Dancing With the Muse – An Introduction to the Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling

We are inundated with writing wisdom. It cascades around us like political fallout, right and left, plotter and pantser, light and dark, first person and third, commercial and literary, nuanced and smack in your face.

How to unblock. How to craft compelling characters (an alliterative gem in its own right). How to write scenes. How to write genre fiction. How to not make your English teacher turn over in her grave. How to get it published.

And how to keep from going insane trying to make sense of it all.

It’s like newsstand health and fashion magazines – different cover model, same old rehashed shit, issue after issue. It’s all just recycled conventional wisdom, and – here’s the really confusing part – none of it is inherently wrong.

The New Language of Writing Advice

And yet, nobody has been able to define what it means, what it really takes, to write a successful – as in, publishable – novel. For the most part it’s all theory and rhetoric, a fluid mass of tumbling ideas, tips and techniques, none of which covers the cradle-to-grave process of it all.

That is, perhaps until now.

The problem is this: we have been trying to stuff the conventional wisdom of writing fiction into a bottle using right-brained, soft-edged literary jargon. When in fact, it all becomes much clearer, much more doable, when we step back for a moment to regard the craft of writing stories from a cold-blooded engineering perspective.

The underlying proposition, or if you prefer, supposition, is that the sum of what goes into a successful novel, screenplay or short story, can be categorized and poured into six separate and highly definable buckets.

Regarded separately, each bucket comes with a user’s manual that delivers standards and criteria for excellence. Fall short of the criteria within any one category and your story suffers for it.

Nail them all, times six, and your story gets a dust jacket and a review in Publishers Weekly.

An Engineering-Oriented Approach

Of course, every engineer knows that the key to success goes beyond functionality to embrace the nuance of aesthetic elegance. Which is why a writer can indeed nail all six of the requisite core competencies and still create a story that ultimately tanks.

It’s like an athlete with all the tools, but lacks the spirit and heart of a champion.

It’s like a musician with a God-given ear who lacks the love of music itself.

It begins with an understanding of a set of core competencies. It flourishes with the artful and inspired combination of them into something, an organic whole, that exceeds the sum of those parts.

That’s the art of it. That’s why, even through this engineering lens, there is still no way to fully convey what it takes to write a successful story. The writer needs to arrive at that place of their own volition, and in their own time.

But first, they need the tools to put it all together. And the tools arrive in six buckets of writing elements and executional processes.

Trouble is, most of us are stuck at square one. From the moment we enter a creative writing classroom, and then in writing workshops, critique groups and in every how-to book ever written, we hear the siren song of character and sub-text, of organic storytelling that relies on nothing other than the writer’s inherent sensibilities.

All without ever really understanding where to start, what comes next, what follows what, and what elements glue it all together.

That’s What the Six Core Competencies Do

There is really nothing about writing a successful story that resides outside of these six basics, other than the source and inspiration for the story itself. From that point on, these six buckets define both the process and the product.

Because at the end of the writing day, all six have to be there. Come up short on any one of them, and the story won’t work as well as it could.

What are they? What are these six magic buckets of brilliance? Be prepared to be under-whelmed. Because you know this already. Just like you know that that all it takes to fly is a set of wings, sufficient forward motion and a weight-to-life ratio that defies gravity.

And yet, flight eludes you.

Within the simplicity of these six core competencies resides a key that unlocks the much more complex essence of storytelling. And that is the balance, pacing, power, emotional resonance, dramatic tension, compelling allure, vicarious experience and the electric thrill of resolution that a successful story delivers.

If you write your story knowing what they are, what the target and its criteria are, then you’ll get there all the quicker.

The six core competencies include:

1. CONCEPT… a stage upon which a compelling and richly layered dramatic narrative may unfold, an irresistible “what if?” proposition.
2. CHARACTER… a multi-dimensional protagonist that demands the reader’s vicarious interest and allegiance as a silent partner in their quest.
3. THEME… the real-life emotional relevance and resonance the story evokes within the reader.
4. STRUCTURE… a four-part sequential context that defines what scenes go where, resulting in optimal pacing and character arc across an unfolding series of expositional revelations.
5. SCENE EXECUTION… the building blocks of narrative exposition that artfully unleash the story, moment by moment, with the delivery of both information and character shadings.
6. WRITING VOICE… the writer’s unique way of crafting words, phrases and sentences that, when combined, evoke an experiential essence that adds value, power and intimacy to the story.

There is nothing else in the storytelling universe, other than the initial determination of genre and the intention to publish it when it’s completed.

Unless you have honored all six of these, that moment has not yet arrived.

Larry Brooks is a bestselling author and writing instructor, and the creator of Storyfix.com, an instructional resource for novelists and screenwriters. He is the author of Story Structure – Demystified, an ebook available through his site. His groundbreaking new book, The Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling, will be available in early 2011 from Writers Digest Books.