Lots of writers hate the rigidity of a writing formula. After all, writing should be an organic process, not something measured in steps. You’re not making yellow curry, or performing funeral rites, or attending AA meetings that the judge forced you to attend after puking into the open window of a police cruiser during a wild Presidents’ Day celebration.
But if you want to write a story quickly, and the thought of getting rich and famous and finally being able to abandon your family doesn’t motivate you enough, a good writing formula can be a big help.
This writing system was created by Antonya Nelson, a writer whose work I won’t mention or link to because I don’t believe in other authors getting more attention than me. But take my word for it, she’s a pro who knows her stuff.
Step 1: Write About Something That Happened To You
The first thing you need to do is get words on the page, and there’s no better place to start than your own life. Think of something that would be emotionally resonant. You could write about a priest who molested you, or an uncle who molested you, or the dog you had to put down because you could’ve sworn it somehow was knowingly and purposefully molesting you.
When I used this method, I wrote about my first wife, particularly about how she disappeared shortly after I discovered she was a serial bigamist.
Step 2: Rewrite the Same Story From a Different Point of View
As the counselor in my road rage support group taught me, it’s important to take a step back and see things from other people’s perspectives. This applies just as much to writers.
To most people, it might’ve made sense to tell of my first wife’s bigamy from my perspective. But I realized my disillusionment and heartbreak might be muddied by the fact that I was cheating on her with the woman who would eventually become my second and by far favorite wife. So instead, I wanted to get inside her head and try to explore the psychology of a woman who married others compulsively.
Step 3: Create a Ticking Clock
Stories rely on momentum. In real life, drinking too much on Presidents’ Day might lead to court-ordered community service that derails your efforts to track down your missing wife, but a story can’t have random digressions like these.
A ticking clock not only propels the story forward but also culminates with a climax that readers expect and crave. When I rewrote my story from my wife’s perspective, I gave her a father who was dying of cirrhosis. She had nine months to scrape up enough cash to buy a liver for him on the black market. In real life, I never met Barbara’s family, as she told me they wouldn’t like me because they were racist against the Irish.
Step 4: Introduce Significant Objects
Frodo’s ring. The suitcase in Pulp Fiction. The magic golf club in The Legend of Baggar Vance. Fiction relies on symbols to deepen the meaning of your story.
If you’re lucky, this symbol might already be present in your narrative. But you also want to avoid cliches. Something like an engagement ring would probably come across as tacky. Luckily for me, Barbara and I never exchanged them as we’d gotten married so quickly we both forgot. So instead, I chose a special duffel bag in which she kept all her different fake IDs and cash and wigs.
Step 5: Establish a Transitional Situation
Sometimes this is easy to forget as many of us go to work, write and watch YouTube every single day until we die, but fiction depends on change. Your character must have some significant shift in their life or situation.
For my story, that was easy. It was the moment Barbara decided to leave me. Of course, I had to change the circumstances a bit. In the story, Barbara sneaks up behind me and bashes me on the head when I find the duffel bag in the closet and when I come to, she’s gone. In real life, I discovered Barbara missing after returning from an erotic three-day holiday getaway with my soon-to-be second wife at Disney World.
Step 6: Integrate a World Event
You can do this to be symbolic, to anchor your story in a way that’s more relatable to readers or to help market it.
I played around with a few ideas as I was editing. I first thought about setting it during the French Revolution, for example, but abandoned that idea when I remembered that cell phones didn’t exist then. Instead, to underline the sense of hidden intent and double identities, I set the story during the final season of Hannah Montana.
Step 7: Develop Binary Forces
Jocks vs. Nerds. Snobs vs. Slobs. Shiites vs. Sunnis. All classic rivalries that make for compelling drama and drive the narrative.
In my story, there was already a clear binary. Man vs. Woman. But I wanted to go a bit deeper than that. In real life, I didn’t know Barbara all that well, or at all, really, it turned out. I mean, she said she liked Shakespeare and tennis and hardcore porn just like I did, but I realized these commonalities were probably just part of the con, a way to worm her way into my life.
Anyway, in my story, I established a second binary by having her be in favor of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics while the husband was partial to the Copenhagen interpretation that insists of wave function collapse after measurement takes place.
Step 8: I actually don’t remember step 8
Step 9: Embrace Experimentation
This is usually the point where I tell you to ignore everything I just said and do something completely different. And this article will be no exception.
But, you don’t have to throw away a perfectly good story just because it might still be too embarrassingly close to what happened to you in real life. Keep playing around with the format. Write the story as a Yelp review. Write it as something your character brings up on his friend’s dad’s death bed.
For me, the only thing I did was change the point of view again, this time to the second person. Turns out lots of people are really insecure about their relationships and I was able to play into their anxieties pretty well.
by Lucy Li
dragoneaglepublishing.com 