Know what your story desires to tell

NPR has a great interview with Richard Russo you can listen to on its site. The author of the divine Empire Falls (a Pulitzer winner) has a new book, That Old Cape Magic. The book is about a writer, a device that lets Russo explain a common author's problem, for those still learning the craft. It's not easy understanding what a story needs to say.

In his novel, [his character] Griffin decides to write about his childhood on the Cape -- including his love for a neighboring family. But his first draft of the story isn't any good because the characters don't come to life.

Russo, who used to teach fiction writing, says this is a problem that he frequently sees in beginning writers.

"The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling. And I think that's why Jack Griffin can't write this story ... there's something about himself that he hasn't quite recognized."

Russo says this idea of missing the point is as common in life as in novels. And as memories corrode or morph, people -- parents and children, husbands and wives -- tend to form different ideas of the past.

How to avoid this pitfall? Keep crafting that three-paragraph synopsis, if it's a longer work like a book. In this format, paragraph one describes the inciting event. Two tackles the expansion and evolution of the story. Three delivers the Big Message: Why your readers should open the book, to learn a larger story, like how faith can overcome fear of the future.

Big truths of stories cover common ground, so a reader has empathy with the lesson: "Hey, I lived that one." Or knew someone who did. Or failed at the lesson.

By the way, Russo sounds like a dynamite interview subject on the radio. A voice as crackling as his characters.

Hooray for a Pulitzer's worth of stories

Short stories get short shrift. These gems of tales, usually less than 3,000 words, usually can't find a publisher or a publication, but everybody professes to enjoy reading them. Count among the satisfied the jury of the Pulitzer Prize, which awarded the 2009 fiction prize to a collection of stories by Elizabeth Stout, Olive Kitteridge.

To be precise, this lovely book is a "novel in stories," a collection of tales with recurring characters but not bound up with a narrative though-line. Reading a novel in stories is easy for people who only read once in awhile. You always feel like you've gotten everything there is to tell in a novel in stories, so long as you finish the chapter you're on. Every chapter is a self-contained story.

Six years ago, I saw a novel-in-stories slammed by a prize-winning novelist. Ann Patchett came to Austin to give a keynote speech at the Austin Writers League "Why Fiction Matters" conference. Patchett spoke knowing she'd just won the PEN/Falkner award for her novel Bel Canto. In the course of her talk Patchett said in passing, "and then there's the novel-in-stories, a form I loathe, by the way." We didn't all want to know what she liked to read, or thought was worthy. But some of us knew something Patchett didn't. The conference organizer Karen Stolz had published a successful novel in stories, The World of Pies.

So maybe — since Stout's novel in stories won the Pulitzer, like fiction of Phillip Roth and Michael Chabon — Patchett might want to revisit her judgment about the worth of novels in stories. She could reconsider while she's dusting off the section of her bookcase that's still waiting for a Pulitzer prize. Bel Canto is based on the Lima Crisis news event, but Olive Kitteridge doesn't need that kind of based-on-a-true-story leg up. It's Elizabeth Stout's world of coastal Maine residents. Booklist said in a starred review

But appalling though Olive can be, Strout manages to make her deeply human and even sympathetic, as are all of the characters in this “novel in stories.” Covering a period of 30-odd years, most of the stories (several of which were previously published in the New Yorker and other magazines) feature Olive as their focus, but in some she is bit player or even a footnote while other characters take center stage to sort through their own fears and insecurities. Though loneliness and loss haunt these pages, Strout also supplies gentle humor and a nourishing dose of hope.

Never let it matter that anyone, no matter how awarded their career might be, reviles your writing style. You can find single-star reviews for Bel Canto on Amazon, after all. Be your own judge and let yourself — not just your writing or publishing — be the beauty in the world.

The sound of a Hammerstein short story

Musical theater brings us story condensed, memorable enough to memorize, lyrics long revered. This weekend Abby and I are wrapping ourselves in the music of Oscar Hammerstein, creator of the lyrics for The Sound of Music, Oklahoma, South Pacific, and Carousel. Among so many others...

Hammerstein had a great start as a storyteller, being the son of a New York opera impresario of the same name (and so he is a Junior, although he always went by Oscar Hammerstein II). Oscar's gift to all of us who want to tell stories is the way that he lifted story to the center of whatever he created for the musical stage, a different style than others — much like Billy Wilder's devotion to story in his films.

Hammerstein's strongest tales, told in a lyric surpassing the beauty of poetry, were often at the end of a musical's act — high points of the theater's storytelling. Some Enchanted Evening comes at the end of South Pacific's first and second acts. You'll Never Walk Alone finishes up Carousel. Climb Every Mountain, one of the last lyrics he wrote before his death, provides the first act finale for The Sound of Music.

He showed more than sentiment in his writing; he told bittersweet stories. Carousel, a show from the earliest days of his teaming with Richard Rogers, serves up sorrow along with love in If I Loved You. The lyric is so short, like so many of his greatest stories:

If I loved you,
Time and again I would try to say
All I'd want you to know.
If I loved you,
Words wouldn't come in an easy way
Round in circles I'd go!
Longin' to tell you,
But afraid and shy,
I'd let my golden chances pass me by!
Soon you'd leave me,
Off you would go in the mist of day,
Never, never to know how I loved you

In fact, If I Loved You and You'll Never Walk Alone finish up Carousel with a one-two finale.

Most of his lyrics are available on the Internet these days. If you're ever stuck on needing confidence for a creation, Abby recommends I Have Confidence from The Sound of Music.

On Wikipedia, the writers there point out that story as the primary point was Hammerstein's gift to American theater. And like any good storyteller, he can be counted on to deliver both the happiness of love and hope, as well as the sadness of endings:

He was probably the best "book writer" in Broadway history — he made the story, not the songs or the stars, central to the musical, and brought it to full maturity as an art form. His reputation for being "sentimental," is based largely on the movie versions of the musicals, especially The Sound of Music. As revivals of Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, and The King and I in London and New York show, Hammerstein could be very tough-minded indeed. Oscar Hammerstein believed in love; he did not believe that it would always end happily.

Wild about Wilder

Movies can teach all of us a lot about story. Billy Wilder, legendary film director, won three Oscars for his screenplays in a storied career. (Two more for direction; like many great screenwriters, he took command of his stories once he got behind the camera.) The Wikipedia entry on him says he was so successful because

Wilder's directoral choices reflected his belief in the primacy of writing. He avoided the exuberant cinematography of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles because, in Wilder's opinion, shots that called attention to themselves would distract the audience from the story. Wilder's pictures have tight plotting and memorable dialogue.

Wilder's best storytelling is all over the map in subject matter, from the wordplay screwball comedy in Ball of Fire to the film noir groundbreaker Double Indemnity to the grit of Hollywood in Sunset Boulevard. Most serious? Alcoholism, in The Lost Weekend, which earned him two of those Oscars. And then there's Some Like it Hot, where he introduced the world of 1959 to the humor of cross-dressing. A hidden gem is Ace in the Hole, where Kirk Douglas growls his way through a media circus of his own creation: he's a reporter -- like Wilder once was -- trying to get back into a $1,000 a week job.

You can see a succinct 90 seconds of his story theory in a film clip on the NPR Web site (Real Player is required). Wilder died in 2002, but before he moved on to the next level of storytelling he left behind his 10 rules of story; nearly all of them can be applied to genre, literature or movies.

(As told to Cameron Crowe:)

1. The audience is fickle.

2. Grab 'em by the throat and never let 'em go.

3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.

4. Know where you’re going.

5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They'll love you forever.

8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.

9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.

10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then -- that's it. Don’t hang around.