Storytelling | Painting With Light

Archive for the ‘Storytelling’ Category

Save the Cat

May 23, 2013

Big Summer Storm or Creative Inspiration?

About Creative Writing
The more I write, the more I’ve come to believe that many of the things they taught us in high school and college, except for the whole “earth is round” thing, was nonsense.

Particularly everything they had to say about creative writing.

My home office is full of books on writing from that time (and quite a few from now) and those books are literally full of useless garbage about either (a) dangling participles, (b) misplaced modifiers, (c) the correct placement of semi-colons, or (d) finding a happy place in which to write.

Stephen King was much closer to the truth of creative writing in his excellent book ON WRITING. It is, by far, the best book I’ve ever read on the writing process. I’ve already gone through it, cover to cover, at least four times … and I will read it again.

Whatever you may think of the subject matter of his books, King hasn’t written nearly 50 novels, all of them best-sellers, by being the only guy in town to write horror stories or fantasy.

He didn’t do it by strict adherence to Strunk & White’s ELEMENTS OF STYLE or the AP HANDBOOK, either.

He did it by being one hell of a good storyteller.

King could set a story in a sleepy town in Maine, put the guts of that same story into an enchanted car, write about an obsessive book reader rescuing her favorite author, tell it all in a story about a rabid dog, or set it around a struggling writer and his family in a nearly deserted, snowed-in summer resort.

For that matter, so can you.

Because any way you look at it, it’s the same story. You can even add elves and dragons and trolls, or talking animals in the world just beyond the closet. It’s still the same story. And, surprise, surprise, it’s all about the story.

Be a Good Storyteller
I had the pleasant surprise the other day of discovering Guy Bergstrom and his fantastically witty blog about writing: THE RED PEN OF DOOM. I’m going to have to write and thank him … and I definitely think he’s a blogger to follow.

In one of his many posts I was introduced to the late Blake Snyder. Blake was another one who took time to cut through all the classroom-taught traditions and nonsense.

In his SAVE THE CAT book Blake pointed out that it’s patently stupid to call FATAL ATTRACTION a domestic drama and ALIEN a sci-fi movie and JAWS a horror flick, because they are all the same basic, primal story: there’s a monster in the house.

I bought Blake’s book, but I won’t summarize it here and give away all its secrets. Even though it’s ostensibly about screenwriting, if you’re a fiction writer of any kind I would suggest you get the book and read it. It’s that good.

Tags:award-winning writing, Blake Snyder, book marketing, indie writers, self-publishing
Posted in Award-Winning Fiction, Book Promotion, Book Review, Storytelling | Leave a Comment »

The First Three Hundred Words

May 18, 2013

Dawn on the River

Feeling Productive
On my last post I spoke about the need to get back to my writing, and for the past 18 days I’ve been true to my plans. I’ve completed six chapters of my Reichold Street sequel, and even got started on another story. It’s been a productive time.

I’m pretty comfortable with where the sequel is going, but the other one … the new one … has me in a quandary. I originally wanted to write a suspense story, a la Dean Koontz or Stephen King but, like most of my stories, it seems to have developed a mind of its own.

Conventional wisdom says you have to hook your reader within the first three hundred words, or you’ll never get them to turn the page, yet alone finish reading.

Part of me believes that to be true … not because “conventional wisdom” says so, but because I often decide on a book purchase myself after scanning the first couple of pages.

I’ve actually got several thousand words down already, but none of them seem quite right as the start of the story. So, it’s the second story I need some feedback about, and I decided to put the (current) beginning of it here:

————
Untitled

The sky was somewhere between indigo and black when the motley family crew we had assembled set out for the lake. Uncle Luther always insisted on an early start. As he rousted me out of my comfortable dreams with a chuckle and a resounding thwack on the soles of my bare feet, he had conveniently beaten the sunrise by a good hour, as if that was the way such days were always supposed to begin.

“Get your city-boy ass outta bed, Roy, or all the fish gonna be napping under the brush line by the time we get to the water.” Luther was smiling as he clumped around the bedroom in his thick work boots gathering up the clothes I had strewn over the bedpost the night before.

“Here’s your duds,” he laughed, “Bacon and eggs will be ready in five.” He tossed my loafers at me with a look of distaste. “These the best shoes you brought?”

“They’re the only ones I brought,” I said, as I wiped the sleep out of the corners of my eyes.

“Gonna need new ones to go home in then,” he snickered. “They’s gonna be soaked and coated in shit before we get the boat launched. So’s your feet.” He lifted his leg to show me his mud covered Timberlands, laced halfway to his knee.

“I can hardly wait,” I said.

Luther smiled and winked as he went back out the door. “I already got the gear in the truck,” he said. “All you gotta do is dress and eat. Piss if you want to.”

“Lovely.”

“Don’t take too long city-boy or I’ll eat your breakfast, too,” he shouted down the hall. “It’s a mighty long time to lunch. You get hungry you might have to munch on the bait.”

The birds hadn’t yet begun to sing their herald to the returning morning but as I dressed the air was already hot with the promise of a sticky, damp kind of day. A day with the air so miserably thick it seemed to suck all the ambition out of a man just to inhale.

© Ron Herron

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What Do You Think?
Is this something likely to grab your interest and make you want to know what happens next? Leave a comment.

Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I once sold encyclopedias door-to-door. What can you possibly say to me I haven’t already heard?

Tags:award-winning writing, book marketing, indie writers, self-publishing, using social media
Posted in Book Promotion, Market Your Book, Storytelling | 8 Comments »

Are You a Storyteller?

April 30, 2013

I’ve Been Putting My Work On Hold

Since I retired from the nine-to-five and started what some of my friends call that writing thing, I have a hard time trying to figure out what to tell people it is that I really do. Oh, I know some folks call me a writer or an author … but what does that mean?

After all, I’m independent … an indie writer … which means neither Random House or Simon & Schuster, or anyone else with the words major publisher associated with their name, has signed me to a contract. There’s a good reason for that: I haven’t tried. At my age, I decided not to play that waiting game.

I have a good friend, himself a published author (although his fiction books are long out of print), who looks down on self-publishing as if it was an eleventh biblical plague of terrible proportions, and a portent to the end of the world.

But all my books have official ISBN numbers and are available in print; they’re listed on Baker & Taylor and are available to libraries; and they are carried by virtually all e-Book retailers. All have good reviews. One of them was even a 2012 Readers Favorite Gold Medal Winner.

So what, exactly, do those “major house” pieces have that I don’t?

Well, royalties that come in dribbles and drabs at only 10% of the retail price for one thing, and warehouses full of books yet to be sold, for another. The only thing I think I actually miss is a big publicity machine to get the word out. As an indie, I have to do that, too.

It’s part of why I’ve been blogging about indie publishing for months now, trying to help other indie wannabes either get started, or get a leg up to where they should be … and trying to get followers who might want to read one of my books.

I like to think it’s helpful to everyone that way, but I have to admit it sometimes feels a little like that picture above, with a stuck key holding up the work. What all my promotion and brand-building effort really means is that what I’m not doing … is writing.

I need to get back to that for a while. I more or less promised a sequel to my award-winning “Reichold Street” by the end of summer … this summer … and I’m many thousands of words behind the pace I need to maintain in order to honor that pledge.

On top of it all, I’ve got several other story ideas bouncing around in that great vacuum between my ears I need to get busy with, too.

I was reminded of that just the other night while out to dinner with friends. Their seven-year-old grandson was with them, and at the end of the evening he wanted to know what I did. I said I was a writer, and he wanted to know what I wrote about.

When I said I wrote fiction he thought about it a few seconds and then his face brightened. “Oh,” he said, “are you a storyteller?”

Yeah, I guess I am.