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I started rolling my eyes reading this thread but I actually agree with VKR's broader point here, which is that almost all stories can be made better by fitting them into a loosely defined structure that most successful works of fiction share.
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It's kinda interesting how stories that turn into cult classic landmarks (as opposed to critical darlings), they tend to hew to the most classical of story structures like Campbell. Star Wars, Fight Club, Groundhog Day, Rick and Morty... all classic Campbellian structure.
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Whether or not that's strictly "Campbellian" I have some quibbles with. I am a fan of Matt Bird's formulation, which is more descriptive than it is prescriptive. Stories tend to be about a person solving a big problem.
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The most important point, of course, is that you have to start with the story before you can beat it into a structure. The paint by numbers approach usually ends in frustration.
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I tend to write a draft, then interrogate it later. "Does the protagonist have a long standing social problem?" "Have they taken up an intimidating opportunity?" "Have they exhausted all the stupid ways of doing this?" "Are they really taking the hard way now?"
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The answers to those questions send me down another series of rewrites. More questions, more rewrites. Rinse/repeat until the rewrites stop making it better.
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But I digress. It's a good thread. This part is especially true, fanfic is a complete joke.
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Fan fiction communities in relation to “published” fiction markets (text, screen) are a joke, compared to nonfiction social media vs old media. Non-fiction new media (blogs, newsletters) have pretty much brought all but the costliest investigative non-fiction to its knees.
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The importance of producing work is real though. Writing 10 novels is tough. Rewriting a single novel ten times is less so. I did an exercise where I wrote close to a hundred flash fiction shorts and by the end I was much better at story telling.
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If I knew I was writing a Catch-22 it’d be worth a decade of effort. Writing 10 dreck novels would likely be less fulfilling for me than flipping burgers for 10 years. Some authors manage to be both good and prolific, but unlike nonfiction there’s no strong correlation.
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I've been at the novel I'm working on now for about five years. The first drafts bear little resemblance to the current one. It might not be the Great American Novel yet, but I am confident that it is on a different level than the first draft.
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The key concept here is that it's not just practice that makes you a better writer, it's deliberate practice. That's why critique groups are so important. Write a million words with no feedback and you'll waste 900k of them.
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Fields that are NOT like that More startups != better entrepreneur More novels != better fiction writer More acting credits != better actor More movies != better director More bills passed != better politician More arrests != better detective
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I’m not sure this is true. That’s a relatively modern way of writing fiction in a peer group. Many great fiction writers appear to have worked largely alone. Deliberate practice need not be that social. It can be deliberate in isolation and in most fields it is that way.
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I agree. I think that writing groups are one way to achieve deliberate practice, but I have my problems with them as well. It's very difficult to interrogate your own fiction output, so a decent group can be the first step for that. Learning to use that feedback is its own skill
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And many of these groups are just not very good, but interpreting the feedback of other amateurs can teach a reflective author how to be more empathetic toward the audience point of view. It's not the only way to do that, though.