I Hate Prompts

Photo by Mark Monlux

I know that the writing part of "writing a novel" is going to be tough. Leaders in my writing group keep telling me, “Just because you’ve spent your career writing non-fiction, don’t think you can automatically write fiction effortlessly” – and I believe them. I just want to get started writing. I don’t want to do any writing “exercises” or “prompts.” The photo above reminds me of a writing prompt. My friend, Mark Monlux, sent it to me because he wanted to teach me how to post a photo on my blog. The photo rubbed me the wrong way. I have no patience for writing prompts or writing "exercises." Reason being: I already know I'm creative; I already know I know how to string words together. (I hope that doesn't sound smug. I don’t mean it to be. I've just written a ton of stuff -- probably 20,000 dramatic non-fiction/feature articles in my career. For the best primer on writing Dramatic Non-Fiction, see Writing for Story by Jon Franklin.) What I need help in is story structure. That's where I feel lost. I've read a number of books of creating plots and they all leave me flat. I think what I'm going to do is take my writing group out for pizza -- my treat -- and ask them to help me brainstorm a plot from my premise. The other not, we created a three-act plot structure for an idea our instructor brought to class. It was fun -- and pretty darn quick. For $100 for pizza and beer, I could end up with a plot outline. That's a bargain.

Thinking like a storyteller.

There's an episode of the Simpsons in which Homer is charged by Marge with finding a suitable suitor for her sister Selma.  So . . . it gets to the point that Homer's "mission" is all that's on his mind. He interprets everything he encounters in light of that mission. So when he encounters Principal Skinner, a template comes up in his brain: name: Principal Skinner. Positives: Uses big words. Negatives: Possible Homer Sexual. I find that something akin to Homer's situation has become the case for myself. That is, I interpret everything I encounter in terms of Story Theory. What's the conflict here? What's the inciting incident? What are this character's motivations? So . . . as you can imagine I can seem somewhat detached at times. Oh well. My point in bringing this up is this affliction is particularly pronounced when I see movies. (Another writer's example of this phenomenon can be seen in a recent edition of Storyfix.) I often see movies with my pal, Mark Monlux, illustrator extraordinaré.  Last year, we saw Suckerpunch. My son, Matthew tagged along. Below, you will see Mark's comic for Suckerpunch. (You see, he produces a regular strip called The Comic Critic. You should subscribe.) I have appended his strip from Suckerpunch below. (The whole point of this post was for Mark, who is sitting at my elbow, to teach me how to do a blog post with links and attachments.)