Revealing Superheroes' Secrets for Better Storytelling

My husband—sweetie that he is—brought me a copy of The Smithsonian from his dermatologist's office. So thanks to Lance and Dr. Mantel, I am now a diehard fan of the magazine.

One of the articles was inspired by the new movie, Man of Steel. They take up how "superhero origin stories inspire us to cope with adversity."

The elements that make superheroes so popular can work with characters in any kind of fiction you may write (or read). Here are the ones that Smithsonian writer Robin Rosenberg found in several of the most popular superhero tales. Check your stories and novels to see how these themes (or "life-altering experiences") might be capitalized on to further pique the interest of your readers.

~Destiny—is your character "chosen" in some way?
~Trauma—has your character suffered trauma that increased his strengths or weaknesses?
~Sheer chance—Sheer chance is usually not as compelling as an action that has been caused or motivated, but sometimes a writer just has to resort to it. If an author makes that choice, he or she should put more emphasis on how the character deals with it.
~Choosing "altruism over the pursuit of wealth and power."

My own takeaway from Rosenberg’s piece is that literary criticism of the last decade has relegated backstory in novels as pretty undesirable, something that should be minimized at all costs. In my gut, I've always disagreed. Of course, we can't let backstory get in the way of momentum, but backstory is often part of your hero’s path to character building so they very well may deserve more attention.  I’m also reading Wally Lamb’s new novel and I’m pretty sure from the evidence that he agrees with me—at least in regard to literary fiction.

Backstory helps your readers relate and find meaning in loss, and it provides models for coping. If you are a write of nonfiction, you may find ways to use superheroes' themes anecdotally in your work.

In either case, understanding the psychological underpinnings of why we are so affected may benefit us all by "tapping into our capacity for empathy, one of the greatest [super?] powers of all."

There’s one more that Rosenberg missed. I think we're all searching for connection—human to human. If that happens to be human-to-alien or human-to-superhero, so be it. It's part of what we all need as readers.

Note: Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist, has written several books about the psychology of superheroes. Search for her on Google.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second edition of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor .

A Seldom Seen Article on Craft: Shoring Up the Sagging Middle

Shore Up Your Sagging Middle

Guest Blog by Heidi Thomas

Writing is a lot like building a bridge. Each scene serves as scaffolding or supports for your entire story to rest on without sagging.
Maybe you’ve made a great start. You have a dynamite hook (some of my favorites: “The last camel collapsed at noon.” Ken Follet, and “The man with ten minutes to live was laughing.” Frederick Forsyth). You’ve gotten off to a good strong start. Maybe you know how your book is going to end, and even have the final scene written.

Now, how do you get through the middle part without it sagging and possibly collapsing?

First of all, you don’t need to write chronologically. You can write scenes out of order. Pick out some highlights and write those scenes, then see if you can figure out what you might be able to fill in between A and G.

Now, send your inner “nice guy” out for ice cream and figure out just how mean you can be to your character. Conflict is the key to keeping a story moving, to shoring it up. You’ve introduced your character and the problem she has to solve. You know what the goal is at the end.

Let’s say Cathy Character wants to be the first teenage girl to climb Mount Huge. What are her obstacles? Her parents are against the idea. It’s too expensive, too dangerous, she’s not in shape, who else is going, etc. Cathy has to overcome each objection, solve each problem.

Maybe her neighbor is a banker, so she approaches him for a loan. If he smiles and says,” Sure, Cathy, anything for you,” the problem is solved too quickly. The story can get boring and the reader’s interest will sag quickly.

But what if he says no? Now Cathy has to figure out another way to raise money. What should she do – a bake sale, a part-time job, rob the local drive-in? (You can see the various paths this story could take.) There are all kinds of ideas and none of them should be easy.

Every time your character figures out a way over, around or through a problem, throw up another obstacle, within reason, of course. You don’t want her to fail at everything.

But when she solves the money part of the problem, there should be another one waiting. Who, besides her parents, are going to oppose her? Does she have a rival? Or is there a friend who is supposedly helping her, but is actually sabotaging Cathy’s efforts?

Building a story is like constructing a bridge. You need conflict as the pillars that shore up the middle.

For each scene you write, ask yourself:
• What is the purpose of this scene?
• Does it move the story forward? (What if I take it out? Does the story flow well without it?)
• Can the reader identify with the character’s problem and struggles?
• Have you created suspense? (Will the reader want to keep reading to find out how your character solves this one? What’s at stake for him/her?)
Have fun being mean to your character and building your bridge!

Author Biography

Raised on a ranch in isolated eastern Montana, Heidi Thomas has loved reading and writing since she was a child. Armed with a degree in journalism from the University of Montana, she worked for the Daily Missoulian newspaper, and has had numerous magazine articles published.
A tidbit of family history, that her grandmother rode steers in rodeos during the 1920s, spurred Heidi to write a novel based on that grandmother’s life.

Heidi's novel Cowgirl Dreams is the first in a series about strong, independent Montana Women. The sequel, Follow the Dream, will be released this year.

Heidi is a member of Women Writing the West, Skagit Valley Writers League, Skagit Women in Business, and the Northwest Independent Editors Guild. She is an avid reader of all kinds of books, enjoys hiking the Pacific Northwest, where she writes, edits, and teaches memoir and fiction writing classes. She blogs, too!

About Heidi's Novel

Defying family and social pressure, Nettie Brady bucks 1920s convention with her dream of becoming a rodeo star. That means competing with men, and cowgirls who ride the rodeo circuit are considered “loose women.” Addicted to the thrill of pitting her strength and wits against a half-ton steer in a rodeo, Nettie exchanges skirts for pants, rides with her brothers on their Montana ranch, and competes in neighborhood rodeos.

Broken bones, killer influenza, flash floods, and family hardship team up to keep Nettie from her dreams. Then she meets a young neighbor cowboy who rides broncs and raises rodeo stock. Will this be Nettie’s ticket to freedom and happiness? Will her rodeo dreams come true?

Based on the life of the author’s grandmother, a real Montana cowgirl.
Cowgirl Dreams is available from the publisher, Treble Heart Books, Amazon.com or the author website. It is suitable for both adult and young adult readers.

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Sharing with Writers is blogged by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:

Larry Brooks Fighting the Publishing Odds for Fiction Writers

By Larry Brooks


In some polite company it’s not kosher to speak the truth about publishing your fiction. It’s like walking into a cancer ward and announcing to all those folks hooked up to tubes that only one out of ten of you is going to survive.

Not good. Haven’t tried that one, but I have spoken at writing conferences where the mere allusion to the truth, as it applies to writers, nearly got me lynched.

Even though the odds aren’t even one out of ten. They are much more daunting than that.

But I continue to speak this truth, not to discourage, but to motivate. Because the bar is very high, the competition very focused and talented, and the folks who say yes or no to your work really – truly – don’t know any more about it than you do.

You want rah-rah, go see Tony Robbins. You want the truth, keep reading.

So here’s the truth.

What you are about to read is a clarifying tool, a light at the end of your tunnel, a destination, an agenda, a truth. I like to think of it as a gift, one that, when it was presented to me, changed my writing life.

Understand these things, and chances are – nothing is definite when it comes to publishing – you will sell your novel or screenplay.

There are six separate things you need to understand and master to write a publishable story. I say separate, but then, when you finally master them, you need to combine them in a way that elevates the combined parts to something in excess of their sum.

Which is the very essence of art.

Here they are.

You need a killer concept. A fresh and compelling idea. Something that will make Spielberg invite you to lunch to kick it around.

You need to craft deep and resonant characters. Heroes that align us with their quest. Villains that titillate and terrify. Bit-players that represent the plethora of choices people make in their lives.

You need thematic power. Something that makes folks feel as if they are experiencing life itself in your story. Something that hits them where they live and endures long after they’ve forgotten your name. Which they will.

You need to understand how to craft effective and efficient narrative scenes. You can wax eloquent about the first three essentials on this list all day, but if you can’t put it on paper in a way that makes sense you’re not in the game yet. Nor will you be until you can.

You need a writing voice, a narrative style, that delivers your story without distraction, and perhaps with an artful nuance. You don’t need to write like Updike – in fact, that will get you rejected quicker than trying to sing like Whitney Houston will get you booted from American Idol.

I’ve saved the best for last.

Because this is the one core competency where the vast majority of unpublished manuscripts slide under the bus.

You need your story to unfold within the parameters of accepted dramatic structure. There are certain things that need to appear in your story at certain places.

You can’t just make it up as you go along.

Even if you do make up the content of your story as you go – not recommended, but if you must, you must – at the end of the writing day you can’t mess with the form and function of accepted story structure.

Don’t believe this? Ask a published writer.

They may describe it differently – there are many ways to skin this literary cat, and some still cling to the illusion of free-form storytelling – but in essence they’ll all tell you the same thing.

Story structure is the magic bullet of story telling. Ask yourself this question: do you even know what it is?

If you didn’t respond with a quick affirmative, or if you did and secretly aren’t so sure, then this might be the moment where your writing career spins in a new direction.

Because that information is out there.

And you get to choose – will you seek it out? Will you master it? Or will you, perhaps in the name of art, continue to believe that you can write whatever you want, in whatever order and form you want, and continue to harbor the hope that someone will buy it?

That’s like someone insisting they can make the PGA tour by hitting the ball with kitchen utensils instead of the accepted elements of the game. Creative, yes. Perhaps even artfully so. But realistic? Not remotely.

It’s your call. Everyone who has ever published a novel or sold a screenplay made that choice. Whatever their process, they’ve landed in the same place – a story that lines up with the accepted parameters of structure.

Bottom line:

You need all six of these core competencies – concept, character, theme, structure, scene construction and voice – to succeed as a writer of fiction. Weakness in any one of them will get you rejected.

But within those six agendas, one stands out as the bedrock, the foundation, for all the others – story structure.

Because if it isn’t there, it’ll sink like a ship without a hull. You can’t build a palace on a platform of woven thread. You need a solid, architecturally sound vessel for your story before it can set sail.
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Larry Brooks is the creator of Storyfix.com, an instructional writing resource for novelists and screenwriters. He’s also a bestselling novelist and the author of Story Structure – Demystified, available through his site.

Note: I love this book. I've read Joseph Campbell and probably dozens of other books on structure, myth, theme and more. Story Structure demystifies but it also inspires by knocking a writer on the noggin with the truth.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and two how to books for writers, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't and The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success. Her FRUGAL book for retailers is A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. She is also the author of the Amazon Short, "The Great First Impression Book Proposal". Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor blog.

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