I Swear, I Thought of Sparkly Vampires First!

In response to my last post, Robyn noted the near-impossibility of stumbling upon a truly original plotline, and offered voice and style as the necessary antidotes to a world already saturated with good ideas. The same day that I read Robyn’s comment, a friend and coworker asked me if she should change the plot of her work-in-progress since she’d discovered that it shared some vital plot elements with a bestseller she’d just read.

I am not a writer, myself, but after years of working with writers I’ve come to see that one of the first and most difficult challenges they face is the pressure to come up with a totally original premise. In an industry that churns out new hits at what can seem like an astonishing rate, that pressure can be debilitating. And maybe it’s too easy for me to say, “Don’t worry about it.”

But seriously, don’t. At least not right away.

First of all, there’s the time factor. The fast-paced industry keeps audience attention constantly shifting to a new hit. As long as your book isn’t about a boy going to wizarding school or kids killing kids, chances are good that by the time your work-in-progress finds its way into a publisher's hands and makes it all the way through the editorial and production processes, it won’t be compared to today’s bestseller at every turn.

More importantly, it’s not ideas that make stories; it’s voice and character. If ten skilled writers tackled the same plot, I feel confident that they’d write ten completely different stories, with ten different moods and at least ten different meanings. Their own individual styles would appeal to different readerships and convey different emotions. Perhaps even more noticeably, each of their characters would be their own, and thus each writer's ideologies and ways of looking at human nature would determine her characters’ personalities and choices. And those unique characters would make different choices in the face of the same challenge. The same basic plot could branch out into hundreds or thousands of unique stories.

There were books about Taliban murders before The Kite Runner. Before Marcelo in the Real World there was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. There were books about the holocaust before Everything is Illuminated. Before The Hunger Games, there were plenty of books about dystopia (even a few about the government forcing children to kill each other), and there sure were a lot of books about dangerous love before Twilight.

We are a species which tells itself the same stories of love, friendship, desire, tragedy, persecution, hope and redemption again and again and again. Almost any story, boiled down to its essential parts, is about the way people interact, the way they hurt and the way they heal. So it wasn’t plot alone that set these novels apart. The premise of a story is all packaging; the story's heart is its emotion. And a story’s emotional content comes from voice and character, not from plot.

True, there does come a point in the journey to publication at which it’s absolutely vital that you and your work stand out. Sometimes a house or imprint will turn a proposal down because the story is simply too much like something that the house recently published or a big competitor already on the market. And I do believe that the very best writers set themselves apart by marrying content and presentation, pairing a great idea with skillful writing.

But when you’re drafting a story, there are still so many directions it could take. Who knows how much of your original idea will even make it into the final story, or how it will read in the context of the finished work. So if you feel you have a good idea but worry about how it may be compared to what's already on the market, I'd encourage you to put that worry aside for now and see how far you can take your idea. Use your idea to explore what your strengths are as a writer, and I trust you’ll find a way to set yourself apart through them.

On Scene Endings and other Small Choices that Make a Big Difference

I hope by now you all have had the chance to see Jason Reitman's film, Up in the Air. (If you haven't, but want to, this might not be the post you want to read, as it will include mild spoilers.)

The film's concept, and the artistic director/writer behind it, have intrigued me since I caught the tail end of an NPR interview covering it. And the finished film really did not disappoint. Much like Juno, it's a very literary take on a basic premise that could have made for a very mainstream film. What makes it stand out is its thoughtful characterization, its skillful weaving together of multiple plot lines and character arcs, and the sincere attention to detail that's shown in its every shot. That last one, it struck me, is something you writer-folk can learn from.

There's a scene in Up in the Air that I found to be a particularly nice touch. Robert Bingham (George Clooney) has finally met the woman for whom he'd give up his "What's in your Backpack?," commitment-free way of life. He's traveled across the country to reach her, only to learn that he isn't a big part of her life -- that she, like everyone else he knows, has her own ties already, and she won't let them go. He's free to return to his earlier habits, uninhibited by the baggage people bring with them.

Scenes in film are even shorter than those in novels, so in a well-made movie they have to be economical in order to have maximum impact. So I was on the lookout for some good moves in the scene directly following this revelation. Bingham returns to the airport -- his home, his comfort zone -- and checks onto a flight. The music is quiet, and when he swipes his card (a card which cues the clerk to say "Welcome back, Mr. Bingham," and something in which he takes total delight), the scene cuts. There's no friendly clerk's voice. Just silence. It's a small decision on the director's part, but it's significant. It not only moves Bingham from point A to point B (literally, back to his apartment in Omaha); it moves the viewer to a better understanding of his mental state. In a very effective, yet very small way, the film conveys the fact that Bingham has lost faith in his free-wheeling philosophy. The airline's welcome isn't included because it's no longer meaningful to Bingham. That's smart, smart directing.

In many ways, writing is a lot like directing a film. When you've got strong, fully-developed characters and the beginnings of a plot in your mind, they have a tendency to take off with it. You can't control everything your characters do, because who they are and how they change has to determine the way their stories advance. But what you can control, completely and entirely, is how their story is told. And a truly great writer pays close attention to every detail, and uses it to artfully convey a story's theme and its characters' mindsets.

A lot of what I know about writing strong scenes, I learned from Cheryl Klein at Scholastic's Arthur A. Levine Books. She taught me that every scene, no matter how short, needs to advance the story told in a manuscript. It can do that in a number of ways: by building character, by containing clues or vital information for the reader, or by moving the story forward with action -- preferably more than one of those at a time. With that in mind, one of the most important choices a writer makes is when to end a scene. Ended too early, a scene doesn't convey everything it needs to and your manuscript feels choppy or scattered. Ended too late, a scene gives the reader everything he or she needs to know but lacks artfulness (a manuscript full of scenes like this will come across as long-winded, and will make it difficult for your reader to hone in on your character's growth and your manuscript's theme). But a good scene -- well, a good scene makes us Get It. A good scene gives your reader everything he or she needs to know, and conveys it in a way that's satisfying because it is purposeful.

Scene endings are particularly crucial in a book's most important scenes: those in which a major change or revelation is occurring or has just occurred (perhaps a good way to identify these things is to zone in on those which make use of all three of those aforementioned Ways to Advance Your Story). Important scenes often end with a clincher which nudges the reader's emotions, and thus their perception of the book, in a certain direction. For a very character-based film like Up in the Air, a quiet and very subtle clincher conveys the appropriate emotion perfectly by leaving the viewers' expectations unmet and allowing them to experience some of Bingham's disappointment. For an action-based book, a thrilling cliffhanger might be exactly what's called for. And for a supernatural romance, perhaps the perfect clincher is the long-awaited kiss -- or a close call that ends without a kiss, but with some sort of self-discovery.

Whatever your story, now might be a good time to think about how you're ending your scenes, and what the manner in which you tell your story adds to the story itself. Remember, your story belongs to your character, but its telling is yours and yours alone. You make the decisions: when to cut, when to go on, when to zoom in on your character's thoughts and when to move back for a sweeping view of events. Questioning those decisions in every scene, no matter how small, will help you strengthen your writing, develop a voice, and more powerfully convey both action and character development.