Inga M. Beck

I am now almost half way through Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story and I must say I am enjoying the read a lot. I find it helpful to read these kinds of books along the side while I write. Books like Stephen King’s On Writing or Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

But as I read this slightly nerdy approach to writing I find that I am guilty of a writing crime. After working ont he same story, writing, rewriting and restarting time and again, I still don’t know what makes my protagonist tick. In fact I did the worst of all, and put an inncoent young girl into a situation just to see what would happen, how she would react, never stopping to wonder what her motives are and how they should affect her story.

Thanks to Lisa I realised my crime. I do like to tell myself that I would have gotten it sooner or later, of course. But without her, it might have taken me weeks, months, even years before realising just why my story, even if it had so many interesting things, just wasn’t working. I wasn’t thinking about my character, I was thinking about my plot.

Lisa stresses the importance of writers “getting to know their characters before they tell their story” and more over she points out that for the reader to identify with the protagonist and want to read on, the protagonist has to want something, there has to be a goal for her. I knew she had a goal, I knew what she wanted, but the problem was, I gave most of it to her in the first chapter. BIG mistake. So I’ve started all over again.

However, while I am quite grateful for this realisation happening at this moment, just when I have the time to throw away all I that I had written and start over again, there are some things that I disaggree with at present in Lisa’s book.

When discussing where’s the best place to start writing a novel she says: “The best place to start is by pinpointing the moment long before, when she [the protagonist] first fell prey to the inner issue that’s been skewing her worldview ever since.” Quite true, if in fact you plan on writing only one draft and getting it perfect in the first go. But I don’t think I would have thought of my protagonist if it wasn’t for the plot I played with for all the time first.

In my experience when I sit down to write something new, I don’t know what it is yet. I sit down and things start happening, some kind of plot appears, some event that I throw the clean-slate persona into to see what happens. Only after that do I think one should sit down and realise their character with percision, get to know them like no one else could ever know them, and according to your findings, change the plot and start over.

But the beauty of the world is that not all of us are the same, and therefore the same way of working doesn’t work for everyone.

Here are the covers of the books I mentioned… I recommend all of them to writers, amateurs and others.