Storytelling and Writing

With Salman Rushdie



  • Writers are born out of readers
  • Writing does not come easy, success takes an incredible amount of time

    "In whatever age, in whatever country, human beings are the same. We have the same longings, flaws, ambitions…"

  • Without conflict, it is impossible to have drama

    "If people are happy, there's no story."

The Six Essential Questions:

  1. Whose story are you telling?
  2. What's the story?
    • Some of the best writing happens when you allow yourself space for improvisation and play
  3. Why are you telling the story?
  4. When does the story take place?
    • You need to make the time vivid to the reader
  5. Where does the story take place?
    • "But that idea of location for me has always been absolutely crucial as a writer."
  6. How will you tell the story?
    > "You can mess up a good idea by getting the how question wrong. I had ideas which, if I had written them differently—more straightforwardly—they would have been better, but I had to fool around and be fancy with it. I messed it up."

  • A good exercise for determining whether your story is cohesive and interesting is to try and explain it to an imaginary friend who wants you to pitch it to them orally

"A novel is written well if the author is really looking at themselves and what they're trying to do and becoming very clear about it. Saying, 'okay, this is what I'm trying to achieve, and this is what I need to do in order to get there. To set yourself the boundaries, to set yourself the shape… and then stick to it."

  • You need some kind of plot structure in order to guide your fleshing-out process. You need a skeleton upon which to construct things.
    • Some authors need incredibly detailed skeletons, others can wing it with the basics in place.

      "The only rule really is 'whatever works'. That's the rule."

"Many of the greatest films I've ever seen have nothing to do with the three-act structure. It's nonsense."

—on Letting Your Story Unfold

  • In books, you do not need a three-act-structure or any sort of grid to contain your storytelling. It's a usable idea, but do not be afraid to let your story play out however feels best.

    "My view is that the story will tell you if you listen carefully what it needs to be."

"A novel can be anything you want it to be, as long as it's not random. It can't just be one damn thing after another."

Who is doing what to whom?
Who is going to be left standing in the end?

  • The scope of your story is going to impact how tightly inter-linked the fates of your characters are
    • Broader scope, looser links, and vice-versa
  • When characters have a tight sense of integration and significance with each other your audience is going to feel like your novel is much more cohesive

Mirroring

Mirroring is the process through which two events are compared to another and the reader connects their similarities. Mirroring works best when there is not a strict equivalence between your two events, but rather differences that make the comparison elegant.

It helps the reader grasp the larger form of the novel and creates a sense of structure.


"I think most people who write books have some little germ of something inside of them that they need to get out. There's usually some little thing eating at you that you need to express. So how do you do that? One answer is trial and error."

—on Embracing the False Starts

Beginning a piece of writing is matter of finding the right entry point. Sometimes your guesses on where that is are dead ends, others will be productive routes.

Asking yourself questions and trying to answer them is critical to prototyping your ideas, even when they do not reflect the final product.
You need to interrogate yourself in order to develop more concrete concepts.

"Very early in the book, you have to make a sort of contract with the reader. You have to say to them 'I'm going to tell you this kind of story'. Then, if they like that idea, they'll stick with you. I think the worst thing you can do as a writer is promise them that you're going to tell a kind of story and then not tell it."

Managing expectations is critical

"Start as you mean to go on."

Your opening sentence should always seek to behave as a reflection of the story's contents. Something that openly displays to the reader what your story is about.

"Many times you may find you want to look at very old stories to write a new story."

—on Drawing from Storytelling Traditions

In many cases the ancient myths are incredibly dense compressions of storytelling that can be unpacked to a surprising degree when analyzed.

Complexity is often more entertaining and more engaging than a beginning-to-end narrative.

Oral storytelling has a number of techniques with respect to keeping an audience engaged in the process of telling a story that you should take cues from them as a writer.

  • Moving between storylines in text is a very careful balancing act where you need to make sure you are not jumping between perspectives too often
    • Mini-arcs between storyline changes help ease this
  • Adding a storyteller to your own story is an incredibly useful device for creating a sort of playfulness to the narration
    • Try this in first person

Characters

"Often times the most important events of our lives happen in our absence."

— on Character is not Destiny

Sometimes you will know your characters very well, and this is often a result of basing that character off a version of yourself. But as a character comes to life, they take on characteristics of their own which are not yours, at which point you must take care to let such traits develop organically.

The most critical part of creating characters is learning to engage with realities that are not your own
- An aspect of writing fiction that needs to be embraced often is taking cues and pieces from real, living people and their experiences and doing so for a litany of people for a single character.
- Characters are at their best when they are an aggregate of many different ideas and traits from relevant, extant people that are then glued together by your imagination.

"My own view has always been that nobody in book, no matter how minor a character they are… nobody should feel just sketched in. Even if it is a character who appears for just a page, or just a scene, you should try and make it so that they are there. That they are as physically real as you can make them."

Writing unlikable and unsympathetic characters is often a difficult, but highly interesting task. The contrast that is created by having characters with a likability problem being the focus of a narrative is something that can prove quite challenging for an author but ultimately very engaging for the reader.

Letting your characters come to life on their own and enter a space of independent existence is a very good way to flesh them out and create living, breathing stories. Finding that space as writer is important because it is what your readers will be doing from the very start.

"This idea of being in conversation with your characters is a way of helping you to create characters which don't just feel like your puppets. Who feel like they have an independent reality."

Writing small biographies for your characters or creating spaces for their consciousness is important for bringing them to life. Things like their verbal mannerisms, important moments in their lives, anything that lets you see into their mind should be documented. But there is a point where you have to put it aside and continue to imagine when you're actually doing the writing.

"We are all—every human being—carrying some kind of damage. It can be a broken heart, it can be (a lack of affection). We all carry bruises and wounds throughout our life. And those sort of shape what we find ourselves doing. What has damaged (your character) in their life?"

Every person has some underlying force that pushes them forward. It can be incredibly simple or stunningly complex, from base needs to advanced hopes and dreams. You need to know this about your characters because that's the story you need to tell. You need to tell the story of where a character's forward motions take them.

Often the banal and the simple details of a character's exterior can help you discover more about them. Working your way from the exterior to the interior is an excellent way to build characters because they allow you to discover whether those exterior things are defense or expressions.

"One of the questions I always ask myself about any character, large or small, is how do they talk? Do they have an accent? … How are they talkative? What kind of vocabulary do they use? Do they use bad language, or resist it? If you go through that to know that about your character, you've gone quite a long way to knowing who they are."

—on Hearing Your Characters

Different characters are going to have different speech rhythms, and this is something which can tell you a lot about them. It's a consideration that you need to make when when you are trying to hear your characters.

Ask yourself, "What is the most unusual thing about this character?" when you seek to introduce them. You need to come up with an aspect of your character that is idiosyncratic and broaden it from there. This helps intrigue your readers so they want the journey.

"The decision between the first and the third person is really about whether you want to have your reader see your character from the outside, and only gradually penetrate to the deeper layers of the character, or whether you want your reader to see your character from the inside—see them as they see themselves—and then for your reader to decide whether the way the character presents themselves is truthful."

"If you are using the first person, you are often saying 'Trust me, I'm your storyteller' but if your storyteller is a liar, they are presenting themselves in a way that is false. What you can then do as an author is to point to the reader the discrepancies; the way in which the character is describing themselves, and how other people see that character."

It's worth getting a hang of various narrative styles because it gives you a toolbox to tell more dynamic stories.

Ways to Reveal Your Character:

  1. What they say
  2. Interior monologue
  3. Through action

"I think it's very interesting in third person to create this tension; how people speak about themselves and what they want, and what they actually do. I mean hypocrisy is one of the great things revealed by that discrepancy."

"The thing about dialogue… is that you have to decide what dialogue is doing in the story."

  • You need to always keep in mind what dialogue is supposed to accomplish; what it's meant to reveal or achieve by existing.

As an exercise, try and write scene where you never say who is talking. Have someone else read it and see if they can distinguish the characters solely by their actions and speech. Good writing for characters is writing where the reader implicitly knows who is speaking.
Differentiation is a skill you can polish, and it lets your characters exist on the page without having to spell it out all the time.


Settings

"The way to avoid cliche (in a setting) is to really look into yourself and to see what it is about (a) place that is significant to you about that place, and write out of that feeling, and then you will write something good."

—on Setting as a Character

The most vibrant way to handle your setting is to treat it as its own character with interacts with everyone in it. Often times writing is aided by establishing the place first, and then letting your characters exist within that place.

  • Time is an incredibly important thing to keep paired with your setting. The past requires you to keep careful track of chronological detail, the future requires you to imagine things which would feel surreal to an observer from the present.
  • Some of the best-written settings are ones that you write from a place of deep feeling. Disassemble your feelings for that setting and draw upon what you find for more eloquent descriptions and engagement with your setting.

"Adjectives are things that allow writers to be lazy sometimes. If you can't say that somewhere is beautiful, or green, or ugly—if you can't use an adjective—what it forces you to do is to tell a story about it. The way in which your readers can be made to understand a place if you can't use adjectives is that you have to tell us a story about it that they relate to. So cutting out adjectives forces you into narrative."

"I'm not saying never use adjectives, I'm saying as an exercise to show yourself how telling a story about a place is the best way of getting your reader to enter into that place"

—on Writing a Place Without Adjectives

"I've always thought that what you're trying to do when writing a book is to create a world that the reader wants to be in."


Observation and Style

"Ordinary life is in the corners of the frame"

—on Your Unmistakably Unique Worldview

Writing is at its most vivid and genius when it is uniquely yours. If someone can look at your writing and react with "I could do that" or a fingerprinting assessment of some influence, you have written very poorly.

"So the more personal and idiosyncratic it (your writing) is, the more it will feel authentically yours. … In order to be a really good writer, you need to have an unusual amount of self-knowledge. You need to really know who you are, what makes you tick, and why."

To increase what you know, and thus to write better, you need to get out of your comfort zone and absorb knowledge as intimately as possible. You need to go new places, ask questions, listen to people with the intent of understanding who they are. You need to discover.

One the greatest things you can do as a writer is become a person who is capable of writing about any other kind of person in great detail. Once you can write about murderers and pickpockets the same way you can write about prime ministers and archbishops, you will have considerably more latitude to create engaging stories.

Research is a journey all its own, with discoveries along the way you can't begin to imagine. The import thing is to discover often, and to discover however you can. To broaden your horizons most efficiently you need to try and adopt the skills of a journalist in order to go out and learn things at a personal level.

"The great gamble of literature is that you do it by yourself. You do it by yourself and you offer it to the world, and you hope that the world will like it."

Sharp observational skills are key to becoming a better writer. When you are out and about, walking on the street, take time to listen to how people talk and watch the movements of the streets. What's happening in the corners of the frame?

You need to form a habit of recording your observations wherever and whenever you are.

Try and make the familiar unfamiliar wherever you go for better observations

Sound is a very important component of your observations and your writing

Diversity in the way your characters speak is CRITCIAL, and the only way you get better at it is by doing a lot of listening to the way people speak.

Style is how you choose to adhere to, or break, the rules of classical form. Voice is what makes a piece of writing your own.

"I would say that what you should do with any piece of writing is to say 'what is it that will allow me to most clearly and effectively portray the characters and tell the story'."

You must keep in mind that people's thoughts and behaviors are different in any time that is not the present. Part of your research should always involve trying to tap into this alternate thought and behavior so that you can write with it in mind.

The internet is great for broad, the library is good for deep.


The Process

All writing is rewriting.

What is most important is getting something on the page, even if it's rough. From there you can actually work with something, rather than just the horror of blank paper. Give your brain something to look at critically.

When looking at your own text, ask yourself two things:

  1. Are there things you're saying that are superfluous?
  2. Are there things you haven't said, that need to be said?

It's important to be constantly checking in on the language and development of the story, especially once you get around to introducing things or implementing turning points.

Performing writing in passes where you sit down, produce content, and then step back is the most common way of doing things. Once you've finished something of any size, you open up the ability to analyze it and see where improvements can be made.

"What you need to know is that it is always possible to make something a little better. It's good to have an attitude of dissatisfaction with your work."

A work is nearing its finished state (or at least, its share state) when you are simply making the content different rather than creating new contents.

In showing a work to your readers, tell them nothing, because it is important to let the writing stand on its own and to see whether your readers can find what you want them to find in your writing without being helped along.


Final Lesson: Seven Useful Tips for Writers

  1. Figure out if you're a maximalist or a minimalist
    • Is your focus very tight on deep specifics, or sweeping and grand on as much of the world as can fit onto the page?
  2. Determine whether you are a careful planner or general improviser
  3. Write what feels deeply necessary to you
    • Always write because it is something you cannot afford to let go unwritten
  4. Always take risks
    • Working 'close to the bull' will present a greater chance of failure, but if you manage to pull it off when you take a risk, the rewards are always greater.
  5. Just sit down and do your work
    • Committing to producing content of any kind is very important so that your process can continue, even if it's not good content.
  6. The solution is almost always to scrap it
    • In general, when your writing encounters some kind of systemic issue with a chunk of itself, it is very rare that any solution is superior to simply disposing with what is problematic and starting anew.
  7. Writers are people who finish books
    • Make sure that you don't stop until you get to the end, because that's when you can begin to look backwards and see what your work needs to become fully realized.

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Pub: 20 Apr 2021 20:14 UTC
Edit: 20 Apr 2021 20:15 UTC
Views: 7975