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Failed Writer's Journey: Craft Books and Resolutions [1]

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Date: 2025-01-03

I know that I am a couple days late with resolutions, but I am not much of a resolutions man. I have found, over the years, that if I want to do something, I will. Promising a new start at the new year generally does little to keep me motivated. Either I am motivated to make the change, in which case I will make it at any time, or I am not, and no amount of public promising or the potential humiliation from failing to live up to aid promises will change that basic equation. But I do have a resolution, this year, that I very much want to keep.

But first, I need to talk about craft books.

I am not generally a fan of craft books. They tend to either be overly prescriptive, like Save the Cat (any book that doesn’t recognize that Memento is a genius script has issues), general to the point of uselessness (Find your voice! Somehow! Via a method I am not going to help you discover! Maybe you can use a metal detector at the beach to dig it up!), or slim pamphlets that are meant as obvious money-making scams, usually written by people with little actual success on their own. Which is why I enjoyed Kill the Dog by screenwriter Paul Guyot so much.

As I wrote when I first reviewed the book, Kill the Dog is almost an anti-craft book. It has some advice on the mechanics of turning words into a screenplay, but it mostly focuses on the importance of voice. You don’t need to adhere absolutely to a specific structure — you need to ensure that your story has a conflict and a satisfying resolution and whatever structure, or lack of structure, that gets you there is all right. What you should be doing is reading, watching, listening, and writing in order to hone your voice. Once you have that, the rest follows. Great stories are the result of great voices.

This doesn’t mean I will never use any structure, of course. My current work was outlined with a fairly standard three act template. Such structures are expected and comfortable to western readers, and there is some value in starting from a place of familiarity. But structure should be a guide, subservient to the needs of the voice and story, not their master.

And that is my resolution — focus on voice and story, to learn to better write as me, rather than as a messenger of structure. I know this probably sounds like a lot of words to resolve to do whatever the hell I want, but I honestly think it’s a bit different. The great stories are not great because of their structure, because they hit a specific beat at a specific page, but because of their voice. They are great because readers come back again and again to the characters and voices that speak to them. Structure matters, but if it interferes with telling the story of these characters in your voice, structure can bend.

I am a failure as a writer, as it says on the door. It is unlikely anyone will pay me to write fiction. It is a hard business to break into, and a harder one to stay in. But if I am to ever succeed, I hope it is because I have something to say in an interesting manner, that my voice resonates with at least some people.

And that is the point of my resolution — not to ignore what I do not like in the craft, but to understand that we have rules, even in writing, so that we think before we break them. And maybe, if I am good and lucky, breaking those rules in service of my own voice will make me a better storyteller.

Weekly Word Count

Twenty-eight hundred.

A decent week helped no doubt by being off for the holidays. In fact, based on my outline, I could in theory have this first draft done in less than two months. I will not, dear readers, have this first draft done in two months. But the writing of this is coming easy, and I am very much enjoying telling this story.

This is also a good example of how ideas evolve. This started as a thriller that crossed the “gang of criminals taking on capitalism” of the show Leverage (which you should all watch. John Rodgers, the show runner, built a fantastically angry show aimed at all the bullshit that is modern capitalism. Leverage is brilliant) and the “good guys guided by AI” of the show Person of Interest (best sci-fi show of the last two decades, with the possible exception of Andor.). However, my writing group helped me see, in the process of talking through the bones of the story, that neither the AI nor the gang were really adding anything to the basic story.

Now it is a contemporary political thriller about a middle-aged female programmer trying to keep the woman’s health app she helped build from being used by the company and its government customers to find and punish woman who get abortions. The core of the story — fighting the mix of tech company abuse and state oppression — remains, but the details tell a much cleaner, more interesting story. I hope anyway.

Plus, I get to slag on Agile in print, so I’m happy.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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