Know what you're aiming at in your war

In his new book The Art of War for Writers, James Scott Bell teaches us that a story's premise must be supported by fresh, solid scenes. Bell, who's also written suspense novels and the great Plot and Structure, reminds us of fundamentals: make your dialogue flow; cut or hide exposition (delay it if you can, eliminate what's not working); flip the cliched situation (so a big-rig truck driver might be a woman.)

But in his scene summary, Bell reminds us that every scene needs to have a thing it is aimed at -- a bull's eye. It's a moment or an exchange, he says.

A bull's eye can be a few lines of dialogue that turn the action around or reveal something striking. It can be as subtle as a moment of realization, or explicit as a gunshot to the heart. Many times, it is found in the last paragraph or two.

In the Writer's Workshop Tuesday sessions, we have an exercise where we're given the last line of a piece of writing, then invited to write toward that line. Bell says that a scene that doesn't have a bulls-eye should be cut or rewritten.

We bring away writings of 300-500 words from our Tuesday sessions, scenes or sections that might be a little off target in our first draft. That's what rewriting is for.

Simple language leads to perfect stories

It's easy to find praise for simple things in life. But writing seems to evoke the opposite effect in building sentences, paragraphs, sections and stories. We want to be noticed with our writing. However, if you look underneath that wish you should find the desire to be heard and remembered. Simple language delivers those two results. Simple lets the story rule the reader's attention.

Last night in our weekly Writer's Workshop we enjoyed Blackberries, a simple short story that our member Kathleen Clark showed me over our summer break. The Leslie Norris sudden fiction story -- another name for a short-short, under 1,000 words -- has few sentences that run beyond 15 words. Despite the brevity, the language is rich in feeling and detail. Here's one of the few, written about a blackberry vine.

His father showed him a bramble, hard with thorns, its leaves just beginning to color into autumn, its long runners dry and brittle on the grass.

Just count the verbs to see why this sentence works so simply. Show. Hard. Color. Even the adjectives are doing verb work, like dry, or waxing specific with an action, like brittle. The nouns swing into action: bramble, thorns, leaves, runners, grass. Of 26 words, 10 breathe simple life into this writing. (Kathleen called the story "perfect." I struggle to find any reason to disagree.)

Blackberries, like many other stories in Sudden Fiction International, runs on three main characters and two minor players across the space of four printed pages. The writing doesn't shy away from using variations of the verb "to be" in various tenses. Norris considers that advice, of using better verbs than be or were, but uses these simplest verbs along with others. Much of the simplest writing does.

Know what your story desires to tell

NPR has a great interview with Richard Russo you can listen to on its site. The author of the divine Empire Falls (a Pulitzer winner) has a new book, That Old Cape Magic. The book is about a writer, a device that lets Russo explain a common author's problem, for those still learning the craft. It's not easy understanding what a story needs to say.

In his novel, [his character] Griffin decides to write about his childhood on the Cape -- including his love for a neighboring family. But his first draft of the story isn't any good because the characters don't come to life.

Russo, who used to teach fiction writing, says this is a problem that he frequently sees in beginning writers.

"The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling. And I think that's why Jack Griffin can't write this story ... there's something about himself that he hasn't quite recognized."

Russo says this idea of missing the point is as common in life as in novels. And as memories corrode or morph, people -- parents and children, husbands and wives -- tend to form different ideas of the past.

How to avoid this pitfall? Keep crafting that three-paragraph synopsis, if it's a longer work like a book. In this format, paragraph one describes the inciting event. Two tackles the expansion and evolution of the story. Three delivers the Big Message: Why your readers should open the book, to learn a larger story, like how faith can overcome fear of the future.

Big truths of stories cover common ground, so a reader has empathy with the lesson: "Hey, I lived that one." Or knew someone who did. Or failed at the lesson.

By the way, Russo sounds like a dynamite interview subject on the radio. A voice as crackling as his characters.

The Four Character Levels

Peter Dunne, movie and TV writer who's won Emmys and a Peabody award, has a great book in Emotional Structure to let you explore and define and show your characters' emotions. Dunne talks early on about the Four Character Levels:

1. Individual: The outer layer, what is shown to the world
2. Familial: The belief system, secrets, seat of guilt
3. Social: Cultural, other-oriented, obligations and changeable
4. Emotional: The real deal, what the character really feels — whether they are aware of it or not.

In 11 pages which Dunne writes very early in his book, he breaks down how these levels show how your hero relates to the world. You can work on these things using the book's exercises. Great stuff.

"Trust your growth," he says to inspire us. "Every time you create a character or write a scene you grow, too. Just as you ask your hero to trust his process, you must trust yours."

As I polish Viral Times in its extensive revision, I keep these levels in mind for my characters. Dorothy Bezder shows up in Chapter Six, to introduce a character she loves who is capable of great violence, all in the name of a vengeful god. What happens to Dorothy after Six? What are her levels?

Artist's choices for me.

The Architecture of Chapters and Cathedrals

I am closing in on my final half dozen chapters of my novel Viral Times. The work that follows this "draft that must be done," as Bruce Holland Rogers calls the first draft: revision. Big revision, at first, to eliminate what's not working.

Determine what's not needed by putting a scene or a chapter against this rule, suggested in Philip Gerard's Writing a Book that Makes a Difference:

Dramatically, the "rule" of chapters is the rule of scenes in any fiction: Each chapter should have a reason for its inclusion. The chapter [or scene] should not just

• provide more information
• expand the resume of character
• enhance the descriptions of place

[A chapter] may do all of these things, but first it must have an indispensable role in moving the story along.

Gerard compares writing a novel to building a cathedral. What's problem is solved by building a cathedral? No, it's not giving glory to God. The cathedral creates a large indoor lighted space.

A cathedral creates an architecture of light, Gerard says. So too does a novel.

HBO's TV as the new novel?

My work on Viral Times goes a long way back, into the 1990s. Back then my wife Abby gave me a gift of The Writer's Dreamkit, software which led me to Dramatica. The software offers tools to understand story, the part of the process I am hacking my way through this month.

You see, I know the story of Viral Times. But getting it down on paper, the plot and storyline, so I can see what I have remaining to write, has been a matter of looking over several very lengthy snyopses. Recently I did a gisting layout in Excel for the novel, with each chapter summarized in 20 words or less. That's gisting, by the way.

It's been yeoman work, and I'm looking at tools to help. While turning back to Dramatica — software so decidated to story that its creators wrote a comic book explaining dramatic storyline theory — I found a Daily Dramatica blog.

Inside the blog: A posting about how episodic TV on HBO is the New Novel. Deadwood is the latest, most brilliant example.

By the way, "The "New Novel" is redundant, since the word novel comes from the Latin novellus, which means "new." So all novels are new, if we're talking about a form of literature. Novels grew up in the era of Daniel Defoe. This author who created Robinson Crusoe as his first book is often credited with creating the first novel. Character study became the major preoccupation of novelists, according to A Reader's Guide to Literary Terms. (And that book is tough to find. I picked my copy up in a used bookstore in Iowa City, home of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. It's out of print. My copy is a first edition 1960 hardback, not that it's worth more than $5 anyway.)

But to get back to what makes a novel great, it's character. The brilliance of the many HBO series — The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Big Love — flows from depth of character.

Abby and I gorged ourselves on the first season of Deadwood as DVDs over one week. (My borther Bob had been raving about Deadwood for months.) Finally we bought the first two seasons, and we watched Season Two nearly nonstop over a long holiday weekend. We were reading a novel, together.

Weekly episodes are chapters. The detail of character story and plotline on an HBO series would never make the cut on basic cable or regular series TV, in my opinion. (Although my son Nick says that the FX Series Nip/Tuck has this same kind of build.

But he's most excited about watching Big Love, also mentioned in the Dramatica blog post.

If nothing else, it's given me a little more justification for watching something on the tube to take a break from the writing. I'm studying story, I tell myself.