The story triangle

June 16, 7:37 PMAtlanta Writing ExaminerTony Burton

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Graphic © 2009 Tony Burton

When I was in the U.S. Navy, one thing that was constantly drummed into us was Fire Safety. Think about it: when you are on a ship in the middle of the ocean, the last thing you want is to have a fire threatening your life, where you have no place to run, and then to make things worse you have to pump water into the ship to put out the fire… effectively sinking the ship if you don’t remove the water!

Fire requires three things: Fuel, Heat and Oxygen. Take away any one of those and the fire will stop.  Taken together, they are called the Fire Triangle.

Good fiction (and for that matter, good creative nonfiction) also has three basic components in order to work properly: Plotting, Characterization, and Good Writing. Yes, we can take some of these and break them down further (dialogue, description, conflict, etc.), but those fall within the basic three components.

For example, you can’t develop good, convincing dialogue without both good characterization and good writing technique. Conflict is useless unless the characters behave in a believable way when confronted with the conflict.

Certainly differences in types of writing may cause you to emphasize one thing more than the other, but they are all necessary. In a genre novel of popular fiction (crime fiction, romance, sci-fi, etc.), authors sometimes think only of plot. But poorly developed characters, even in plot-driven fiction, will drag the story down. And if your characters are well-developed and the plot is interesting but the writing is abysmal, who will want to read it?

Literary fiction, on the other hand, sometimes has beautiful writing with glorious wordsmithing, but if that is all there is to the story, will it stand as a well-written story? Probably not.

Admittedly there are occasionally stories in some genres that focus primarily on plot. We may see an exciting adventure story with two-dimensional characters, but wouldn’t it be much better if we actually cared what happened to the people in the story?

Even with an excellent plot and fully-developed characters, however, you must have good writing.  What does that mean?  It means descriptions that paint clear pictures of location and characters.  It means dialogue that is realistic.  It means leaving clichés out of your writing.  It means, in short, writing in such a way as to grab the reader's attention and hang onto it.  Leave off the good writing and it is like trying to maintain a fire with no heat. All three parts of the story triangle must be there.

It has been said that the only good writing is rewriting. Hemingway once famously said, “All first drafts are s**t.” Without going into the scatological side of things, I agree with the sentiment. Nobody’s first draft is worth publishing, and you may regard that as an axiom.

I’ll say it again: Good Writing Is Rewriting. It takes all those ideas you put down in your first draft, all those half-formed characters and skeletal plots and makes them into a real story. Good writing is crisp and clean, unburdened with useless words that don't either move the story forward or paint a clearer picture of the scene. It pulls the reader in, making the reader part of the story instead of an observer.

Some writers are very talented in one or the other of the three parts of the writing triangle. Some create memorable and empathetic characters, but do not create a believable and workable plot. Some people have a beautiful way with language, able to make a sentence sing, but write characters with all the depth of a teaspoon.

If you truly want to be a writer, you must work on developing your ability to create all three legs of the writing triangle. And the only way to do that is to write… and write… and write some more, with honest feedback from those you trust.

Don’t stop writing.

Copyright ©2009 Tony Burton

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away."

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, author, 1900 - 1944

Quotation taken from THE WRITER'S JOURNEY JOURNAL