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Maass’s main premise is that to produce highly successful fiction in the 21st century, writers must meld the best attributes of genre and literary fiction to create “high-impact” novels and stories. To write such high-impact fiction, writers must be very personal. He writes, “to create a novel’s emotional landscape, you must open yourself to your own...to put authentic emotions on the page, you need to own them...your deepest hurts are a wellspring of passion.” Readers, he insists, are craving emotional transformation, even when it involves intense emotions they initially resist. Big emotions, when they are authentic and unique to a situation, can satisfy that need.
I recognize all of this to be true, but I struggle with the practicality of pulling it off. Maass admits that mining one’s own hurts for material is difficult to do but leaves it at that. Going deep into my experiences, traumas, and fears does strengthen my work, but the process also aggravates my anxieties, which are not easy to turn off. For however long afterward, I’m high strung and/or reclusive, and I’ve got the self-loathing dial turned up to eleven. This can make daily life—working and being a good partner to Mr. Owl—more difficult, and I worry how it will get more challenging if/when I try to juggle writing and kids. Still, I have a deep fear that I won’t produce something truly meaningful, something that connects with others, without plumbing those depths. (Not everything I write needs to involve this soul excavation, but at some point I will need to do it.) Maybe my lesson here is that I need a more-structured survival strategy when mining my emotions. The thought of developing such a strategy reminds me of Hopper and Joyce entering the Upside Down in Stranger Things—I’ll need some manner of protective suit, breathing apparatus, a tether back to normal life, and something to restore me once I’ve returned to the other side.
His second recurring theme is that when writers make storytelling choices, chances are they’re playing it too safe. He encourages writers to consider how to guide, or manipulate readers to certain emotional experiences, and in offering his explanation, he anticipates their resistance:
“So don’t plan [your novel], manipulate, or do anything else that offends you, but do recognize that your artistic sensibility pulls you away from strong feelings. It pushes you toward what’s subtle, nuanced and delicate, which can be another way of saying what is small, nebulous, and weak….if that’s all you do, the result will be a novel of light impact.”
Multiple levels of tension. He discussed how to maintain tension in a story at three levels: premise, scene and individual lines. Powerful premises are plausible, have inherent conflict, are original, and have gut-emotional appeal. Scenes should change both the story circumstances and the focal character (particularly their self understanding), even if in small ways. Tension can be built at the line level by heightening the focal character’s emotions, especially if those emotions conflict.
Twists and turns. I haven't really ever thought about the definitions of these terms. Maass defines a turn as when something unexpected happens and a as a twist as when a character does something unexpected. Explanations like these make it easier for me to apply the techniques in my work.
Balancing your writing process. As an agent, Maass has no doubt seen the many different ways that writers choose to work, with all of their pros and cons. Outliners need to push themselves to take detours in their writing that might enrich their stories. Intuitive writers need to avoid becoming too attached to passages and story elements that disrupt the structure and flowers of the story. Bookish researchers need to balance their fact-gathering by observing people (and vice versa).
Balancing cool and warm writing techniques. Maass lays out a continuum of ways to convey emotion that ranges from “cool” to “warm.” Emotionally cool writing techniques include using subtext, suggestion, and showing rather than telling, while warm ones include interiority, exposition, reactive passages, an emotional exploration. While writers tend to one end of the spectrum or another, Maass suggests that they can strengthen and balance their writing by making sure they draw from both ends of the spectrum.
He ends each of his chapters with a set of questions that prompt writers to reexamine the choices they’ve made in their manuscripts. The full list of questions and some other bonus materials are available on the Writer’s Digest website. Some of them may be hard to respond to without the material in the book, but others may be useful on their own.
Up next, I’ve chosen a library pick designed to help me with my Grub Street ghost story class: Rick DiMarinis’s The Art and Craft of the Short Story. That said, I’m open to suggestions of what to read next!