Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

There were a number of very perceptive comments in response to my last blog posting. I’d like to respond to Cherie’s question:

Something I’ve been pondering as I read through the recent blogs: do you feel that the type of novel being written would or should affect the use of Reaction Scenes? I was thinking that in a romance novel, for example, it would make sense to go a little heavier on Reaction Scenes because a romance focuses more on emotion, and the thought processes and reasoning of the characters would be of more interest. Whereas in an action story, long and frequent Reaction Scenes would slow down the pace too much and only detract from the action. Would you agree with this, or do you feel that the books genre shouldn’t really influence the use of Reaction Scenes?

Yes, absolutely it makes a lot of sense in romance novels and women’s fiction to put in more word count on Reaction Scenes. In a typical thriller or action-adventure novel, on the other hand, you’d minimize the Reaction Scene length and put your word count in Action Scenes.

In chapter 10 of WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, which I just turned in to my editor yesterday, I analyzed one Action Scene and one Reaction Scene from the following two novels: GONE WITH THE WIND, by Margaret Mitchell, and PATRIOT GAMES, by Tom Clancy.

In GONE WITH THE WIND, the Action Scene and the Reaction Scene were about the same lengths. In the Action Scene, Scarlett confronts Ashley in the library and basically throws herself at him. In the Reaction Scene, she tries to figure out how to deal with her disaster, and after quite a lot of pages, she decides to marry Charlie Hamilton. Lots of emotive stuff and interpersonal stuff for Scarlett to work through.

In PATRIOT GAMES, the Action Scene is much longer than the Reaction Scene. The Action Scene shows hero Jack Ryan breaking up a terrorist attack on the Prince of Wales and his family (setting–early 1980s, when Diana was still in the picture). It’s a good exciting scene and ends with Ryan taking out one terrorist with his bare hands, then shooting the other one and getting shot simultaneously. (That’s a disaster–taking a 9 mm bullet in the shoulder!) The Reaction Scene is just a few paragraphs. Ryan sees the Palace Guards coming with rifles and realizes that he looks a mite suspicious–he’s the lone man standing at the scene of a terrorist attack, and he’s holding a loaded gun. No long dilemma here. Ryan just pops the clip out of the gun, then drops them both on the ground, and then collapses on the ground as his wound starts to put him into shock.

It would be instructive to go through a few published novels and mark the Action and Reaction Scenes and compare their relative lengths.

Yesterday, I talked about how you set up Scenes and Sequels (which we have now agreed to call Action Scenes and Reaction Scenes) when writing with multiple points of view.

Today, JD asked:

In the multi-POV situation, isn’t there often a cliff hanger of some sort that encourages you to read through the other POV characters to get back to find out what happened to Character A?

How does that fit in? Is the cliff hanger really a division of the setback? Then when you return to Character A, you finish the “Action Scene”, have your “Reaction Scene” and move into your next “Action Scene”? Or, is the cliff hanger just the end of the scene and how he gets out of it is part of the reaction and I’m just having trouble breaking it in my head?

I guess my question is, What is a cliff hanger and how does that fit into the A-Scene, R-Scene structure?

Randy sez: A cliffhanger is just a Setback in an Action Scene. The pattern of an Action Scene is that the POV character has a Goal coming into the scene. He experiences Conflict throughout most of the scene. Then at the very end, he hits a major Setback.

Please notice that the preferred way to end the Action Scene is by showing the Setback without showing the POV character’s response to it. The reader can see clearly that the POV character is in trouble, but then the scene ends abruptly. That’s a cliffhanger. It’s a great way to end an Action Scene.

Bonnie asked, regarding multi-POV novels:

In some cases, wouldn’t you have John’s Action Scene, then Mary’s Action Scene, then John’s Reaction Scene and then Mary’s Reaction Scene? In other words, all the scenes are still there, just interspersed between the other character’s scenes. Perhaps that depends on the scene, and how important the information in the Reaction Scene is — whether or not it needs to be its own scene or can be conveyed in Mary’s Action scene. I agree with JD about the cliffhangers.

Randy sez: Yes, you can do it that way. When writing a multi-POV novel, you just have more options than when you’re writing a single-POV novel. I’ve written both kinds, and there are sometimes reasons to go with single-POV. (For example, when you want to keep secrets from the reader, such as in a mystery novel or certain kinds of thrillers. Then, if the POV character isn’t privy to some secret, the reader can hardly blame you for not telling that secret.)

Keep in mind that in modern fiction, the Reaction Scene doesn’t get as much play as it used to. Modern readers like more action, less introspection. So it’s probably possible to have a novel in which there are NO Reaction Scenes at all. (I can’t think of any like this, but I think it’s theoretically possible.) But as I noted yesterday, even if you don’t write the Reaction Scene, you need to know what happened there.

Yesterday, I asked for the opinions of my loyal blog readers on what to call those pesky Scenes and Sequels. Thanks to all of you for responding! I’ve read through all your answers and I like “Action Scenes” and “Reaction Scenes.” As one of you pointed out, James Scott Bell uses these terms.

I looked back at Dwight Swain’s book and discovered to my horror that he never said that a Sequel is a full-fledged scene. He called it a transition between scenes. So I’ve been misreading Swain for about 20 years now.

I also like the idea of calling the parts of Motivation-Reaction Units “Action Beats” and “Reaction Beats”. This solves a couple of problems with terminology very nicely.

Thanks to all of you for your thoughts and ideas! I appreciate you.

Today, I had an email from a loyal reader asking how Scenes and Sequels tie together when you have multiple POV characters. This is a good question and it’s one I’ve heard many times. I just wrote the answer to it yesterday when I was drafting my chapter on Scenes, so it’s fresh in my mind.

In keeping with my new naming scheme, I’m going to refer to Scenes from here on as “Action Scenes” and I’ll refer to Sequels as “Reaction Scenes.”

When you have a single POV story, you typically write an Action Scene (containing a Goal, a Conflict, and a Setback). Then it’s quite natural to follow that up with a Reaction Scene (containing a Reaction, a Dilemma, and a Decision). Then you use that Decision to give you the Goal for a new Action Scene. This gives you a simple alternation between Action Scenes and Reaction Scenes, on and on, until the story ends.

However, there are two common cases where you often want to break this chain:

1) In a multi-POV book, you often write an Action Scene in the POV of John and then follow it with an Action Scene in the POV of Mary. Then you might do an Action Scene in the POV of Santa. Then you come back to John and do another Action Scene. When do you work in the Reaction Scenes? Answer: you can often avoid ever writing any Reaction Scenes, if you can let the reader know what went on in the Reaction Scenes somehow or other. You can do this using dialogue. John tells Mary, “Since Harvard didn’t accept me, I decided to join the Navy.” There’s the Decision, and we don’t have to wallow through John’s pesky Reaction and Dilemma. This is pretty common in modern fiction.

2) You can let the reader figure out what happened in the Reaction Scene without bothering to show it. Often, you can do this by just showing the next Action Scene in which the new Goal tells us immediately what the Decision had to be from the missing Reaction Scene. This is also pretty common in modern fiction.

I recommend that whether you show the Reaction Scene or not, you should still figure out what happened in it. You are the God of your story, and you get to know everything that goes on. In fact, you HAVE to know everything that goes on. Omniscience is a burden, and you have to bear it.

A loyal blog reader has asked me how Scenes and Sequels relate to chapters. For those who need a refresher course in what Scenes and Sequels are (or for those who have never heard of them) you can find a nice summary in my article on Writing the Perfect Scene. So far as I know, the terms Scenes and Sequels were invented by Dwight Swain in his book Techniques of the Selling Writer.

So let’s say you have your story all broken out into Scenes and Sequels. Is each of these its own chapter? If not, then how do you fit them together into chapters?

The answer is quite simple. Scenes and Sequels are typically anywhere from 1 to 12 pages long. Mine average about 4 pages each. It’s rare to be less than 2 pages or more than 10. So I just string them together in chapters of roughly 10 to 12 pages long. That is, I just keep throwing in Scenes and Sequels until a chapter is “full.” Then I make a new chapter and start filling that. There’s no reason to sweat too much about the structure of chapters. Chapters really aren’t that important. The basic unit of fiction is the scene, and there are two flavors of scene: the Scene and the Sequel.

Incidentally, is anyone else tired of this ambiguity which we inherited from Dwight Swain? Scenes and Sequels are BOTH scenes (in the ordinary sense of the word). Swain chose to create the technical terms “Scene” and “Sequel” but I personally have always found it hard to explain that they are technical terms.

I’ve just finished writing up the chapter in my new book WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES on this topic, and here’s the solution I’ve tentatively come up with:

Dwight Swain’s “Scene” has three parts, a Goal, a Conflict, and a Setback. So I’ve taken to calling this a “Goal-Conflict-Setback Scene” and I abbreviate this a “GCS Scene.”

Dwight Swain’s “Sequel” has three parts, a Reaction, a Dilemma, and a Decision. I’ve started calling this a “Reaction-Dilemma-Decision Scene” and the abbreviation is “RDD Scene.”

In my view, this makes it a little simpler. Both of these are scenes. So why not make the names clear?

What do my loyal blog readers think? I have plenty of time to change this. I’d like to hear your opinion.

I have been Xtremely busy lately working on my WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES book. It’s coming along nicely and I’m getting a chance to rethink everything I’ve ever taught and figure out how to say it better.

Yesterday I got an email from a friend asking me a question about writing and inviting me to answer it here on my blog. Good idea! Here’s her question:

I’ve been working on the scene/sequel rhythm to my story and I have a question about pacing. Do scenes tend to be longer than sequels? It seems like if they’re the same length, my characters are going to spend a lot of time wallowing in self-reflection. Can you address the length of scenes vs. sequels some time?

Randy sez: That’s an excellent question. For those not familiar with Scenes and Sequels, you can get a lightning introduction to them in this article on my site: Writing the Perfect Scene.

Now to answer the question. In modern fiction, the Sequel has suffered at the expense of the Scene. It’s common to drastically shorten Sequels. It’s even fairly common to skip the Sequel entirely and go straight to the next Scene.

I don’t favor letting those pesky characters wallow in self-reflection. Better to let them wallow in more car chases and exploding helicopters. That is the reason God invented fiction — to let us safely enjoy car chases and exploding helicopters, without the usual problems.

Gotta question for me on fiction writing? Just click through to my Contact page and email it to me. I’ll answer all questions in the answer I receive them. I’ll try to do one quick answer every day.

In my last blog post, I claimed that there is ONE thing that you must know in order to create good characters. I challenged my loyal blog readers to tell me what that ONE thing is.

Rob nailed it:

Every character is the hero of his/her own story.

Randy sez: Correct! This is absolutely fundamental to getting three-dimensional characters. When somebody tells you your villain is “cardboard,” the problem is almost certainly that you don’t give a dang about that villain because you cooked him up specifically to be the villain in your hero’s story.

The solution is Xtremely simple. Ask your villain what his story is. If you ask, he’ll tell. And if you give him a little time to explain, you may find that he has a point. In fact, it’s only when you realize that he has a point and start believing that he has a point that he’ll become a real character.

Ditto on all the other characters in your story. When you quit thinking of the hero’s sidekick as a sidekick, and start thinking of him as having his own story, that’s when he’ll come alive in your mind. If he’s alive in your mind, then he’ll be alive in your reader’s mind.

It really is that simple.

Let’s illustrate this by looking at Han Solo in STAR WARS. We’ve already worked out the one-sentence summary and one-paragraph summary for the movie, which essentially tell Luke’s story:

“A young farm boy joins a princess in the Rebellion against the Galactic Empire.”

“Luke Skywalker meets two mysterious droids who lead him to an old Jedi master, Obi-wan Kenobi. When Obi-wan asks him to help rescue Princess Leia, Luke refuses — until he finds his aunt and uncle murdered by Storm Troopers. Luke and Obi-wan join forces with Han Solo and Chewbacca to rescue the princess — at the cost of the old man’s life. Luke and his friends escape and journey to the rebel planet, where they learn that they have been tracked by the Death Star. In the final battle, Luke uses the Force and some help from his friends to destroy the Death Star.”

Notice that Han Solo doesn’t play at all in my one-sentence summary, although he gets some air-time in my one-paragraph summary. From Luke’s point of view, Han is the bus driver to get him to the action. And he’s a pretty irritating and selfish bus driver, at that.

But how does Han see things?

From his point of view, he was minding his own business, trying to earn the money he needs to pay back Jabba the Hutt, when in came this snotty kid Luke and this pie-in-the-sky old man Kenobi, offering him money for a ride off the planet. They’re a bit of easy money, but to be honest, they’re kind of flakey. Luke thinks he’s a hot-shot pilot, but he’s a farm kid with too many hormones clogging his brains and no experience in the real world. And Kenobi is clearly a quack.

So Han gives them a ride to the place they want to go, which unfortunately no longer exists when they get there, because the Death Star has inconveniently shot it to bits. Before he can react, the Death Star is pulling Han’s precious ship in with a tractor beam, and now the old coot has some whackball idea about how he’s going to get them out. Oh yeah, right.

And once the old guy has gone off to try his little magic tricks, this idiot kid Luke wants to go off saving the princess from under the noses of about seven billion HEAVILY ARMED Storm Troopers. Where’d this kid study logic? Against his far superior judgment, Han gets talked into making a stab at rescuing the princess, but only because she is rich and rescuing her would solve Han’s financial problems.

Thanks to Han’s great shooting (and no thanks to the dratted kid, who just hasn’t got a single brain cell more than necessary to support complex life), they do rescue the princess, who turns out to have a major league attitude. When they finally get back to the ship, they find out that the old man is duking it out with good old Black Sheet Vader himself. Too bad the old guy’s a little slow and gets a light saber in the gut, but that was his choice. Now the thing to do is get out of Dodge.

Once again, thanks to great driving AND great shooting by Han, they escape the Death Star. Yeah, sure, the old man did his part by shutting off the tractor beam. So he found a lever somewhere and threw it–big whoop-de-doo. The important thing is that Han Solo, the greatest pilot ever to fly the galaxy, got them out, evaded the chase, and took them safely to the rebel planet, earning the bucks he badly needs to pay back Jabba.

What gets weird is that Luke then thinks Han is SELFISH for wanting to go pay his debts! What kind of double-think is that? A guy needs to pay his debts. It’s the right thing to do. And anyway, right now, Jabba the Hutt has every bounty hunter in the galaxy out looking for him, so it’s also the smart thing to do. Han is never going to be free until that debt is covered. And Luke wants him to hang around and shoot up Imperials? That is just too stupid for words. What’s even more stupid is that Luke goes and gets himself in the thick of the battle, and ends up with one shot to take, Lord Vader on his tail, and no way out.

Han is a decent guy–ask anyone. He sticks up for his friends, even when they do stupid stuff. So he comes back, takes a shot at Vader, and knocks him into the next county with unbelievably great shooting. Luke squeezes off a lucky shot and takes out the Death Star. End of story. Except that, oh yeah, it’s pretty clear the princess has a thing for Han. Which is only natural, considering. Han’s not so sure he likes her. She’s kinda snooty in exactly the wrong sort of way. But he’ll think about it.

So that’s Han’s side of the story, and from his point of view, he’s the hero of it. Luke (quite literally) is a guy who just came along for the ride.

Given all that, here is Han’s one-sentence summary:

“A dashing young smuggler takes on Lord Vader in the battle to destroy the Death Star.”

16 words, and it makes clear who’s the REAL hero of this story.

Next time, I’ll work on Han’s one-paragraph summary, which makes clear what the REAL disasters are in this story–and here’s a hint: they aren’t what that snotty kid Luke thinks they are.

My loyal blog readers will be gratified (and astonished) to learn that this blog has been listed in the “Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs.”

The rankings are divided into several sections. If you scroll down to the “Fiction Writing” section, you’ll see the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog listed at the top of that particular group. Part of what makes this blog special is my loyal blog readers, so I thank all of you for participating.

I’d like to continue our analysis of STAR WARS (Episode 4) which we began a few weeks ago. In our last few blogs on the subject, we came up with a nice sharp one-sentence summary and a one-paragraph summary of the movie. Those are good high-level analyses of the storyline, but it’s now time to look at the characters. Which raises the rather interesting question, who are the principal characters in STAR WARS?

Luke Skywalker is obviously the lead character. But who should go second on the list? Is it Leia (the love interest)? Or Han Solo (the buddy)? Or Obi-wan Kenobi (the mentor)? Or Darth Vader (the antagonist)?

Each of these four has a claim to be the #2 character in the movie. It all depends on what kind of movie you think you’re watching.

If you see the romantic storyline as very important, then Leia has a claim. This is of course before we learned that Leia is Luke’s sister. For sure in the movie, Luke had a thing for Leia, as did Han. Which made it convenient when Leia turned out to be off-limits to Luke so there was no need to have a goat-fight between Luke and Han in Episode 6. That would have been a little unfortunate, because everybody comes out stinky from a goat-fight.

If you see the male-bonding storyline as more important, then you might argue that Han Solo is the #2 character.

If you see the story as a Hero’s Journey kind of story, then Obi-wan Kenobi might have a claim, even though he dies halfway through the movie in a shocking disaster that forces Luke to grow up in the Force. Obi-wan does kind of hang around a bit afterward (or else Luke is hearing some seriously bad-news-for-your-mental-health voices in his head).

If you see the story as a Good-versus-Evil kind of tale, then Darth Vader is a good choice for the #2 character.

I think that the reason the movie had such broad appeal is that the movie was really all of the above. This is kind of risky in a movie, because people like to know what a movie is. When it’s a little of this and a little of that, then it better be awfully good at both this and that.

As it turned out, the movie was awfully good at all of the above. I’d say it’s about evenly balanced between the various kinds of story, so it drew in a broad spectrum of people. There was a synergy between the storylines that transcended genre. (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence. I’m going to leave it there to prove that I can buzzword as horribly as anyone else.)

In any event, in the next week or so, I’d like to analyze the storyline for each of the 5 characters listed above: Luke, Leia, Han, Obi-wan, and Darth. What we’ll learn is something absolutely critical for the fiction writer who wants to create strong characters. There is ONE thing you must know in order to have some hope of succeeding.

What that ONE thing is, we’ll discuss next week. But you already know what it is, don’t you? You have it within you. Trust your feelings . . .

Last week, I challenged my loyal blog readers to do a one-paragraph summary of Star Wars. Several of you took up the challenge (this is hard!) and posted summaries.

In my opinion, the best summary was posted by Ben:

A young farm boy, who dreams of adventure, lives in a galaxy torn by rebellion and war. He is pushed into the conflict after his aunt and uncle are killed by the Empire for the droids he possesses. After joining a smuggler for cheap transportation, the boy and his mentor are captured by the Empire on their way to rescue a princess and, in the ensuing struggle, the mentor sacrifices himself. The boy and the smuggler save the princess and think they have escaped, only to learn the Empire has followed them to the Rebel base, intending to destroy the planet. Aided by his companions and the last lesson of his fallen mentor, the boy must exploit the hidden weakness of the Empire’s destructive weapon to preserve the Rebellion.

Randy sez: One thing I should have mentioned is that in a one-paragraph summary, you have enough space to use the names of the characters. In your one-sentence summary, you generally don’t have that luxury, but when you expand to a full paragraph, you have room for maybe 3 or 4 character names.

Let’s analyze Ben’s paragraph for the component parts:

Sentence 1 (The story setup): Ben gives us the primary character, “A young farm boy, who dreams of adventure.” He also gives the setting, “a galaxy torn by rebellion and war.” I’d say he scores well on both counts. This is a good solid setup.

Sentence 2 (The first disaster): Ben nails this one, “his aunt and uncle are killed by the Empire”. He also shows how this disaster leads to the first major turning point in the story, “He is pushed into the conflict.” The purpose of the first disaster is to commit the lead character irrevocably to the story. Up until Luke finds his aunt and uncle dead, he can back out of the story. But once he finds Beru and Owen dead, he knows that HE’S DEAD TOO unless he fights back. So he’s committed; he joins forces with Obi-wan Kenobi, knowing that he can never back out.

Sentence 3 (The second disaster): Ben again gets it exactly right, “the mentor sacrifices himself.” This is common in heroic stories. The mentor is there for part of the story, but then vanishes, leaving the lead character to swim in deep waters alone. From here on, Luke must fight his battles more and more on his own.

Sentence 4 (The third disaster): Ben gets this critical disaster right again, “Empire has followed them to the Rebel base, intending to destroy the planet.” The purpose of the third disaster is to force the end-game. In Luke’s case, he no longer has a choice about taking the battle to the enemy, because the enemy is taking the battle to him and to all the rebels. The stakes have been raised as high as they can go. After this final battle, if the Rebellion loses, it can’t fight another day because all its leaders will be destroyed.

Sentence 5 (The ending): Ben summarizes the ending here, “the boy must exploit the hidden weakness of the Empire’s destructive weapon to preserve the Rebellion.” This holds back just a little bit. It’s really OK here to tell the ending.

Overall, an excellent job, Ben! That is exactly the way you write a one-paragraph summary.

Here is the summary I wrote down on a piece of paper after my last blog. You’ll notice that it’s very similar to Ben’s, but I am using the names of the characters:

Luke Skywalker meets two mysterious droids who lead him to an old Jedi master, Obi-wan Kenobi. When Obi-wan asks him to help rescue Princess Leia, Luke refuses — until he finds his aunt and uncle murdered by Storm Troopers. Luke and Obi-wan join forces with Han Solo and Chewbacca to rescue the princess — at the cost of the old man’s life. Luke and his friends escape and journey to the rebel planet, where they learn that they have been tracked by the Death Star. In the final battle, Luke uses the Force and some help from his friends to destroy the Death Star.

One thing to note that both Ben and I did in our one-paragraph summaries is that we “back-loaded” the disasters to the very end of Sentences 2, 3, and 4. This maximizes their emotive punch. You will note that in my presentation of the ending, I tell the finale — “destroy the Death Star.” When you summarize your story for an editor or agent, they don’t want you to be coy about the ending. They want to know if it’s a happy ending or a sad ending or something else. They’ll be OK with either kind, but they don’t want you to write a great story that ends with a muddle ending that leaves the reader saying, “Huh?”

OK, whaddaya think? I have no delusions that my one-paragraph summary is perfect. Are there ways to make it better? Remember that small differences matter. As Mark Twain observed, the difference between the good word and the exactly right word is the difference between the lighting bolt and the lightning bug.

If you can see how to improve my one-paragraph summary, post a comment here.

In my last few blog entries, I challenged my loyal blog readers to write a one-sentence summary of the movie STAR WARS. Many of you responded, and I took some ideas from the best to sharpen my own summary of the movie.

My current favorite one-sentence summary is: “A young farm boy joins a princess in the Rebellion against the Galactic Empire.”

Several of my loyal blog readers have noted that all boys are young, and therefore “young farm boy” is redundant and therefore the sentence should start out, “A farm boy…”

I am going to politely disagree here. “Young” is pulling its own weight here. I have looked at the sentence with and without it, and I think it works better with it. So I’m leaving it in, even if it’s redundant.

But now let’s move on. Perfection is not something we’ll ever achieve. If we’ve got an editor or agent interested in this one-sentence summary, they’ll want to hear more. Not a lot more, but a bit more. My bet is that they’ll want to know the Three-Act Structure for this story. You can learn more about Three-Act Structure in my Fiction 101 and Fiction 201 courses, but I’ll assume you know what this structure is.

I prefer to present the Three Act Structure in a five-sentence summary, as follows:

Act 1: A setup sentence to set the stage, and then a second sentence that tells the first major disaster (which ends Act 1).

Act 2: A sentence that tells the second major disaster (which happens at roughly the midpoint of the second act). Another sentence that tells the third major disaster (which happens at the end of Act 2 and forces the ending.)

Act 3: A final sentence which explains how the story resolves.

There you have it. Three Acts. Five sentences. Three diasters. It’s really not all that complicated.

Now your homework assignment, for those who want to play, is this: Write a one-paragraph summary of STAR WARS. Use five sentences to tell me the setup, the three disasters, and the ending.

I’ll do the same and we’ll compare notes in a day or two.

Post your one-paragraph summary here in a comment.

Yesterday, I challenged my loyal blog readers to write a one-sentence summary of Star Wars. I promised to pick a winner today.

Now it should be obvious that there is no objective way to do this, just as there is no objective way to rate fiction. We all know that some fiction is fantastic, some is good, some is mediocre, and some is tripe. It’s just that one person’s “fantastic” is another person’s “tripe.”

So the goal here is to learn to write the kind of one-sentence summaries that are going to get the attention of editors and agents. Do that and it won’t matter whether Randy thinks your sentence is any good.

With that enormous load of caveats firmly in mind, let me tell you what I think makes a good one-sentence summary.

First, it should be short. The reason–so you can memorize it easily, say it quickly, and have the editor/agent understand it immediately.

Second, it should be neither too vague nor too precise. The reason–too vague is unlikely to excite anyone; too precise is automatically going to be too long to say on that pesky elevator.

Third, it needs to connect emotively. The reason–because the main purpose of fiction is to give the reader a powerful emotional experience, so the one-sentence summary needs to make some sort of a promise as to what sort of emotional experience is going to be delivered.

Given all that, here is the one-sentence summary that I wrote yesterday in one minute. It’s not the best possible, but it gets the job done: “A young farm boy joins the Rebellion against the Galactic Empire.”

Does this meet the requirements I gave above? Yes.

First, it’s only 11 words, 7 of which are one-syllable words. So this is easy to remember and say quickly.

Second, the sentence is neither vague nor precise. We have “a young farm boy” which tells us what category of person we’ve got, without too many details. We’ve also got a “Rebellion” (capitalized, which tells us something already) which defines what kind of story this is. And we’ve got a “Galactic Empire” which tells us enough to be going on with, but doesn’t tell us all the boring details.

Third, there are several emotive buttons I am punching here. “Young farm boy” immediately punches the “underdog” button. “Rebellion” (capitalized) tells us that there’s a war on, and that the good guys are the ones rebelling. Both of these punch all sorts of emotive buttons in humans. “Galactic Empire” tells us that we have a vast, overwhelmingly powerful evil opponent.

So my sentence is quite serviceable, and I wouldn’t be ashamed to use it to pitch this story, if I were a young George Lucas trying to get this movie made.

But can we do better? The answer, I think, is yes we can. I read through all the ideas posted by my loyal blog readers, and one of them immediately jumped out at me, posted by Destiny. Here is Destiny’s winning entry: “A farm boy journeys with a jedi master to rescue a rebel princess and fight against the empire.”

This is 18 words, which is a bit long, but what I like here is that Destiny is punching some more emotive buttons: “Jedi master” connotes some sort of mystical force to be used; “rebel princess” is terrific, by connoting war, politics, and love all in one shot (any time there’s a princess in a story, it’s very likely to be a love story).

I also take note of runner-up Marcus Goodyear’s entry: “A young farm boy joins the rebellion against an evil empire–armed with secret plans, quirky robots, and a mysterious connection to the Force.”

You will note that Marcus and I independently came up with almost identical wording for the first 11 words. The only differences are: I capitalized “Rebellion” and Marcus didn’t; I called it “the Galactic Empire” and Marcus called it “an evil empire.” I’ll discuss a little later why I prefer “Galactic” to “evil”.

The problem with Marcus’s sentence is that it went on to add more details. In my view, those should be saved for later. When the editor or agent says, “Oooh, that sounds cool! Tell me more!”–that’s the time to bring in the secret plans, droids, and Force.

Let me commend a few other entries. Ben suggested this one: “A farm boy in a far away galaxy joins a courageous Rebellion against an evil Empire.”

Randy sez: Again, this is a very strong sentence. I like the “far away galaxy” because we all know how emotively powerful that phrase was in the opening seconds of the movie–so much so that it’s become a buzz-phrase. There are two issues I have with Ben’s sentence: the words “courageous” and “evil”. I prefer not to make value judgments in the one-sentence summary. The reason is because this is “telling” when you really want to let the editor/agent draw their own conclusions on who is courageous and who is evil. People don’t like to be told; they like to figure it out.

I also liked Sean’s entry: “A farm boy crosses the galaxy to rescue a princess from the man who killed his father.”

Randy sez: This is strong and short and punches many emotive buttons. But it’s missing one thing. Remember how Star Wars made you feel? That there is an enormous, huge Galaxy controlled by an evil Empire? The blackness and vastness of space on the screen gives you an overpowering desire to join the Rebellion and battle monstrous evil. Sean’s entry isn’t capturing the bigness of the plot. Star Wars is about more than the man who killed Luke’s father; it’s about a galaxy’s freedom from oppression.

Carrie’s entry also caught my eye, just because it chose to focus on someone other than Luke: “A dark mystic pursues a farm boy who possesses blueprints of a planet-destroying weapon.”

Randy sez: It sometimes works better to write a one-sentence summary about the villain of the story. In the case of Star Wars, I think it works better to focus on the hero. HOWEVER, I applaud Carrie for trying something out of the ordinary. That is always a good thing. Don’t just try one idea! Try a bunch! Try weird things that you don’t think will work. You can always reject them if they’re not as good. But you might learn something.

Having said all that, can we improve my original one-sentence summary? I think we can. Here’s my next cut at it: “A young farm boy joins a princess in the Rebellion against the Galactic Empire.”

This is now 14 words instead of my original 11, but it adds one new emotive button–the princess. That is good because it broadens the appeal. If I can revert to highly sexist and misleading categories, this changes the story from a story for “boys” into a story for “both boys and girls.” You are all smart enough to know that gender stereotypes are frequently wrong but often have a grain of truth. You are all also smart enough to see that grain of truth here and not waste our time attacking those pesky stereotypes, which I’m sure we all despise.

The fact is that Star Wars had broad appeal–to men, women, rich, poor, old, young. It had action and SF and romance and mysticism. The one-sentence summary that I have given above captures all of that except the mystical element. I don’t know if it’s possible to squeeze the Force into the one-sentence summary. In my view, sometimes less is more.

Any comments, suggestions, ideas? Can we improve this one-sentence summary any further? Do you see any problems I’ve not noticed?

Go ahead and post a comment here if you think we can. Next week, we’ll expand this one-sentence summary out to a one-paragraph summary.

See ya then!