Hello again my friends! Over the next week or so, I’m going to present answers to the the five storytelling mistakes I presented yesterday. Today’s post unpacks and solves for this snafu:
Choosing an obtuse voice to tell your story.
Remember, as writers our main job is to create value. For ourselves, for our characters, and, obviously, for our readers. We don’t often equate story with value. I mean, writing a book is not like solving war; curing cancer; ending poverty, right? Not directly, anyway. But, the first step in harnessing your drive to create a world on paper is to acknowledge the value of the practice of storytelling in general. What if we reframe the act of writing? What if we understand that without story, our lives lack meaning? What if we realize that the value we’re offering is in service to satisfying the human desire for connection?
Lofty, yes? Okay, let’s bring it down a peg. In order to produce work that resonates with others, we have to exploit, manipulate and leverage. See? Not so altruistic after all! Writing is seduction. It’s creating a puzzle that woos folks into a world other than their own while inviting them to bring their frame of reference to the page. Think of your story as a big, fat game of Wordle. There’s a reason that puzzle has exploded in the Zeitgeist, yeah? The chosen word is the constant. The way each person solves the puzzle and discovers the word, is unique and varied. When you set out to write a story, keep in mind the desire in our audience to “win” the same way they win at a NYT puzzle. Winning, for the reader of a novel for instance, involves a satisfying, nonlinear game that culminates in arriving somewhere new. And that new place makes the reader feel, ultimately, less alone.
So, the translator employed to deliver meaning to the reader from the writer is the character. This is a big ask. This conduit guides the audience through the labyrinth of story, and must not lose the thread lest the reader disengage. Once that happens, the magic stops.
Remember yesterday, when I talked about the danger in writing a boring story about a boring man? When you make the mistake of manufacturing a specific tone or personality via a voice that copies the intended effect without engaging the reader emotionally, you’ve lost the reader.
Okay, so how to fix this.
You need two main ingredients: Emotionality and specificity, combined with the variable of distance. Emotionality is not sentimentality, by the way. It’s vulnerability demonstrated mainly by action and secondarily by reflection—especially reflection lodged in physical response.
Specificity builds on emotionality. In the particularization of objects, gestures, events, and the like, the reader aligns with the character. In other words, the reader is brought back to their own value system, and begins to root for the character.
By distance, I mean how close or far the character is from the reader. Decisions such as what to withhold, and when to reveal, affects distance. Sometimes a character knows more than the reader; sometimes the reader is the holder of a truth unknown to the character. Ironic distance is particularly useful when the reader knows more than the character, and that can lead to a reader’s backdoor empathy—even for an “unlikeable” character. Along with distance, bear in mind that you have a whole book to demonstrate character dynamic and catalyst-based change.
Let me give you an example from one of my favorite authors.
(spoiler alert)
In Tom Perrotta’s MRS. FLETCHER (also an HBO limited series based upon the book—hence Kathryn Hahn’s seductive pose above), there are dual perspectives. A third-person divorced, doting mother about to become an empty nester, and her college-bound son, delivered in first person. The son is initially presented as a callow jerk, and the mother as an overprotective, exhausted woman in the throes of a midlife crisis. The conflict arises when the mother ends up having a fling with a fellow student she meets in a writing class. The fellow student, it turns out, is an acquaintance of her son. The reader and the mother know this, but the son does not. Until…he walks in on them after he has left college in disgrace because of an asshole thing that he does.
Now, Perrotta could have chosen to tell this story only from the son’s perspective. Or only from the mother’s. Do you see how this would have been a missed opportunity? Do you see how, even when the son is presented as a cad and a lout, the reader ends up feeling the weight of his sorrow and anger? A catastrophic collision occurs when the son walks in on the mother in bed with his acquaintance. (There is more, of course, including the son’s relationship with his remarried father and his new family.)
Tying this back to value, the nuanced, particularity of Perrotta’s story, his intelligent, yet complex rendering of a privileged young man, combined with the universality of a mother’s complicated emotions when she’s confronted with a suddenly empty nest, leads the reader to their own broken heart, as well as a chuckle at the absurd condition of middle-age in America.
Thanks for reading. Tune in tomorrow for a look at the sin of info-dumping.
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