REPORTER: “Are you a mod or a rocker?”
RINGO: “Er, no, I’m a mocker.”
Are you a plotter or a pantser?
A shower or a teller?
First-person or third-?
Are you a Shaker, a Quaker, a candlestick-maker?
The whole damn writing community defines ourselves by our strictures. You write fantasy, I write science fiction. She’s literary, he’s genre. Are you profic, antiship, a twit, a bookstagrammer?
Let’s us draw lines in the sand and pick a side, it’ll be great sport!
Except…
I write science fiction, fantasy, horror, and under other names, romance, Westerns, erotica, mysteries, thrillers, and men’s pulp. I take great pride in it. Each genre strengthens the others.
QUERY: Are you a plotter or a pantser?
ROSCOE: I’m all three.
Welcome to R. Jean Mathieu’s Three Tools of Writing.
Over the next few weeks, I’d like to walk you through some of the ways I write stories. I say “some of the ways,” because no two stories are the same, and because the tools are always the same. I don’t scream on Twitter how all you need to fix a bed is a hammer, or how all cabinets should be built with screws only. (I scream about other things on Twitter, thank you very much.) Instead, I look at the job, pick the tool I think is right for the job, and try it. If it doesn’t work, I’ll try a different tool – and a different way of approaching the story.
I have three tools that I come back to again and again, well-worn and fitted, after twenty-five years of constant use, to my hand. They are:
- Bradbury’s lists (and Goldberg’s free hand)
- Dent’s Master Pulp Formula
- Card’s MICE Quotient
I’ll be going into each in detail over the following weeks, but here’s the short version.
Ray Bradbury’s free-association lists, in my mind, are bound forever to Natalie Goldberg’s free-writing notebooks. Ray conjured out of the air lists of nouns, nouns that became memories, or notions, and which burst forth into characters or conceits and finally into stories. Many of his classics still bear the stamps of their birth – “The Veldt,” “The Pedestrian,” “The Long Rain.” And Natalie Goldberg, a poet of my mother’s generation, believed in the truth of freewriting, of allowing the words to race across the page without censure from our conscious minds. Hell, I’m doing it right now. Both believed in the bones of stories, letting these hard, firm truths thrust upward and outward to startle and inspire us. And, taken together, they have written me stories that made me weep.
Lester Dent’s Master Pulp Formula is just that – a formula for writing a pulp yarn of six thousand words, applicable at sixteen thousand or sixty thousand, believe you me. It’s a formula for keeping everything in proportion – so your story doesn’t start dragging in the second quarter, or rushes unsatisfactory toward a crashing climax. And, with a sufficiently loose definition of ‘action,’ you can apply it to startling results to romance, erotica, or Westerns, too.
(And remember, per the Snowflake Method, it’s not really an interesting story until the third perspective enters the page.)
Orson Scott Card is a terrible human being – but, confoundingly, also a very good writer. He’s not the only one, not even the only one on your bookshelf. And, before I knew what a terrible human being he was, I read his book, and his method of writing – the MICE Quotient – is too good a way to write for me to thrust away. What, then, is your story? How do you frame it? Is it coming to a place? Or is it asking a question? Or fixing a rent in the world? Or struggling against your place in the world? The power here is that any one idea – a person, a place, a mere notion – can become different stories depending on which avenue you pursue, how you choose to frame it.
Here they are, three tools, three totally contradictory ideas about writing, about art, about storytelling. And I use them all.
Because each could be the right tool for the given job.
Join me, over the next four weeks, as I show you how to use my three tools for your writing job.
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