Novelists are famous for their struggles. We must face the crisis of writer’s block, the crushing disillusionment of learning that our work needs improvement, and the emotional turmoil of revision. Many novelists must weather rejection after rejection while struggling to find instructional materials that actually help them improve. A writer can spend decades of study and thousands of dollars in educational programs and still not have the skills required for success.
For the few that do well, it feels good to believe that success is based on merit and that there are no wrongs to rectify. But this state of affairs wasn’t inevitable. It’s the result of a cultural movement that started over 200 years ago and still has a grip on us today.
The Tenets of Romanticism
Romanticism was born in late 18th-century Europe, during the Age of Enlightenment. In France in particular, Enlightenment rationalists judged art, theater, and literature by the standards of neoclassicism. This included a bunch of arbitrary and extremely restrictive storytelling rules Mythcreants has mocked elsewhere. For instance, all stories were supposed to take place over a 24-hour period. Naturally, speculative elements such as ghosts were out of the question.
Starting in Germany, Romanticism arose partly as a backlash to this nonsense. While the specific expression of it naturally varied a great deal, it generally included the following beliefs:
- Neoclassicism called for emotions to be restrained, whereas Romanticism placed central importance on emotion. Works were supposed to express the emotional state of the writer and appeal to the emotions of the audience.
- Artistic freedom and originality were considered paramount, whereas being cliché or derivative was the worst. Writers were even supposed to isolate themselves from the outside world to ensure nothing influenced them.
- Many Romantics thought that if a good artist was left alone, their subconscious would follow natural laws. Accordingly, they believed great stories came from the unbridled inspiration of writers who were inherently genius.
- Romantics asserted that because literature and art are a matter of subjective taste, there’s no point in following rules of any kind.
While less central to this topic, Romanticism also had tone and aesthetic preferences. In response to the industrial revolution, they emphasized idyllic depictions of nature and of the past. They were fond of the medieval period and had no issue with speculative elements. Unsurprisingly, this led to today’s fantasy.
History nerds will tell you that Romanticism peaked in the first half of the 19th century and then was replaced by realism. Instead of idyllic scenes of nature and the past, it valued the gritty reality of the present. Also, speculative fiction was once again taboo, because of course it was.
But those were just aesthetic changes. Somehow, the reign of the genius writer who spontaneously generates masterpieces from their subconscious never ended. Today, this idea still influences many fields. While storytellers of all stripes have no doubt encountered it, novelists are among the most affected.
How This Sabotages Novelists
Even if you don’t explicitly believe in the tenets of Romanticism, you probably internalized them before you ever set pen to paper. According to Romanticism, everything you need to know is hidden in your subconscious, so most writers begin under the impression that they don’t have much to learn. After a novelist starts an ambitious work under this mindset, the next step is a collision course with reality. Sooner or later, the vast majority of fiction writers will face harsh disillusionment and disappointment. But this only happens because of the writer’s beliefs coming in.
To illustrate just how profoundly Romanticism has changed the learning process for fiction writers, let’s compare it to another craft without so much baggage: woodworking. It’s obviously wrong to say that woodworking includes no artistry; it has a great deal. However, everyone understands that if you want to create a wood chair that won’t collapse under you, you have to follow some natural principles. Similarly, if a novelist wants anyone to appreciate their story, they can’t just write “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” repeatedly for a hundred pages.
Now, imagine it’s your first day in woodworking class. To start, the teacher shows you how to use a few tools, and then sets you to work making something incredibly simple. Maybe you’ll cut out a few chunks from a two-by-four, sand them smooth, then nail them together before you stain and varnish.
You show your work to the teacher, and she points out where you needed to sand more or where your cutting was imprecise. Maybe you were hoping she would be impressed, but it’s only your first try, so it’s no big deal. You listen to her tips and work on improving your skills as you slowly take on more challenging projects.
If you learned woodworking via the principles of Romanticism, you would forgo instruction in favor of intuition, cloister yourself in your basement, and try to build a liquor cabinet as your first project. Then, when your liquor cabinet looks terrible and starts falling apart, you would feel absolutely crushed. Not just because your project didn’t work out, but because of what you think this failure means about you.
Again, Romantics believe that masterpieces have no origins other than the writer’s inherent genius. So when something goes wrong, it means the writer isn’t good enough. And because learning is discouraged, this supposed genius or lack thereof is largely an immutable characteristic. When your ambitious first attempt at a liquor cabinet doesn’t work out, that means you are forever incapable of crafting a good one.
In our search for answers, many writers learn that this mindset is wrong. But by that time, we’re usually invested in an ambitious project. We’ll spend all of our energy trying to fix our janky liquor cabinet instead of practicing on smaller projects, thereby making our progress slow and discouraging. When we finally move on, it’s tempting to think that since we’ve grown, we can do the same thing and it’ll work out this time. Just as likely, the cycle of disillusionment will repeat itself.
On top of that, just because we know better doesn’t mean the internalized messages go away. Whenever we send our work to an editor, agent, or publisher and get a less-than-glowing response, what many of us hear is you aren’t brilliant enough. To accept that our work has flaws and spend our time and energy fixing them, we have to face our feelings of inadequacy.
Whenever we get stuck, this sentiment rears its head. We might be stuck because the wood we used to build our cabinet isn’t quite right, we measured wrong in the beginning, or our day job is sapping all of our energy. But rather than thinking of obstacles in terms of the particular situation we’re dealing with, we’ll blame ourselves. Every time a project doesn’t go smoothly, it’s because we have woodworker’s block. Naturally, solving this problem via any sort of calculated method is gauche.
Even the rare writer who succeeds with their first novel is hindered by Romanticism. Sure, their ego is comfortably inflated,* but believing in their own genius means they are unlikely to grow much as a writer. After they become famous, they will reject all feedback from editors, and their novels will go downhill from there.
How Romanticism Sabotages Editors
While the damage to writers is enough to justify why Romanticism is harmful, the writing itself is only one part of the fiction industry. Many writers get critical feedback from their editors. But editors aren’t helping fiction writers as effectively as they could. Romantic ideology holds them back.
Under Romanticism, the emotion, creativity, and subconscious of the individual writer is paramount. Outside influences on the creative process are frowned upon. Editors are a shameful outside influence, and they are painfully aware of it. While an editor focusing only on the technical aspects of writing may not have much trouble, when it comes to the story itself, many, if not most, editors are afraid to offer suggestions or examples.
For instance, let’s say your heroine is on a quest for a magic sword. She has a mentor with her, and every time she faces an obstacle, the mentor tells her what to do. This means she has no agency, a common storytelling problem. A content editor who knows their business will notice this issue and inform the writer. However, most writers need more guidance than simply knowing what the problem is. Unless they are already experienced storytellers, they’ll also need to know how to fix it.
That’s why when Mythcreants does content editing, we report problems to the writer in a format like the one below.
I love the labyrinth of challenges the heroine has to go through to reach the magic sword – they’re fascinating and full of tension. However, currently the heroine gets past those challenges simply by following the directions her mentor gives her once he reads the ancient inscriptions. Readers are likely to find that unsatisfying; they’ll want to see the heroine triumph over each challenge using her own mettle or wits.
- One option is to have the heroine enter the Labyrinth alone or become separated from her mentor while they are inside. That way she’ll have to decipher the inscriptions herself. She might have picked up a little of the ancient language from her mentor, or she could look at illustrations and other clues to guess what it means.
- Alternatively, the mentor could keep reading the inscriptions, and the heroine could be instrumental to some other aspect of each challenge. After the inscription is translated, her mentor might need help understanding what the cryptic words mean. Or they might give dangerous instructions that she must complete because she’s in better shape than her mentor.
Further reading:
Our goal is to give our clients actionable advice that they can follow even if they aren’t storytelling experts. With these types of recommendations, writers not only know what the problems are, but also they’ve been given some ideas for how those problems could be solved in their stories. They can use our suggestions if they want to, but even if they don’t, it provides a more specific idea of what they need to do.
Most content editors we speak to are astounded that we do this. In their minds, if they offer any ideas in their feedback, the story wouldn’t belong to the writer anymore.
When explaining why this isn’t the case to other editors, Oren uses a specific analogy. Let’s say you decided to give yourself a new hardwood floor. You talk to an expert and tell them about your home, your budget, and what kind of floor you want. Based on your needs and goals, the expert recommends you use maple. You buy a bunch of maple, but you still have to do all the hard work of putting in the floor and finishing it. When it’s all done, you would never say the expert created your new floor. You obviously did it yourself.
However, if the flooring expert followed the tenets of Romanticism, they wouldn’t be able to give you any suggestions. Instead, they would try to offer advice aimed at provoking thought and providing inspiration, hoping that will allow you to come up with the right ideas yourself.
They might tell you:
- Visit buildings with beautiful hardwood floors and study them closely.
- Ask yourself: how should each wood grain flow to create a pleasing pattern?
- For fifteen minutes each morning, sit quietly and picture the perfect floor in your head.
It’s not that these suggestions are necessarily bad; some of them might be quite helpful. But if used instead of more concrete advice, they’ll probably leave you confused about whether to choose maple, oak, or pine.
It is true that to give helpful suggestions, an editor has to have a good understanding of what’s important to you and what you want to accomplish with your story. Mythcreants works to draw this information out of our clients, whereas most editors we know of count on their clients to volunteer anything that’s important.
How It Affects Instruction
Instruction for novelists comes from a wide variety of sources, including academia, books, and industry workshops. When it comes to the technical side of writing, I think these sources do okay.* But on the storytelling side, their value is more limited. That’s where Romanticism holds the most sway.
In response to the arrogant artistic “rationalism” of the Enlightenment, Romantics basically swore off understanding. They declared that everyone would just use their subconscious to craft stories and that there was no point in trying to create guidelines because it’s all subjective anyway.
So unsurprisingly, a great many professionals in the industry today, including writers and editors, rely on their subconscious to make storytelling judgments. They know something’s broken when they read it, but they have trouble identifying the cause of the problem and describing it to others. They’ll struggle to form that knowledge into a general principle that helps others avoid the same problem.
At Mythcreants, we call the process of articulating what your gut knows intellectualization. Without it, you may recognize a storytelling principle at some level, but you don’t fully understand it. And if you don’t understand it, you can’t teach it. This is one reason that bringing in best-selling novelists isn’t a magic fix for bad writing instruction.
The problem is that instructors have to learn what they teach somewhere. When a society has spent hundreds of years rebelling against bad attempts at understanding by rejecting the pursuit of knowledge, what anyone in that society can learn is limited. That’s how you get this state of affairs. You know, the state of affairs where a blogger like me is constantly making up terms because no one in the industry has words for anything.
Academia is supposed to be the one teaching, innovating, and spreading the best ideas. But while professors vary in approach, in general academia is steeped in the same Romantic tenets of emotional primacy, absolute subjectivity, and subconscious genius. Professors tend to be less interested in studying natural principles of audience engagement and more interested in preaching realism. Ironically, while the Romantic notions they embrace were designed to thwart creative restrictions imposed by oppressive institutions, today’s academia is the oppressive institution.
If their instruction doesn’t help students write compelling works, professors can claim it’s the fault of the student for lacking inherent talent. Since academics are vetted by other academics, this culture can perpetuate itself without outside accountability.
While Romanticism may have sprung from the events in the 18th century, the parts that endured have done so because writers have chosen to perpetuate it for hundreds of years. For big names, it offers verification of their superiority and a shield against any type of criticism. For everyone else, it offers seductively beautiful ideas about the magic of inspiration and the poetic martyrdom of the suffering writer. But we don’t need this mysticism to be passionate about storytelling, and we’ll all be better off if we give it up.
P.S. Our bills are paid by our wonderful patrons. Could you chip in?
A little off target, perhaps, but as a German, I feel I need to tell a few things.
First of all, on Romanticism.
As you wrote, it all started in Germany and we Germans take things very seriously. The still most-revered German writers both lived at that time – Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller.
Goethe was a big fan of Neo-Classicism. It’s in all of his pieces, from his plays (best known would be his “Faust”) over his novels (“Werther” is probably best known outside of Germany) to his poems (I’m a big fan of his “Zauberlehrling” on which one part of “Fantasia” is based – the part with Mickey Mouse).
Schiller, the younger of the two, was ears-deep in the Romantic movement. His very first play is the most well-known outside of Germany – “Die Räuber” (The Robbers), which he wrote while still in school. Schiller was an absolute Shakespeare fanboy and reacted rather harshly to other criticising the Bard. In Germany, his “Götz von Berlichingen” might be better known, if only for the rude insult within which has become so intrinsic to German language – ‘Er kann mich mal am Arsche lecken.’ (He can lick my ass – told to the messenger of a bishop as a message to give to said bishop.)
Yet, both of them were also long-time friends (but never roommates) and kept up a lively correspondence for all of their lives. Sadly, Schiller, despite being the younger one, died first, while Goethe lived for over 90 years, surpassing his younger friend.
Even today, in academia here in Germany, Schiller and Goethe (or the ‘Goethe-Schiller-Ding’) are the end-all of literature for a lot of academics. Their writing is the best, their way of setting up their stories can’t be surpassed … yada, yada, yada. Now, don’t get me wrong – they both wrote good stuff.
Schiller had a way of making ‘bad people’ look good by diving deep into their personality (Karl Moor, the lead of “Die Räuber” is a bandit, after all, Götz von Berlichingen is a Raubritter – a knight who is also a robber).
Goethe took a regular devil’s pact (the story of Faust predates him by centuries) and turned it on its head by changing the reason for the pact from ‘riches and influence’ to ‘knowledge’. His Faust makes a deal with Mephisto to finally understand how the world works – and Mephisto leads him astray to get him off that. They both did good work. Yet, because of the way they’re viewed today, it seems as if any other kind of writing is not worth it.
Personally, I like a lot of more modern writers better. I love Dürrenmatt’s “Der Besuch der Alten Dame” (The Visit of the Old Lady) and “Die Physiker” (The Physics) much more than Goethe or Schiller. Yet, to German literature academia, nothing beats two guys from the time of the romantic movement.
The whole romantic idea of just being a perfect writer or not might also be why there’s precisely one huge volume on writing advice in German (which I like to call “How to Kill Insects”, because it’s heavy enough to squash the biggest bug and useless otherwise). I had to buy books on writing in English not because I love reading them (although I do love reading them), but because there was no other choice. We need more German books on writing to get that whole ‘you’re born a writer or not’ out of our heads.
Thanks, that was interesting. I recently had an exchange with a French writer who has permission to translate our articles to French on his site. I was surprised that he wanted to translate the nitty gritty wordcraft pieces because I wasn’t sure how well they would translate over. He admitted he wasn’t sure either, but he wanted to do it because French writers apply Romantic principles to wordcraft, so there isn’t even good wordcraft advice in French. Is it similar in Germany?
Not that English-speaking writers never treat wordcraft as subjective and a matter of artistic inspiration, but there’s much higher acknowledgement of craft principles there.
There’s generally little wordcraft advice for Germans, yes. I do admit that some advice is harder to use in German, because we have a different structure, but it would still be nice to have some basic advice for making your text easier to read and more interesting.
As a matter of fact, the first time I read the basic rules for writing, you know ‘show, don’t tell’ etc. it was in English. It irks me something fierce, because I can clearly tell from my old stubs and projects that my writing has improved vastly with the help of English books on writing.
Hi Cay,
thanks for your thoughts on the state of German literature, you are, oh, so right. If you want to be taken seriously by the literature establishment, you’ll have to banish anything that involves a plot or, beware, makes the reader feel something (except the weight of your words).
In one point I disagree, though: There is more and more helpful advice on writing and storytelling in German, and some of it even helpful for more seasoned writers … as I hope my own books on writing are. Check them out, if you like, on schriftzeit.de/buecher.
Cheers, Stephan
This was EXCELLENT. I think it’s my favourite article of all time.
The idea that writing is an innate talent that cannot be helped or improved upon by study is one of the most awful, pernicious ideas that’s far too common in the writing community. Thank you for helping dispell this myth ^^
Aww, thank you! And you’re welcome :)
Very interesting and thought provoking article. Thank you.
Drawing paralells from another area where I am a bit more knowledgable, I would say that while having a comprehensive theoretical aparatus for storytelling is a very good idea, care must be taken to prevent the system from being restrictive or inflexible towards changes in time or context – ideally it should be revised every so often and changed in any aspect if needed.
I certianly do not wish to argue with this article, I just wanted to add this on top.
That’s very much what every ‘skip these stereotypes’ or ‘avoid these tropes’ article here is about.
Stereotypes, tropes, and clichés are what happens when the system calcifies and certain things always happen the same way. By breaking them up, the storytelling is renewed and revised.
Looking at storytelling ideas throughout history has given me an appreciation for how many cultural movements are backlashes, and the ways that people go overboard in reaction. That’s made me think about how people might apply my own theories in ways I do not intend and if there’s anything I can do to help prevent that. I certainly hope that others will build off my work and update it over time.
So in essence, Neoclassicism forwent emotions and creativity and put all its coins in rules and structure, while Romanticism abolished rules and structures and glorified emotions and creativity.
Once again we see it. Like everything in nature: balance is the key.
French neoclassicism went much too far in creating mandates, but much of it was also just silly and wrong. The French unity rules originally came from a guy who was basing his ideas on Aristotle, but didn’t actually have Aristotle’s most important work on storytelling, and then just inferred too much and made up a bunch of stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_unities – plus, Aristotle mostly wrote about Tragedies specifically and his understanding of stories was from a time long before stories were easily mass printed and distributed.
What we need is not mandated rules like the French tried, but simply a good understanding of how stories engage people. And it wouldn’t make sense to aim for a balance between understanding and ignorance.
That was an interesting read.
I suppose I can add this one to the list of terrible things that can trace their legacy back to romanticism, including amatonormativity, anti-intellectualism, nationalism…
It did give us speculative fiction though, let’s not forget that.
I know, I know.
But then we got people fretting over reactionary themes in classic speculative fiction, Iron Dream and all… :P
I think all of those things are quite a bit older than Romanticism, they certainly shaped the period (as they do to many era in various places) but Romanticism did not create them.
Yeah, you’re right. Except maybe nationalism, which if I remember correctly is rather similar in age, but I still don’t think Romantics created it.
I meant to say that the current expressions of these things were undoubtedly heavily shaped by Romanticism, and it’s hard for me to unsee it once I was made aware of it.
And I never liked Romantic written works to begin with.
Reiterating what’s been said above: THANK YOU for this article! I’ve brushed elbows with these concepts so much, it’s kind of depressing. What a relief to see all the problems I have with them put succinctly into words.
This is especially true in academia – one friend told me about a writing teacher who maintained that it was possible to select the “true writers” from a group of students without even having taught them yet. Which, in addition to being obviously bogus, seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy if I’ve ever heard one (and a back-patting one – bet you’ll never guess how this teacher regarded himself). Hey, teacher, maybe that’s a sign you’re bad at your job!
This is also how you end up with a poetry textbook by Mary Oliver with the first words of the intro being “True poets are born, not made in school. This is true also of painters, sculptors, and musicians. Something that is essential can’t be taught; it can only be given, or earned, or formulated in a manner too mysterious to be picked apart and re-designed for the next person.” And then later on the same page, claiming the textbook is about the “matters of craft,”: “It is about the part of the poem that is a written document, as opposed to a mystical document, which of course the poem is also.” Ugh! Few words could more quickly make me want to give a middle finger to a poet I’d previously respected! I wanted to throw that textbook off a cliff; it completely soured my view of Mary Oliver.
Treating any kind of creativity as some kind of ~mystical magical unique juice that only [insert type of creative person] brains secrete~ is only going to cause harm and dissuade people who think they don’t possess the ~magic juices~ from being creative, when in fact that’s not how this works! That’s not how any of this works!
As you’re dealing with that, you might appreciate this post: https://mythcreants.com/blog/a-writers-guide-to-crafting-true-macaroni-art/
I think a lot of discovery writers don’t really understand where the words come from, which leads to this belief. Like the article talks about, they know what’s good when they see it but can’t necessarily describe why in terms of basic principles.
As a former discovery writer myself I understand this. I would subconsciously craft the story in my head, then when I figured out what ending I wanted, I would write in a flurry of activity. I was basically doing the story structure/plot in my head first, then filling in the details as I wrote. This approach worked great for a while when I was writing stories, but it was inconsistent and doesn’t work well for novels. Novels are too big to keep in your head all at once.
I would rather understand the principles so they can be used with control rather than trying to handle a bolt of lightning and not knowing where it’s gonna go or what’s going to come out the other side.
Same here … I used to be a discovery writer, too. By now, I do outlines and, recently, even pre-plotting to get the stuff I want in the story in order.
You simply work out things in your head, often subconsciously, as a discovery writer. That’s why you need to wait until a new part of your story is ‘ready.’ At least that’s how it was for me. Now I sit down, figure out what I want to happen, sketch out my scenes, and then I can reliably write it, because I know what I’m doing and where this is going. The best about it is that it helps immensely with my problem with endings – now I know the ending and I’m not going back and forth wondering where to make the cut.
That approach makes it much, much easier to implements structures and know how to keep the plots moving and not go off in the wrong direction.
I loved this article!
I keep returning to Mythcreants week after week because you all give practical, demystifying, and encouraging advice about storytelling and wordcraft that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. Keep up the good work–I appreciate you all!
I’ve been thinking of how fiction contains a lot of romanticism about science too.
People have further written about how this myth is alive and kicking in certain academic fields, like my own field of philosophy, and how it’s really harmful to diversity.
In novels, comic books and movies, science often seems to be more about some mysterious, innate talent than actually getting an education and learning stuff.
If we look at Marvel, Bruce Banner is usually portrayed as a top scientist in both movies and comics. But although he once WAS, he shouldn’t be at the top of his field any longer, not after he’s struggled with his Hulk issues for a sufficient number of years. The Hulk issues should prevent him from keeping up with cutting edge research – from reading new papers, going to conferences, conversing with colleagues, and all that stuff. He should eventually fall behind.
It’s typical for both movies and comics that a scientist is an expert on ALL of science (not to mention this weird-ass MCU thing where scientists brag about how many doctorates they have – that’s not how Academia works!). Stephen Hawking once lamented that while people like Leibniz, in the seventeenth century, were experts on “science”, this is impossible nowadays – everything has branched out so much and become so specialized that you can’t even be an expert on “physics”, only a small subfield of physics. But of course, in the world of fiction, you can be a genius in every scientific field at once since you don’t have to LEARN all the fields – it’s all about innate talent.
This is also why Suri in the Black Panther movie (in the comics, she’s an adult) can be a better engineer than Tony Stark, even though she’s just a teenager. In the real world, this is impossible, since you have to LEARN how to do all this stuff, and this takes some time to do even for the most brilliant student. But in the MCU, she’s simply born with a higher level of innate talent than Tony Stark was born with.
No one in the real world believes it works QUITE like that, but in some fields, including philosophy, there’s still this widespread idea according to which innate brilliance is crucial for success, and why it therefore might make sense to choose a candidate whom you feel have a higher level of innate brilliance over a candidate with better previous accomplishments. In the real world, however, people somehow don’t sense that black girls like Suri have this innate talent. They don’t even sense that white men have this innate talent if they don’t have precisely the right background. Somehow, people just sense this innate talent, over and over, in people who are perfectly privileged in every single way, and therefore end up hiring THOSE for prestigious positions, even if less privileged candidates had better CV’s. (This is a bigger problem at American Universities, where hiring committees usually have more leeway in whom to hire, whereas in Sweden, for instance, we’re more bound up by formal rules on how to evaluate CV’s etc. But it’s likely a problem everywhere, even though it can be more or less big.)
Yes! This is a toxic mindset that’s pervasive in academic science and ruins it for the rest of us!
Wow… this article really put into words a lot of things I had encountered but didn’t know how to describe. Especially how people are expected to learn how to write through trying and failing at ambitious projects, leading to a feeling of not being good enough. The books I tried to write when I was younger weren’t terrible because I don’t have the innate talent, they were terrible because I was a kid trying to emulate my favorite books without actually understanding story structure or character creation!
This metaphor might not make sense, but I had the thought that writing is sort of like architecture. I saw a design contest online a while ago and was looking at the past winners, and most of them were more art than architecture– pictures of impossible buildings that were beautiful, but had no actual blueprints. “Is that architecture?” I thought. “Just paintings of things that you wish could be built?” I could just draw from my heart– or I could learn about engineering and the principles of design, and create the plan for a building that could actually function in real life.
I need to think of writing more like that– a process of construction, like your woodworking metaphor. Not something that comes to you in a magical dream of inspiration, but something that I actually craft so its pieces support each other.
Oops, I didn’t mean to write such a long comment. This is my first time commenting on an article here; thank you to all of you putting practical writing advice out here for free.
This is honestly such a good article, and it articulates probably the biggest obstacle that I face daily as someone who wants to write books but has never been able to complete one yet. It’s relatively easy for me to write a short story based on “feel” or “seat of the pants” writing, but with a novel, for it to truly be a good story, that requires structure and planning.
Writing/Storytelling is a skill, and just like anything else it requires practice to master. It’s hard for us to see it that way, but the sooner we can accept that the sooner we can move forward on improving our craft.
While I haven’t succeeded yet, this site more than any other has helped me to learn to understand the art of creating and analyzing story structures, and I am very grateful to all of you for making this content available to us.
Hello and thanks a lot for this article !
I am French and I actually find ridiculous the 3 unities rule, even though I’m a big fan of Barque opera sung in French or Italian… The one rule you really need is the “unity of action” because you don’t want your story to be a tangled knot of a half-dozens plots !.
And I unfortunately have to confirm that French academics have not yet understood that their studies of “geniuses’ works” are totally not useful to would-be writers… The first time I read good advice on storytelling, it was when Bragelonne, a S-F and fantasy publisher specializing in translated American novels, decided to translate Orson Scott Card’s “How to write fantasy and sci-fi”. The book was quickly sold out, and the next year they translated “Characters and Viewpoint” by Card… Both are still in good place in my room, and much used.
Creative classes are developing these last few years, but it is still something of a novelty, and usually done by writers who may or may not be able to fully explain what they feel or understand of a text. So it is certainly an interesting experience in itself, but il will not necessarily solve your personal problems.
I know this an old post, but I agree so much. Romanticism is such a huge problem in general, but I’ve especially seen this problem in discovery writing. It is possible to write a story without an outline and to do it well, but it takes skill. You have to know your craft, you have to understand basic storytelling principles. There’s also plenty more techniques and mindsets that just aren’t taught to people who want to discovery write. You’re simply told to just write. And when you fail, you’re told (or you assume) it’s because discovery writing is a bad process. When in reality, discovery writing is (at least in my experience) a complex method that you have to learn. It’s not an innate ability (there’s always the exceptions, of course, but I’m talking about in general). Very few people actually give good instruction on how to write without an outline, even people who can do it well. This is very frustrating for me, since I enjoy discovery writing but there’s very little instruction on how to actually do it well.
Thanks, Chris,
for this excellent and insightful piece. As per usual, I might add, because I’ve read a lot of your stuff and it never fails to give me new ideas or add something to my craft and something to think about for my own books on writing and storytelling.
So, romanticism. Your article is quiet ironic, for me as a German writer and writing coach, because we see the English speaking storytellers and especially the Americans as poster boys and girls for storytelling and the nitty-gritty, crafty stuff around it. Case in point: There are so many excellent books on the craft coming from the US, while in Germany the majority of the (small, but growing amount of) books on storytelling for writers (and not for scholars) dig about as deep as the paper they are written upon. »Show don’t tell« and »don’t overuse your adverbs« is about as distinguished as it gets. That’s changing, but sloooowly.
What makes me especially sad: Most writers, even the ones who want to learn about writing better in the first place, stop learning the moment they get their agent or publishing contract. Add editors who don’t know much about how to tell an engaging story themselves, and you get an overwhelming majority of novels on the market that could’ve and should’ve been so much better. It’s breaking my heart.
He, but we keep it up anyway, don’t we. And I am so thankful and happy for any one writer who never stops honing his or her craft. Thanks again for your great advice.
Cheers, Stephan
Thanks Stephan, it’s always interesting to hear what’s going on elsewhere.
Does the blog have a place where I can clearer idea of what system/technique you suggest, and where should I find it here? Or is this more for other services? There are indeed articles about improving technique, but I don’t see an overarcing outline to its approach or table of contents and in general it seems easier here to find critiques of insufficient structures or of Romanticism than to see what the proposed alternative is.
The link to browse our archive by topic in is our main menu, just go here: https://mythcreants.com/tags/
You can find many of our most foundational articles on story theory here: https://mythcreants.com/blog/tag/plot-101/
If you want to know how story structure works, this is probably the most important article: https://mythcreants.com/blog/your-plot-is-a-fractal/
As for our cultural approach to storytelling, I’ll refer you to our principles page: https://mythcreants.com/about/our-principles/
I look forward to your criticism ; )