didn’t know that. And to further complicate the matter, chances are they couldn’t have told her what their criteria for loving a book actually
are
, anyway. It’s like that old saw,
I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it
.
⁹
Which means it’s a gut feeling.

Or, in the case of pornography, sometimes that feeling is a little further south.

The truth is, it’s almost impossible to differentiate between the gut feeling you get when you’re reading a fabulous book and the feeling you get when you’re reading a manuscript written by a close friend. It’s surprisingly easy to misattribute the cause of a gut feeling. For instance, there’s a classic experiment in which an attractive woman approached men in the middle of a scary, heart-pounding suspension bridge over a deep gorge, and after asking them to fill out a questionnaire—supposedly for a class project—she gave them her phone number. She then did likewise with an equal number of men after they had crossed the bridge and were sitting on a bench, recovering. Around 65 percent of the men on the bridge called her, compared with 30 percent of those on the bench, whose hearts were no longer pounding when she approached them.
¹⁰
That is to say, a majority of them had mistaken an adrenaline rush of fear for the giddiness of attraction. In the same way, friends and family tend to misattribute the adrenaline surge they feel when they read your book to their appreciation of your prowess as a writer rather than the thrill of knowing you actually wrote it. This isn’t to say you may not actually have written a crackerjack book, but chances are, they won’t be able to tell the difference.

In other words, love is blind.

And when it’s not, it tends to be supportive. When you read a friend’s writing, your first allegiance is to your friend. So even when your gut tells you that it’s probably not time for her to quit her day job, you take into consideration how hard she worked, how much the book means to her, and the fact that you don’t want to hurt her feelings. Or start a fight. The same is true with acquaintances. No one wants to be the bearer of bad news; it inherently stirs up strong emotions—in this case, most likely the kind of conflict-induced tension that the manuscript in question probably isn’t generating. But as we know, whereas in books, conflict is what draws us in, in real life, it’s something most people will go out of their way to avoid. Which is why when you read
a friend’s manuscript and find it completely devoid of tension, the last thing you want to do is actually create some by mentioning it.

So you find nice things to say:
Loved the premise. Fabulous thesis. Great sense of place; I really felt like I was in downtown Barstow. And Tiffany’s clever retort when she caught Tad rifling through her underwear drawer—priceless!
Your friend beams, and you haven’t told a single lie. Except by omission. But hey, you tell yourself, you’re not a professional critic. Maybe the book really
is
great, but you’re just too much of a dolt to see it. And so you breathe a heartfelt sigh of relief and enthusiastically give the manuscript the benefit of the doubt.

But as a writer, is that something
you
would really want? The benefit of the doubt? Hey, why not! When you’ve sweated blood over something, given it your all, you want to hear that it’s great. Perfect. Brilliant, in fact. Then again, would you want your doctor to have been given the benefit of the doubt throughout medical school? Or the pilot of the jumbo jet you’re about to board?

But wait—doesn’t your story belong to you? Who says writers have to please everyone? First and foremost, don’t we have to write for ourselves, to speak our truth? Maybe. But ask yourself, when you read a novel, do you really ever want to know the writer’s truth? Do you even think about it? The truth we’re looking for is something we can relate to
ourselves
. Writers who focus on “their truth” tend to forget that as far as the reader is concerned, writing is about communication, not self-expression. That brings us to another myth whose neck we might want to wring:

Writers are often rebels. We buck the tide by trade. We have a fresh take on the familiar, and our goal is to translate that vision into a story so others can step into our world. Since we’re all about originality, why should we have to follow a tired old set of standards, anyway? Can’t
we just peel that girdle off and breathe freely? After all, we make up stories; can’t we make up the rules, too?

It’s at about this point in the argument that someone always starts talking about Cormac McCarthy.
He
doesn’t follow the rules, and he won the Pulitzer. My response is always,
He does follow the rules, but he’s done it in such an idiosyncratic way that it’s easy to take his style for a new set of rules
. Yes, there are masters out there with such utterly distinct voices that they have the ability to instill an intoxicating sense of urgency in ways that
seem
to defy analysis. It’s in their DNA, which is why it cannot be duplicated. They’re in a rarefied minority. If we could write like them, we’d have long since been published, and universities would offer graduate seminars on our work.

On the other hand, the vast majority of extremely successful writers
don’t
write like them, either.

And here’s something a little more sobering. For every successful writer who
seems
to flout the rules, there are millions along the way who tried to
actually
flout them, and whose manuscripts crashed and burned as a result. You just never heard about them because, well, they crashed and burned. Chances are they either ignored the feedback they got or, worse, never asked for it.

Writers need impartial feedback, and one of the logical places to get it is in a writers’ group. The members of an effective writing group need to be astute and able to not only point out what isn’t working but also tell you why. The rub, of course, is that they also have to be right. The places where something isn’t working are not hard to spot. What’s hard is explaining exactly
why
it isn’t working. This often leads to misguided advice, which results in the writer either making the problem worse or simply substituting one thing that isn’t working for another. So when you join a writers’ group—especially if you don’t know anyone in it
yet—your best bet is to sit back and listen. You will learn far more about them by how they critique each other’s work than how they critique yours. Why?

First of all, because you can actually hear it. Being singled out in a group, especially for the first time, can be overwhelming. Remember what we said about the mortification of discovering you’ve made a mistake in public? That’s what a critique can feel like. Everyone is looking at you, and your face goes red, there’s a loud buzzing in your ears, and suddenly the room gets very hot. People are talking, but you can’t make out the words. It’s hard enough to hear, let alone be objective.

On the other hand, when they’re critiquing someone else, it’s infinitely easier to judge whether their comments are on target or flying wide of the mark. You’ll have your own opinion of the work you hear and so be able to gauge whether their comments are insightful, astute, and expressed in a way that is supportive while at the same time, pulling no punches.

Keep in mind, too, that a writers’ group, by definition, will hear your work in pieces. Thus it can be difficult for them to tell whether the story is building, if the setups are paying off, or if that beautifully written passage about Jamie’s first kiss that had them all crying has
anything
to do with the story of how she and her sixty-eight-year-old grandmother climbed Mt. Everest.

The other option when it comes to getting feedback is a trend that is gaining momentum. A colleague at a literary agency in New York recently told me, “More than ever it is important for writers to hone their craft and submit only their most polished professional draft. Do not count on anyone—agent or even [in-house] editor—to ‘fix’ it. Everyone is so tight for time that material has to be rewritten several times, and edited, before anyone in the business sees it to consider.

Using freelance editors and consultants to help get a manuscript in shape is increasingly common.”

The good news is, there are many extremely capable freelance literary consultants out there who can provide objective, professional feedback that can help you not only rewrite your story but also improve your writing skills in the process. The bad news is, you’ll find a gazillion to choose from—some great, some not—just by typing “literary consultant” into Google. My advice is to make sure the person you hire has a background in publishing—either as an agent or as an editor. If you’re a screenwriter, look for someone with genuine development experience. If you’re considering hiring a story analyst, find out what production company or studio they read for, and how long. Experience matters. Because while any intern can (and does) decide whether or not a script or novel works, when it doesn’t, very few can tell you exactly why—and fewer still, what to do about it.

One way to toughen your hide before you venture into this territory is to start reading reviews—book reviews, movie reviews, reviews of all sorts. Why? For perspective. Think of it as a training course. Imagine you are the author of the book that’s being taken to task. Because, let me tell you, reviewers are merciless—as they should be. Often gleefully so.

For instance, in his review of the movie version of
The Da Vinci Code
, A. O. Scott of the
New York Times
manages to take a pretty good swing at both author Dan Brown and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. First calling Brown’s bestseller a “primer on how not to write an English sentence,” he goes on to chide Goldsman for penning “some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own.”
¹¹

Ouch. But at least that’s just about the prose rather than the authors themselves. For that, here is
Slate’s
Dana Stevens on the movie version of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestselling memoir
Prozac Nation
:

Double ouch. In one shot, Stevens slams the book, the movie, and Wurtzel herself. In print. For everyone to see. And given that the Internet is now home to just about everything anyone says about anything, both reviews will be at the world’s fingertips, a mere couple of keystrokes away, 24/7, forever.

Be prepared: regardless of how successful you get, people are going to be analyzing your work, for better or worse, from here on out. Some will come at it with bizarre, idiosyncratic potshots; others will zero in with dead-on accuracy and illuminate massive trouble spots you won’t believe you could have missed.

If you have trouble now hearing it from a friend, in private, imagine how it’ll feel from a stranger, in public. Thus your goal is to toughen up. That’s not to say you won’t feel gut punched at first. There’s no real way around it. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra had this warning for his fellow writers: “No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.”
¹³

Is it worth it to rewrite an entire novel or screenplay two, three, or four times? What about five or six? Just how many times are we talking about? It’s impossible to say. So perhaps an anecdote will suffice—one
that highlights just how long the road can be and how sweet the reward at the end.