Be Crazy Dumbsaint of The Mind or (Three Tenets of Storytelling)
Throughout my writing career I’ve come across various tips, tricks, and edicts on the craft.
Strunk & White: ”Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.”
Lubitsch, by way of Billy Wilder: “Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever.”
Jack Kerouac: “Accept loss forever.” (And also the title of this post.)
Annie Proulx: “Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.”
George Orwell: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”
But there are three I always return to — the rubrics for each story I write. The first two I found in an Atlantic article (circa 2005). I cut them out and taped them to my lap top screen.
1) Can this story save any lives?
At first glance the above is a heavy burden, but important to ask—even if the only life it saves is your own.
I fully believe the following:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you”
And if your work saves you, there is the chance it can save someone else. And this isn’t just the “Big Important” stories. I know someone who changed their whole career path after watching a movie about surfing. Someone else who decided they didn’t need to die after seeing a cartoon logo on a sunscreen bottle.
For more on this topic I highly suggest The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope.
We can never know the full power of our own work. The only thing we know for sure is that it can’t do anything until it is written down, told, shared, brought forth. To do so is as necessary as breath.
2) Does this story contain any sentences I want to carry to my grave?
I’ve stained hands, walls, and pages trying to keep track of all the sentences that have devoured me. Some have been lions ripping me to shreds. Some have been whales swallowing me whole. And some have been microbial, entering me unnoticed and eating me from inside out.
When considering this tenet, I always think of this passage from one of Emily Dickinson’s letters:
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
Not only can you exchange the word book for sentence/story/film/song/art, but it too contains one such sentence (at least for me): “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Not every sentence that does this kind of obliteration needs to be as dramatic as Emily’s. Some sentences gain their power more from what precedes them, or by what follows them, than on their own. For me, the final line of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is just such a sentence: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
The book I’m currently reading The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith has given me this gem: “A thing being rare doesn’t make it wrong.”
And finally, an example from my own work Debris: “The heart plays tricks sometimes, beating in places where it’s not.”
Even if the only thing I can do is to be open, ready and willing—I am always striving for that kind of sentence. The kind of sentence that is both prayer and prayer’s answer. The kind of sentence that, when silently mouthed, makes me taste blood.
3) And then what happened?
This third tenet came to me by way of Neil Gaiman. It speaks to the importance of making your reader lean in with curiosity, asking “And then what happened?”
In my screenwriting work, the goal is for each act, sequence, and scene to leave the viewer feeling this way. Often times, I hope to end each page of the screenplay with something that makes the reader want to turn to the next. Doing it per page can prove to be a little difficult, depending on rhythm and (for the producers out there) page count (unfortunately), but it can lead to others referring to your work as a page-turner.
In prose, I’ve found it’s a powerful exercise to work with this idea on a sentence level. Even going so far as injecting conflict into description. For example, instead of saying: The pawnshop window is full of engagement rings. I might suggest how one of the diamond’s chipped facets struggled to throw the sun back out through the grimy neglected window, a Sisyphean curse that could only be broken by someone’s belief in love…or a violent smash and grab. (Okay, possibly over-written and self-indulgent. But I did say it was an exercise. I would definitely go back through and think of Orwell’s “Omit needless words,” and Elmore Leonard’s “Don't go into great detail describing places and things.”And perhaps there is already conflict in the image of a sea of engagement rings in a pawnshop window—depending on when and where it is placed, and who it is witnessing the cold hard fact.)
My hope is to have the reader asking “And then what happened?” After the opening sentence, paragraph, chapter, all the way through the end, and even after the’ve closed the book and gotten on with the rest of their lives.