Storytelling: An Unfortunate Series of Events

Have you ever tried to plot a story?

It usually ends up being a series of interconnected events that charge the story onward until that final THE END moment where you expect the reader will stand up, slap the book closed, with a heavy breath and go "OH MY GOD" (Insert other deity or whatever you happen to believe in) and then follow it up with phone calls to the nearest 87 relatives telling them about what an awesome book they just read.

And stop...

So that is unlikely to happen, for many reasons, but that's not the topic of this blog post.

If you're anything like me, you may try to see that as a story. Sorry friends, that one has jumped up and bitten me on the ass so hard I have trouble sitting down to write.

Think back a minute. Storytellers, the good ones, didn't get a bunch of people around a campfire and go on about shrimp tacos, shrimp grits, shrimp fritters, and the like until the defining moment.

They were showmen (and women) and they livened it up. They brought the characters to life within themselves. The plot didn't happen. It came alive, through inflection, faces, dramatic effect.

Well, you're a writer, so you don't have any of that stuff available to you, though I welcome you to make all the funny faces you want for the pictures on your back covers.

What you do have, and the point of this post, is to explain HOW it should come together. A series of events are like the bones of a plot. You need meat on them, ligaments to connect them together, and then ultimately, the biggest draw is how you present it, the skin, the part that everyone can see, though they may not agree completely on what is inside (And that's a good thing. It gets people talking).

To sum up, what I am striving toward, and what I'd like other writers to do is to make sure they have more than event A >> event B >> event C.

If it feels stilted to you, it probably is. No, this doesn't mean give me explosions, incest and drama on every page. Good God... The Little Engine That Could doesn't need that crap. What you do need is to make sure that people are following along for the ride, with the characters, right there waiting to know what happens next.

Set the scene. Let them know the smell of the wind, the color of the girl's hair in front of the boy. The way that an ice cream truck's jingle makes the old man feel right before he knows he's going to die.

Then you have the reader hooked, and once you've done that, the game begins. Writing is a game. It's where you play with the reader's heart, and you make all the rules save one. They can close it at any time. Make them pick it back up, not out of a feeling of accomplishment of getting through your 900 page tome, but because they rush back to it, wanting to see, and smell and be that character, or be with them.