Storytelling
November 9, 2024 by Harvey
In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* A New Short Story
* Reminder
* Storytelling
* The Writing
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“I’m surprised and happy to see the DITW comment is from me. I’ll continue to share epiphanies when I have them. I’m happy to be useful.” Emilia Pulliainen, writer and subscriber
The Quote of the Day is spot-on. Imagine how many other writers we would help lift up if we all shared the epiphanies that come to us as we’re writing fiction. Any time you share an epiphany with me via email at harveystanbrough@gmail.com or in a comment on a post, I’ll share it in TNDJ. Please contribute.
A New Short Story
“On Bullies & Gods” went live yesterday at 10 a.m. on my Stanbrough Writes Substack. Go check it out.
As always, if you enjoy the story, please tell Everyone. If you don’t, shhh! (grin)
Reminder
Today is Saturday. Just a reminder to get your Bradbury Challenge story info in to me before the Journal goes live on Monday.
Remember, if you finish a story earlier in the week, you can send it to me early too. It never hurts to avoid pushing the deadline.
I’m also looking forward to receiving the weekly word count from all of those in the Stephen King (November) Challenge. That also should be in before the Journal goes live on Monday.
Storytelling
I get a lot of questions that I can answer, in general, with this sentence:
“In storytelling, no single aspect is more important than the ability to pull the reader into the story and keep him there. Two factors determine whether the storyteller is able to do that: reader taste and writer skill.”
When a story isn’t to a reader’s taste, nothing the writer can do will pull the reader into the story.
According to most writing instructors, reader taste has two levels or filters.
The first level of reader taste is genre. If a reader doesn’t care for a particular genre, you can mark that up to reader taste. No matter how great your assassination thrillers are, readers who do not like thrillers or assassinations will never read them.
For example, I peronally don’t care either way about heaving-bosom romances. Nothing wrong with them, but the genre simply isn’t something I care about as a reader.
On the other hand, almost all of my own action-adventures and thriller, mystery and detective/PI, science fiction/fantasy, magic realism, and western stories contain a heavier or lighter romantic element.
The Horror genre (especially slash & gash) isn’t to my taste either, but most of my stories across the genres contain strong elements of psychological suspense. And yes, a few of them contain some of the gore. If you want to be horrified, read “Ice Scream” a short story exerpted from my novel Jonah Peach.
The second level of what other writing instructors call “reader taste” is Voice, or how a story is presented.
This one has far less to do with reader taste. It falls more into the category of writer responsibility.
How a story is presented is up to the writer. How it is presented determines whether it will pull the reader in if s/he is initially interested.
For example, the SF, mystery, and thriller genres (among others) are to my taste as a reader.
But if I begin a story and it has a lot of allusions to Asian or Arabic culture in the Asian or Arabic part of the world, I’ll probably set it aside no matter how well written it is.
That’s reader taste. Again, Asian and Arabic allusions are perfectly fine. They just aren’t to my taste.
However, if the same story has a lot of allusions to Latin American culture and is well written, it probably will pull me in immediately.
So Voice in that way is part of reader taste. Nothing you can do about it.
But that “probably” illustrates what I mean when I say Voice is more a product or writer responsibility, not reader taste.
If readers enjoy your genre and try one of your books, and if the cultural setting or religious bent or whatever else doesn’t run them off but they STILL can’t get into the story, in every case that is the writer’s fault.
You have to write an opening that will give readers no choice but to continue reading. An opening that grabs readers and pulls them into the story.
You do that by grounding readers in the story with interesting, detailed description of the setting, by pacing the scene correctly, and with realistic dialogue that has the give and take of a “live” conversation.
(As an aside, the mood of the conversation and the pacing of the dialogue is displayed in sentence and paragraph length and with the use of punctuation. All of that too comes naturally as you practice putting new words on the page.)
To learn how to do all of that specifically, I strongly recommend reading (or reading again) Writing Better Fiction.
Writing Better Fiction is still on sale for only $10.50 at StoneThread Publishing ($14.99 everywhere else). If you don’t have it, get your copy now. The sale will end very soon.
The Writing
Good day of writing yesterday to get my average back above 3000 wpd for the month.
The novel should wrap today. Then I’ll write my short story for the Bradbury Challenge for this week.
Beginning in January, I’ll start publishing my Bradbury stories for the past couple of months to my Stanbrough Writes substack. Check it out. It’s free.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
The bells of Notre Dame cathedral ring out for first time since 2019 fire Story ideas abound.
Writing to a Theme: Questions to Find Your Story’s Heart A gentle reminder that I do not always agree with items to which I post links in Of Interest. Writing to a theme invokes, at least temporarily, the conscious, critical mind. If you want to write an authentic story, simply write what the characters give you whether or not you’re keyed by a theme.
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 940
Writing of Blackwell Ops 30: John Quick Returns
Day 1…… 2155 words. To date…… 2155
Day 2…… 3930 words. To date……. 6085
Day 3…… 3042 words. To date……. 9127
Day 4…… 3057 words. To date……. 12184
Day 5…… 5268 words. To date……. 17452
Day 6…… 1500 words. To date……. 18952
Day 7…… 3194 words. To date……. 22146
Day 8…… 3236 words. To date……. 25382
Day 9…… 3005 words. To date……. 28387
Day 10…. 3742 words. To date……. 32129
Day 11…. 4609 words. To date……. 36738
Fiction for November…………………. 24554
Fiction for 2024………………………… 861686
Nonfiction for November……………... 8070
Nonfiction for 2024……………………. 342490
2024 consumable words…………….. 1028215
Average Fiction WPD (November)…… 3069
2024 Novels to Date……………………….. 15
2024 Novellas to Date……………………… 1
2024 Short Stories to Date………………… 18
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………..…… 97
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)……………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………… 255
Short story collections…………………….… 29
Disclaimer: Whatever you believe, unreasoning fear and the myths that outlining, revising, and rewriting will make your work better are lies. They will always slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
Writing fiction should never be something that stresses you out. It should be fun. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Because of WITD and because I endeavor to follow those Rules I am a prolific professional fiction writer. You can be too.
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Loved the new story, Harvey, and the opener is fabulous! Have already added it to my "Great Opening Lines" website: https://greatopeninglines.com/short-stories#2087
I'm way behind due to being sick but trying to get caught up on emails, so I just FINALLY read this one. LOL
A writer friend and I were just talking about reader taste recently. She writes romantic women's fiction. She currently has 2 series going and has found some readers report loving one of her series and not being interested in the other, while other readers absolutely love both. Her writing style and voice are the same for both. There's one tremendous difference - one series has military heroes/heroines; the other has doctors. Some readers aren't interested in military related stories, while others love them. It makes total sense that each series will have their own audiences, as well as some readers loving both.
I'm the same way as a reader. Four authors immediately pop to mind that I read avidly. All four write a couple of different genres. I LOVE their urban fantasy, but I'm not interested in their work in other genres. No difference in author voice/style/technique. The stories themselves simply don't appeal to me because they're in genres that just aren't of interest. When I meet someone who enjoys those other genres, though, I don't hesitate to suggest they check those authors out.