High Tension Writing Workshop - Wombats CCLXXV

This past weekend I went to the three and a half day  High Tension Writing Workshop by Donald Maass, a literary agent and author of Writing The Breakout Novel. I'm still kind of processing the information.   I would highly recommend the workshop.  Donald Maass is a natural educator--good speaker, well organized and funny.  He also has thirty years of experience in the publishing industry and understands it thoroughly.

The basic message of the workshop is that the current marketplace is super competitive and full of short attention spans.  Writers have to adapt to a world where a large part of the population is ADHD. They have to adapt to a world where their book is competing for reader attention with TV, video games, the Internet, and a gazillion other books.

In that environment, reader attention is a precious commodity that you should never take for granted.   it isn't enough to have a good plot and interesting characters. You have to keep the reader wanting to read--compelled to read the next paragraph.  As a new writer you can't afford flabby paragraphs. You can't afford pages that contribute plot points but aren't interesting in and of themselves--something I'm often guilty of.  You have to earn the reader's continued attention every paragraph. This is a market where if the reader's attention wanders you may never get it back.  If a reader gets bored and puts your book down, then  wanders off to read their e-mail they may never pick it up again.

This is also a market where the only contact a reader may have with your book may very well be taking it off a bookstore shelf, glancing at the back cover, then opening it at some random page and reading a paragraph.  If that random paragraph of a random page doesn't hook the reader, your book goes back on the self and that reader may never look at another word you've written.  Unfair?  Not really.  Readers are under no obligation to try to read enough to understand your plot.  They're looking for something that will entertain them.  If the random paragraph doesn't say 'this is worth my time', they are under no obligation to read on.

In the current marketplace, every paragraph may have to act as a hook, and as much as possible it needs to be able to function that way.  That is not a simple job, especially when that paragraph also has to advance the plot.

So how on earth do you do that?

Oddly, most of the obvious ways to hold a reader's attention don't work well anymore. A fist fight? Been done a gazillion times. It's likely to be skimmable. Flabby. A gun fight? Same thing. Sex scene? Same thing.  It won't hold most readers' attention. The big emotions have been done so often that readers are numb to them too. Fear? Hatred? Often skimmable.  Won't necessarily hold a reader's attention.

As writers we stand on the shoulders of giants. And they've written most of the good lines, most of the good plots. They've used most of the good emotions and description. And they've been followed by a horde of imitators who have made most of the things a writer would be likely to write seem old and trite.

I went into the workshop thinking that I had a lot of the answers.  The novel I recently renamed from Char to Time Travel Can Be Murder has a plot I'm pretty sure is unique.  It's intricately plotted, with quirky characters.  We read a few passages from it at the workshop.  Verdict: Flat.  Flabby. 

One section in particular stands out in my mind.  Going into the workshop I thought it was one of my better scenes.  The POV character and his cousin are in a farmhouse, along with a cocky deputy sheriff.  Char, an accidentally displaced 'cave-woman'  comes down the stairs with a rifle.  A wild fight ensues.  During the fight Char knocks out the POV character's cousin and then knocks out the deputy, right after he says "I'll take it from here."  She almost has to jump to hit him in the jaw.  As he falls on his face, out cold, the POV character starts laughing.  Char stares at him and then starts laughing too.  During the scene Char reveals for the first time that she's already learned enough English to communicate in it, which should come as a shock to the reader. 

Quirky, oddball scene.  Verdict: Flat.  Someone coming into the scene without knowing the characters would see a fist fight followed by an inexplicable aftermath.  And it is realistic that potential readers may come into the scene cold.  We have to write so that distracted potential readers will be pulled away from the distractions and into the book.

So what does hold a modern reader's attention? That's not easy to summarize, and I don't want to steal too much of the workshop's thunder. It's not the same for every writer or every scene/every genre. The keys are finding something fresh--a different way of looking at events and finding ways of getting the reader to identify with the character, or with the scene.

I'm probably showing my age here, but I remember a scene from early in the first season of Twin Peaks.  Somebody had deer head in their office.  Somebody had taken it down and it was laying on the desk.  The deer head on the wall would have been just part of the scenery.  Put it on the desk and it dominated the scene--couldn't take your eyes off of it.  You probably want to be a little more subtle than that, but a lot of what keeps reader interest is a familiar object or emotion looked at in a different way.  Characters that readers care about, that they feel that they know are important too, but very difficult to pull off.

Most writers, including me, seem to visualize a reader far more interested in reading their book than a modern reader is likely to be, and definitely far more interested than an overworked agent or editor will ever be.

The ideal is to have some kind of tension in every paragraph, some kind of hook.  That is incredibly hard.  But that is what the market demands.  Writers need to write for the distracted reader, to pull them into the story, and keep them there through the book.  That leads to publication, to sales,  to repeat sales, to word of mouth advertising, to fans who will seek out the next book.