Is this a blueprint or a zero draft?
Read It Your Way, Story Genius: Chapt 6-8
Last time we met to discuss chapters 3-5 of Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write A Riveting Novel by Lisa Cron, we were asked to play the What If game to find our stories and to start exploring the interior life of our main characters. How did it go? Did any of the exercises from the book send you on a new story trajectory?
It’s August. Which means my fiction writing has ground to a halt. This is the season of rest and playing outside in the woods and planning for the fall. For me, summer generally, and August specifically is a season where very little writing gets done. That’s fine. Sometimes doing nothing now helps you to do a lot later.
So it’s actually the perfect time to be reading this book. Sometimes writing craft books can throw me off my game, if I read them at the same time I’m trying to write something new. I get in my head and start to think I’m doing it all wrong.
Hot tip: the only wrong way to write is to beat yourself up about how you’re choosing to get the hard work done.
This week, we’re discussing Chapters 6, 7, and 8, which dig deeper into understanding our main character’s motivations, desires, and misbeliefs. Cron builds on the previous chapters where we are trying to figure out our main character’s desires and misbeliefs.
In this section, we continue to explore that, but we go deeper. We learn more about what the desires and misbeliefs are, but also where they come from—the key moments in a protagonist’s life that brought them to the place where your story begins.
My favorite quote from this section:
“…if at any point your protagonist can simply decide to give up without suffering great personal cost due to her inaction, you do not have a story.”
Do the Work Now for the Payoff Later
Okay. I’m going to be honest with you. As I read this book, I go back and forth between finding it pretty informative and absolutely hating everything she’s saying. I think the thing I’m hating really—and I know I’ve mentioned this already—is the prescriptive tone, the idea that if you just follow her very well-laid out steps, writing a book will be easy and natural and you will not have to suffer a day in your life.
Writing usually causes some suffering, that’s normal. Though I think that if you’re suffering more than 30% of the time while you write, you should reconsider your artistic calling. But let’s set that aside for now and get back to Story Genius, which, by the way, is not a book I would recommend for writers who are just starting to write their very first novel.
This is an advanced-level craft book. I could see a situation where a new writer reads this and absolutely loses their desire to write. It’s a bit of an intimidating book if you’ve never tried writing anything before. So, if you’re a new writer (hi!), put this book down and come back to it after you’ve dabbled with you’re own process and rhythm for a bit.
Okay, for those of you who are still here—am I the only one who, the entire time I was reading through chapters 6-8, just kept thinking, “This sounds like a hell of a lot of work?”
(Let me add a caveat that, yes, I know writing is a lot of work. That’s part of the reason I love it so much because it’s a huge challenge. And with huge challenges come big intrinsic rewards, and I love intrinsic rewards. I am a woman highly motivated by pride, ego, and ambition.)
What I mean is, this is a lot of pre-writing work and then I still have to write a book on top of that and then edit it and rewrite and rewrite—but then I stopped and flipped the script in my head. Because what I think Cron is trying to show us here is that you can do a significant amount of prep work now to avoid a lot of clean up work later. She also claims that the work we do at the beginning is not pre-writing, but writing itself—which I can kind of see, because we’re asked to write scenes that could foreseeably be used later in our books.
I don’t know if that’s what actually happens if you follow her method, but I could see a situation where it might work. But I can also see a situation where you would lose all desire to keep going and just abandon the work you’ve put in and go find something else to do.
I think I’ve said this before but I’m a writer who likes to discover a lot about my characters inside the actual story, but this has led me to some dead-ends in the past, and to a lot of struggling with an emotionless, pointless plot. But I’ve always managed to figure a way out of it, mostly by doing what Cron is suggesting—returning to the main character’s arc, figuring out what they want and what is keeping them from getting that thing, then following the natural cause and effect trail to get to the story. I just do it in draft 2, 3, and 4 rather than at the beginning.
Cron’s suggesting we do more of the heavy lifting BEFORE we ever start on the main plot of the novel. I’m intrigued. I think I would like to have more confidence going into a first draft, but I’m also worried I’m going to get bored before I even start.
If I know everything that there is to know about my book and my characters before I start, I might lose motivation. This happens quite a bit with lots of writers, not just me. Maybe we spend too much time on an outline and then when it comes to finally writing the novel, we lose momentum because we already know what’s going to happen. Or maybe we finish a first draft and don’t want to edit because we’ve already told ourselves the story.
I worry with Cron’s method, that the risk-taking and wonder, the exploration and joy may quickly be sucked from my process. But then again, maybe it will open up a whole new avenue of understanding. Maybe this is my chance to Level Up, as the gamers say (do they say that? I have no idea).
August seems like a good month to try something new, anyway, since I’m in a fallow season, a good month to push against my own long held worldview, experiment with a new way of writing, and see what changes as a result.
“…stories build on the casual relationship between what just happened, and what’s about to happen as a result.”
Discussion Questions
Cron’s method of discovering the story and a protagonist’s motivations reminds me a lot of the Zero Drafting method. What similarities or differences do you see and how do you think each of these methods can help you create a stronger story in the long run?
If you find yourself getting bored with a novel you’re working on, do you abandon it or stick it out? If you stick it out, what ways do you motivate yourself to fall in love with your story again?
What are some craft books you would recommend for new writers? What are some craft books you would recommend for more advanced writers?
Put It Into Practice
Complete as many of the exercises from Chapters 6, 7, and 8 as you would like. Use the story you were working on earlier or start something new. Come back and let us know how it went for you!
Read through the first 1 or 2 chapters of your favorite novel (or novels) and note if the book starts in media res, and if so, what is revealed about the protagonist in the first few pages, what is held back, what questions do you still have, and what about the scene makes you want to keep reading.
Reading Discussion Schedule
July 2, 2024: Kick off Party!July 9, 2024: Introduction, Chapters 1-2July 23, 2024: Chapters 3-5August 6, 2024: Chapters 6-8August 20, 2024: Chapters 9-12
September 3, 2024: Chapters 13-15
Virtual Discussion and Write-in to be held in September shortly after our last discussion. Date and details to come!
1. I think it depends on what a zero draft is to someone. I've had people look at my skeletal first drafts and call them zero drafts. To me, they aren't. They are bones, but not a blueprint or outline. Creativity was involved, words that will end up in the final draft are there. I just get the pleasure of taking what I have and molding it. It's not a sketch on a page, it's the armature.
For me, long outlines in any form kill the story. Many stories have died that way, much to my disappointment. I love them, but I'm no longer in love with them. The sparkle has essentially been scrubbed out.
2. Boredom can happen for a million reasons, so it depends. Sometimes I step away, sometimes I take a break, sometimes I create something related to the story in a different artistic medium. But then sometimes, I shelve it—for now, forever, for a day that may never come.
3.. The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing by David Morrell for advanced writers. It's unlike anything I've read before—not a craft book, not a memoir, just something else. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke for both. You just can't go wrong with a book that's not about craft but definitely still is in some way.