What is a story? Is it this:
The alarm went off at seven a.m. I loved Fridays because instead of hitting snooze, I could turn it off for the weekend. I went downstairs and got breakfast, made sure I looked extra nice in case my friends wanted to go out right after school, and sat through class.
When the day was over, I was glad that I made sure I looked great that morning because one of my friends drove around afterward and the guy I’ve been too afraid to talk to all year was in the back seat next to me and we laughed and had fun.
No, of course that’s not a story; that’s Rebecca Black’s song “Friday.” Remember that one? Of course you don’t. It had the lifespan of Chipotle guacamole on an Arizonan’s dashboard and even less flavor. No one remembers that song except the people who made it, and even they don’t want to.
But let’s change it slightly:
The alarm went off at seven a.m. I loved Fridays because instead of hitting snooze, I could turn it off for the weekend. I went downstairs and got breakfast, even though I felt a little sick. I was beginning to think I needed to eat more, and I already knew that without something in my stomach, I’d never make it through my 8 a.m. class. I made myself look extra nice because I really needed the boost.
It worked. I felt a little less nauseous than I had for a week as I sat in my seat. Last night I’d actually thrown up. It was after Bill and I had driven around. The evening was fun and I told him that I thought we may have had too much fun. After a long talk, he asked the big question and I said, “Of course. It could only be yours.” He kissed me and we held hands as he drove me home.
Okay, now we have a story. But wait, there’s more:
My stomach was still as I looked out the classroom window onto Vassar’s campus. I hadn’t told Bill I was a sophomore here because he was in his mid-thirties and successful and I wanted him to think I was the queen he treated me like instead of a princess who wouldn’t even turn twenty until the end of the year. The campus was the most beautiful place in the world…
Sure, it’s a story, but I never said it wasn’t a boring one. But wait, there’s more:
….which must be why he picked out that place to make out with someone else underneath a tree just outside my class. Less than twelve hours after we’d talked about names for the baby. What the actual f—
Now we’ve got a Story. But wait, there’s more:
Doctor Thompson walked into the classroom carrying his leather satchel. It was always an interesting class when he brought that in because he always had tricks to pull out of his bag. As he gave me a quick smile, my morning sickness returned because I felt the weight of the lie I’d told Bill. He wasn’t the only one who could be the father.
Now we have both an entire novel and a sequel to “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by The Police, a song that is still on the radio over 40 years after it came out. All I’ve done is shifted the high school girl to college and have her do more than just stand too close to her professor.
So is that it? Are we done? We could be. (With how rough the text is, we’re obviously not done editing. That’s because we don’t edit in November. November work won’t be perfect. Don’t try to make it that way until December. Let it stand like this or you won’t make it to 50,000.)
We’ve got enough little stories to build a big story out of. We’ve got some characters: a young woman who was smart enough to get into one of the Seven Sisters colleges (which are prestigious counterparts to the Ivy League), but who makes dumb—but human—choices. We’ve got the rest of the book to find out which one is right about her. (Maybe both: in a good character, smart and dumb are often inside the same person.) Does she have the baby and drop out of school? Does she find a way to keep up at a hard school and have the baby at the same time? Does she get rid of or give up the baby? Does the stress of her course load cause her to have a miscarriage and the issue resolves itself? Does she work hard to figure out a way to stay in school while carrying the baby to full term only to have it be stillborn, leaving her so traumatized that she has a nervous breakdown? Or does she find out a couple weeks later when she has her period that her morning sickness was just a reaction to a change in her breakfast cereal and that pregnancy tests aren’t something you want to go cheap on? Were the period she missed and the abdominal pain signs of ovarian cancer? Write and find out. (Or, if you’re a planner, you already know before you wrote this at all.)
We’ve got a professor who is implied to have had an affair with one of his students. (It’s not explicitly said; I just let the reader make the connection between him walking in and her immediately feeling guilty. Let people use their brains every once in a while. Some of them will thank you for it. The rest buy their novels in airports.) Maybe she’s the only one, maybe she’s not. Considering this is written in first person from her perspective, this story isn’t about him, so we don’t know and probably don’t even need to know. Or maybe we find out when she decides to tell him it might be his and he gives her some cash and the address of a doctor who can “fix” it, hinting that this isn’t the first time he’s been in this situation.
We’ve got a man who’s cheating on his girlfriend the day after she told him she was pregnant, so she probably wasn’t his only girlfriend even before then. Want to add another layer to the story? We can do it in one sentence: “The ring on her finger told me he wasn’t going to be divorcing his wife after all.” Or we can get even more creative and change that sentence to, “She wasn’t wearing a ring, so he’s cheating on me with someone who isn’t even the wife he said he was going to be leaving.”
That’s how big stories get built from little ones. It’s also the power of a technique I personally call, “But wait, there’s more!”
This isn’t to be confused with the dumb technique talentless hacks use when they can’t tell the difference between action and story. Michael Bay is the ultimate example of someone who doesn’t understand what “But wait, there’s more” actually means. He’ll have something blow up, then wait, there’s another explosion! And more explosions! But wait, here’s another explosion! After the second thing blows up, forty explosions are the same as none because they don’t mean anything anymore.
“But wait, there’s more” is more like what improv comedians use in workshops. There the idea is, “Yes, and…” It’s a way of never making your reader want to say, “So what?”
When I add books I’ve read on Goodreads, I generally don’t leave reviews other than how many stars I thought it was worth. I’d love to, but the time I’d spend writing one is time I don’t spend reading the next book in the stack. However, if I leave a one-star review, I go out of my way to leave a review. I don’t want to trash something just for the sake of trashing it; if it’s bad I will say why I thought it would be a waste of time for others to read it. For fiction, many of these reviews boil down to “By the time I got to the end, I really didn’t care what happened to the characters.” These books were just chapter after chapter of “So what?” to me. (In some of these, there was the feeling that the book had a lot more to say, but it got squeezed out in the process of meeting a publisher’s arbitrary word count limit.)
The birth of Eileen Wright
I was hacking away on my first NaNoWriMo novel and about halfway through, even I got to the point where I looked at what I was pounding out at the keyboard and thought, “So what?” It was a buddy comedy, and the two buddies were interesting enough, but were running out of steam. So I added one more: a woman who was supposed to walk on for one scene and be forgotten.
I’d spent all October sketching out what I wanted the two guys to be. One was bright and funny and the other was darker and more serious. They made a good pair, but I hadn’t even considered her at all. She wasn’t supposed to happen.
So now that I’m in the middle of November, without the luxury of a month to figure her out, I had to come up with a personality in a hurry. All I knew is that she needed to be seriously injured physically as a counterpoint to Richard, who was seriously injured psychologically as a child.
Okay, so she’s missing an arm. No, wait, if she’s missing a foot maybe I can bring some humor out of him not noticing it right away. (The book was supposed to be more slapstick than it ended up being: her name intentionally sounds like “I lean right,” which should give you some sense of where the book was then.) Great. A foot it is. But so what? I mean, yeah, missing a foot isn’t great, but let’s make it even worse. (But wait, there’s more!)
She wanted to be something that required a foot. A gymnast? An ice skater? Oh, I’ve got it: a dancer! So what? (But wait, there’s more!)
She didn’t want to be just any dancer, but a ballerina. Ballerinas are obsessed with dancing perfectly. So what? Plenty of little girls dream of becoming ballerinas and almost none of them do. (But wait, there’s more!)
She was extremely talented at it and was on her way to stardom. The path of a pro ballerina is way more complex than most people understand or care to, so in this case I did the reverse of “But wait” and took the less-is-more tack of just having her accepted to Juilliard because that’s easy for anyone to understand. I try to be as absolutely realistic as I can with things (the amount of research that goes into something made up is surprising), but sometimes you’ve just got to take an insane process like summer intensives and ballet company pre-pro programs and competitions and all that and just wrap it up into one digestible thing that stands for the whole. People know Juilliard, so they know she’s really good. That’s enough to move on, and now we’re starting to feel really sorry for her. (But wait, there’s more!)
To be even meaner to her, instead of having her grow up struggling and poor and all the usual, worn-out tough girl tropes, let’s give her an ideal life growing up as a rich girl so when her perfect life falls apart, it shatters into shards that make it even a bigger, bloodier fall. (But wait, there’s more!)
How did she lose that foot? Car accident? Boring and overdone. Did it have to be removed after an accident during practice led to an operation that left it horribly infected? Better, but still a bit of “so what?” in there. (But wait, there’s more!)
She lost it after she gave up her sheltered life to serve her country in the Army. She was trying to do a good, noble thing and it came out the absolute worst way possible. For someone like her, death would have meant less suffering. Living a life with all of her dreams taken away with no way to get them back is even worse. Okay, yeah, we don’t need more now. She’s ready.
So after all that cruelty I inflicted on her, I let Eileen walk onto the stage. She quickly became the favorite of all my characters. Instead of the one book that was intended, I’ve written five, all of which have her in it. So will the next one. She’s smart and witty and willful, all characteristics she got from growing up in a wonderful family and making it through an elite boarding school instead of the done-to-death “gritty girl” trend. (Take the sweetness of heart and love of fashion of Alicia Silverstone’s character from Clueless, but replace the airheadness and valley girl speech with a sophisticated, bi-cultural woman who occasionally lapses into her native French.) But the intense focus that made her so gifted also left her somewhat emotionally naive and romantically clueless, and her post-crash trauma and PTSD leave her extremely vulnerable; so much so that she does impressive things on the outside to hide her weakness inside. The things that make her such a complex character wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been the victim of “But wait, there’s more!”
One of the reasons I write is because it lets me see a little more of her world every time I do. I enjoy living in her universe for a while, which is pretty incredible for someone who was supposed to be a disposable character whose only role was to be a woman Richard fell in love with and then lost, never to be heard from again.
That’s what “But wait, there’s more” can do for you in November: you just take a small story and add a small story to it. Cities aren’t made of buildings; they’re made of bricks that make up buildings. You’re the mason who has to say, “But wait, there’s more” and pick up 50,000 bricks in a month.
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