Today I turn the tipping over to Philip Martin, of Great Lakes Literary Agency.
Philip
Martin is the editor of The New Writer's Handbook (which includes my
short article on working with kids, "Show, Don't Tell.")
He offers the following advice on telling a fresh story:
The
core of the writer's challenge is to tell a fresh story. As William M.
Thackeray (Victorian novelist, author of Vanity Fair), summed it up:
"The two most engaging powers of a good author are to make new things
familiar and familiar things new."
But how? How to put a fresh spin on old and common themes?
As children's book author Morris Gleitzman says on his website:
"I
don't think you can make emotions up, no matter how good your
imagination is. (. . .) All we can do is use the emotions we all feel
every day. Love, hate, hope, fear, excitement, jealousy, sadness, guilt,
joy, anxiety, etc. The characters in our stories may be feeling them
for different reasons to us, but they're the same emotions. (. . .)
"So
part of the storytelling process for me is to find interesting and
unusual reasons for characters to have the emotions that the rest of us
experience every day for familiar reasons."
The key to the trick: "interesting and unusual." In a word: quirky.
Too
many beginning authors prefer to create a familiar, likable character,
someone who doesn't rock the fictional boat . . . while the ones we
enjoy the most (think about it) are often the quirkiest, from Pippi
Longstocking to Holden Caulfield to . . .
Find the character that swims against the tide, and you've got a core element of a good story.
For more about Philip Martin, visit The Writers Handbook Blog.
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