Oregon Coast, Part 1
Only a few days after I started work on this website, I left for a week and a half’s worth of workshops on the Oregon coast. Every time I go out there, I learn so much and am so grateful for the experience.
This time, all the traveling, note-taking, and writing were on account of two weekend workshops and a week of one-on-one work sandwiched between. The first weekend workshop was all about story structure, the nuts and bolts or, to use the analogy we went with all weekend, the skeleton or bones of a story. It doesn’t matter how much other stuff is written in over them, if the bones of the story ain’t right then the story ain’t right.
One of the tools we discussed is the legendary Lester Dent’s formula for short fiction.
You can break down the structure of any genre of story, any size, using Lester Dent’s pulp formula for short story success. Each story or novel scene can be parsed in four sections of 800-1500 words, with each section having its own purpose and structure.
In the first section, you’ve got your character in a setting with a problem, as different or unusual as you can conjure. The character tries to solve the problem, and by either failing or succeeding makes things worse.
In the second section, the character tries again using the next logical series of actions. Try/fail or try/succeed. Either way, the problem gets even worse.
The third section brings another try/fail or try/succeed cycle, with of course such ramping up of the worse-ness that in section four, the problem appears bleak. There’s no way the character will ever solve it, except by virtue of innate intelligence, skill, strength, and/or other trait, the character does. This is followed by what Lester Dent calls a “snapper” and other folks have been known to call “validation.” IOW, something that lets the reader know the story is over.
After much lecturing and many exercises incorporating this nifty formula, there was a lot of discussion on the chief qualities of story and the way they must be balanced in different parts of the story in order to make it work.
All of this was a revelation to me. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of it before at other workshops, but this is the first time it really sank in and made sense to me.
Like other tools in the writerly toolbox, this isn’t something to think about when you’re writing. When you put the words on the page, your subconscious is in charge. The more your conscious mind interferes with what’s happening on the page, the more your story will veer off its path. For me, the result of this is always project block. Always. Never fails.
This is the sort of stuff that should be practiced with strong focus for long enough (a couple of months, say) that it sinks into your hindbrain. That way, your subconscious incorporates the tool and the effect is that the structure (or whatever else it is you may have praticed) just comes out of your fingertips as you write, no thinking about it necessary.
And so I write. And so it goes.
