The 39 Steps: A Primer on Story Writing 1) Step one in the great enterprise of a new and preferable you in the house of fiction is: Mean less. That is, dont mean so much. Make up a story, screw around with it, paste junk on it, needle the characters, make them say queer stuff, go bad places, insert new people at inopportune moments, do some drive-bys. Make it up, please.2) Dont let it make too much sense.3) Do use stuff that you care about when youre making it up. If youre mad at your mother, husband, boyfriend, wife, lover, neighbor, dog, take it out on a mother, husband, etc. and put it in the mouth of one of your characters. If youre full of love for the sea, say something nice about the bath.4) Leaven the piece with some merchandise (figurative) you dont particularly care about but that seems to you odd, intriguing, curious, baffling, quirky. Attach this material to your characters.5) Do not use the above to rationalize disconnected, ersatz, or unrelated oddball debris. Id like to talk to you but theres a giant in my room isnt the answer to any narrative question.6) Long plot explanations arent going to get it. Like, when something neat (horrible?) happened to one of the characters a real long time ago, and you really really want to tell us about it, you know? Dont.7) It doesnt particularly matter which characters these things you care about (see #3) get attached to (these are things like pieces of dialogue, bits of description, some gesture, a look somebody gives somebody, a setting, tabletops). In fact, youre probably better off if the stuff attaches itself in unexpected ways to wrong characters (so you dont go meaning too much, see #1).8) Remember: Many things have happened which, to the untrained eye, appear interesting.9) Grace Slick.10) At every turn, ask yourself if youre being gullible, dopey, pretentious, cloying, adolescent, Neanderthal, routine, dull, smarty-pants, clever, arty, etc. You dont want to be being these things.11) Be sure theres a plot for the reader to grasp; while not necessarily the center of the story, its key to lulling the reader into that comfort zone where hes vulnerable.12) We cant care about sand mutants; if you do, or think you do, kill yourself.13) Coherence is a big part of the game. Make sure the story is coherent, that the scenes flow each from the last, that the reader has the clearest sense at all times of what is going on. Err on the side of clumsiness to start with; back away later.14) For dramatic purposes youre probably well-served sticking close to an objective narrative (1st person unvoiced, or 3rd person objective-in either case, the camera view). This forces you to write scenes in which characters do and say things to/with/for each other; these things will then construct the story for you. This expedient blocks the telling problem.15) Organize the storys structure around the simplest available strategy. For example, if theres no obliging reason that the story be told in flashbacks, dont use flashbacks. Dont use flashbacks simply because you get to a certain point and then think of something that requires telling in flashback if it is to be told at that point. Instead, return to the front of the story and add the material in its appropriate spot.16) Plain chronological storytelling is a good idea. Rules on deviations: (a) avoid disruptions in time as much as possible; (b) flashbacks (and similar) are ten times more confusing to the reader than they seem to you (keep in mind for use in strategically confusing parts); (c) flashbacks, dream sequences, drug-induced beatific appreciations, Mongol hordes, etc. are not good excuses for lumbering attempts at the high rhetorical bar; (d) deviations from a norm tend to draw attention away from the story, away from the characters, away from the emotional/spiritual center of things; (e) sometimes you may want to do this.16a) In the redundancy department: Give us as much of the ground situation as you can as soon as possible. The first paragraph is not too soon. The first page is not too soon. Tell us who, what, when, where, etc.17) Do not do this artfully.18) Remember that you want something to change over the course of the story. Something big and visible to the reader. Start with one situation and end with a clearly different situation. In between tell us how you got from the one to the other. Dont be subtle designing this change-for purposes of nailing dramatic structure be as reductive as humanly possible.19) Remember this simplified structure is not the story, but the hanger on which the story hangs. The story is shirts and jackets, ribbons, the perfumes of the closet, details, bits of persuasion, rubber gunk underfoot, attitudes, hints, suggestions-everything you can attach to this hanger.20) Obviously, these carefully hewn 39 steps must be adapted t12下一页