The post This one thing will help you finish your story appeared first on Randall Floyd.

The other day I set out to type at 55 words a minute, finish 4 chapters, and get 6600 words on the page … all in two hours.

I failed.

Now, before I get into all of my wonderful excuses for why I didn’t type, let me impart some knowledge that I picked up after my failure at typing faster than I have my entire life.

It matters what time you go to bed.

I wanted to spend some fun time with my wife at the movies last Tuesday night, so we went to Regal cinemas and saw a movie. It started at 7:20, so I thought I would be just fine on time.

I checked my watch after I walked into the front door and realized that it was after 10:00, my designated bedtime. It was definitely worth getting home a little after 10. It was a great movie (we saw Wonder) and I had an awesome time with my lovely wife.

When I finally got into my covers, however, the clock read 11:45 …

Nonplussed, I decided to keep my schedule and try to get up at 4:25 a.m. the next morning.

When I woke up at 7:45 I knew I’d been a little too ambitious for my own good.

At lunchtime for work that day I didn’t even want to start typing though and try to at least make up some of the time. It was too daunting. So, here is the first thing that threw me off my rather lofty goal.

#1 – Falling behind early can kill your chances of getting started

You’ve probably read this somewhere, and if that’s the case, you probably should have sent me an email that my goal was too big.

You didn’t, and I blame you for all of my problems.

Especially the ones that don’t have anything to do with getting six books finished up … but I digress.

What killed me this morning was the fact that I had to type for 2 hours, which meant I had to do some serious planning for my chapters, which meant I probably needed like 3 hours of time to do my typing.

Waking up at 4:25 gives me roughly 2 and a half hours. I get the third hour in during my lunchtime at work.

By the time my lunch time came around, I’d already given up the ghost for the day on trying to get some typing done. My brain, body, heart, and desire all told me, in roughly the same way, that typing for the day was a lost cause.

So, guess what I did … I listened to them. (There is a silver lining to this that I’ll bring up at the end.)

All told, since my goals looked impossible, I didn’t even want to start once I’d gotten off to a late beginning.

#2 Your ability to function at a high level could get impacted … and not in a positive way

The second day, this morning, I tried the same goals, but this time I actually got to start typing before the sun was even thinking about coming up.

I put on my headphones, turned on the tunes, got my timer out, pulled up the old word-processor, and took a deep breath. I was ready to go, or so I thought.

I briefly thought about my goal of 55 words per minute, and as I did so, I felt my heart rate pick up. Then I felt a tingling in my fingers, and a small voice in the back of my head started saying things to me.

It took me a moment, but I realized that I was completely stressed out.

I hit the start button on my timer and took off typing. But, just before my typing sprint, I decided to change my tactics. Actually, I decided to stop doing the writing sprints completely.

Instead, I decided to type until my chapter was completed.

The result was a really quick start and a really slow finish. I wasn’t able to keep my momentum up, and I could actually feel myself dragging about halfway through the chapter.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I had actually been typing 55 words per minute at some point, but my stress had caused me to change my tactics (because of a serious amount of self-doubt) and caused me to burn out.

So, does that mean you should never set out unachievable goals?

Probably not.

If I hadn’t set out to type those words so fast, I wouldn’t be anywhere near where I am in my story right now. It’s probable I wouldn’t have even started writing yet.

If you’re going to shoot for the moon, then I say go for it.

Just understand that getting discouraged stressed, and feeling some anxiety are going to happen. But guess what?

It’s normal. So acknowledge those facts, and then move on with shooting for the moon!

The post 2 reasons why setting ridiculous goals might hurt your ability to get stuff done appeared first on Randall Floyd.

Have you ever found yourself with a difficult decision to make? Now, think about how stressed out you were when you made that choice.

Why were you so stressed?

What kinds of pressures were you facing?

What made your decision so difficult?

Did you put off making a decision until the last possible moment?Remember how you felt at that moment, right before you made your decision. This point in your life, in the language of storytelling, is called the crisis.

We all have crisis points in our life, and they vary in degrees of severity. But usually, we can remember them with great clarity. It turns out that in your stories, fiction or non-fiction, the biggest parts, the most memorable scenes, revolve around these crisis points.

I’ve read a bunch of books on writing. In most of them, online and elsewhere, for whatever reason, the authors fail to drive home the importance of having crisis points.

This is a travesty.

If every writer knew what the crisis was, and how every single person, EVER, can relate to a well-crafted crisis, and how to craft one in each scene of their book, his or her writing would be 100x better. Add to that the huge uptick in reader interest, and you have a very important tool in your belt.

Everything hinges on the crisis.

In theory, the crisis is a very simple thing: a question.

How your character responds to that question tells the reader a whole lot about the character.

However, not every question is a crisis. Let me lay it out for you.

The crisis is going to be one of two things. It’s either (1) a best-bad-choice scenario, or (2) an irreconcilable good situation.

In the best bad choice scenario, the main character is forced to choose between two bad situations. Neither situation will be good for the main character. She is forced to choose between two outcomes that are going to seriously hurt.

Taking a real-life example, think about a couple that’s been married for years. For whatever reason, I’m sure you could come up with one, things in their relationship aren’t going well.

They’ve tried counseling, job changes, more date nights, less time together, couple’s massage, but things aren’t getting better. Then they have an argument. It’s over something small, but it blew up in both their faces.

The husband goes to the bar, and the wife calls up her sister. After the dust settles, neither one of them can look at the other.

Let’s just add one more complication – they have 2 preschool-age children.

This is a crisis point. The couple has two choices – split up or stay together. How they split up, or how they stay together don’t really matter at this point. However, the stakes are clear. There is no good choice in this one.

If they stay together, each one of them is going to drown in discontent. Other things are going to happen that will drive the two of them even further apart.

If they separate, both of them will be able to go their own ways, but now they have to think about how they are going to split up time with the kids. They’re going to now have two separate households, and their expenses are going to increase … probably double.

No matter what the couple chooses, it’s a bad choice.

Now, this particular crisis point may not be all that compelling, but it really drives home the point that the couple is at a complete cross-roads. They have to make a choice … and not making a choice happens to be making a choice.

Show me the [irreconcilable] goods.

The other kind of crisis your characters will face involves two good outcomes. Each outcome is, shocker, good for someone. The kicker here is that these good things are at odds with each other.

The good things can’t both happen – it’s physically impossible.

One of those things is good for the hero, and bad for everyone else, while the other choice is bad for the hero, but good for everyone else.

In another real-life example, let’s look at a soldier in the middle of a firefight. His squad is surrounded, and their heads are down. The only thing keeping them from dying is a large rock giving them cover.

The team is quickly running out of ammunition, and things are looking dire. The squadron leader, looking for an escape route, can’t find anything that would help. He radios air support, and a bomber drops a small payload on the enemy, opening up a small gap in the attack.

If he goes, he’ll probably make it out alive, but there’s not enough time for the rest of the squad to get out. He thinks about his wife and kids at home. Suddenly, leaving his men to see his family again gets really tempting.

Then he looks back at his men. He’s hit with a realization – he might be able to save his men. The result, however, is that he’s going to die. The only way to get his men out of there is to distract the enemy with something big.

What’s the squad leader going to do?

It doesn’t really matter – not when it comes to the crisis. The point is that he has to make a choice.

The leader’s choice is between two good things. He can save his life, or he can save the lives of his men.

Now it’s your turn.

Let’s go to “The Son of Neptune,” and see how the crisis of the first scene plays out.

Cornered, Percy Jackson (a demi-god) has to choose between fighting two gorgons (Medusa’s sisters) in his weakened state or jumping down a mountainside.

<What kind of crisis is this?

If you chose irreconcilable goods, then you’re wrong.

This is a best-bad-choice scenario. Neither choice is good for Percy. Both of them could end up in death to the hero – one is death by monster, the other is death by falling a really long way and landing without a cushion.

As you can see, the crisis isn’t that long. But the length doesn’t matter. It’s the magnitude of your crisis that hooks your readers in.

Whatever your crisis is, all it takes is some time to give your reader clarity about what the two choices are. Once the crisis is all worked out, you can move on to the highest point of action in your scene – the climax.

This article is number three in a five-part series on writing great scenes. Here is part one, and here is part two.

The post Essential story element #3 – The Crisis appeared first on Randall Floyd.

A few years back, I found a podcast. It was a well-done show, and the guy doing most of the speaking goes by the name of James. I found what he was talking about very interesting.

I began taking notes.

I took so many notes I filled seven pages in my legal-sized notebook — front to back.

That was for the first 15 minutes.

I heard lots of things that probably should have changed my life. I made plans, plotted out dates to accomplish those plans, and made a decision, right then and there, to “choose myself.”

All told, I probably spent an hour and a half going through this stuff.

It was bliss, and I was ready to change the world, and, probably, more importantly, my life.

Then an alarm went off on my phone. The timer I’d set had just run out. It was time to hit the sack and get a good night’s sleep.

I couldn’t have timed the completion of my little excursion into the recesses of my mind any better.

There was just one problem.

That timer wasn’t supposed to tell me when to go to sleep. Nope, it was supposed to tell me when my practice test was supposed to end.

I was studying for the bar exam, and the biggest exam of my life was the very next week.

Somehow, I’d managed to get distracted again.

I’ve heard lots of stories about people who seem to have a natural ability to do something. I’ve seen natural piano players, athletes, readers, bakers, and eaters.

Apparently, I’m a natural at getting distracted.

I don’t even have to practice. Usually, it happens like this.

I start doing something important since I put it off until the last moment. I get into it, and really dig in. Something about having imminent deadlines really galvanizes my mind, body, and spirit.

But, inevitably, I start getting that itch, usually behind my left ear.

It always happens right about the time the thing I’d been dreading doing, and the reason I put off taking care of my “deadline-pending-the-next-day” task in the first place, is staring at me in the face.

Suddenly, the thing I know I should be doing becomes much less fun. That galvanized feeling usually dissipates, and I start looking around for other things that catch my fancy.

It’s quite the cycle, and without fail, it happens every. single. time.

It comes off super sinister, like the big bad wolf and red riding hood. Like something inside of me doesn’t want me to hit my deadlines, to succeed, to do anything good with my life.

Check that … It almost seems like this cycle doesn’t want me to do anything. period.

Eventually, when I finally took time to notice this was a pattern of mine, I started asking questions.

“What gives?” is usually the one I started with.

I dug in, trying to figure out what exactly gives, and the answer hit me in the face.

It hurt.

This consistent distraction circle actually has a source and a meaning. The source is my inner Jiminy Cricket. Only, it feels much less like a conscience, and much more like somebody much bigger and stronger than me, like Bill Gates, is pulling me away from the stuff I needed to do.

The meaning goes much deeper.

It turns out that this need to “distract” myself, has a much less sinister purpose than what I’d initially thought.

I’ll illustrate with a story (mostly fictional):

A while back, I was having dinner with my great-aunt Bettie. We were in the middle of Montana, in the middle of summer.

It was hot.

We were having a grand old time eating brisket in an old log cabin, in 110-degree weather, without air conditioning.

Did I mention it was hot?

Well, she gets up and walks to the kitchen to get the lemonade out of the fridge, when all of the sudden she falls over.

Granted the woman was old and rickety, and she was prone to falling over occasionally, I still feared the worst. At that point in my life, I’d never seen an actual dead person.

Being the gentleman I was, I cautiously approached the old woman. Cautiously, I called her by name.

That did it. She immediately got up and started rubbing both her knees. “Darn this arthritis!” she shouted, to go along with a couple of old-fashioned country cuss words.

The next day, we were hit with one of the biggest rainstorms in the history of Montana.

It took me a few years to figure out the significance of this event — even though it was mostly fictional. Apparently, the storm and my great-aunt’s arthritis were connected.

There happens to be a direct connection between flares up in arthritic joint pain and temperature drops of more than 10 degrees, drops in barometric pressure, and even rain.

My great-aunt’s knees were the harbinger of that massive storm that may or may not have happened.

I guess that’s why my great-aunt, as soon as she recovered (which was just took a few minutes) went outside and “battened all the hatches” on the farm and the house.

Looking back at this experience, it makes complete sense. Auntie had learned that her pain actually told her that the weather was going to change.

Distractions work in much the same way.

They are, in effect, the harbingers of greatness. You just need to recognize them for what they are.

Looking back at those times I’ve suffered from acute episodes of distractedness, I tried to find a pattern, some kind of similarity between the events.

It turns out, all I had to do was take a step back and squint my eyes a bit. Then, oddly enough, things started falling into place.

The first thing I noticed was that the distraction itself wasn’t all that important. Really, the substance of the distractions didn’t matter one bit. To the contrary, the more I looked at those distractions, the more difficult analyzing them became.

I had to look beyond those distractions, and really look at what I was doing when that distraction reared its ugly head.

This is where the magic started happening.

Every single time I was getting distracted, it was because I was on the brink of breaking through on something.

Going back to my bar exam struggles, I was right in the middle of trying to figure out secured transactions law. If you don’t know what secured transactions are, that fine, even attorneys that practice secured transactions law have difficult.

Imagine trying to shove your head into a hole the size of your fist. Now, imagine you actually did manage to get your head through the hole without traumatic brain injury. Here comes the hard part: you need to now get your head out of the hole.

That’s essentially how I felt when I was trying to learn secured transactions. It was brutal. I kept banging my head, trying to figure it out. Eventually, I got distracted. Little did I know, that the next time I sat down and actually tried to learn secured transactions, it clicked.

Time and time again I’ve noticed that those times when doing something else, instead of doing that thing you’re dreading, signals you’re about to break through.

But, in many cases, it’s not only signaling a breakthrough but something even better. I’m talking about serious personal growth here.

Distractions are necessary. We need to have them. Sometimes they help us decompress. Sometimes they get our mind of really painful stuff.

But deep down, we were given these distractions for the same reason my great-aunt was given arthritis.

We need them to succeed.

The post The Art of Getting Distracted appeared first on Randall Floyd.

I slogged through the entire novel, and it was tough. The action didn’t build like a well-written book is supposed to, the ending didn’t hit me as right.

When I finished reading the thing, I found that nearly every single thing I liked about novels was missing.

The book would have been a huge disappointment if I were reading for entertainment purposes. But, I wasn’t.

When I picked up the book to read it, I had committed myself to a single rule: read this book until you find a grammatical mistake.

At the end of the book, I sat back in my chair and let out a breath of air. The author had done it. I couldn’t find a grammatical mistake anywhere. It was a thing of beauty – something that would make my 10th grade English teacher beam with pride.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book was garbage, but I say that in the nicest way possible.

You see, my reading exercise had two purposes. The first thing I wanted to do was see if it was possible to write a story with no grammatical errors.

Check.

The second thing I was looking for was whether or not the book, through free of typos and other mistakes, followed the rules of storytelling.

That was a resounding “No.”

The author of this novel, while well-intentioned, had fallen into one of the most common traps I see when editing novels.

Time after time, writers fail to write a book that words before they start fixing minor errors.

It’s a completely natural thing to want to do.

The problem is that this is the wrong way to to do things.

I read another story recently, this time I read it because I wanted to have a good read. The book had mistakes in almost every chapter, but I kept reading.

The story was well plotted, and the action built the way it was supposed to. When I got to the end, I once again sat back in my chair and let out another breath of air.

When I see books with errors, I tend to get distracted. I think that’s natural for most people out there. But what I found with this second book, was that because it followed the essential elements of storytelling, I was actually able to forgive the author for the mistakes, because the story was compelling, and it worked wonderfully.

What I learned with this second book was that grammar mistakes are second to following the principles of storytelling.

This is the case every time.

You might have the cleanest, most grammatical book ever written. But if it doesn’t flow the way stories are meant to flow, the book will stink, and nobody, except your high school English teacher, is going to like it.

So, the next time you think you want to start proofreading your book, take a step back and look at your global story. If it doesn’t work, ignore the typos. Figure out why your story isn’t working.

Once you do that, then you can work on the grammar.

The post Nobody Cares about your Comma Splices appeared first on Randall Floyd.

In his book “The Story Grid,” Shawn Coyne calls this the progressive complication. I love his words here too because they do an amazing job explaining what the point of these rising action beats is supposed to do.

The whole point of the rising action scenes is to drive your protagonist to a point where he needs to make a choice he can’t get back from. Each complication adds another layer of difficulty for your hero.

Each time something in this portion of your scene occurs, your character gets to the point of no return, where he needs to choose something.

The most important thing about your rising actions is that each beat needs to up the ante for your protagonist. Things need to get more difficult, whether it’s physically, emotionally, mentally, or any other adverb you can think of.

The whole point is to keep your readers engaged.

If your protagonist has a bunch of random things happen that don’t really make his journey in your story more difficult, your story will turn stale and, shocker, it will be boring and flat. To illustrate the proper use of rising action beats, once again I’ll turn to “The Son of Neptune.”

While Percy is running from the gorgons, we find out several more complicating factors.

The first one is that, since he’s been running for so long, he hasn’t had time to eat or sleep. This makes him weak and much more vulnerable. So, even though the gorgons can’t kill him, it looks like at some point soon he’s just going to break down from sheer fatigue.

Then Percy gets a feeling that he is about to find what he’s looking for. Unfortunately, that thing he’s looking for is way under his feet. You see, Percy is at the top of a mountain. So, getting down to the place he needs to get to will be extremely difficult.

The last beat in the rising action is where Percy gets cornered by his attackers. By themselves, these complications are fairly benign. However, when added together, they create quite the quandary for the hero.

As a matter of fact, this last complication puts Percy in a spot where he has to make a choice he can’t return from. When you get your main character to this point, you know you’ve done your job.

Getting your protagonist to this point is the purpose of your rising action. This question that your character is facing is called the crisis, and I’ll be hitting on that one in my next post.

The post Essential Element #2 – The Rising Action appeared first on Randall Floyd.

The inciting incident has several names, such as the initial conflict, the exposition, the beginning hook, among other things. What you call it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that your scene, your sequence, your act, and your book have one.

The inciting incident is the thing that gets your chapter going. You can think of it as the problem at the beginning of a scene that gets things going. It can come in many different shapes, sizes, and intensities.

You can even think of the inciting incident as a mini-event.

So, in order to give you an idea of what an inciting incident is, I’m going to break down the first chapter of one of my all-time favorite books.

The book is called “The Son of Neptune,” by Rick Riordan. The book is pure gold, and it’s chalk full of great examples of great writing.

The inciting incident in the first chapter of this book is really easy to identify. In typical Rick Riordan fashion, he throws you right into the action. The scene starts off with the hero trying to escape from two gorgons (Medusa’s sisters), and he can’t kill them. However, you quickly find out that they want to kill him.

It’s a great start, and the details Rick Riordan give you to make this particular chase scene more interesting are great.

The protagonist can’t remember anything about his past except for the name of a girl. He’s trying to find something, but he’s not exactly sure what that thing is. And, apparently, he can’t be killed either.

It’s quite the setup, and all of these things end up with huge payoffs later on in the story.

The post The First Element of Story Telling – the Inciting Incident appeared first on Randall Floyd.

Previously

If you don’t have them, even if you’re missing one, your book will not work. Someone is going to read it, and while it will probably be good, something just won’t quite feel right in their gut.

The conversation you might have with this person might go something like this:

You: “Well, what did you think?”

Friend: “It was pretty good.”

An awkward pause ensues. You clear your throat before continuing, trying to figure out why your friend seems to be more interested in the wad of gum on the ground than making eye contact with you.

You: “…and?”

Friend (but now you’re debating this title): “I liked it … but … oh, I don’t know. It was just missing something.”

You, expecting something a little bit more concrete, clear your throat a little louder before speaking: “What was missing?”

Frenemy (no longer loyal enough to be your friend), after another awkward pause: “I can’t put my finger on it, exactly. I just know something didn’t work.”

Then your frenemy screams and runs away because your hard stare burned a hole in her forehead. At that point, you’re left wondering what exactly was missing, or what parts of your story didn’t work.

Since the beginning of time …

What your friend couldn’t articulate, was the fact that your book is missing an essential part of every story.

She just doesn’t know it.

Every person intuitively knows how a story is supposed to work. The human race is defined by the fact that we, as a people, live and die by stories.

Stories shape our decisions, our thoughts, and how we react in a given situation. Not only that, but we tell people stories and listen to stories every single day.

Think about it for a second. How did the first caveman teach his kids about the dangers of the sabretooth tiger? He told them about the time he lost half of his left pinkie when he tried to take food from under the cat’s mouth while it was eating its fresh kill.

We have entire industries built on storytelling. Movies, books, music, theatre.

As mankind has evolved, one way to tell a story developed and remained stalwart. All the great stories have these elements. This story structure is so ingrained in our beings that we don’t even realize that we are evaluating stories based on these elements. It’s why your now frenemy couldn’t place her finger on why your book stunk. She didn’t know, exactly. The story just didn’t feel right.

But don’t worry, all is not lost. I’m going to tell you what those five elements are.

The 5 elements of storytelling are …

Get ready for this:

1. Inciting Incident
2. Rising Action
3. Crisis
4. Climax
5. Resolution

That’s it.

There’s nothing else to your story. If you have an inciting incident that pulls your reader in, they’ll want to read more. Then, take them along the story, making things progressively more complicated for the main character. At some point, things are going to get so complicated, the main character is going to come to a crisis point.

The crisis is simply a question that the main character faces. It’s the major turning point of the story when the hero must choose between two courses of action. One course of action will turn your hero away from his goal, and one will carry him towards it. Once the decision is made, the climax follows.

Your climax is the height of action/suspense in your story. The part of your story where, though your character has made the decision to move forward, it appears that he is going to fail because the odds are just too big for him.

After your hero gets through the climax, you need to show your readers the consequences or fallout of the climactic scene. That’s the resolution.

If you can bring all of these things together, your story will work.

So, the next time someone tells you your story just wasn’t quite right, you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly what you need to do to make it better. Or, better yet, you’ll be able to pinpoint it before your friend, who is no longer your frenemy, will have a chance to read it.

The post 5 Elements of each Story appeared first on Randall Floyd.