Hook, Line, and Reader by Gabriel Valjan

 

What hooks you into an idea enough so that you want to write it? Character, setting, plot, genre?

In his Acknowledgments in Bound for Gold, author William Martin discussed his first foray into screenwriting at my alma mater, the University of Southern California, and he said something about writing that I believe is worth the block quote.

Though I had little writing experience, I had already rejected the advice that you should write what you know. I believed then, as I do now, that you should write what you want to know, or where you want to go, or who you want to meet when you get there.

While I’m on the road with quotes, I’ll not quote E.M Forster’s “The king died and then the queen died” as a definition of Plot, but rather choose John le Carré’s “The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is.”

In my mind, Forster is interested in How and then What, whereas le Carré’s is asking, Why?

When I write, Plot is the premise. I am more interested in Character, his or her motivation. In my next Shane Cleary adventure, THE BIG LIE, Shane is hired to find a missing dog. In of itself, an odd request, but the request is more Conflict than Plot because the person who hires Shane has tried to kill him before. Why would Shane take the case?

Character + Why = Story.

Life tends towards chaos. People are not predictable. The unexpected happens. While there are twists and turns in fiction, Plot on the page must maintain a certain logic of Cause and Effect, or Action and Reaction. I don’t focus so much on Plot because I know savvy readers can guess all the possible outcomes. My interest is in human psychology. Why do people do the things they do?

I choose to write Genre because there’s an agreement between Reader and Writer. There are Rules and there are Expectations. I like to break Rules. Writers cannot kill the dog or the cat in their story. In cozy mysteries, violence is best left off-screen. In literary fiction, which I have written, Plot is a loose goose, not as important. With literary fiction, readers suspend Rules and Expectations because they want to be surprised. In genre, they know how the story will end. Readers of literary fiction can take in, for example, the use of language, which brings me to my beef with most literary fiction: a lot can happen or nothing of consequence.

Once I am hooked to a premise, I write as if I plan to meet someone on the road. It could be the Stranger as in a Character I have created, or it could be some aspect of myself during the creative process that I have not acknowledged.

It still comes down to why people do what they do. History is full of unanswered questions to Why. How could the most philosophical people in the world listen to a clumsy Austrian with a funny moustache, and believe he was the leader of the master race? Or how could cunning Italians accept from their leader the ridiculously pompous prose of a former elementary school teacher and failed journalist from a God-forsaken Emilian village? How could Spaniards, another people with a centuries-old civilization, believe a flaccid petit-bourgeois from Galicia with royalist delusions was their caudillo?

People, you think you know them, until you don’t.