Emma Coats, formerly a storyboard artist with Pixar, has taught storytelling for a few years, I gather. Her 22 principles of storytelling have been on the Interwebs for a while, but I don’t believe I’ve linked to them here. They are very good.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

#9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

For a different perspective, award-winning author Paul Harding has a few ideas of what makes fiction work. “Fiction is about immanence. We are beings who experience our selves in time and space, through our senses. Fiction persuades its readers that they are reading something artful by immersing them as fully as possible in the senses and perceptions, the thoughts and actions of fictional lives.”

Author Barnabas Piper also chips in his two sense, saying it’s the boring parts that make the whole story work. “World-class novels are not composed of email responses and traffic jams and grocery shopping. But without such things the characters would never get where they needed to go and be who they need to be.”

Kevin DeYoung talks about a pastor’s responsibilities and possible conflicts with writing books and articles. Among other good thoughts, he says, “I’m glad I read Martyn Lloyd-Jones before I ever wrote a book because I can hear the Doctor in the back of my head saying, ‘The pastor is first of all a preacher and not a writer.’ There is nothing wrong with being a writer first, but that’s simply not the calling of a pastor.”

He notes what a wonderful privilege it is for people to read anything you’ve written, which is a good reason for a writer to get over himself.

On a related note, Miles Mullin writes about contemporary tribalism among evangelicals. “This is the troubling reality of the personality-based leadership that encompasses much of American evangelicalism. Often, charisma and dynamic communication skills trump character and integrity as popular appeal wins the day,” he observes. Like fans of sports teams who argue over purely subjective judgements, fans of preachers and writers defend their leaders against any accusation, sometimes even against obvious sins.

Read many good reasons for keeping a journal in this post by Ivan Mesa. One reason is to help us remember God’s blessings. Mesa writes, “D. A. Carson is right: ‘Believers who spend no time reviewing and pondering in their minds what God has done, whether they are alone and reading their Bibles or joining with other believers in corporate adoration, should not be surprised if they rarely sense that God is near.'” (via Challies)

Today, according to this web site, is National Punctuation Day.

I think I’m pretty good at punctuation, generally. The problem comes with differing styles. For years I eschewed the Oxford Comma, because somebody back in elementary school told me you should never add a comma before the conjunction, as in “I had lunch with Gary, Eric and Denny.” It was only fairly recently that I learned there was any controversy. I learned this while acting as editor of the Journal of the Georg Sverdrup Society. I found out that we follow the Chicago Manual of Style, which mandates the Oxford Comma (“I had lunch with Gary, Eric, and Denny”). The Associated Press is against us, but we don’t follow them. So I learned to love it. Now I can’t imagine doing without it. And that’s good, because we use the APA Manual in graduate school, and they’re Oxfordian as well.

I keep wondering how the American Psychological Association’s style book came to dominate graduate school documentation.

The only other punctuation problem I can think of that I personally struggle with is the way Microsoft Word automatically clumps the three periods in an ellipsis together, turning them into a single, compact idiogram. Which we then have to unclump over at the Sverdrup Journal, because we want our periods separate but equal. I don’t know why. I just do it.

Happy Punctuation Day. Period.

Our friend Greybeard sent me a link to a comic today, and I thought it was pretty funny. I’d post it here, but I’m not certain about copyright fair use, so I’ll just link to it and you can look for yourself.

It’s about “contrived coincidences” in story plots.

This, friends, is a very bad thing.

You read a story, and you’re following along with it, and suddenly something happens out of the blue, completely out of left field, purely so that the author can make the plot go in a direction he wants.

C. S. Lewis wrote about a similar issue, somewhere (I forget where, and I don’t have time to riffle through my library). In writing about miracles, he notes that it’s entirely against the rules for a novelist to include a miracle in a story, just to get his hero out of a tight place.

But, he notes, there is at least one legitimate use for a miracle in a story. You can start the story with a miracle. The occurrence of a miracle, followed by an examination of the way it affects the people who observe it, is a perfectly legitimate premise for a story.

In other words, a miracle can pose a problem in a story. But it can’t solve one.

Otherwise, you’ve wasted your reader’s time. You’ve dragged him through all the sturm und drang of plot development, rising action, rising tension, repeated frustrated attempts at resolution, and then you resolve the whole mess with a deus ex machina (a Latin term referring to a dramatist’s trick of sending an actor, dressed like a god, down by block and tackle to save somebody from a bad situation). The whole purpose of a story is to teach the main character something through suffering, and to teach the reader by proxy. The miraculous/coincidental resolution renders the whole exercise meaningless. The story itself becomes a redundant appendage to the climax. You might as well have written the climax on its own, and saved the reader the time.

I note that I have confused coincidence with deus ex machina in this post, but they’re closely related and undeserving of individual attention.