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This workshop was borne out of necessity. I had been teaching my ongoing Monday night workshop for years, and was growing frustrated that the class had become a bit of a social event, and that some of the writers were taking years to complete the first drafts of their novels. They were having a blast in class, but it was apparent that (for a few of them, at least), this was the extent of their writing for the week. Although I encouraged them to write their first drafts quickly, there was no system in place to support this goal. I gave them deadlines, but it didn’t make a difference. One morning while I was sitting quietly (I like to meditate, or rather, I do meditate) and reflecting on how I had achieved my initial success as a writer, I realized that when I began to write my first drafts quickly, allowing the story to surge through me, without censoring myself, my work tended to be more alive.
It came to me quickly: The 90-Day Novel. We will all start together. We will do it as a group, and we will hold ourselves (and each other) accountable for our daily page count. We will support and encourage each other through the process. We can still have fun, and connect with other creative people who are serious about their work, but we will do this under a very real time-constraint.
I put out the word and the workshop filled up quickly. I rented a space at the Black Dahlia Theater on Pico Boulevard, while wondering to myself if this was going to work. Some of these people had never written before, while others had struggled for years on the same story, and now I was suggesting that they write a first draft of their novel in three months. I feared I might be setting them up for disappointment, but I decided to throw myself into it, and leave the results to the gods.
What happened next was interesting. There was this weird sort of giddiness in the group. They didn’t talk about how difficult it was. They looked at me with a sense of wonder and asked, ‘isn’t this impossible?’ And I thought to myself… um, yeah. And it struck me that when we are confronted with the impossible, we let go of our expectations, and that’s when miracles tend to happen. We have no choice but to surrender to our unconscious, and we allow our genius to take over. When the focus shifts from ‘will it be good?’ to ‘will it get done?’ our unconscious is free to do its work, and that work often bears rich fruit.
The excitement was palpable. We had, as a group, made a contract with our unconscious to complete a task that held a tremendous amount of meaning for us. We communicated daily on the private group page, logging on our word count, and although writing is a solitary act, the willingness of each writer to share their daily victories as well as their private demons created a sense of camaraderie that pulled everyone along in its wake.
Of the fourteen writers who signed up, only two did not complete their first drafts. (One has returned to work with me privately after a 2-year hiccup, and the other dropped out early for personal reasons). Which is to say that virtually every student that signed up finished the first draft of their novel in 90 days!
In Stephen King’s book, On Writing, he says he writes his first drafts in 3 months. I’m told that John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath in 100 days. Over and over, we hear writers talk about the importance of getting the first draft down quickly. What they are saying is that when we write quickly, we tend to bypass our critical voices, and tap directly into our unconscious, to the heart of our story.
THE PROCESS: WRITING FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS
The 90-Day Novel exists as a way of making direct contact with our unconscious. It is so common for writers to have an idea, and get very excited by it, only to become stuck halfway through the first draft. At some point, we begin to doubt ourselves. The story doesn’t seem to want to go where we had envisioned it, and we wonder if we are up to the task.
I spent years going to every seminar and reading every book on story structure and getting frustrated by the dry, academic nature of the approach. It always seemed to me that they were saying, in one way or another, that storytelling was an intellectual process, that it was our job to ‘figure out’ our story. Stories would be analyzed and dissected and held up to the paradigm and we were supposed to then ‘know’ how to write our own story. Story analysis, in and of itself is fine, and can be quite useful as a teaching aid, but how does it help us when we come up against our own specific story problems? Without a specific process, and a means of articulating it in a comprehensive way, a lecture on story can sometimes leave us feeling only greater despair. I used to stare at the blank page and wonder what was wrong with me now that I ‘knew what to do’ and still couldn’t ‘figure out’ how to structure my new story. I could ‘feel’ the story inside me. I had a ‘sense’ of it, and all sorts of images and ideas and characters, and I felt increasingly frustrated that the story within me would never be freed.
STORY STRUCTURE AS AN EXPERIENTIAL MODEL
There is a structure to the universe. From the smallest atom to the forces that move the planets, there is a universal law that we live (whether consciously or not) in a state of surrendered acceptance to. Structure is an intrinsic aspect of our daily lives, not some rigid formula that exists somewhere out there demanding that we conform. Although every blade of grass may share a fundamental structure, each one is unique. Creative people sometimes balk at the notion of structure, because it is so often perceived as formulaic, and no creative person wants to waste their time doing something that has been done before. Except that nothing could be further from the truth. A working relationship to structure will not hamper our imagination: in fact, it will set it free. Once we begin to understand that our story lives fully and completely within us, and that our job is simply to inquire into its ‘nature’, our imagination begins to stretch far beyond our initial idea. And yet, there is a rigor to structure, which is not the same as formula. It is the rigor that allows us to stay connected to that initial impulse, that central issue at the heart of our story. This is where the through-line springs from, the underlying structure that supports our plot.
Everything we need to know about our story, we already know. (I don’t mean specific research, like do Canadians measure temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius? It’s Celsius.) I mean that the ‘nature’ of the relationships, the themes we are consciously or unconsciously wishing to explore, already live within us, and there is a simple process that allows our story to emerge in a clear through-line that leads to a transformation. We are going to allow it to be made conscious, without mucking it up by trying to impose our ‘ideas’ of where we think the story ought to go.
Our desire to write our particular story is not an accident. In fact, we are uniquely qualified to tell it. All of the experiences, the events in our life, the thoughts, ideas, feelings, images, hopes and fears, etc., have conspired to lead us to this place, where we are now ready to tell this story.
SO, WHY DID I HAVE TROUBLE BEFORE?
Well, it doesn’t help that we live in a left-brain society that doesn’t exactly reward the creative impulse. We have been trained to second-guess ourselves, to live in fear, to be more interested in the result than the process. We are not encouraged to be curious, so it’s difficult to really get quiet and inquire when our ‘fight or flight’ mechanism is on high alert. In Ireland, artists are not required to pay taxes. In France, writers are treated with reverence. Can you imagine in this country, bright Billy telling his folks, ‘Well, I waffled between med school and law school, but I think what I really want to spend my life working at is writing tone poems.’
There is this attitude that if you’re not great at something right out of the gate, then you shouldn’t bother. This type of thinking prevents countless creative people from ever getting started, and can hinder even the boldest among us. Quite simply, the desire to write is connected to the desire to evolve. We are here to express ourselves. Creativity is not an occupation. It is our birthright. It is a way for us to make meaning of our lives, to reframe our relationship to our world, to communicate the deepest aspects of ourselves.
START WHERE YOU ARE
The 90-Day Novel attracts all sorts of people, from award-winning authors and journalists looking to deepen their relationship to structure, to people who may have never written a word before, and are seeking a framework to get their story onto the page. Regardless of one’s experience, the process is the same. Our job is to start where we are, and begin to build a body of work. When we drop all of our preconceptions about what good writing is, and we give ourselves permission to write poorly, something wonderful tends to happen. We become a channel for the story that wants to be told through us, and our work has a chance to live. Rather than impressing with our important writing, we can impress with our willingness to be truthful and specific on the page.
IMAGINING THE WORLD OF OUR STORY
The first step is simply imagining the world of our story. When we attempt to ‘plot out’ our story, we may likely find ourselves writing our ‘idea’ of our story. It’s not that our idea is wrong. It is just that it is probably not the whole story. The whole story resides in our unconscious, and when we allow our unconscious a period of time to play and explore, our characters tend to spring to life and surprise us with where they actually want to go. Imagining the world means imagining our characters in relationship to each other and scribbling down the images, ideas and fragments of dialogue that emerge. I have created a lengthy series of stream-of-conscious writing exercises that have proven to be helpful in allowing the world of the story to emerge. If we are writing what truly interests us, there will be conflict.
CONFLICT
Conflict is the basis of drama. As we imagine the world of our story, we are naturally drawn to those ‘charged moments’, large and small. We are not going to be drawn to what our hero had for breakfast, unless say, he’s on death row and it is his final meal, or he is eating breakfast when he gets the call that his best friend has just won the lottery and wanted to call and thank him for gifting him with the ticket.
All we need to do at this stage in the process is scribble down very quickly whatever ideas and images come to us. It is thrilling to sit in front of the page and allow ideas and images to accumulate without having to immediately force them into our ‘idea’ of our story. We want to give ourselves a short period of time to just explore these budding scenarios without making premature demands on a plot. As we remain curious and continue to write, more questions emerge, and a world begins to appear before us.
Let’s be clear: at this stage, we are not writing our novel (or memoir), nor are we even outlining our story. We are simply allowing our right-brain, that hemisphere that makes connections we will only comprehend in retrospect, an opportunity to play. Without this initial step, outlining the story can become an exercise in limiting our options. We never want our ‘idea’ of our story to get in the way of letting our character’s live. There may even be times when it seems like we are going in the wrong direction. Rather than panicking, we can inquire into the ‘nature’ of our experience, and be curious about where this experience exists in the world of our story. As we allow our characters to live, we are able to explore the vastness of their choices.
HOLDING IT LOOSELY
Again, we are not structuring our story yet. We are just allowing our mind to wander around in the world of our story, and writing down whatever emerges.
For example, let’s say I begin with the most bare bones of an idea: I want to write a love story set in New York. I might wonder where these two people live, what their backgrounds are, and how they are going to meet. Hmmm. OK. Jack lives on the Upper East Side and Jill lives in The Bronx. Hmmm… I like that. That feels interesting. What else? Well, how do they meet? What if she is a bank robber and he is a lawyer? Maybe. What else? Well, he could be a banker. Possibly, but it feels sort of obvious, and like Elmore Leonard has done that construction a million times. What if they meet in an elevator? And the power goes out? Hmmm. I kind of like that. What if they are on their way to divorce court, they are both getting divorces and they meet at their divorce trial? Oh wow, where did that come from? What if it is two couples and they start dating the other one’s former spouse immediately following their respective divorces. Ooh, that’s interesting – it brings up the question – did the marriage fail because of her or him? Whose fault is it? Or were they just poorly matched? Hmm… I like that.
So… I just scribbled that down in about four or five minutes – completely random, playing on the page. I just want to give you a sense of the experience of allowing our imagination to wander and putting it all down on the page.
If I were to continue writing, the premise might shift into all sorts of different directions. I am simply going where my curiosity leads me. We must trust our curiosity. It is energetic. The moment we get tight and are ‘forcing it’, we are out of our story. One of the great challenges of this process is allowing ourselves to accept the level of joy and satisfaction that often accompanies it. We are writing very quickly – allowing ourselves to dream on the page, holding it loosely, letting the world shift and change as it pleases.
FROM THE GENERAL TO THE SPECIFIC
When we hold our ‘story’ loosely (can we even call it a story at this point?), we can move very quickly, discarding one idea for another. Can you imagine if I decided early on that Jill was a bank robber and then started writing my novel? I would have eliminated the possibilities that followed. I would have immediately narrow my options. And frankly, that is not the story I wanted to tell. It may have been my original ‘idea’ of the story - bank robber and banker, but, in fact, what was really interesting me was the ‘nature’ of an antagonistic romantic relationship, and for my purposes, it may be more effective if I have two newly divorced couples and they swap. The ‘nature’ of the relationship has not changed, but the premise feels stronger as a means of exploring this question (that I was not even conscious of a minute earlier).
There is enormous value to imagining the world of the story. We don’t have to waste weeks and months going down a dead end, writing hundreds of pages about a banker and his nefarious sweetheart, only to realize that our interest is waning. When we move from the general to the specific, we are fall less inclined to write six hundred pages only to discover that our story is lacking a worthy antagonist. (Trust me on this – only it was more like a couple of thousand pages).
Our unconscious is really good at doing one thing. It wants to make order out of chaos. And so, our job is to give it conflict, it will begin to work overtime. It will work in our sleep, attempting to make order. And the most general place to start is imagining the world. We just give ourselves a short while to investigate, and as a sense of the world begins to reveal itself, we begin to inquire into the structure questions.
THE STRUCTURE QUESTIONS
The structure questions are designed to invite up images from our unconscious at key points in our hero’s journey. The thinking is that if we ask experiential, universal questions, we will, over time, begin to see the framework of a story emerge. This takes a little while, but it can be quite thrilling to see a story emerge that lives beyond our ‘idea’ of the story we may have been struggling with for months, years, even decades. As we continue to inquire, a through-line begins to reveal itself, a beginning, middle, and end. Nothing is forced through this process. Some of the images that emerge may seem wildly disconnected from each other in the early stages. You might think, ‘how on earth is my hero going to go from driving a truck in Memphis to singing on the Ed Sullivan Show?’ But as we continue to inquire into the structure questions, and we hold our story loosely, the story becomes more specific.
The structure questions can provide us with objectivity. We may have gotten stuck in the past because we were attempting to write ‘our story’. Even if it was fiction, it was still our ‘idea’ of the ways things should go. The structure questions open us up to our unconscious, that deep knowing that stretches our imagination beyond the personal to the universal, places that might feel a little too exotic and frightening, and just plain ‘not nice’ to our well-brought-up selves. I sometimes watch writers limit their stories by judging their characters, as if human beings ever navigated the world through logic. I’ve seen writers kill the conflict in their stories with statement like, ‘well, I can’t have him cheat on his wife, if he got caught the consequences would be dire.’ Great! Let them be dire! Get excited by the conflict in your story, the impossible situations our characters find themselves in.
DON’T EVERY WORRY ABOUT PUTTING YOUR CHARACTERS INTO SITUATIONS THAT YOU CAN’T ‘FIGURE’ A WAY OUT OF.
It is not your job to figure it out! Trust that your unconscious will find a way to resolve it for you. Remember, story is not linear. Allow yourselves to be surprised by the wildness of your characters choices. Our job is to stay connected to what it is that our hero wants, and to simply ‘support’ whatever actions result. Of course there is nothing logical about infidelity, high-speed chases, falling in love, climbing Everest, or committing high treason, but these things happen every day.
THE OUTLINE
As we explore the structure questions, while continuing to imagine the world of our story, a series of images begin to appear. There is not yet a clear distinct through-line, but what there is, is a connection to the source, a sense that our characters are not merely functions of a plot, but are really, truly alive. As we continue to imagine, we may wonder ‘how on earth does my character get from Portugal to France’, or, ‘I had no idea he spoke Spanish’, or, ‘wow, why would she ask for a divorce when she just learned that she was pregnant?’ We don’t try and figure out how to connect all of these scenes. We relax and we allow our unconscious to do the work. We trust the images that are revealed to us. Storytelling is a right-brain activity. The moment we attempt to come up with ‘logical solutions’ to human behavior, we are out of our story.
EVERYONE’S PROCESS IS DIFFERENT
There are no rules. I don’t ever want to impose a way of working for a writer. My job is to facilitate you in finding the story that lives within. However that happens for you is valid. The creative process is as mysterious and personal as each one of us. It is about continually being willing to trust our instincts, even in the face of our own self-doubt. Some people feel comfortable with a thorough outline before writing the first draft. Some people want to outline very little, and begin with the ‘loosest’ sense of where the story wants to take them. Ultimately, the choice is yours. Some writers don’t outline at all, while others only claim not to, though upon questioning, I’ve discovered these are often the seasoned writers for whom structure has become second nature, and although they’ve been imagining the story for a while, they just haven’t written an outline down on paper. Norman Mailer thoroughly outlined his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, making him a literary sensation at age 24. He says he didn’t bother to outline his second novel. Can you remember its name? Me neither.
Within this process, I want to allow some space for each of you to find your own rhythm. What I want to impart to you are principles. The specifics of how you choose to apply them will be discovered and refined by you over time.
WRITING THE FIRST DRAFT
After we have spent the first four weeks (five classes) imagining the world and allowing an outline to emerge, we begin to glimpse the difference between our idea of our story, and the truth of our story. Armed with a sense of the beginning, middle and end, we can begin writing our first draft. We are going to write the first draft quickly, and we are not going to stop to try and fix or correct our story along the way. Our goal is to continue moving the story forward and to get to the end. When we stop to rewrite, we tend to become self-conscious and get stuck. Let’s get to the end of the first draft before approaching the rewrite.
We are going to do this in a modular fashion, meaning that we are going to set small goals for ourselves based on the plot points from our outlines. We will write to these goals each week, and in that way, we will reach the end of our first draft by day 90. Whew. Breathe.
Weekly Topics
Here is a quick overview of the topics covered.
Week 1: Imagining the world of the story
Week 2: Story Structure
Week 3: Transformation
Week 4: Diamond Dogs story analysis
Week 5: Beginning/Inciting Incident
Week 6: Antagonists
Week 7: Decision
Week 8: False hope/success of hero’s ‘idea’
Week 9: Commitment
Week 10: Suffering
Week 11: Surrender
Week 12: Action
Week 13: Choice/Freedom
Week 14: Endings
Over the course of 90 days, the topics discussed will include:
- Story structure as an experiential model
- The secret to writing constructive outlines by utilizing stream-of-consciousness writing exercises + a series of other proven techniques that allow the story to emerge.
- Exploring the ‘universal dilemma’ (dramatic question) at heart of the story
- Using your fear as an ally (writing from a place of jeopardy)
- Developing memorable characters
- Writing compelling dialogue
- Subtext (secrets to writing driving narrative)
- Theme (what is this thing really about?)
- Developing a powerful ‘want’ for the hero
- Clarifying the protagonist’s need
- Protagonists and Antagonists (The art of conflict – clue: they want the same thing!)
- How to write a compelling opening
- Showing, not telling
- Dramatizing exposition
- Disguising back-story
- Layering information (conflating scenes)
- Building tension
- Raising the stakes through your second act
- Developing ‘turning points’
- Climax (the secret to writing an unforgettable battle scene)
- Tying up loose ends
- Bookends (beginnings and endings)
- Transformation (the ‘magic’ of story)
- And much more…
- Point of view (First person or Third person?)
- Beginnings (Why is this day unlike any other?”
- Endings (Order is restored)
- Humor (Finding humor within drama, and vice versa)
- How to overcome writer’s block (Decade-long blocks vanish instantly)
- The art of story creation (moving from the general to the specific)
- Making your story more dynamic (exploring opposing forces)
- Blind spots (everyone’s got ‘em – and how to gain clarity)
- Our hero’s story is our own.
- You are uniquely qualified to write your book (Here’s why!)
- Get to the end (Before you rewrite)
- But that’s how it happened in real life! (Not a good enough reason to put it in the book!)
- Becoming willing to write the forbidden
- Battling procrastination
- The anarchist within
- Making the impossible possible
- Act 3: The hero accepts the reality of his situation
- We are not alone (allowing external forces to inform your story)
- Disguising coincidence
- The paradox of the ending (we fear what our soul craves)
- Character is structure (the marriage of plot and character)
- Making the reader care
- Exploring the primal forces that bring your work to life
- Exploring your back-story
- The scientific advantage of writing longhand
- Your ‘idea’ of your story is not the whole story
- The value of writing quickly
- Fact versus fiction (The how’s and why’s of cannibalizing our real lives)
- Is it memoir or fiction?
- Can I tell my secrets?
- Acknowledging the source (At the heart of every story is the betrayal of a lie!)
- Building conflict (Characters behave uncharacteristically)
- The ruthless detachment of the writer
- Making writing a habit
- We are not doing this alone (The writer is a channel)
- Giving yourself permission to write poorly
- Surrender
- Choice
- The 3 Secrets to completing your first draft (95% of writers never do – here’s why you will)
- The ending informs the beginning
- Finding the story within
- Writing the first draft (Here’s why you cannot make a mistake!)
- We are the authority over our work
- And much, much more…
There is no better time than this moment to commit to your dream. I look forward to working with you.
Best,
Your fellow writer, Al Watt |
