A Letdown Squid

Quotes from Writing for Story by Jon Franklin (2)

Structure - The Complicating Focus:

“Any dramatic piece draws its energy from the reader’s curiosity, both intellectual and emotional, about how the complication is going to be solved. In a whodunit, the reader wants to know, you guessed it, whodunit. In a dramatic short story, be it fiction or nonfiction, the reader wants to know how the character is going to make out…is he gonna get the girl, or isn’t he? This ‘dramatic tension.’

And it doesn’t exist until you get to the complicating event, which doesn’t come until the end of the complicating focus.  It is the climax of that focus; all that comes before is preamble, introducing the character and setting the scene for the confrontation of character and problem. 

This embodies the dilemma that the writer faces in the complication.  The writer doesn’t really have the reader by the scruff of his neck until the complication is ended. Until then the writer has to keep the reader interested by sheer craftsmanship and wit, by breathing life into the character, by skillful use of language and, most of all, by foreshadowing.”

AND

“The first developmental focus may show your reader muddling through his past, the second may show him muddling through the present, and the the third may show him grasping the nature of the problem and, for the first time, taking logical and positive steps toward the resolution.

Or he may try one thing in the first developmental focus, fail at it, and try another tack in the second focus. He may fail at that, too, and go on to try still a third thing in the last developmental focus.”

16 April 2012 · Comments

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Quotes from Writing for Story by Jon Franklin (1)

The New School for Writers:

“The writer grew stronger with every story; like his protagonists, he learned something with every sentence. He grew steadily more mature, strengthening his art and craft, perfecting the techniques and tempering the insight that he hoped and prayed would one day carry him into the highest reaches of literature.

This testing, this practicing, this experimenting, equipped the young Hemingway and the young Steinbeck for ever-larger literary tasks.  Eventually the writer who stuck with it was able to graduate with reasonable safety to the world of books, where failure or a single project is a disaster that wipes out years of work and can lead to bankruptcy and/or divorce.

For all these reasons and more, the short story was the greatest training ground that literature has ever known.”

16 April 2012 · Comments

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