Yes! No! But Wait...! E-Book

Tim Lott

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 215

Beschreibung

Yes! No! But Wait…! is the most straightforward book on writing a novel ever published. It is also the most practical, honest and useful. Tim Lott admits he can't teach someone how to write a novel (that's one of the myths propagated by the novel-writing industry). But he can help anyone construct a solid platform on which they can stand to discover whether they have the talent, will and imagination required of any novelist. A distillation of a lifetime's reading, writing and thinking about stories and how to tell them, Yes! No! But Wait…! is the one book any aspiring author needs.

Leseprobe

To my mentors and friends, Robert McKee, John Yorke and Will Storr, without whom I would have remained lost in the woods. Also David Mamet and Joseph Campbell, who have been inspirations for me in both life and writing.

What do we wish for in the perfect game?

Do we wish for Our Team to take the field and thrash the opposition from the First Moment, rolling up a walkover score at the final gun?

No. We wish for a closely fought match that contains many satisfying reversals, but which can be seen, retroactively, to have always tended toward a satisfying and inevitable conclusion.

We wish, in effect, for a three-act structure… In which… each act of the game recapitulates the game (following the paradigm: ‘Yes! No! But wait…!’).

David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama (1998)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface: The One Thing You Need to Know

1. Plot (Part One)

2. Character (Part One)

3. How Character and Plot Are Unified through Change

4. ‘Charlie and the Hole’: A Three-Act Story Incorporating Character and Plot

5. ‘Charlie and the Hole’: A Three-Act Story Incorporating Character and Plot – with a Mid-Point

6. Plot (Part Two)

7. Character (Part Two)

8. Change, Character and Plot in Real Life

9. Conclusion: The Rebirth of the Author

Appendix 1: Structure Grid

Appendix 2: The Mid-Point

Appendix 3: The Shape of Stories – Ten Novels

Appendix 4: Want and Need at the Mid-point

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Stanley D. Williams’s ‘Story Diamond’. Reproduced by kind permission of Stanley D. Williams.

Figure 2: John Yorke’s ‘Lightning Guide to Screenwriting Gurus’. Taken from John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (London: Penguin, 2013) [Appendix VII]. Reproduced by kind permission of John Yorke.

Figure 3: Three-act structure

Figure 4: Three-act structure including major turning points

Figure 5: Three-act structure with all major turning points

Figure 6: Gustav Freytag’s story pyramid

Figure 7: An alternative story pyramid

Figure 8: The hero’s journey

Figure 9: The author’s attempt to define story structure

Preface

The One Thing You Need to Know

When I originally had the idea for Yes! No! But Wait…! I wanted it to be the most straightforward and accessible book on writing a work of fiction ever published.

I was also determined to make it the most honest.

That immediately presented me with a problem.

Because then I had no choice but to confess that the book I wanted to write wouldn’t teach anyone how to write a novel.

No one can do that.

Not even people who write novels know how to write novels.

That’s why promising young novelists often run out of steam after one or two books. And why very good novelists sometimes write mediocre or bad novels.

I know – because I’ve spent the last fifteen years trying to teach people how to write fiction (while actually writing novels, ten at the last count, in the time left in between).

I’ve read and critiqued hundreds of manuscripts by would-be authors.

The results have all pointed towards the same conclusion.

Which is that writing a novel – at least, a good novel – is hard.

Really hard.

(Although it should be borne in mind that there is a considerable market for bad novels.)

You can read all the ‘How To’ books you like, go on all the courses you want, but if you don’t have a respectable quantity of talent, a prodigious amount of willpower, great reserves of self-discipline and the ability to sit alone in a room for very long periods, you are unlikely to go the full stretch.

All the same – I hope this is the most useful book on the subject you will ever read.

Because it calls out the dream factory of the highly profitable and ever-hungry creative-writing industry – which stretches from the universities, to the halls of publishing and literary agencies, and to innumerable mentoring services and websites. Then there are countless video courses, lectures and evening classes in far-flung town halls.

Many of these individual sites and courses are perfectly good, sometimes excellent, at what they do. I wouldn’t teach for Guardian Masterclasses if I didn’t believe it to be an outstanding example of what the teaching industry can achieve. Or have spent my years with the Faber Academy.

The trouble is, taken all together, they muddy the water rather than purify it.

In a way that is not quite duplicitous, but definitely questionable.

The creative-writing industry, as a whole, sprawls like a cuddly, beckoning parasite over would-be writers everywhere in the Anglosphere and beyond.

Without ever stating the case baldly, it tells all the hopefuls out there, dreaming of being the new J. K. Rowling or Jonathan Franzen or Bernardine Evaristo, that anyone can write a novel – and then pockets their money for the privilege of being sold a glittering but usually unrealisable chimera.

These courses are often a great source of fun and camaraderie. They certainly offer a huge range of information and advice.

Far too much – in my view.

Because there is only one thing you really need to know.

One thing that towers over the rest of the creative-writing landscape like a behemoth – but which is all too often obscured, at least partially, by the sheer volume of choice and possibility offered by colleges, universities and private organisations.

What is that one thing?

———

Storytelling is a mystery.

It’s such a mystery that Hollywood can spend millions of dollars putting together a story on-screen, using the best writers, script editors, directors and producers in the world.

They know all the books on storytelling backwards and have probably written a few themselves.

Then they still manage to come up with something that stinks to the heavens.

Because all the craft in the world doesn’t get you a hit movie.

Or hit novel.

Or a hit play.

Then again, neither does pure talent.

From time to time, an unusually gifted writer emerges capable of producing a publishable, or even great, novel without having to think much about how it is being done.

Some writers have an almost uncanny feel for structure and character, and for them, things just fall into place automatically.

Those chosen few just… do it.

It may be inborn talent, or it may be as a result of learning the craft by osmosis, that is, via a lifelong habit (which all writers share) of compulsively consuming stories on the page and screen. This leaves an unconscious residue that some fortunate people can just draw on without having to think much about it.

So – if you think you can write a novel without any help, then there is nothing to stop you.

Put this book back on the shelf, walk away and get writing.

After all, if storytelling is an impenetrable mystery, why bother trying to learn it?

That’s why this book doesn’t promise you it can teach you to write a good novel. Or any kind of novel at all.

But it does tell you everything that it is helpful to know before you start to try – after which, if truth be told, you are on your own.

It is not a handbook to be systematically referred to.

As one of my storytelling heroes, Robert McKee, remarked during one of his brilliant lectures, ‘You only think of this stuff when your writing is NOT WORKING.’

It’s a fallback position – something to turn to when you’re stuck, a roughly drawn map when you’re lost – and a useful editing tool.

It’s NOT a blueprint for ‘how to write a story’.

I rarely start a novel with the ideas in this book laid out in front of me consciously.

But when I am stuck, those ideas drift to the surface and lend me help.

Or, when I am editing my novels, they remind me of the ideal shape of a piece of fiction, which I am at liberty to conform to or ignore.

Many highly salaried tutors and financially shrewd website owners tell you (or, more often, imply) that if you put craft at the forefront of your mind – bingo, you will be able to write a novel, assuming you study assiduously enough. Hence the popularity of three- or even four-year novel-writing courses – a case of overkill if ever there was one.

This book, on the other hand, doesn’t waste tens of thousands of words telling you about everything you can’t learn.

Because most fiction skills can’t be taught.

Or rather, they can be taught – and they are, endlessly – but they can rarely be learned.

Most skills are a matter of instinct, practice, deep reading, habit, luck, insight, imagination and willpower.

They are lodged deep in the unconscious mind. Or they emerge from long practice and emerge as the fruit of many failed attempts.

Such qualities cannot be purchased at any price.

———

A story is organic – not rational or analytical – in that everything in a story is connected to everything else.

You grow a story.

A novel is not a job to be done – it is an exploration to be undertaken.

Having said that, every art has its craft, and storytelling is no exception.

As well as artists, writers are wordsmiths – like blacksmiths or silversmiths.

That is to say, there is a ‘making’ part to this growing of stories.

And there are techniques to help you do that – whether you are a thriller writer, a literary writer, a dramatist or a screenwriter.

This is a book about those techniques – the craft of storytelling, the ghostly, bare scaffolding on which a writer can hang the verdant products of their imagination.

Above all, there is one thing that needs to be learned before you get started trying to write your novel on your own (which is how all writers have always worked since writing began).

And that thing is teachable – if you work hard to understand it, ingest it and make it your servant (no writer should ever have a master).

That one thing is the sole subject of this book.

The One Thing has two aspects – plot and character.

I describe them, quite correctly, as ‘One Thing’ because they are two sides of the same coin, intermingled strands of the same double helix.

They are unified by the principle of change. Both plot and character will be in a state of continual change throughout the story.

Change one and you change the other.

Plot and character, tied together by change, are the essential ingredients for any screenplay, novel, short story, drama or TV series.

Master them and you have mastered the foundations of storytelling.

Then you can start to build.

1

Plot (Part One)

Introduction to plot: What is a plot anyway?

Plot has long been unfashionable among certain sectors of the literary elite.

The screenwriting guru Robert McKee notes the persistence of this anti-plot trend in his book Story (1997).

‘Over the last 25 years,’ he notes,

the method of teaching creative writing in American universities has shifted from the intrinsic to the extrinsic. Trends in literary theory have drawn professors away from the deep sources of story toward language, codes, text – storyseen from the outside. As a result, with some notable exceptions, the current generation of writers has been undereducated in the prime principles of story. [Chapter 1: ‘The Story Problem’]

Many writers themselves seem to cheerfully sign up to the war on plot.

‘Well, fuck the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative truth,’ said Edna O’Brien.

‘Plots really matter only in thrillers,’ declared Martin Amis.

‘As far as I’m concerned, character is everything. I never did see why I have to throw in a plot too’ – is the view of Anne Tyler.

It’s not even a modern point of view.

‘I have never troubled myself much about the construction of plots,’ said Anthony Trollope (1815–82).

However, to me – despite the fact that I admire all of the above writers – such statements seem to be partly a form of aesthetic bravado and partly a defensive strategy peddled by writers who struggle with plot (which is practically every writer I know).

Try telling any great screenwriter, like David Chase (of Sopranos fame) or Jimmy McGovern or Russell T. Davies or Sally Wainwright, that plot is for ‘precocious schoolboys’ and you are likely – with respect to O’Brien, Amis, Tyler and Trollope – to be met with either extreme scepticism or, more likely, outright incredulity.

As Richard Skinner, head of the Faber Academy, puts it in his book Fiction Writing (2009):

Somehow fiction that is plot-driven has over the years become synonymous with poorer quality, cheapness, contempt even. Malign it if you will, but ignore it at your peril, for plot is the ‘thrust’ of a narrative and its genetic code [my italics]. Without it, a narrative seems lifeless, without energy, inert. A narrative that is weakly plotted feels as though it will never get started and then you think it is never going to end.

This part of the genetic code, however, can be frustratingly elusive.

This is why, as a writing teacher, I can’t help but notice that the primary problem that plagues an overwhelming number of my clients is usually the same one.

This problem is articulated perfectly by one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century, Patricia Highsmith, in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966):

The beginning writer’s most frequent snag may take the form of the question, ‘What happens next?’ This is a terrifying question, which can leave the writer shaking with stage fright.

———

What happens next?

It’s certainly the question that scares me most as a novelist.

The problem with this problem is that I don’t really have a solution.

I can make suggestions, but it’s your book, and you have to decide what happens next.

It has to arise from your own imagination and be delivered in your own unique voice.

However, there are elements of the craft of storytelling that can assist you in deciding what happens next.

They are not rules or principles.

They are simply clues.

Before we get on to what some of the clues are, it’s first worth asking two questions.

The first question is: ‘What is a plot anyway?’

The second question is: ‘Is the plot in a story the same as what happens in life?’

The answer to the second question is the simpler.

It’s ‘no’.

Plot isn’t the same as life.

It couldn’t be more different from life, in fact.

True – in life, stuff happens, just as stuff happens in a novel.

However, I don’t know about your life, but most of my life is routine – not to say meaningless, chaotic and, as often as not, boring.

I scrub my teeth. I meet a friend. I watch TV. I cut my nails. I go shopping. I go to sleep. I wake up. I eat. I breathe. I read my credit card bill. I panic. I pick my nose. I water the plants. I stub my toe. I argue with my partner.

And so on.

In other words, like history, it’s just one damn thing after another.

There’s no particular order to it, other than that imposed by necessity, or chance, or the pursuit of desires or the avoidance of pain.

A plot is different.

George Saunders, in his book on writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), writes:

The story is faster than real life, more compressed and exaggerated. A place where something new always has to be happening, something relevant to that which has already happened. [‘A Page at a Time: Thoughts on “In the Cart”’]

Alfred Hitchcock said of film plots that they were ‘life with the boring bits taken out’.

But Hitchcock’s definition is a very partial one.

It’s not enough to take the boring bits out.

Because it will still be boring.

A plot also has to be meaningful.

That is, it will possess a particular architecture, designed consciously by the author to express something that author wants to communicate to the reader.

It is governed not (like life) by randomness, but by causality and theme.

It has a discernible beginning, middle and end (yes, in that order).

It is, as Aristotle wrote, ‘the organisation of events’.

Plots have a shape.

And, remarkable though it may seem – in classic storytelling at least – they all have roughly the same shape.

We will come to the fascinating outlines of that universal shape later in this book.

For now, let’s address the first, more penetrating, question.

What is a plot anyway?

What holds a plot together?: Towards unity

John Yorke,in Into the Woods (2013):

A story is like a magnet dragged through randomness, pulling the chaos of things into some kind of shape and – if we’re very lucky – some kind of sense. Every tale is an attempt to lasso a terrifying reality, tame it and bring it to heel. [Chapter 22: ‘Why?’]

Jean Rhys:

To give life shape – is what a writer does.

Without unity, stories are just like life – a chaotic salad of events and happenings that have no shape or meaning.

For any novelist – or dramatist, or screenwriter – a story has to be transmuted into a coherent and unified plot.

How is this to be achieved?

By means of theme, causality and purposefulness.

———

The theme of a story is one thing that might be said to hold a narrative together.

In this instance, events are arranged in order to demonstrate a point that the writer wants to make or to communicate, an idea they care about enough to spend years trying to express that idea at book length.

That idea, which will usually be too complex to be expressed directly, will be demonstrated not in words as such, but through a sequence of actions.

Action, not words, is the grammar of storytelling.

As one author once remarked about novel writing, ‘Work out what you want to say, then spend the book not saying it.’

As McKee pointed out in a lecture, story is the ‘dramatisation of truth… the living expression and proof of a controlling idea without explanation’.

A ‘controlling idea’ is the same as a theme.

You don’t have a character saying, ‘Well, that proves it! Crime doesn’t pay,’ at the end of a detective story.

Or the heroine stating, ‘Well, that proves it! True love conquers all,’ at the end of a romance.

The action explains the meaning.

———

When I worked as a screenwriter – I penned maybe a dozen commissioned screenplays in all – I spent a great deal of time in meetings with producers, directors and script editors, all of whom scratched their heads and worried away at the same question.

‘What is this story really about?’

Once we’d solved that question, everything else began to fall into place.

Because finding the solution meant that we had discovered the theme.

The central idea binding the plot of King Lear together is that spiritual pride leads to a downfall (a common theme in classic stories).

Lear is about a very great deal more than this. Many volumes have been written about the nuances of that remarkable play. But at its heart, it is the depiction of a man who has let his great power go to his head so that he has become spiritually blind and emotionally stunted.

(His putative ally, the Earl of Gloucester, becomes physically blind – partly as a result of a similar mix of pride and naivety. Both the main plot and the subplot reinforce the theme.)

By the end of the play, Lear can ‘see’ again.

But unfortunately, it’s too late.

Gloucester’s blindness leads him to ‘see’.

Also too late.

C’est la vie.

(The bemused, compassionate shrug is, as far as I am concerned, the most convincing of all story endings.)

So – theme is one clue to help you with the puzzle of what might come next in your story.

How?

You might ask yourself, ‘What scene or event will contribute to developing this theme?’

And if you are lucky, you will get an answer – if you think and imagine hard enough, and experiment with sufficient tenacity.

There is a difficulty with this principle though (there’s a difficulty with everything when it comes to writing).

Many writers don’t know what their theme is until they are halfway through the book – since many writers simply make it up as they go along and hope for the best. That’s certainly my ‘technique’, otherwise known as ‘seatofpantsery’.

Some writers finish a book still having no idea what the theme is. They just write the book as it comes to them, then serve it up and hope for the best.

I once did an interview for students at the University of East Anglia, after I’d written maybe half a dozen novels, and the interviewer, Russell Celyn Jones, said this to me:

‘All your books are about loss – aren’t they?’

I blinked and swallowed. I was taken aback.

Because he was right.

Only it hadn’t actually occurred to me until the moment Russell suggested it.

However, on other occasions, I have specifically set out with a theme in mind.

The theme of my book The Seymour Tapes (2005) – which is about a man who installs secret cameras in his house so he can see what his family say about him behind his back – came in the form of a question:

‘Do you really want to know what you think you want to know?’

Or, to put it more simply, ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’

The theme of my book White City Blue (1999) was also in the form of a question (themes often are).

That question was: ‘What are friends really for?’

The identification of these themes helped me to write the books.

More specifically, they helped me decide what ought to happen next.

Because whatever was going to happen next in a scene, that scene ought to do at least some work to illustrate the theme.

Which at least narrowed down the field of possibilities somewhat.

(One of the main problems of writing a book is infinite possibility. So anything that makes things more limited is to be welcomed. The chaos of anything, finally, has to be turned into the finitude of something.)

———

Along with theme, another thing that gives unity to the events in a story is causality – or what some theorists have called ‘plot’, which they distinguish from ‘story’.

(I should mention at this point that later in this book I will ignore this distinction between ‘story’ and ‘plot’, and use the two words, for the main part, interchangeably.)

It was E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel (1927), who first made the formal distinction between plot and story when he wrote:

Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality [my italics]. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but their sense of causality overshadows it. [Chapter 5: ‘The Plot’]

Nigel Watts embroiders the point in his book Write a Novel: And Get It Published (2010):

Although a story may be interesting it is rarely as satisfying as a well-constructed plot. Why? Because without causality, there are usually no answers to the questions ‘what happens next?’ and ‘how did we get into this mess?’

Young children have no sense of plot. Listen to their stories: ‘This happened and then this happened and then this…’ Love them though we may, there is only so much prattle we can listen to before we tire… More than the events themselves, it is the links [my italics] we find compelling. [Chapter 2: ‘Plot’]

I should mention that there are plenty of writers who don’t really worry too much about the governance of causality. These are novelists who prefer to write novels as a series of character sketches or disconnected scenes rather than as fully realised plots. These are more like interconnected short stories bound together into a single volume.

Olive Kitteridge (2008) by Elizabeth Strout is one of these, as is Mrs Bridge (1959) by Evan S. Connell. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘novels’ read exactly like life, rambling from one event to another with hardly any causal link at all over five entire volumes. There are many other examples.

You can get away with this – if you are a good enough writer of sentences and observer of character and scene.

Strout, Connell and Knausgaard definitely are good enough, because they are among the greatest writers of each of their generations.

But not many people are good enough.

A person with the ability to write a whole novel is rare. One who can do it successfully without bothering with a linked-up plot is bordering on a genius.

I would also contend that these writers do have plots in their work.

The thing is, they are internal plots.

The narrative is not defined by what happens in the outside world, but by what happens in the interior world.

And in the case of these writers – and other ‘character-driven’ texts – we see a definite development (or regression) of the characters as the novel progresses.

In other words, we have a character arc – which is a kind of psychological plot.

This is another reason why plot and character are two aspects of the same thing.

———

In life, as we have observed, things tend to happen quite randomly. Causality is involved,but in a rather fragmented and unpredictable way.

I drink a glass of water. I brush my teeth. Then a pebble thrown up by a passing car shatters my window and I have to call the glazier.

The cause of my drinking a glass of water is thirst. The cause of my brushing my teeth is the need to stop decay. The cause of my calling a glazier is the accidental pebble.

And so on.

(Read Aristotle if you want a handy primer on the various orders of causality.)