By: Linda Rohrbough
You can make a number of mistakes in fiction. I see them in bestselling
authors all the time. But the big mistake writers make, the one the marketplace
finds unforgivable, and the one that keeps most writers from being published,
is what I call The Big Mistake.
The Big Mistake is to have a character bumping along for the ride
without telling the reader anything, or very little, about what the character
wants and what their goals are. This is, in essence, a lack of ability to tell
a story.
If a novel like that gets published (and it probably won’t in this
market) it’ll be a toilet tank book. You know, the book someone started on a
potty break, put down on the toilet tank and left there. The story won’t stay
with the reader.
What’s interesting to me is how simple this sounds. I was one of
those people who nodded my head agreeably, yah, yah, yah, about what I thought
was a restatement of the obvious. I find this funny now,
because clearly I didn’t get it either. The feedback I got on my first novel before it was published was
after readers trudged through fifty pages, they couldn’t put it down. But that
first fifty was a death march.
I got all kinds of advice on how to fix this. I was advised to cut
the first fifty and start the book there, sprinkling in information from the
cut portion into the rest of the book. But it wasn’t a plot where I could do
that. I thought about shelving the book and writing another, but my readers
said no, this is an important book and it needs to be out there.
I tried everything I could think of to fix it: critique groups,
contests with feedback, and my own rewrites – lots and lots of rewrites.
Rewrites did finally work, but only after several years. I got into a workshop
where a scriptwriter, who became my writing buddy, said, “Linda, it’s all here.
Just rearrange it like this and add this.” And from there I landed a fiction
agent and a publisher.
But I was still lost because I didn’t know why the last rewrite worked. How could I
reproduce this success if I didn’t know how I got it to begin with? I realized
then why so many authors have a pile of books under the bed. Instead of
rewriting until it works, they write another book. And another. They hit on
what works by accident, then work by instinct.
Which is probably why so many of my critiquers, including my New York Times bestselling
friends, couldn’t help me.
It’s like a painter who knows when it feels right, but can’t teach anyone else
how to do it. Only I’m not that kind of gal. I hate hit or miss mode. Those of
you who’ve been in my workshops know I like to work by principles I can apply
in any situation.
Let me tell you that in the first fifty pages, I knew my character
wanted something — she had goals for the next ten minutes, the next hour, the next
week and the next month — but I never came out and said what they were. I knew enough to
have conflict and obstacles. And the final rewrite — the one that worked — didn’t require a lot of changes. As I think
back now, I believe I was trying to be subtle, something my university creative
writing training instilled. (By the way, I have a whopping forty hours of
creative writing, most of it at a graduate level, with a 4.0 out of 4.0 grade
point average, and I never learned any of this in those classes.)
What my character wanted stayed under wraps until page fifty and
that’s where she comes out and says to herself, “I’m done crying, I’m going to
do something about this crummy situation I’m in.” And I let the reader see
that. By the way, that’s also where the book got much easier to write. Before
that, it was torture. The point is, I realized the change I made was that I
changed the book so my protagonist was never without clear motivation shown to
the reader.
Now this sounds simple, yes? And obvious. But notice I never said
it was EASY. Because it isn’t.
This Big Mistake is no secret. I bought Debra Dixon’s book GMC: Goal, Motivation &
Conflict at the conference
bookstore during my first Pikes Peak Writers Conference (PPWC). Jim Frey,
author of How to Write a Damn
Good Novel and one of the
keynote speakers at the 2009 conference, talked about writing well-motivated
characters overcoming obstacles to achieve a goal.
The late Dwight Swain, author of Techniques
of the Selling Writer asked
this question in the 1960s, “What does your character want and what is in the
way of them getting it?” And in the 1940s, there was Lajos Egri’s classic, The Art of Dramatic Writing, a book Jim Frey said his mentor made
him read forty times before he got this concept. Jim said he even made a tape
recording of himself reading Egri’s book and played it over and over as he
drove around doing his day job as an insurance adjuster.
Bestselling and two-time Spur award winning author Dusty Richards
once told me you cannot remind your reader too many times of your character’s
goal. I own and read all these books. I could quote Dusty. But I didn’t hear any of this, if you know what I mean.
Then I spent eight days in the late summer of 2009 in a brutal,
intense, invitation-only workshop with Jim Frey in the California mountains. It
was there I really saw this principle for writing fiction for the first time. I
got it on the first day, watching Jim coach other authors in the workshop
(where we shared bathrooms, sleeping arrangements, and kitchen duty like kids
at summer camp and spent twelve hour days for eight days working non-stop). Jim
fervently complained he was tired of “teaching rocks to fly.” Now that I
understand the principle, I get his frustration.
What never ceases to surprise me now is when I read unpublished
but extremely talented, and I mean mega-talented, writers who do not tell me,
the reader, what the character wants. They do lots right. There’s a strong
sense of place. They have voice. I start to get a feel for the characters right
away. I can follow what’s happening. They even have the ability to write those
one-liner’s I go back to re-read because of the way they turned a phrase.
They’ve obviously been practicing their craft for a while, but they are making
The Big Mistake. Of course, you can tell too much too soon. Brain dumps are to
be avoided. But I see very little of that in writers who come to me for
coaching.
I was telling my story about learning this principle to a group of
writers during a meal during a PPCW conference. To illustrate, I reached over
and picked up at random a book on the table. It happens this mystery novel was
getting “buzz” — it was up for a major
award. I read it aloud to the table and I didn’t have to finish the first page
to prove my point. In the first THREE sentences we knew what the character
wanted and what the obstacles were. I could see the light bulb go on for the
writers at my table.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember now the title of the book or the
author, but I still remember the gist of the story in those first lines. The
book started in the middle of a scene and I didn’t even know the character’s
name yet or the character’s long-term goal. But I knew I’d finish that page and
turn to read another. Of course, when I went to pick up the book at the end of
the meal, it had already been snatched up. (Drat.)
Anyway, I hope this long treatise on The Big Mistake helps you get
your light bulb moment. From experience, I know this isn’t an easy concept to
grasp. But once you get the principle of making sure your reader knows at any
given point in the book (and especially in the beginning) what your character
wants, and what’s in the way of them getting it, your writing will take a
quantum leap forward.
Sidebar:
Books to help you avoid The Big Mistake:
GMC: Goal, Motivation & Conflict by Debra Dixon
How to Write a Damn Good Novel by Jim Frey
Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain
The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri.
Tip: Record yourself reading each of these books and play them to
yourself over and over.
About the Author: Linda Rohrbough has been writing since 1989, and has more than
5,000 articles and seven books to her credit, along with writing for
television, and seven national awards for her fiction and non-fiction. Find her
on Facebook as "Linda Rohrbough - Author" or visit her website:
www.LindaRohrbough.com.
