People
often ask me how my career in journalism affected my work as a novelist. It’s a
great question because the answer is fairly illuminating on the craft of
writing, which takes unequal parts dedication, practice, courage, vision,
talent, persistence, thick skin, and perspective.
In short, my journalist career made
my novelist dreams a reality. It did so in several ways, partly by forcing me to summit the mountainous 10,000
hours of writing practice required for mastering the basic science of good
sentences. It did so even more partly by helping me learn how to build stories
-- on deadline! -- that contained
beginnings, middles, and ends. It did all of this, mind you, while working with
editors and colleagues and sources to make sure the story actually worked for
its readers and was true to itself. That’s called professionalism, and it’s an invaluable tool for
writers of all stripes.
But the most important lesson
journalism crystallized for me was that every story has a soul. It’s up to the writer
to find it, name it, and nurture it. In
journalism, that’s called nailing your lead and/or your focus graph (the
paragraph somewhere near the top of the feature that drills down into what the
whole long story is about).
Yes, stories do indeed have souls. The
same soul can grow into many different directions, with entirely different sets
of characters, locales, and events. Just think about how some cultures believe souls go on to live multiple lives. But the story’s soul is yours to toy with; it's the magic seed necessary
for growing a great narrative. Think about the souls of great literary works
like Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Don Quixote, The Iliad; they’ve all been told and
re-told by later authors and film makers who embraced the story's absolute core or parable, and used it to grow their own new narrative.
What does a story’s soul look like?
Let’s see if you can affix these souls to a work of fiction. The story’s soul
is: about fellowship triumphing over darkness in the Orc Apocalypse. It’s about
overcoming addiction and an intellectually oppressive society to find truth and
happiness as an individual. It’s about love killing the demons. It’s about
revenge on the shark that ate your mates from the USS Indianapolis.
The soul of a story appears ludicrously
simple once it’s denuded to its core, but that’s what makes it so powerful. It’s
pure. So whenever you get lost in your story – or article, or essay, or love
letter – you can always close your eyes, repeat the story’s soul in your head
like a mantra, and then proceed. The story’s soul is your guiding light, your
north star.
It starts
with the lead. My English professor, Al Wachtel at Pitzer College, used to
drill us on thesis statements, a single line (maybe two) into which is
condensed the core principle of your entire paper. At eighteen, I thought this
was absurd. I silently seethed that over the course of four pages (four pages!
Ah! That’s so long! How will I ever type that much on Beowulf!), there is bound
to be stacks and layers of messages and meanings that can’t possibly be bundled
up and wrapped into a single, encapsulating thesis statement.
WRONG. It can, and it must, be done.
If you can’t, you don’t have a cohesive message. Just a pocket of story pearls
without a necklace stringing them together. The thesis statement is that
necklace. In journalism, when you pitch a story, your editor might say, “Okay, I
get it that it’s interesting to you. But what’s the story? What’s the hook?”
You need to be able to answer that in such a way that you can sell it to your
editor. Or sell your book to an agent with an elevator pitch. Or sell your
just-about-anything to just-about-anyone. Otherwise you won’t be able to sell
it to your readers, or your clients and consumers. They’ll know you’re pushing
something soulless.
Back to the lead. A lead can be
three words or it can be thirty. It can answer the five Ws (whowhatwherewhenwhy
and how) or it can simply establish the mood: “Call me Ishmael.” “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the
desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Regardless, you develop such an intimate relationship with your story what with all the time and energy you devote to it that, until you nail your
lead (or your thesis sentence, or your focus graph, or whatever you want to
call it), you won’t get the most out of it, just as you can’t
possibly have a healthy relationship with someone whose soul eludes you. Find
the story’s soul. Embrace it. Nurture it. Then write the hell out of it.
That’s not to say a story can’t
have a complicated, hard-to-define soul. It can. But as a writer, I keep coming
back and examining my stories’ souls to make sure the plot moves along with
some sense of continuity and consistency. I carve out pieces of the story’s
soul and implant these mini-souls into each of the characters so as to support
the overarching story. Yes. My books have soul.
Writing is good for your own soul.
It makes you a smarter and deeper human when you take the craft seriously.
Forced to probe your own depths to identify the story’s soul, you may find that
all’s well in your interior; or you might discover some areas that need some
work, be it by way of knowledge or experience or emotion. In any case...
Keep looking. Keep writing. Keep
improving. And pray the story its soul to keep.
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