Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence by Lisa Cron Read Free Book Online

novel like
What Came Before He Shot Her
, from the first sentence, the tone implies the exact opposite, though it doesn’t come right out and tell us so. Instead, tone makes us feel it, by evoking a particular mood. Tone belongs to the author; mood to the reader.
    In other words, your theme begets the story’s tone, which begets the mood the reader feels. Mood is what underlies the reader’s sense of what is possible and what isn’t in the world of your story, which brings us back to the point your story is making as reflected in its theme—
reflected
being the key word. Because as crucial as theme is, it’s never stated outright; it’s always implied. Movies and books that put theme first and story second tend to break the cardinal (although often grievously misunderstood, as we’ll see in chapter 7 ) rule of writing, “Show, don’t tell.” It’s the story’s job to show us the theme, not the theme’s job to tell us the story—especially since theme is a rotten storyteller and, when left to its own devices, is much more interested in telling us what to think than in simply presenting the evidence and letting us make up our own mind. Unchecked, theme is a bully, a know-it-all. And no one likes to be told what to do, which is why reverse psychology works so well. What this means is that the more passionate you are about making your point, the more you have to trust your story to conveyit. As Evelyn Waugh says, “All literature implies moral standards and criticisms, the less explicit the better.” 12
    Besides, did you ever go into a bookstore saying to yourself,
What I’d really like is a book about survival and how catastrophes bring out the gumption in some and not in others?
13 Or
I’m dying to curl up with a good book that traces the defects of society back to the defects of human nature?
14 Or
What I’m
so
in the mood for is a book that is a metaphor for Latin America?
15 I don’t think so. Which isn’t to say that you might not leave with
Gone with the Wind, Lord of the Flies
, or
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, whose authors, when pressed, described their themes as such.
    But wait: aren’t there more themes in each of those books? Probably. In fact, a simple Internet search will turn up myriad suggested themes for each title—some of which would no doubt stun, if not infuriate, their authors. But they are mostly secondary themes. What we’re talking about is the main theme—the one you, the writer, choose, rather than the ones scholars will later foist upon you so graduate students can endlessly debate them in small, earnest seminars.

Gone with the Wind : A Case Study
     
    To better understand how to use focus to define what your book is about—thus creating a yardstick by which to filter out all unnecessary information—let’s look at the most accessible of the three books just mentioned:
Gone with the Wind
. In the past some have dismissed
Gone with the Wind
as a trite, melodramatic potboiler, nothing more than “popular fiction.” But no one can deny its power as a spellbinding page-turner. And here’s the shocker: in 1937 it won the Pulitzer Prize. It also happened to be the bestselling novel of all time until it was surpassed in 1966 by
Valley of the Dolls
—which somehow the Pulitzer committee overlooked.
    First, let’s take a good look at the theme of
Gone with the Wind
according to author Margaret Mitchell in an interview with her publisher in 1936:
    If it has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those who go under? I only know that the survivors used to call that quality “gumption.” So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn’t. 16
     
    As Scarlett fights, schemes, manipulates,