. . . just the Roadrunner’s nemesis. Beep, beep. Coyote the Trickster and writers are kindred spirits in inventiveness, mischievousness, and evasiveness.

Stephen King likens the aids writers use for writing fiction to tools in a toolbox. From On Writing:

“I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you. Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work.”

Mr. King’s correlation is good and logical and memorable, but is also kind of a comfortable and even a bit stodgy analogy.

Tools emphasis the artisan aspect of writing and imply rigidity in use because tools themselves don’t lend themselves to multiple uses or extensive creativity. This suggests an awful large toolbox to accommodate the infinite number of unique tools and variations on existing tools writers need to pick up while rummaging through the yard sales, antique shops, and shiny new hardware stores devoted to the craft of writing.

We’re not saying King’s tools and toolbox aren’t important–they’re extremely important, and everyone serious about being a fiction writer should read and study On Writing. We just like to take those boxes people seem to like to work in and see if we can punch holes in them to let in some fresh air.

For instance, we prefer tricks in a bag of tricks to tools in a toolbox.

“A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.”–Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Writers aren’t so much artisans as they are magicians who trick readers into thinking those words on the real or virtual page can turn into worlds as real as the one we live in. All it takes is the ability to get inside readers’ heads and switch on the parts of the brain that illuminates the imagination and triggers it into action. Reading is the art of imagining things conjured up from simple words on a page.

Performing this magic requires an understanding of the tricks in the bag of tricks–point of view, description, world creation, setting, character, dialogue, story development . . .

“Wait a minute,” you say. “That’s just all the regular stuff everyone talks about. Those things are tools in King’s toolbox.”

Yep, that’s true.

This exercise is not to suggest new aids to writing–just lighting the existing ones from different angles and through a variety of unique filters to find engraved figures or ornamental letters or subtle hues that may be invisible in other analogies for the craft of writing. Maybe that missing key to finally understanding point of view, for instance, may come clear when described in terms of playing a trick on readers’ perceptions rather than as a tool used for showing a story through specific characters.

To use a musical analogy–musicians play music, not instruments. How well they play the music depends on their proficiency with an instrument, but when they are doing it right, the listener hears the music, not the instrument. Pretty tricky. When a fiction writer is doing it right, the reader reads a story, not the words on the page. The difference is the ability to perform a literary sleight of hand.

Here are a couple of tricks to ponder:

• Storytelling is about what is withheld from the reader. In other words, readers keep turning the pages to find out what they’re not being told.
• Point of view is the most powerful trick in a writer’s bag of tricks. A story without control over point of view is a story that is out of control.

These two tricks are make it or break it criteria for submission acceptance, for us at least. Which means we’ll be chatting about each of them in future blogs.

“In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader.”–William Carlos Williams

. . . in a book about the ethics of eating meat.

We read the following passage from Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and were reminded of one of the more problematic issues a writer faces when writing fiction–deciding how much of a character’s backstory to tell without bogging down the pace and wandering away from the focus of the story. When does a character’s backstory become irrelevant and a detriment to the process of storytelling?

Here’s the passage . . .

More stories could be told about my grandmother than about anyone else I’ve ever met–her otherworldly childhood, the hairline margin of her survival, the totality of her loss, her immigration and further loss, the triumph of her assimilation–and though I will one day try to tell them to my children, we almost never told them to one another. Nor did we call her by any of the obvious and earned titles. We called her the Greatest Chef.

Perhaps her other stories were too difficult to tell. Or perhaps she chose her story for herself, wanting to be identified by her providing rather than her surviving. Or perhaps her surviving is contained within her providing: the story of her relationship to food holds all of the other stories that could be told about her.

The most fascinating part is the idea that the grandmother might be living the story she wants to live, which is the culmination of all the other stories she has lived but the only relevant story for her is the present one.

In a novel, the protagonist lives the story the writer chooses for her, and this life is the culmination of the character’s back story, but how visible should that backstory be? Of course, that depends on many factors, the most important being the relationship of the present story to previous events in the character’s life.

So think of Mr. Foer’s grandmother when filling in a character’s backstory. It doesn’t matter how interesting that backstory is. If it’s not relevant to the story or characterization, then all it is is interesting and probably not important enough to be included.

On the positive side, if it’s interesting enough, you have the idea for a new story.