Authorial Acrobatics

It's Niagara Falls. It's one of the most beautiful natural wonders in the world. Who wouldn't want to walk across it?

Nik Wallenda

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"It's Niagara Falls. It's one of the most beautiful 

natural wonders in the world. Who wouldn't want to 

walk across it?" -- Nik Wallenda

The World English Dictionary defines "acrobat" as "an entertainer who performs acts that require skill, agility, and coordination, such as tumbling, swinging from a trapeze, or walking a tightrope." This definition could also apply to a writer.

Entertainer
No matter what we write--non-fiction, children's books, literary fiction, or whatever--our primary purpose is to entertain. OK, maybe we want to enlighten, instruct, shock, or create abstract art, but whatever we want to do with out writing, it will go nowhere if readers don't find it at least somewhat entertaining. There are a lot of books out t here, and people will go back to the authors they have enjoyed in the past.

"I hope what I do and what I just did inspires people 

around the world to reach for the skies." -- Nik Wallenda

Performer
In order to entertain, we perform. We create and construct. We put ourselves in front of an audience and risk failure and ridicule in the hopes of succeeding.

Skill
Successful writers require a number of skills. We must have grammar and story-telling skills. We must be able to say old things in new ways. We must learn and practice the arts of writing, including understanding how to structure a story, how to write dialogue, how to make non-existent people live. Many, maybe most, of the basic skills of a writer can be learned, but they must be practiced and be combined with a difficult-to-define something that puts them above others who have solid writing skills but can't write a story.

"The impossible is not quite impossible 

if you put your mind to it." -- Nik Wallenda

Agility
A writer must be flexible. A writer must be able to turn on a dime, to perform sleight-of-hand tricks, to create and control puppets while the puppeteer remains unseen. Agility applies both to the flexibility required to create characters and their stories, and to scheduling writing time around a busy life.

Coordination
Most people who attempt to write fall flat on their faces. Even the successful authors. But the successful writer learns through practice how to keep from falling, even when flirting with the disaster that is present in nearly every first draft.

"I've trained all my life not to be distracted 

by distractions."--Nik Wallenda

Tumbling
We fall. We get up. We make our characters fall and get up. We perform amazing and dangerous stunts, jumps, and twists. We are under a constant danger of stepping out of bounds or landing on our heads. Every step of the writing life is flirting with danger and risking failure. But we learn to "fall with style" so our tumbles become intentional and our rebounds are artful.

Swinging from a trapeze
Every jump we make in our stories risks failure, and failure can be disastrous. We swing in the air, grasping our thoughts and ideas, letting go to grasp at the next one. Will we catch it? We won't ever find out without letting go of the comfortable hold we have on where we are.

"Every walk that I do, there's obstacles in the way. There's always 

somebody or something that comes across negative, 

but I live for that sort of thing." -- Nik Wallenda

Walking a tightrope
The balance required to successfully complete a story often seems impossible. When we're out beyond the imagined safety of our beginning and our end, treading carefully on a narrow line that constantly threatens to swing out from under us, it often seems like we'll never reach our destination safely. Most people who start a book never finish. They either fall or they give up and sit down somewhere in the middle, holding on to the dream but failing to move forward. Those who succeed take one step at a time, blending caution with the requirement to teeter constantly on the edge of disaster. It seems like every force in the universe has combined to knock us off the tightrope.


And so...
And so, if we have to be acrobats, why not make the best of it? How much fun is it to watch an acrobat who does his or tricks above the safe cushion? Sure, it can be fun and you can still be amazed by the perfmorer's talents. But, as an author, if you want to gain an audience and make them share in your nervousness, to make your readers hold their breaths from beginning to end, you have to write without a net. You have to transcend the comfort of the ground and put everything on the line. You have to risk spectacular failure. Make your reader afraid. Make them wonder how you can possibly get out of danger and safely reach the end without toppling into the abyss of failure. What's more, every time you succeed, you need to increase the risk for your next stunt. If you're comfortable, you'll fail. Danger heightens awareness and attention, and makes you respect the tightrope, causes you to keep working, to take each dangerous step, and to put on a brilliant show.
  

"I'm one of those people who always tries 

to overachieve. I want to do more. 

I want to do bigger things." -- Nik Wallenda

And that's what you want to do. You want to entertain brilliantly, which means hazarding spectacular peril. So discard the net. Go higher. Go farther. Risk it all. It's scary, but the success will be worth it when you look back and see what you overcame to achieve your tale. 
 

A Comedy of Horrors

by Scott Rhoades

Last Friday, I wrote about how delight relies on surprise. Things that delight us are often things that surprise us.

This week, I want to write about two genres that depend almost entirely on surprise to delight us, two genres that might be thought of as near opposites but that are really very similar. If you read the title of this post, you know where I'm going. (I never was very good at keeping a surprise.)

Comedy, as I pointed out last week in my almost worshipful praise of songwriter Tom Lehrer, depends completely on surprise. Think about jokes. Jokes, whether they hinge on a stupid pun or an unexpected resolution to a humorous situation, depend on a surprising punchline. When the surprise is gone, so is the funny. That's why a joke is only really funny--I mean gut-splittingly-drink-spittingly funny--the first time you hear it.

For comedy to work really well. You need a set up. A good set up builds tension, and the tension continues to deepen until you finally get the release from the punchline. If something in your setup fails, you end up with a premature release. It might not completely spoil the punchline, but it takes away much of the punch.

The same with horror. The best horror doesn't simply gross you out, something many of today's horror writers, and especially screen writers, never quite learned. Horror is all about building tension toward a release at the end. Sure, there might be small releases along the way, like the smaller hills on a roller coaster, but they are not really releases. Each of these releases is a trick that actually builds even more tension, until you get your release at the end. Like humor, that release has to be a surprise if it's going to work.

Another technique that's often central to both comedy and horror writing is the transportation of the audience away from whatever they consider safe. Safety inhibits surprise. At the same time, taking us too far from our safety zone eliminates much of the delight we get from a good surprise. An unsafe, unpleasant surprise does the opposite of delight. That's why people like roller coasters, scary stories, and jokes that push our limits like an uncomfortable pause without going too far. And it's why they don't like the surprise of a baseball coming through their living room window. They want a safe way to flirt with danger, to trick their brains into releasing endorphins without ever really putting them into really unsafe territory.

Let me take a break for a second to ask a question. Where might you find some of the best humor writing? Inside a good horror story. In a horror story, lots of stuff goes wrong. But if everything goes bad all the time, then you expect the bad and it no longer surprises. The tension is built not so much as a ramp as a series of steps combined with ramps, and many of those ramps are punctuated by something funny. Just like you can't know good without knowing bad, you can't know terror without knowing laughs.

Something else horror and comedy have in common? What do you do at the end of a good joke? You laugh like crazy. What do you do after a good scare? That's right.

Watch the people as a scary roller coaster pulls into the station. What are they doing? Laughing. What were they doing a few seconds ago? Screaming their little heads off. Wouldn't you love that same result in your own stories?

Here's the thing--all good fiction writing and many kinds of nonfiction writing are no different that horror and comedy. It's all about building tension until you reach the release at the end.

Both comedy and horror are often maligned (something else they have in common) as having less literary merit than more serious books. Whatever genre you like to write from picture books to literary fiction for adults, you can learn a lot about good writing by reading these "inferior" genres. If you don't usually read horror, try it. Same with humor. (Or mysteries. Or thrillers. Or romance. Or whatever.) Pay attention to the way the writer builds tension and makes you think there's relief in sight, only to twist that false relief into more tension. Then watch as the coaster comes back into the station. Pay attention to the laugh at the end as the tension is finally relieved by a surprise.

Then, no matter what you write, use fear and comedy to build the tension in your own story. Take the reader into safely dangerous territory, then let us feel the relief when that tension is released at the end. You'll delight your readers, and have a lot of fun writing.