Toni Lopopolo Literary Management: Recent Episodes
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21st Century personal history and 21st Century fiction follow the same principles. Dramatic narrative takes us beyond description. Screenplays and scripts for motion pictures and television dramatizations are roadmaps for performance. Novels, short stories, and personal essays are roadmaps for reader engagement. The best way to describe a person, a place, or an object is through action. Action is a character responding to a stimulus. Any variation is a description or a tell.
We’re all trying to pursue dramatic writing, not descriptive writing,
The dramatic information comes from what our principal characters know or experience. We can’t slip in the stage directions. We can tell them it’s cold outside, that they’re hungry or apprehensive. We have to put them into situations where they become aware of and respond to the cold, the hunger, the curiosity, or the apprehension.
Relying on descriptions and laundry lists because of past times when readers or listeners gave you props for the poetry of your prose, most of “them” have imperfect concepts of both poetry and prose.
Story is action that leads to emotion.First thing to happen after a play or film has been cast, the actors assemble in a situation much like our Zoom sessions, in which the director goes through the script line-by line, marking the action that is to take place. Through these table readings, the actors get the sense of who they’ll be dealing with, the emotional, cultural, and political attitudes of each to the other. This process, known as blocking, reminds us how actors got their name. They act. They feel.
You don’t have to ask the actor portraying you what you feel, but you have to do better than describing how you felt to your reader. You have to become the you at every discreet moment in your narrative, then engage it. Comfortable won’t get it. You have to find a way to conduct yourself that allows someone watching you to see your intended emotion, or you have to in some way cause another character if you feel okay because you don’t look so hot. And you have to respond with a bit of a heavy hand to convey you’re over protecting yourself, that you’re fine, damnit.
You’re strong on story concept, weak in execution, still writing in the early and mid-twentieth century narrative traditions. How to advance? Thought you’d never ask.
- Only one point of view per scene.
- Keep yourself out of the narrative. Stay with the POV character’s perception of the story at hand.
- Edit out as many stage directions as you can find.
- Forget about the reader.
- Write for the characters.
- You don’t need to explain things to your POV character that the character already knows.
- In the current story, remove all traces of you. The narrator is too busy to explain things, should not have time to explain things to himself that he already knows.
- Sad to say, because of what Toni calls “head shifting,” or switching from one point of view to another, the first readers of literary agents and book publishers would stop reading after about the first 500 words because of POV shifts and egregious stage directions or “tells.”
- Consider, for a moment, your Zoom session mate, Lisa. For all practical purposes, she’s Toni’s first reader. She needs to read your work all the way through because her task in this case is to provide valuable clues and hints of missing or misused technique. If this were not a teaching-learning session, her instructions would be, “Read until you can stop.”
- If you were to produce a first novel that sold between 20 and 30 thousand copies, your next title could use the narrative approach you chose here. But not now.
- Your choice. Take yourself out of the process. Stop explaining things to the reader and characters. Pick one person to be the driving force of the story, Let him carry the water. Let him pursue his agenda, even to the point of misreading the agendas of the other characters.
- In the most direct terms, Antony, good story concepts such as this will get you only so far. To get beyond them you need to get inside your characters to the point where you can see their individual versions of reality.
- Another way of saying this: Listen to your characters. Forget about your opinion.
- Worth your time to consider these points if you wish to move the total effect of your story beyond description and into the artistic world of drama.
- Your choice. Stay here or take the next step.
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