But this iguana - he is, for the length of this video, as dear to me as my oldest friends. I find them creepy and papery and fundamentally unlovable. I have, for reasons I can’t quite reconstruct, owned iguanas. Is your heart not racing? Did you not, in those two minutes and sixteen seconds, feel every string of your emotional instrument expertly plucked? That single interaction between a gaggle of scaly creatures on the other side of the planet has taught me more about storytelling than entire years of expensive education.įor instance: You need a sympathetic protagonist, and that doesn’t mean he needs to be cuddly. Meet the hatchling iguana and the hellishly numerous racer snakes of Fernandina Island. At long last, some expertise that leaves me feeling neither grubby nor in need of a nap. Which is why I am so excited to have finally discovered, well into my thirties, a group of story gurus whose wisdom meets me precisely where I am. Forster, meanwhile, would like us to muse together on the distinctions between narrative pattern and narrative rhythm. Blake Snyder wants to know whether my story is more “Monster in the House” or “Dude with a Problem.” E.M. Their rules of story structure - and it is always story structure that I am convinced is the crux of the difficulty - are either too rigid or too academic, too low-brow or too lofty. Dear Non-Judgmental and Miraculously Competent Stranger: Please cure me of my idiocy.īut these books, good and sensible as many of them are, never quite do the trick. At the many points in the writing of a novel when I feel hopeless, I turn to these books as I turn, before weddings and funerals, to YouTube tutorials on how to tie a tie. Bird by Bird and Hero With a Thousand Faces and Save the Cat and Aspects of the Novel and self-published Kindle things whose titles I’m too embarrassed to type out. It certainly accounts for those books’ presence on my shelf. Which accounts, I think, for the entire sub-industry of books devoted to taking the mystery out of writing. You feel inadequate and enraged and your knees hurt and you’re fairly sure that that plastic thing you just removed is now broken. Not knowing what to do on the page is no more pleasant, and no more spiritually charged, than not knowing what to do with an overflowing dishwasher. “The writer,” says Donald Barthleme, “is one who, embarking on a task, does not know what to do.” This sounds somehow both daunting and holy - as if writing is going to be all mystic attunement, unaccountable inspiration - but it turns out to be simply and depressingly true.
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