Minimum Viable Storytelling
Two Hundred Sixty Eight Words That Turned An Angry Mob
Years ago, I read the perfect explanation to give aspiring writers about the importance of perfecting their craft before calling in every favor they can exploit to get their manuscript/screenplay/proposal into the hands of an agent/editor/publisher/studio executive. It was written by a professional screenwriter, Josh Olson (A History of Violence). It's called I will not read your fucking script.
For experienced book editors/agents/publishers who have themselves put in the work perfecting their own craft (finding stories that will compel people to part with their hard-earned money and invest in a fifteen-hour reading experience), this statement from Olson is especially true:
It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.
Suppose you've read tens of thousands of proposals and manuscripts vetted by other professionals before reaching your inbox. Among those thousands, you've chosen to fight to publish 300 of them in a thirty-plus-year career. In that case, you've earned the right to stop reading after a sentence.
That's right. A sentence. Most editors and agents read far more than a sentence before tossing the proposal in the reject pile, but they don't owe anyone more. Is that harsh?
Let's say you've never studied medicine but always thought you'd be good at it. Would you feel comfortable asking someone you knew who was a surgeon to explain what they do...in terms that a five-year-old would understand...so that you could try laparoscopy? Like, how hard could it be, really? It must be like cutting a steak and then sewing the cut back together. How hard can that be? You've cut lots of steaks in your life.
Why then do amateur writers who don't understand the complex structural and thematic nuances of a well-told prose story think it appropriate to jot something down on a whim and ask their Aunt Mabel to call her old college roommate who has clawed her way into a relatively secure job at a publishing house and ask her to read the first draft of their masterpiece?
I think one of the dazzling qualities of Art—especially a well-told complex story—is that it looks easy and effortless. A great story feels like the writer has crawled inside your head, pulled up an easy chair, and whispered the written words into your ear. That magic seduces all of us. And like the precocious child at a birthday party, we want the magicians to tell us their tricks.
This brings me to the art of writing a nonfiction proposal, a document that can lead to the funding of the worst and best year/s of your life, writing a book.
The advice I offer is not in the realm of trickery. There really are no tricks to fine writing. It's trial and error. It's a long march of mistakes, like playing the piano, cooking, or throwing a slider. But there are pieces of sheet music, books of recipes, and diagrammed finger positions to ground and guide the dedicated. I'll present the equivalent to the aspiring nonfiction storyteller.
A great proposal is about structure and voice. How can a writer structure a proposal so that they can dynamically "show" what they want to create as well as entertainingly "tell" his target reader (agent, editor, etc., not Aunt Millie) how they plan to do it?
As a former agent, I would first tell a potential client with an idea I think could appeal to editors and publishers (notice I didn't write "appeal to book buyers") to open the proposal with a prologue of not more than two thousand words.
The prologue is the SHOW.
The prologue must be equivalent to reading the prose of the final draft …the one after copyediting and proofreading, the one that is given to an interior book designer. The prologue is the entire book boiled down to a single overarching story, with short tangential mini-stories that inform and support the main attraction. The gist, the whole schmagilla, has its own hook, build, break, and payoff.
The prologue has to "turn." It has to take the reader from one place to another. It has to surprise the reader. Done well, a dynamic prologue is crack cocaine to an editor. She will read the proposal straight through if you nail the prologue.
As straightforward as it seems, the prologue is the white whale of a proposal. It will shake you to your core. It will keep you up at night. It will bury you if you are unsure what to SAY. A great story says something. It elicits an emotional response from the reader. Good luck if all you want to do is report a series of logical arguments and convince in your proposal. No one wants to read an argument. They want you to grab them, shake them up, and then turn the story to give them insight. Not just any insight but the revelation that little did they know it, but your book is the one they'll desperately need to publish. If you can't deliver that experience, you should find another idea. Or spend a lot of time learning about storytelling's structure, function, and organization. [The Five Commandments of Storytelling is a great start] Wikipedia and scientific journals are filled with reports and valuable research tools, but they aren't stories. No one sits up all night reading Wikipedia or Bacteriology Today.
It's impossible to do all of that—an overarching main story supported by mini-stories that surprisingly take the reader from one place to another and elicit a predetermined emotional response from the reader—in two thousand words or less.
Right?
Wrong. Here’s an example…
Okay. Say you wanted to write about an event that turned the tide of history. It's a perfect little story about a benevolent King killed by a cabal of ambitious upstarts who pervert the truth to gain power. To get an advance to write the story, you must write a proposal and a dynamite prologue. You ask yourself some questions:
1) What point of view should I feature in the prologue?
Third Person Omniscient?
First-person, from the King's point of view?
First-person, from the leader of the cabal's point of view?
First-person, from the court jester's point of view?
First-person, from the Queen's point of view?
First-person, from a shepherd who witnesses the murder?
2) How can I make the prologue turn?
Maybe the King takes his "friend" out to lunch to thank him for his service and, through the course of the meal, discovers that his friend is there to kill him? The turn would be from loyalty to betrayal? Nah, too reminiscent of Harold Pinter.
It takes you about three months to finally figure out how best to SHOW what you want your book to SAY—
It's from the bible
Ezekiel 25:17
… The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides
By the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men
Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and goodwill
Shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness
For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children
And I will strike down upon thee
With great vengeance and furious anger
Those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers
And you will know my name is the Lord
When I lay my vengeance upon thee
You decide to look at the story from the point of view of a soldier close to the King. Now that the old guy is dead, his ties to the past regime put the soldier in grave danger. He can either kiss the feet of the new guys in power or he can fight. But to fight alone is folly. The stakes for this guy are huge, life or death. If he fails, evil will reign. You decide to have him publicly comment on the death of the King. But you have to "turn" the story so the audience has the same insight that the soldier wishes them to experience.
One writer solved the problem this way:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interréd with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest—
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men—
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
Two hundred sixty-eight words, and my heart's in Caesar's coffin too. I don't know if Shakespeare was inspired by Ezekiel 25:17 when you wrote Julius Caesar, but I was. That's what masterwork stories do for us. They bridge meaning from one seemingly different time to another. They're portals of novelty describing the same eternal forms.