9 Writing Strategies of Authors in the Top 1% transcript

These nine strategies are what the best authors in the world do to write bestsellers and cult classics and books that win awards and books that sell a gazillion copies. And the very first one is don't become a conflict junkie. So we all know that conflict is essential. It's been drilled into our brains by a thousand writing teachers and advice givers. But Ursula Leguin has a different point to make about conflict. Leguin, as you probably know, is the famous fantasy novelist of the Earth Sea series and also of the Left Hand of Darkness.

But she also wrote a book for writers called Steering the Craft which cautions against the overuse of conflict. What she says in that book is no narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Even an element as foundational as conflict isn't enough. It can't do all the things you need it to do in your story. Readers will get exhausted if you just have conflict after conflict after conflict.

And for an example of this, let's look at Underground 6, which is a movie by Michael Bay. And it starts with a 20inute car chase scene. I'm not joking. I'm not exaggerating. It really is that long. And you know what? I've never been so bored by a car chase scene. How can a car chase scene be boring? Somehow he made it boring. I kept on thinking, when will this end? And this is a perfect example of how conflict after conflict after action after action, it starts to become monotonous.

What you want to do in your book is you want to alternate the pleasures of your book, alternating between more conflict heavy scenes and more uplifting or emotionally satisfying scenes. Look at a Stephen King novel like Shaw Shank Redemption. We have the brutal scene where Andy is beaten by Bogs and his gang. Okay, that's plenty of conflict right there. But then we also get these other scenes where Andy is mentoring one of the other inmates and teaching him how to read.

It's very inspiring. It's very heartwarming. So Ursula Luin would say here, and I think I agree with her, that yes, you should work hard on inserting conflict. Absolutely. But you should work just as hard on inserting acts of human goodness and kindness and sacrifice. The next strategy used by the top 1% of authors is number two, show the equation, not the answer. So Andrew Stanton wrote Finding Nebo and Wall-E and all the Tory stories.

Dude is a legendary storyteller and he came up with this advice for fiction writers called the unifying theory of 2 plus two. He says that good storytelling doesn't give you the answer of say four. It gives you the equation the 2 plus two. In other words, give the audience the pieces and have them figure out the answer. For an example of this, let's look at one of his movies, Wall-E. The film never explicitly states that the earth has become inhospitable due to overconumption, environmental neglect.

Instead, what do we see? We see mountains of garbage. We see a lone robot compacting this garbage. We see withered plants and we see abandoned cities. So, we are getting the equation. We're getting the 2 plus two. And we have to figure out, oh wow, Earth has been absolutely wrecked. Now, I will say the unifying theory of 2 plus two, it works just as well for character development. Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games, never comes out and tells us, "Oh, Katniss developed emotional barriers as a survival mechanism." Instead, she shows you the evidence, like Katniss's reluctance to ever cry on camera, or Katniss's very practical approach to romantic relationships, like calculating her survival percentages when choosing between Peeta and Gail.

Now, should you break this unifying theory of two plus two some of the time? Yes, of course you should. Look at Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. She goes ahead and explains certain Chinese cultural concepts that a lot of readers might not get. For instance, the significance of the red candle ceremony and the various meanings of certain Chinese superstitions. But most of the time in your writing, you want to give the reader the equation, the 2 plus two, and let them figure out the answer.

And I talk more about these type of principles in BookFox Academy, my collection of 10 different courses which guide you through the process of writing your novel. I will put the link in the description below. I think you're really going to like this next strategy. It is number three. Create memorable set pieces. So, Alfred Hitchcock built his films around what he called crescendos, which were these big set pieces that really encapsulated the meaning and the entire story in a single scene.

Think of the snake pit in the Raiders of the Lost Ark or that final road chase scene in MadMax Fury Road. Think about the burning oil rig in There Will Be Blood or Paul at Trades riding that sandworm in Dune. Now, those are examples of spectacles. And you might be saying to yourself like, "John, like my novel's a bit of a quieter novel. It doesn't have a big thing like that." That's okay. You can also have emotional set pieces.

Think of the faked O in Harry Met Sally, what she did in that restaurant. Or think of the moment where the couple embraced in the rain in The Notebook. These scenes are also set pieces and they're just working on more of an emotional level than more of a spectacle level. So, let me ask you right now, what is the one image you want to linger in your reader's brain after they finish your book? If you don't have a good answer for that, then maybe you haven't really created a crescendo moment inside your story.

For me, after I read Threebody Problem, there was one scene that really stuck in my brain and it's where this ship is being sliced by a thousand like nano particles and it's literally cutting through it as if cutting through a block of cheese. It stuck in my brain and it really made me like that story better. So, when you're thinking about how to write a big setpiece or crescendo for your novel, here are four pieces of advice.

One, think about how to expose your character in this moment. Indiana Jones is facing his greatest fear of snakes while also pursuing his greatest desire, the Ark of the Covenant. Two, you want to find the tensions in your story. In There Will Be Blood, the greatest success of finding oil, of striking a rich is matched by the greatest failure of the explosion causing his son to go deaf. Three, you want to find the strongest emotions.

With that scene in Harry Met Sally, it's a very strong feeling of embarrassment or maybe laughter. And in the notebook, you find that pristine example of pure love as they unite. And my fourth tip is to aim your story. Figure out early what your setpiece or crescendo is going to be and then aim the whole story toward that. And it's not always a climax. It doesn't have to be a climax. Now, this next tip is very important.

It is number four. It's called sneak in lines of action. So if you have a first chapter which is more of a setup chapter rather than a in media race sort of chapter starting in the middle of the action then you need to have lines of action. The person who came up with this term is Patricia Heismith who is the author of a whole bunch of novels but you probably know or at least have heard of the talented Mr. Ripley. She defines lines of action as potential action in your novel.

You don't actually have something happen but you're alluding to the fact that it will happen soon. So lines of action would be the desire of a character for something they don't yet have because we sort of intuitively understand they're going to try to get that thing. That action is coming soon. Or say the plan of one character to take a trip in the future. There's no trip yet. There's no action, but we're looking forward to that action happening.

Another line of action would be the mention of some kind of danger in the near future. It could be termites or it could be an earthquake. For an example of this, look at Agatha Christies. and Then There Were None. The beginning of the novel isn't particularly exciting. It's 10 different people all traveling independently toward Soldier Island. But there's lots of potential action because we're wondering what's going to happen when they get to this place.

What's going to happen when they all meet each other? And what is the purpose behind why they're going there? Spoiler alert, it's a mystery novel, so there are some murders. Now, here's an advanced version of this technique. You can also have quiet lines of action. Say you start your story off and everything's great. Main character's happy. Home life is great. work life is great. They're singing in the rain. They're skipping out the door.

What are you thinking as a reader? You're thinking, "This can't last. Like, something bad is about to happen to you. I just know it." And you're right. Right. So, there's a potential line of action by showing all this good stuff because we know the bad stuff is coming. Not a lot of writers know about this next technique, but I think it's foundational to story writing. It is number five. Balance the outer story and the inner story.

This piece of advice comes from Ron Carlson, author of a whole bunch of novels, but he also wrote a craft book called Ron Carlson Writes a Story. Now, he defines the outer story as the details of the world, the actions, the events, all the externals. And he defines the inner story as what is going on in the hearts and the minds of your characters, emotions, psychologies, memories, thoughts. So the danger is that if you only show the outer story, then we're not getting any sense of this character's inner life, their true self.

On the other hand, there's also a danger to showing too much of the inner story. So we're sort of trapped inside this character's head, and we're not getting any external action moving the plot forward. So a book that balances the outer story and the inner story really, really well is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. There's such a contrast between her outward compliance, oh well I'll do whatever you tell me to do, and her inner rebellion.

Her inner story is her strong memories of the past and grief for her daughter. But outwardly, she's just complying with all the patriarchal rules. Now, the most common mistake that fiction writers make when they try to do this is that they think of the outer story and the inner story as two parallel lines running side by side, but they're not really overlapping with each other. So, as a writer, you're thinking, "Oh, let me write the outer story.

Okay, now let's switch. Now, let's do the inner story." What Atwood does so well, and what I think the top percent of fiction writers out there do so well, is that they blend together both really seamlessly, often in the same scene, switching between outer story and inner story back to outer story back to inner story. So, maybe just do a litmus test on your novel and ask yourself, do I tend to write more outer story or do I tend toward write more inner story?

How can I balance that better in my book? This next strategy that the most successful authors in the world use is number six. Exaggerate your character. Orson Scott Card is famous for his Ender Game series, but he's also the author of a small craft book called Characters and Viewpoints. And this is the advice he gives when building characters. You take a human trait and then you make it a little or sometimes a lot more extreme.

For an example of this, look at Rald Doll's Charlie in the Chocolate Factory. Specifically, the character of good old Willy Wonka. He's eccentric. He's unpredictable. He's just a little bizarre. And this has been captured in all sorts of interesting ways by actors like Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp and also most recently Timothy Shamlet. And I'll let you all argue in the comments which one actually portrayed him best. I have my favorite, but what's yours?

So, Willy Wonka is such an exaggerated version of a character. He has all this flamboyant and theatrical clothing. He speaks in riddles, poems, and nonsensical phrases. and he is extremely reclusive to the point that he hasn't gone out of the factory in years and he hired all Oompa Loompas so he doesn't lose any of his trade secrets or Scott Carter notes that stories in a culture tend to come in waves. There will be a period where people prioritize and enjoy more realistic characters.

These are characters which people really relate to. They seem like everyday Joe's. But then he says the culture shifts toward more extraordinary characters, characters who feel exotic and exaggerated and just wild. Look, realistic characters are very relatable, but the danger is that they end up boring the reader. Extraordinary characters are certainly a lot of fun, but the danger is that they end up seeming unrealistic and unbelievable.

So, I want you to think of your favorite novels right now. Are those characters tending toward being more realistic, or are they tending toward being more exaggerated? you probably want to model your characters on whatever you enjoy reading the most. But if you trust Dorson Scott card and man, this guy is a legend. He would encourage you to go for more exaggeration in your characters. It will make them more memorable and help them to stand out.

The next strategy is absolute brilliant one. It is number seven, the cameo technique. This is a very simple technique. Stick famous people into your novel. Why? because it gives the reader a jolt of pleasure when they encounter a character that they know already that they're familiar with. Now, I'm drawing this technique from Pcible Everett who I've read a bunch of his books and in almost every single book he always named drops famous characters, people like Bill Clinton or Sydney Poier, people like John Wayne and also John Colrin.

Now, normally we think of this technique as something you do in historical novels and I want to change your mind about that. I think that you can do this in any genre, no matter what you're writing. So, in Brett Eastston Ellis's American Psycho, which is set in 1980s Manhattan, he has Donald Trump make a cameo. In Henry Fielding's Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget is interviewing Colin FTH for a newspaper article.

If you're writing sci-fi or fantasy, you can make up a famous character, or you can make a character who seems to resemble someone very closely in our world. Think of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. He has characters like Archer Pendrag, which is basically King Arthur in our world, where he has another character called Billy Under the Hill, which is pretty much Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit. Terry Patchet does the same thing in his Discworld series.

He has a band called The Band with Rocks in it, which is an illusion to the Rolling Stones. He has another character called Leonard of Quirm, which is basically Leonardo da Vinci. Now, look, I'm not telling you to make these characters one of your main characters. This is a cameo technique. They can appear in a single scene and then drop out of the novel. They can be a minor character, but it does give a lot of pleasure for the reader when those little cameos appear and we're like, "Oh, yeah." Like, I know that person.

Now, we only have two strategies left. Let's tackle number eight. Hemingway's one true sentence. Ernest Hemingway said that when he was stuck in his writing, he would tell himself, "Listen, all you have to do is to write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." Now, he wasn't talking about factual honesty. He wasn't talking about non-fiction. He was speaking about novels. And so what he meant by one true sentence is some sort of emotional honesty.

What is a true sentence? Well, according to Hemingway, a true sentence is simply one that captures a genuine human experience of the world. One that's not cliche, one that has been stripped of all pretense and decoration. It's just honest insight into the state of the universe. So look at his book, The Garden of Eden, where he's describing what true love feels like. It had been wonderful and they had been truly happy. and he had not known that you could love anyone so much that you cared about nothing else.

Or consider how Hemingway opened his book, A Farewell to Arms. In the late summer of that year, we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plane to the mountains. It's such a brief declarative sentence, but it forms the cornerstone for the whole novel. He built the whole novel off of that voice. So, when you are stuck in your writing career, writing one true sentence is how you move forward. and you stack up enough of those true sentences and voila, you've written a novel.

Now, this last strategy is a little bit counterintuitive because we're ending with advice about the beginning. Number nine, start with an image. Now, normally when you're thinking about how to start a novel, maybe you think about a character or maybe you're an outliner and you've like written the whole plot down. But those are not the only techniques that you can use. Jon Diddian is one of the most famous essayists from the 20th century, but she was also a novelist and she described this way of starting her novel play it as it lays.

She did not think about character or plot or inciting incident. No, what she did is she saw in her mind's eye, she saw an image, a minor Hollywood actress sitting in the Riviera Casino in Las Vegas. And then Diddian wondered, "Okay, so what happens to her? I can see her very clearly. We need an event." And what happens is someone pages her over the loudspeaker. So I want you to let your imagination fly right now and think about the image that is at the beginning of your book or the image that is at the core of your book.

I know that sometimes when I talk about the senses in your novel, I say like, "Oh, the visual is overused in novels." But for this case, I think it's really important to use that visual imagination because it helps you crystallize a scene and really get a good grasp on it. Lastly, make sure to check out BookFox Academy and my collection of 10 do it at your own pace courses, or join us in BookFox Lab, which is my private coaching for authors.

The link for those is in the description. And remember, you can always reach out to me if you have any questions.