Find the real story beneath your BIG IDEA

Are you putting the finishing touches on your dystopian YA novel about kids who are chosen by lottery to fight to the death on national television? If so, this post is for you.

MaryAnn’s enlightening post on emotional resonance has had me pondering what else poetry can teach us about story. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a poetry workshop with Richard Jones and subsequently falling in love with his collected poems in The Blessing. He talked about where he got his ideas, and how everyday things can inspire poems like The Altar, about the joys of sharpening a pencil. But he also said that some themes come up again and again, such as the tragic death of his young nephew. His analysis of whether this was a problem, which I'm paraphrasing from patchy memory, was something along the lines of: So what? Mary Oliver's been writing the same poem for thirty years.

If you’ve read much Mary Oliver you’ll know why everyone laughed. You’ll also know she’s one of the most universally loved poets of the last few decades. 

To say that reading one Mary Oliver poem is like reading them all would be like saying that every time you hug your child is exactly the same as every other. Of course it isn’t. He grows and changes and sometimes he hugs hard and sometimes he hugs soft, and sometimes he asks in a whisper if reindeers get Christmas presents and sometimes he tells you I love you the best of all, Mommy, except also I love Daddy the same because I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

You wouldn’t ever not want another hug, just because you’d had hugs before.

Storytellers seem to diverge from poets here. No one wants to reinvent the wheel, or more pessimistically, beat a dead horse. (Even worse: a flesh-eating horse that won't die.)

The speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons publishes two laugh-out-loud lists of dead horses: Stories We've Seen Too Often and Horror stories We've Seen Too Often. 

When I'd finally caught my breath again after imagining the horrors of being a slush reader for Strange Horizons, I noticed that star-crossed lovers, man vs. nature, kidnap & rescue, and any others of the 1, 3, 7, 20, 36 or 42* basic plots were not on these lists. Maybe that’s because it’s a speculative fiction magazine, but my money is on the fact that classic plots don't hinge on clever world-building or twist endings.  They are frameworks for universal experience and emotion.

Some authors do amplify their stories with fascinating new ideas, which is exciting. It’s also rare. And relying on originality to sell a story is risky; someone else may have had the light bulb go off just before you did. 

When I think about what makes poetry work, I realize that a unique premise is overrated.  I think this is true even in that skeleton of the literary closet called genre fiction. 

My current, never-ending work-in-progress has vampire characters. Sometimes I wish I had a 12-step meetings for vampire writers where I could publicly admit I write them and everyone would nod and welcome me and we’d all drink weak coffee in styrofoam cups. 

I guess I’ll just admit it online and make my own coffee.

This novel was never supposed to be about vampires. Supernatural undead aren’t the point of the story. Fear, love, courage, family, finding your way out of a rock and a hard place… those are the point of the story. I could change the vampires to some other ambiguous evil, or even take out the supernatural altogether, and I may someday. Paranormal stuff is fun to write, but the premise is not the story.

Most of the items on the Strange Horizons lists are ideas where the premise is the story. For instance, #12 on the Horror List:

Initiate into religion discovers that the religion is actually killing/destroying its initiates.

Before we continue, I must review the warning from the fiction list:

One more thing: We know it's tempting to look at this list as a challenge. Please don't. In particular, please don't send us stories that intentionally incorporate one or more of these items.

In other words, don't try this exercise at home. And if you do, don’t send it to Strange Horizons.

Back to business: I don’t know that this plot isn’t salvageable. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But I do know that if the whole story is just building up to this horrifying revelation, you will never meet the challenge that you were already advised not to take but we’re hypothetically taking anyway.

Let’s say you already started this story, and now you stumble across this list and bang your head on your desk. You declare you’re done with fiction forever because you’re a writer, and prone to histrionics.

There’s a good chance you initially approached your story with the time-honored question: What if? Perhaps: What if a religion’s sole purpose in recruiting new initiates was to kill them? You were very proud of your idea until you read that website, or this post.

I say the game isn’t over! Maybe, just maybe, the premise isn’t your problem. Maybe it’s the question. 

What if? is a great question. I support what-iffing. But if you think your story has already been written, you might need to ask, What would it feel like?

What emotional state makes a person vulnerable to a predatory cult in the first place? How does it feel to find acceptance? What does it feel like to have your sense of meaning—of purpose, of life and death, of God—crumble under the weight of betrayal? How do you find the will to fight?

When a timid voice of intuition tells you something is wrong, what does the air feel like on your skin? What do you smell? What seeps through the filter of your senses?

These aren’t light questions. These are heavy questions. Some of them are questions that poetry asks all the time. Poems grapple with love, friendship, grief, loss, meaning, death… They tackle these over and over and over again, and yet poetry has never been exhausted. 

Neither have stories.

Whether you’ve written The Hunger Games, Twilight, or murderous cult story #12, don’t despair. Figure out what your story is really about—not the cool what if idea, but the story underneath. The what would that feel like? story. That's the story that only you can write, and when you find it, the rest is fixable. I think.

And if you lose your way, read some Mary Oliver. That same poem she’s been writing over and over? It never gets old.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own…

                                               From "The Journey"; Dream Work 

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

                                                From "Wild Geese"; Dream Work

*Okay I made up that last number. It just seems like there should be 42 basic plots.