Matt Bird - The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers

Youve just boarded a plane. Your iPhone is loaded with all your favorite podcasts, but before you can get your earbuds in, disaster strikes: The guy in the next seat starts telling you all about something crazy that happened to himin great detail. This guy is an unwelcome storyteller trying to convince an extremely reluctant audience to care about his story. We all hate that guy, right?

But any time you write a story for strangers (any kind of story: novel, memoir, screenplay, comic, even just a cover letter), you become that unwelcome storyteller, desperately trying to make a connection before those earbuds pop.

Twenty-first-century culture moves fast, and theres an endless amount of content bombarding us at all times. What are the new rules for succeeding as a writer in this oversaturated environment? The answer is simple: If you want to write for strangers, you have to remember what it feels like to be that jaded audience.

When that guy next to you starts talking, do you just assume hes got a good story to tell? No, you dont. Do you automatically care about what he has to say? Certainly not. But wait could you ever possibly care? Yes, but only if he swiftly wins you over:

• How quickly do you want that chatty passengers story to become interesting? Right away!
• Do you want him to start with a lot of background information about where he was born and what childhood traumas he had? No! You want him to skip over all that.
• Do you want him to tell you about a bunch of unrelated things that happened this week? No! You want him to tell you a focused story about one unique and interesting thing that happened to him.
• Do you want him to go on and on about what a pitiful, inactive, incapable failure he is? No! If youre going to care about him, hed better be worth caring about.

Its that simple. Tell the story that would win you over, even if you didnt want to hear it. This is the heart of The Secrets of Story.

Of course, there are thousands of other writing guides. So what makes this one unique (and uniquely necessary)? The advice in this book is

• Irreverent: Writers are snarky people, but too many writing books are burdened by a grandiosity and solemnity that seem totally alien to a writers day-to-day experience. I love writing, and Im in awe of great stories, but the best way to write those stories is to never lose your perspective or sense of humor.
• Comprehensive: Too many writing books fall into the category of Here are a few pointers I picked up over the course of my career. Thats great if those pointers happen to be the ones you need right now, but these books offer no place to begin, and they make no attempt to systematically cover each step of the process. This book has a step-by-step, concept-by-concept approach that examines just about everything that goes into writing a great story.
• Practical: My focus is less on What does it all mean? and more on accumulating surgical instruments for specific situations youll encounter. The hope is that the next time youre laboring over some poor patient and desperately hold out your hand for the next tool, it will be within reach. Consider me your operating room nurse.
• Counterintuitive: Too many books fill their pages with common sense or easy wisdom, confirming the certainties that readers brought with them. I try to limit myself to counterintuitive insights I never would have guessed when I started. This book strips away the easy assumptions that struggling writers fall prey to and replaces them with less-than-obvious solutions.