Interim Step Four: Developing Your Voice
If There Are Only Seven Plots, How Do You Make Your Work Stand Out?
I choose to write crime fiction and psychological thrillers for a very specific reason. In my stories, books, and shorts, there’s not necessarily a Cinderella-type “Happy Ending,” but there is a modicum of justice. I think there is closure in justice, and when I started writing again twenty-plus years ago, I knew I wanted to do something to right the wrongs I see on a daily basis. So many victims of crime don’t see any justice; they have no resolution. And in my mind, resolution is the key to a crime novel. It’s part of the structure. It’s the payoff readers want, wait for, and get angry about when it’s not there.
There are various ways to end a story satisfactorily. The most common: the protagonist wins, and the villain goes down. Or, which is more fun sometimes, the villain wins, and the protagonist finds a new path. There’s nuance in this kind of resolution, but if you play your cards right, you can create something so compelling people will come back for more again and again.
If you look at the classic romance novel and the more modern rom-coms, they also have a predetermined structure with an expected resolution. So do horror, the gothic, science fiction, fantasy; even the literary novel has a set structure that identifies it as that particular genre. As we’re all drawn to telling stories in our own way, those natural inclinations tend to fall into standard storytelling “methods.” Once you know who you tell a story, your books become your calling card. Your readers know what to expect, though they still want to be surprised by the story. Surprising yet inevitable, that’s the way every story should wrap.
So, if all stories fall within an agreed-upon set of parameters with a satisfying conclusion that brings resolution to the story’s central question, and there are only seven plots, what makes them all so very different? What makes a book stand apart? How is it that you can give five writers an exercise—here is a picture, using it, tell me a story with man versus man as the central conflict—and end up with five WILDLY different tales? Imagination, individualism, quirks, prejudices? All of that. But something more.
Voice.
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