Writing Mistake #8: Waiting for Something to Happen

The worst advice I've heard on writing so far is that if you put two characters together long enough, something is bound to happen. To me, this is the antithesis of writing, for writing is about control, not happenstance.

If we state this poor advice in different terms, then we might say, forget about plot and just write a story. Horrible advice. Writers must refine not only their storytelling ability, but also their mastery of plot and language. To disregard any of these three functions of the writer is to disregard writing.

As a review, storytelling is the writer's ability to produce verisimilitude within a narrative. This is the writer's ability to manipulate the reader's belief system: the reader's suspension of belief. It is the ability of the writer to form a bond of trust with the reader, and for the reader to accept the writer's narrative.

Language is a mastery of words, and this mastery is the ability to select the best words to convey the writer's thoughts. This is the realm of linguistics and the understanding of the various cultures of language. Words to the writer are as colors to a fine painter or musical notes to a musician.

And to round out the trio, the writer must also master plot. While storytelling is perhaps the most aesthetic of the three; plot is unquestionably the most analytic. This may explain why many fine writers encounter the most difficulty mastering plot.

Popular psychology has given society the false notion that there exists a left and right brain, each specializing in certain functionality. The left is described as logical while the right is described as intuitive. This pseudoscience has no empirical support yet influences our culture greatly for no other reason than blind superstitious belief.

The result is often detrimental to artists, for art itself is often lumped into the right-brain "specialization" of intuitive thinking. To state that art is a right-brain activity is similar to claiming that walking is a left-legged activity. Simply stated, it is a statement of ignorance and stupidity.

Art as well as science, or more generally, all thinking, is both a logical and an intuitive process. This explains why many of our greatest artists also have facility with science, as well as many of our greatest scientists also have facility with art. Leonardo da Vinci immediately comes to mind.

Any work that involves the mind requires full functionality of that mind, and this means strong logic and intuition. With mastery, the difference between the two disappears. Yet because of the superstitions of pop psychology, people continue to believe in the myth of logic being the domain of science and intuition being the domain of art.

And this is why many fine writers sit around waiting for something to happen. You may be great at describing a desert to me and taking me there with you, but I'm not about to wait there forty days with you in the sweltering heat. I got better things to do and so does your other readers.

If you are sitting around waiting for something to happen; it is because you lack purpose; it is because your writing lacks purpose. It's nice to believe that there is something special inside you, but this is an example of storytelling. If a baby is born and sits around doing little but keeping itself alive until it grows old and dies, then yes we have a person, but it is a shell of a person with little to no substance. What defines us are the actions we take in life.

What defines your character is not a name but what that character does. What defines a character is not storytelling, but plot. It is the difference between attempting to define your character by its name versus your character giving meaning to its name.

Two main types of stories sell well. First we have melodrama, where shells of characters that are little more than names on a page get caught up in the same series of events story after story, novel after novel. The theme is generally a shallow exploration of a popular or scandalous moral issue. And the second type is the rollercoaster, where characters go from point A to point B while navigating all sorts of ups and downs and twists and turns. The theme here is generally survival.

While both of these styles are often financially lucrative, the former is heavy-handed on the storytelling side, while the latter is heavy handed on the plot side. Language is often reduced to cliché or ignored completely. Either can be fun to read, but both are lacking. We can imagine them as fast food.

As writers we should aspire to produce the best food possible, if for no other reason than we have nothing better to do with our time since we don't want to get a real job. And then there is the appeal to greed. Why sell your story for a few weeks when you have the potential to sell it for years or decades with a little more effort?

Yes, if you wait long enough for something to happen, it is true that eventually something will. The problem is that this something will be under the control of someone else. For the writer this often translates into cliché. And while a mastery of plot is not everything, it is one-third of everything and cannot be overlooked.