From Jane Friedman:
One of the most important abilities a writer can hone doesn’t involve writing—at least not their own.
Learning to objectively assess other people’s stories, and pinpoint what makes them effective or not, will do more for your own writing craft than even psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s much vaunted (and misinterpreted) 10,000 hours of practice popularized by Malcolm Gladwell.
That’s not to denigrate the importance of actually doing the work of writing. But no amount of putting words on the page will teach you as much as analyzing what makes story work and training your own editor brain.
Analyzing story like an editor informs every element of writing and every skill a writer must develop—not just editing, but also drafting and revision, and storytelling skill as well as craft skills.
The ability to see our own work clearly is one of the greatest challenges of writing. Authors fill in the blanks of their characters and world and stories in their heads without realizing whether it’s coming across effectively on the page to readers. It’s almost impossible to assess our own work as objectively as we can with other people’s.
That’s why practicing the skill with stories we did not create is one of the best ways of learning to see the component parts of effective story and internalizing those skills in the ones you do.
And no matter where you are in your writing career, whether multi-published or at the beginning, you already have the main tool you need to master this skill: yourself.
Analyzing starts with you
Outside of the intrinsic rewards of creating story, story’s effect and its purpose is the reaction it elicits in the recipient. Much of the reason we work to understand and master essential story components like character development, well-structured plots, meaningful stakes, strong momentum, suspense, etc., is because these are the tools by which story compels its audience.
So in learning to understand these core craft elements, we start with observing our own reactions to the stories we take in, and trace our subjective reaction to the objective techniques that elicited them.
I called this objective analysis because you aren’t colored by your own intentions for the story; you’re simply taking it in as an observer, the way editors approach a manuscript when working on it.
And yet where humans are concerned, there’s really no such thing as pure objectivity. We are all subjective creatures, bringing our own biases, experiences, judgments, and perspectives to everything we experience. But it’s those subjective reactions that will lead you to discover the techniques of story that are effective for you, that lead to the types of stories that affect you and move you and elicit a reaction.
By learning to pay attention to how you are impacted by story, both good and bad, you learn to trace back those ultimate effects to the techniques that elicited them. You use your subjective reactions to determine the objective craft techniques the storyteller used to create them.
Analyzing in the wild
In analyzing what you read (or watch or hear or see), first start with your overall general impressions: Was the story effective? Did it engage you? Elicit any reactions in you? What were they—and where in the story did you feel them?
“Reaction” may mean you loved it, were moved, affected, excited—or it may mean it angered you, galvanized you, engaged your attention and thoughts. Indifference results from those forgettable stories that make no ripple at all.
Then you’ll trace those reactions back to specific story elements they relate to, and dissect why those elements worked (or didn’t, which can be equally instructive). And finally you examine the text line by line, identifying granularly how the author created the effect you perceived.
. . . .
Finally I can go back and dissect, line by line, how she weaves this tapestry. Let’s take just the opening paragraph—I’ll insert my analysis in red:
That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town auditions was proof of our dull reliability. [Patchett plunges readers into the story in medias res, right in the middle of the action. From the first line she begins to paint a picture of the situation and the characters—both that they are responsible but that they see themselves as dull.] The play’s director, Mr. Martin, was my grandmother’s friend and State Farm agent. [The first brushstroke in creating a sense of place—a small, interrelated town.] That’s how I was wrangled in, through my grandmother, and Veronica was wrangled because we did pretty much everything together. [Relationship details—both with her grandmother, who clearly has influence over the protagonist, and Veronica, clearly her best friend, which also sets up stakes on these relationships that are both germane to the story.] Citizens of New Hampshire could not get enough of Our Town. We felt about the play the way other Americans felt about the Constitution or the “Star-Spangled Banner.” It spoke to us, made us feel special and seen. Mr. Martin predicted a large turnout for the auditions, which explained why he needed use of the school gym for the day. The community theater production had nothing to do with our high school, but seeing as how Mr. Martin was also the principal’s insurance agent and very likely his friend, the request was granted. Ours was that kind of town. [All small, telling details about the world of the story, the character’s background, and setting up the central role Our Town plays throughout the story as well as its themes.]
Another reader might have different reactions to a story like this. Maybe it seems too quiet or small. Maybe they think nothing really happens. Those are as valid as my own interpretation. Analyzing story isn’t about whether it’s good or bad or you like it or not. It’s about how authors use concrete storytelling devices to create an effect. How you are impacted by that varies from reader to reader—and it’s part of learning your own style and voice as a writer.
Link to the rest at Jane Friedman
Of special importance:
“In analyzing what you read (or watch or hear or see)…”
There is much to learn from non-textual narratives like video, audio, comics, and games.
Also from genres other than your preferred ones.
Plot, pacing, dialogue… All forms of storytelling have common goals of engagement and entertainment but bring different tactics that can be useful when their use is understood. Also, things *not* to do. Plenty of those in recent output.
“Dragon Age: Origins” and a historical fantasy, “Song of the Nile” (about Cleopatra’s daughter) taught me a lot about worldbuilding. I knew about the historical eras DA:O and the novel were based on to “see what you did there,” and how they deployed their research. Especially since with the novel the author revealed she was using the same source materials I was relying on.
So I think it’s valuable for writers of fantasy & sci-fi to read historical fiction (or play games, or watch movies) based on the time periods their stories are modeled on. And also that they should be conversant with those eras to start with, otherwise the examples will be lost on them.
I don’t know who recommended this video about “I, Claudius” and the lost art of scene blocking, but the techniques it demonstrates are even useful for prose fiction. It reinforced something Elizabeth George taught about “Talking Head Avoidance Devices,” and something the late David Farland talked about with dramatizing a crowd (focus on one vivid individual in it).
Every form of storytelling media has something to teach the other. In the last minute of the video the channel host points out that modern cinematography forces the actors to do all of the heavy lifting. But in the days of “I, Claudius,” camera movements and scene blocking offered subtext, comedy, drama, etc. Mise-en-scène reinforced the story. In prose fiction, the writer can think about mise-en-scène for more than just setting up Chekhov’s gun.
Valuable not just for historical or contemporary writing – but even if your world is 10,000 years in the future (assuming you still have humans or their analogues in the story).
(Two verifications before posting, for some reason or other.)
And they’re on a motorcycle kick today, apparently…
Agreed.
I’m currently reading a history of grain trade built on the premise that trade routes create empires rather than the other way ’round as traditionally posited.
(I linked to it the other day.)
Trade and empires are common elements in SF and anything that relates to them or both to each other is useful for world building because both are recurring elements of the human experience. So are crime, romance, politics, and other areas explored in fiction and non-fiction.
A good writer needs to be like the robot in SHORT CIRCUIT constantly for “input”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Circuit_(1986_film)
After all, the job is about creating ” output”.
history of grain trade built on the premise that trade routes create empires rather than the other way ’round
Okay, I missed that post, but this part here I thought was common sense. Human settlements start with “where’s the water” and goes from there. If you’re near a river or the coast you just hug the shoreline in your raft or canoe. Also, I gather that if you’re near the meeting of two rivers you’ve got yourself a trade hub.
To me the interesting thing is figuring out how that translates to outer space. I would imagine it would start near wherever wormholes are located if “natural.” If artificial, then “jump gates” would be near habitable worlds, metal-rich asteroids, or water-rich worlds. Go from there. What is the economy built on? What are the “cash crops”?
Input: “Information is inspiration.” The actor Clifton Duncan attributes this quote to Zelda Fichandler. I love that quote because it’s true. One’s creative well needs to be refilled with new knowledge, new stories.
FYI, Duncan has a cool YouTube channel where he interviews interesting people, e.g., Heather Mac Donald, John Ionnides (who brought attention to the replication crisis in science), Dean Cain, and even “The Critical Drinker.” Duncan is particularly concerned about the state of the arts, and how the quality of it is endangered by the type of constraints the Critical Drinker refers to as “The Message.”
The book in question is OCEANS OF GRAIN.
https://www.amazon.com/Oceans-Grain-American-Wheat-Remade-ebook/dp/B096RSW7GQ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=WCP9LBNNDEYA&keywords=oceans+of+grain&qid=1704516484&sprefix=oceans+o%2Caps%2C255&sr=8-1
Aside from the underlying theme, it covers a lot of the history of Odessa and its role in the 19th century. One thing that pops up is that russia tried to use grain exports to europe for political power and were stopped by a new tech and american grain. Oddly familiar, no? 🙂
As to interstellar trade how it plays out will definitely depend on the economics of the interstellar travel more than the form it assumes. Asimov’s Empire was very cavalier in the matter, directly mapping sea transport to space so everything was economically viable to move about and Trantor could survive solely as an importer of food and dry goods while solely “exporting” warships. 😉
Conversly, John Ringo’s delightful LIVE FREE OR DIE posits a galactic community where only rarities were viable for trade, varying by species. One such went absolutely bonkers for maple syrup which they found irresistibly intoxicating. The first part of yhe book is thus titled THE MAPLE SYRUP war.
Greg Costikyans FIRST CONTRACT postulates a galactic civilization where the highest value is raw matter of any kind instead of technology or finished goods. Another highly amusing story where Earth’s first encounter turned out poorly as the UN oh so wisely accepted an “uplifting” tech package in return for the “useless and worthless” Jupiter. The galactically obsolete tech proves economically useless because the aliens have replicator-like tech they hoarded that converts mass directly into anything. And they got essentially 90% of the non-solar mass in the system for free.
By contrast, the Honorverse uses wormholes and ftl to move massive amounts of product economically but slowly so the highest value is tech and control of the wormholes.
STARGATE actually presents an interesting variation in that it allows direct surface to surface transit but limited by the size of tge gates. So much so that tech is the key product rather than its products. (With a few exceptions.)
Lots of room for variants still left to be explored but as a rule very little SF world building bothers with economics. Me, I suspect the first human interplanetary polities will be merchant empires.
We’ll see one possibility come into focus if asteroid Psyche is truly mostly heavy metals. And that will happen soon.
When I used to do beta reads this very point would come up, because I’d reference real life historical analogs to explain why the imagined futuristic society wouldn’t work (or would work in a different way than the writer expected).
For me Captcha obsession is with bicycles, but motorcycles are a close second.