How To Write Your Best Story: Advice for Writers on Spinning an Enchanting Tale (2nd Ed.)

By Philip Martin

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.” – Flannery O’Connor.

Beginning writers often wonder what it takes to get published. The second edition of this practical book looks at what really makes fiction work: good storytelling!

Oddly, storytelling skills, despite their immense value to all writers, are seldom emphasized in writing courses. How To Write Your Best Story explores three key elements that fuel the magic of story: intriguing eccentricity, delightful details, and satisfying surprises.

The proven storytelling techniques are time-tested and used by the best authors, including by winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer, and National Book Award, as well as by commercially successful authors whose books appear on bestseller lists and whose work is treasured by generations of fans.

Written by an accomplished editor and indie-press publisher, this guide draws on the author’s decades of experience in the book trade, studying what really works for emerging writers and editing many books of advice on literary craft and career development.

The practical tips, techniques, and examples of best practices here draw on the work of great literary storytellers – from Shakespeare, Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mark Twain to Willa Cather, E.B. White, and James Thurber to Neil Gaiman, Ivan Doig, and Patrick Rothfuss.

How To Write Your Best Story will help you understand how to craft better fiction (or nonfiction) and to get your best work published.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Philip Martin is an experienced editor of many books of advice for authors. Previously acquisitions editor for The Writer Books, he has also written A Guide to Fantasy Literature and The Purpose of Fantasy, as well as award-winning books on traditional culture.

He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he directs Great Lakes Literary, offering editorial services and websites for authors.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crispin Books
• Release date: Oct 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781883953959

Book preview

General Things about Good Stories

Crick! Crack!

This phrase may not be familiar to you. It is the traditional beginning of a story in certain parts of the Caribbean.

Crick! Crack!

To indicate their readiness to hear the story, the audience is supposed to respond:

Break my back!

It’s a bit mysterious . . . perhaps intentionally, like a magical incantation of abracadabra. The purpose is simple: to join teller and listeners, to give notice that the real world is about to be left behind and the world of story entered.

The version more familiar to many of us is that sing-song phrase: Once Upon a Time. Although that form requires no response, it also signals a beginning, a crossing from one world to an imaginary one, a joining of teller and listener in the wondrous realm of story.

Crick! Crack!

Break my back!

Let’s start by looking at some common features of good stories.

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A Traditional Start

Why does your imagination spring to attention when you hear a traditional call to story, such as: Once upon a time in a far-off land . . . ?

The answer: It says, in the simplest fashion: I’m ready to tell a good story.

That traditional story opener includes the implicit question: Would you like to hear it?

It’s rare in a live setting that someone answers: No thanks. Who can resist the promise of story, the hook dangled before the imagination? We all still harbor a deep-seated urge to slide under a feather comforter and plead: Yes. Tell me a story. Please!

But literature is a little different. A book is much easier to put down, or to decline to read in the first place. For that reason, the opening of a written story is essential to get right. The first lines of a novel need to be strong and appealing.

Still, many great classic stories or novels start with a compelling hook that is little more than a traditional signal that a good yarn is coming.

A most extraordinary thing happened in Petersburg on the twenty-fifth of March.

– first line of The Nose by Nikolai Gogol

This is the tale of the wonders that befell on the evening of the eleventh of December, when they did what they were told not to do.

– first line of "The Ice Dragon,

or Do as You Are Told," by E. Nesbit

All this happened, more or less.

— first line of Slaughterhouse-Five,

by Kurt Vonnegut

These are beginnings based on a traditional version of storytelling. The opening lines of a story are a promise. This is why traditional openings are so effective. Signaling that a story is coming, the promise is laid out with the authority of a storyteller who implicitly suggests that what follows is worth our shared time.

Call me Ishmael.

– opening line to Moby-Dick,

by Herman Melville

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Story is not the same as plot

E.M. Forster, the talented British author of A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Howard’s End, and other novels, spouting his opinions about the importance of plot in his 1927 book, Aspects of the Novel, claimed that plot was obviously superior to story. He tried to explain, saying that a simple and uninteresting type of story is:

The king died

and then the queen died.

That’s an utterly ridiculous statement; it makes little sense to suggest that this brief compound sentence is a story. It’s just a short statement about two events – one first, the other second. If that’s what Forster thinks is a story, he is a poor storyteller. Nonetheless, Forster presses on to boast that a plot, in contrast, is so much more wonderful:

The king died

and then the queen died of grief.

True, that offers a little more, a more significant series of interconnected events. But either version is too brief to represent either story or plot.

Forster seems to misread the concept of a story as something too simple to have much value. What he refuses to acknowledge is that the traditional methods of a good story are far more complex, effective, and artistic than he is willing to admit.

Forster’s condescension to story goes so far in Aspects of the Novel to call story a very low form of art, saying it was the chopped-off length of the tapeworm of time. Ouch.

Yet he had to admit in that same work, yes – oh, dear yes – the novel tells a story. He seems embarrassed to have to concede that point.

Forster’s arrogant view is that plot is a more advanced form of fiction, beyond the ken of simple, primitive folk who can only tell a story. Forster seems to feel that you must possess a superior, ideally British, education (or an erudite book like Aspects of the Novel), to create a well-plotted novel, rather falling to the sad depths of writing a story-centric one.

Unfortunately for Forster and others, that evolutionary model of civilization (including literature) has long been discarded by social scientists. This model posited an upward trend from savagery, barbarism, and primitivism upward to civilization. Of course, the British in the 1920s prided themselves on being superior to traditional cultures, underpinning their conviction that it was good to colonize indigenous peoples, to teach them to be more like the British.

However, if you take time to look more closely, you quickly discover that traditional folkways are far more complex and intricate than first assumed by outsiders. In the last hundred years, anthropologists have come to realize how well developed and complex traditional cultures are – including their understanding of the power of story.

More recently, scientists have begun to study the power of story to anchor images, organize sequences of events, encourage sympathy for characters, and reinforce values. Stories are shaped in a way to gather attention, create meaning, and hold an audience. They are eminently sharable, and they help those who hear those stories to retain them long in the memory.

In other words, stories have the amazing ability to shape thoughts, captivate and engage others, and be remembered. For writers, story uses deeply internalized, structured methods to create lasting literature.

In considering plot versus story, it might best to say that story is essential and elemental, while plot is constructed and can be somewhat artificial. Both are good and enjoyable when done well. But story is closer to the heart – closer to why we value stories and storytellers.

As Ray Bradbury said, plot is nothing but footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to somewhere else important to them. [Emphasis added.]

As I’ve said, story rules, plot drools.

A story, in my view, about a king and queen might start something like:

The king dies, and then the queen died of grief.

The king, you see, really liked chicken soup. He would swoon at the smells of an enormous pot on the stove, turbulent with bubbling sounds, simmering with herbs and the morsels of tender chicken, swimming in sumptuous vegetables.

But this particular day, the regular cook was sick.

So the queen, despite a lack of any cooking ability, decided to make the king’s soup herself. After all, she said to herself, how hard could it be to make something as simple as chicken soup?

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The Three Elements of Good Stories

A story promises some sort of linkage to a sequence of events, some version of a plot, but most of all, it delivers a set of three key elements:

1. Something curiously odd at the start to catch our fancy.

2. Selective and purposeful details to draw out the tale into an appealing journey for the reader.

3. Some conclusion that makes it clear why this story has been deemed Worth Telling.

These are the three elements of story that we’ll be looking at in coming chapters. Those three things are the core of effective storytelling techniques, used by great literary storytellers from Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Willa Cather to E.B. White and James Thurber, and on to today’s master of story such as Neil Gaiman, Ivan Doig, Patrick Rothfuss, and others.

If you understand the real value of good storytelling in literature, beyond the plots of kings and queens dying of grief or a bad mushroom, you’ll write better.

In later chapters, we’ll explore specific techniques to improve these three elements of story in your writing.

First, though, a few more thoughts on the nature of stories.

A Premise is not a Story

Contrary to what some like to claim, 6-word stories aren’t really stories.

Sorry.

The myth began, I believe, with a blithe (and inaccurate) statement by Ernest Hemingway that this 6-word story was possibly his best prose ever:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Okay, that’s interesting. It’s a concept. It’s a start of a good story.

But it’s not a story.

It’s a premise, a teaser. The 6-word purveyor has offered a clever prompt. The reader of those six words then, on his or her own, fills in more of the story—a lot more. Yes, the reader can use this little emotional springboard to step in to become the real storyteller.

It is a fun way to get us thinking about brevity, something that Hemingway cared about. I have no problem with Hemingway if he wants to cite his clever scribble as a good example of what a few well-chosen words can unleash in the imagination. The 6-word challenge is an intriguing exercise.

It’s just not a story.

It’s been suggested Hemingway’s 6-word phrase was done as a bar bet. It has all the depth of things said while leaning on a bar after a few drinks and only a cocktail napkin to write on – lots of emotion and sincerity, but not much storytelling. It’s good that Hemingway went back to his flat and wrote some real stories, which, we’d all agree, are better pieces of prose to consider as his best ever.

The witty exercise has its fans. In 2006, Wired Magazine, for example, ran a 6-word writing exercise, based on the Hemingway bit, asking famous science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers to submit 6-word stories. The results are fun. Here are a few examples:

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.

– Orson Scott Card

Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.

– David Brin

Heaven falls. Details at eleven.

– Robert Jordan

Corpse parts missing. Doctor buys yacht.

– Margaret Atwood

Fun for the writer?

Intriguing for the reader?

You bet!

Stories? No.

A story needs to do more.

What’s the shortest possible story? Is that a useful question? It’s little different from the arbitrary 50,000-word goal that the annual National Novel Writing Month sets. Six-word stories or 50,000-word stories are arbitrary goals. A story is as long as it needs to be to fulfill its