In the sixth in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Chris McCormick, author of Desert Boys (Picador), lays out his method.
Sixteen Steps to Writing a Story:
Sixteen Steps to Writing a Story:
- Figure out what you know. Maybe it’s a place, or a place within a place, or a job, or a task within a job, or a certain kind of dynamic in a certain kind of relationship. Be so daringly specific that you fear no one will relate. That’s how you get people to relate.
- Figure out what you don’t know about what you know. This way—Grace Paley used to tell her students—you’ll be writing with a question in mind instead of an explanation. Readers, like actual human people, hate being explained to. They’d much rather join an investigation.
- Now that you have a question in mind, imagine a character who’s relevant to that question in an interesting way.
- Imagine a second character who’s relevant to the same question in a different but also interesting way.
- Write a scene in which the first character relies on or disappoints the other.
- Write exposition that uncovers how the two characters have come to this point.
- With all this new information in mind, start over.
- Write from inside the story, not above it.
- Write until you arrive at some deeper understanding of your original question. Avoid pat answers.
- Now that you know what your story is about, start over.
- After many drafts and revisions, and only when you’ve done all you can on your own, send the story to one or two (but, like, never three) trusted readers.
- Thank them for their time and friendship, even if their opinions are untimely and unfriendly.
- Revise endlessly-ish. You could go on tinkering forever, but there’s quitting and there’s finishing. Trust yourself to know the difference.
- People, like readers, hate being explained to. That’s why lists like these invariably fail. Call bullshit on this one and the millions of others like it.
- What isn’t bullshit is that you should read greedily and diversely and slowly. If any of these feels like a chore to you, your own stories will be chores to read, too.
- All that matters is energy and compassion. Stories that move forward while moving us can get away with absolutely anything.
