The Secrets of Writing

By James Hudnall

If you want to be a writer, you also want to know how to do it well. How do you create work that will stand the test of time and get great reviews? How do you craft a screenplay or a comic book? How do you master the novel? This book teaches you all the tricks and more. It explains how to make fiction that is unforgettable and meaningful. The secrets are out there, but this is the only book you'll need to learn them.

James Hudnall has been a professional writer for over 30 years, having worked in Hollywood, novels and comics. He’s taken all he’s learned and put it one book to tell you how it’s done. Become a master storyteller and create works that will live on through the ages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Hudnall
• Release date: Dec 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310503689

James Hudnall

James David Hudnall is a veteran writer of fiction and commentary.. The majority of his work has been in the graphic novel field. He has had one television show made from his comics (Harsh Realm, Fox 1999) and has several comics properties in development. His Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography has been called one of the best comics of all time by “Wizard Magazine.” It was cited in TV guide as an inspiration for an X-Files Episode. He currently writes an online comic, Blue Cat for Acesweekly.co.uk with Val Mayerik. His first novel is The Age of Heroes: Hell's Reward. It’s book one in a planned series of novels. His The Secrets of Writing will be out in late January. It's a much praised collection of his essays on writing fiction. Hudnall has been a writing teacher, lecturer, publisher, and internet engineer for many years. He currently lives in San Diego, California.

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The Secrets of Writing

By James Hudnall

Copyright © 2015 by James Hudnall.

Smashwords Edition

Visit: thehud.com

THE SECRETS OF WRITING

James Hudnall

Also by James Hudnall

Hell’s Reward

Espers: The Storm

Espers: Interface

Espers: Undertow

Espers: Crossfire

Chiller

2 To the Chest

Streets

The Age of Heroes

The Psycho

Sinking

Blue Cat

Devastator

Shut Up And Die

Aftermath

For David Lloyd, friend and first collaborator.

Thanks for everything.

Special thanks:

Todd Mulrooney for the cover.

Maya Eilam (mayaeilam.com) for the Story Shape infographics.

Batton Lash (supernaturallaw.com) for the Section illustrations.

Kurt Vonnegut for Story Shape theory.

INTRO

1

FOREWORD

When I sat down to write this book I became possessed. I thought about it every waking moment. I even had dreams about it. It really took over my life. Since I was a kid I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t become one until I was 28 with my first comic, Espers. As I became more experienced, the theory and practice of this art form became more interesting to me. I became fascinated with exploring the form in other media like books and film.

Then I set this book aside, for almost 20 years. I felt there was more I needed to learn. I came back to it now and again, but I finally felt it was time to finish it. What I felt was needed is now in the text.

Since I started out as a comics writer there will be a lot of references to comics. But this book is for writing in general. Most of my references are to films because that is what most people have been exposed to. Writing is writing. There are different expectations from different media. Each as its strengths and weaknesses, but the principles of writing are the same.

My goal was to create a comprehensive, easy to understand, book on writing in general, with a slant toward the comics industry. You can use the principles outlined in this book to write comics, novels, movies, plays, you name it. I’ve tried to dissect and analyze every aspect of writing and storytelling I could think of. I went back and read a whole stack of books to refresh my understanding of other people’s theories so I wouldn’t leave anything out.

I’ve tried to make this book simple by keeping the terminology simple. Terms like Protagonist and Antagonist have become Hero and Villain. I avoid politically correct terminology and refer to generic characters as he. Audience was used instead of Reader because you’re not just writing to one person but many. Hopefully, many people will experience what you write. They’re your audience.

Occasionally I’ll discuss books or comics, but again, I’ll stick to popular work so you’ll have an easy time finding it if you haven’t read it.

Hopefully, you’ll find this book as useful as I have. Putting my thoughts in order and brushing up on text books has given me a lot of fresh insights. You’re never too old, or too experienced, to learn new things. Sometimes you also need to refresh your knowledge.

No one, no matter who they are, is above learning new tricks.

Experience is important, but not always enough. You can learn a lot by doing, but some new tricks might evade you. That’s why it’s wise to keep abreast of all the literary journals and theories out there. And talk to other writers. Swap notes. It’s good for you!

You may find it annoying that certain maxims are repeated over and over again in this book. It’s because these principles need to be permanently etched in your mind. You need to remember these things better than any of the Ten Commandments. But, while everything in here is true, there are always exceptions. Consider the following to be the basics and take it from there.

Breaking rules is a creative choice. But first you need to learn them or you’re an amateur,

REMEMBER: There are no rules to writing, only principles.

THE BASICS

It isn’t the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. It’s the job of the artist to give audience what they need.

Alan Moore

SO YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER

A lot of people say they want to be a writer. A lot of people say they plan to be a writer. A lot of people dream of being a writer.

Writers write. They don’t talk about it. They don’t dream about it. They do it. It’s the only way you will ever be a writer. By doing.

The only way to get good is to do more writing. And never stop trying to learn. Never stop watching plays, movies, and shows if that interests you, to study the techniques and structure. Never stop reading comics or books to learn from them. Books especially, because there is where things can get a lot more dense and magical. All forms of writing have their unique advantages and disadvantages over the other. It would be wrong to decide one medium is inferior to the other because they all require the same fundamentals. There is worthless dreck in all media, so none is without its share of crap. But all media has its classics as well. I have worked mainly in comics in my career but have transitioned to prose and film. You can do it all. But you have to write.

A big mistake many creative people make is getting upset by other people’s success. It’s none of your business. Your career is your business and if it’s suffering then stop wasting your time obsessing about other people’s. It’s a waste of energy. Energy and time are better spent.

Spend it creating.

Your biggest enemy will be one person. That person is you. You will hold yourself back more than anyone. You may think that’s not true, but you’re the one you has to do the hard work. You’re the one who has to stop procrastinating and making excuses. You are the one who gets lazy and slacks off or plays video games or does drugs instead of producing a masterpiece.

You are the only one stopping you. So defeat your weaknesses. Get fit in the head and focus.

Here’s the good news. It has never been a better time to be a writer because you can do it more easily than at any time in history. You don’t need a publisher anymore. You don’t need anyone’s permission. There are all sorts of new places to publish your work no matter what form it takes. All you have to do is create it.

Of course, there will be work to do after that called promotion. That will be harder than writing your book. But here’s the great thing about being a writer. Once you finish something, it will exist as long as you keep it alive in some form once it’s published. Once it’s in the cloud or print, it exists and will exist for a long time. How long depends on may things, but the beauty is, you can write something when you’re young and still make money off it when you’re old.

But you have to write it first. And that goes back to what I said above. Only you can stop you. So don’t stop yourself.

Do you want to be a writer? Then write something.

This book is here to help you. I try to give you all the tools you need to do the job.

But it’s up to you after that.

Write!

WHAT IS A STORY

We are, by nature, a creative animal. We’re driven to make our mark on the world in some fashion, beyond our need to survive. Some people satisfy their creativity in the business community. Some fill it with music or dance. We’re going to focus on that most ancient of trades, storytelling.

Humankind, as we know it, has been on earth for at least 40,000 years. We can safely assume that somewhere in the midst of that time, people started telling stories. It all probably originated around the campfire when we lived in caves and hunted with flint spears. Stories began as one hunter bragged about some saber-tooth he killed or a fish that got away. As people’s tastes became more sophisticated, the demands on a story grew. There needed to be more at stake, more exciting things happening, That required technique.

We don’t know when people first started formulating story technique, but we know from recorded history that they began doing it in Ancient Greece, about 2,500 years ago. The first known plays were performed there, in honor of the god Dionysius. Stories were acted out with pantomime and dialog before a live audience. The actors wore masks depicting the mood of the character. Writers quickly saw the need for improving their craft when actors started speaking their lines. Before then, stories were told by one performer who was usually the guy who made them up, or they were etched on stone tablets where only those with the skill to read could appreciate them. Now you had a whole new art form where flaws in a story became more brutally apparent.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to write a treatise on the subject of crafting an effective tale. In De Poetica he laid the groundwork for the theory we now know as Story Structure.

Story Structure is the foundation upon which all stories are built. It is the framework that holds a story together. You cannot write a story without employing it. However, if you don’t understand the principles of story structure, you can quickly make a mess. It's why so many stories out there are weak. The authors of those narratives didn’t employ the principles of structure appropriately.

It’s kind of like that old biblical parable about the man who built his house on the sand, while another built his house on stony earth. The house built on the beach got destroyed because the foundation was assembled on unstable ground. The same thing happens to a story made with an unsteady structure. It falls apart.

The last thing any good writer wants is to spend days, months, or years on something that’s ultimately weak. Aside from the blow to your self-esteem and the rejection of the public, it doesn’t do your career a whole lot of good.

There is a big problem with structure, however. It’s such a vast and complex subject, and many people mistakenly think of it as a formula. Aristotle and some of the theorists who followed didn’t help matters by actually defining the method, as they saw it, rather than revealing structure as a series of principles, which is what it is. Think of it as a form, rather than a formula. The structure is the form your story takes.

Formula writers mistakenly follow the notion that plot twists have to occur on a certain page, and characters must be introduced a precise way, etc. We’ll get into that later on. But, by dogmatically following these formulas, they end up creating predictable, by-the-numbers plots that don’t do a whole lot to satisfy the audience. You can see this kind of writing in many movies, TV shows, novels, comics, et al.

The structure is a theory, like numbers theory in math or music theory in music. The theory allows us to understand and affect things the way we would like. It provides a whole spectrum of methods to get from point A to point B. You don’t have to follow any particular path to get to where you want to go. You just need to understand the general rules and apply them as you see fit.

REMEMBER: Story structure is a series of principles. It’s not a formula.

MEANING MAKES A STORY

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see.

Joseph Conrad

Theodore Sturgeon was a classic science fiction writer who coined what has come to be known as Sturgeon’s Law. It goes something like this: 90% of everything is crap.

He’s pretty much correct, but crap sometimes sells. The question is, is that what you want to produce? Stories like that are quickly forgotten whether they sell or not. And let’s be frank, most writers will have to deal with rejection. Crap is nothing to aspire to. It’s worthless for a reason.

You want to feel good about your work. There’s something to be said for the theory that art is therapy. We suffer through our art but in the end, we produce meaning and beauty.

There is one thing that lifts great stories above the drek. What separates the wheat from the chaff and that is meaning. A good story has a point. It has something to say. It sheds light on the human condition or the darkness in men’s souls. It says something no one is willing to say. It reveals painful truths about life or it answers questions people are always seeking answers too.

Junk fiction does none of that. It’s empty calories. But great stories last through the ages. The Iliad and the Odyssey are two of the greatest stories ever told. They have been around for thousands of years. Charles Dickens and Mark Twain are still being read over 100 years after they died. Victor Hugo, Cervantes, Tolstoy, there are a whole lot of dead writers who are still required reading in school. What separates them from the mountain of forgotten books? I’ll tell you.

They revealed some truth in their stories that still resonates with people to this day. Great stories stay with you by providing meaning. By offering context for things we often find elusive. But more importantly, they help fill in the gaps in that crazy puzzle we call life.

Fiction was invented to answer questions people had no explanations. The early stories responded to questions like, why are there storms or death? They did it with myths about the gods. Later fiction dealt with other matters in society, injustice, poverty, things people still think about today, and no one has a satisfying solution. But fiction can at least make sense of the senselessness of our existence. People respond to cause and effect. Our mind is trained to understand things by seeking patterns. A good story weaves those patterns together in such a way that truth becomes revealed. It creates answers where none were before.

Story structure is a method of making the design take shape. But to understand this better, we can reverse engineer the story, so the structure's revealed in a way that makes sense. The famous author Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions) wrote a thesis on the shape of stories that illustrates what we’re talking about. He showed how the structure of a story could be displayed. Here are a few of his examples.

Story shape can be summed up as simply at the chart above. A story has two states, positive and negative, which is where your characters will find themselves at any point in the story. Time as a human experience is linear. For the sake of this example, we’ll deal with the classical structure, time is where the story starts and ends. It separates the events of the story in one line. The positive side is everything north of the timeline, and the negative is south of the line.

Stories start either positive or negative. Events will go in a particular direction until there is an incident that makes it switch gears. In this simple example, you see a character has all kinds of good things happen to them at the start of the story then half way something changes their fortune, and it gets dark. It ends up on the other side of the dividing line and then only starts to climb back toward the end. It's not a typical story, as we will explain later, but it gives you and idea of the shape.

Things happen in the plot in the wavy area which is a one-dimensional line that goes up and down depending on where things are in the story. For this discussion, we show plot events happening in this area so you can imagine them by way of example.

Our first example is two classic story plots that are also some of the most commonly used. You can see from the illustration, and they are very similar

The Man in Hole is a classic story that is often used in comedy. A character or characters have their lives upturned. They find themselves in a bad place. And then work to get back on top. It’s simple and it has worked in so many different plots you would be amazed. Almost every major comedy in modern time is a variation on this classic. Think about it.

Boy Meets Girl is the basis of just about every romance ever written. Two people meet. They are attracted to each other but they have differences. Things turn sour and get complicated. One of them keeps trying to win the other over, or they bond through shared suffering of some kind. This leads to things improving as conflicts are resolved and they end up happily in love.

What they have in common is they usually start with things going well for the main characters, but then events turn sour. There is a point where events lead to a series of hardships and trials that the characters have to overcome to get their lives back on track or to cheat death. Once they do, the story ends with them rewarded with success of some kind.

The original Star Wars: A New Hope is a classic example of what is known as the romance story. Innocents are thrown into a war, they go through all sorts of death defying adventures until they are rewarded with great success. That same basic story was also used in Conan the Barbarian, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Lord of the Rings and a host of others. In the course of those stories the main characters learned something about themselves that was a revelation to them.

Here are a couple more, complex examples.

Here we see a Fall type story where someone starts off well, but a series of bad events put them in a negative state at the conclusion. They give the example of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis where a man awakes to find himself a giant cockroach. The other example, The Twilight Zone, often had stories with negative endings. It's a one-way trip through the story values discussed later on.

By contrast, the Which Way is Up pattern is more random. In stories like that, it’s hard to tell who’s the hero or the villain, and the results are often ironic.

We derive meaning from stories based on a lot of factors which we will discuss in this book. But I wanted to talk about shapes so you can see how events shape the outcome and the feel of the piece.

REMEMBER: People want to find meaning in your work, not just entertainment.

Infographics: Maya Eilam (mayaeilam.com)

STORY

The story is a subject where many writers disagree. The difference between a plot and a story has been argued since Aristotle stirred things up back in Old Athens. For the record, I’m going to take the side of writers like George Bernard Shaw, who said: There are only two stories. ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’

Translation: Boy Meets Girl and The Hero on a Quest.

However, I part company with Mr. Shaw on the number of stories. I think there is only one story. The Hero on a Quest. Because Boy Meets Girl is about one or more characters questing for an object of desire. Love.

Man vs. Nature is often cited