Story Arcs, Mary Sues, and a Nuke in the Trunk: The Fiction Masterclass | The Exceptional Scribble Show, Episode 274

This is the complete interview hour from Richard Lowe’s return guest appearance on episode 274 of The Exceptional Scribble Show with host Sage the Poet, joined by co-host Warrior Queen of Poetsalm and caller Sky Ski, broadcast live on September 10, 2019, lightly edited for readability. This appearance followed his farewell as monthly panelist that May; segments outside Richard’s hour are omitted.

What a ghostwriter is, in one minute

Sage the Poet: Tonight’s topic is the ghostwriting process, and our focus: how to compose a fiction book. Richard, start us with the definition of a ghostwriter.

Richard Lowe: A ghostwriter writes books for somebody else, and it’s called ghostwriting because the ghostwriter is usually invisible. Sometimes they’re credited: Trump’s book put the ghostwriter’s name on the cover; Hillary Clinton’s didn’t. Just about any book you’ve seen by a celebrity has been ghostwritten, with exceptions, because celebrities, heads of industry, and politicians aren’t writers and don’t have the time. Typically I’m hired by people building credibility and expertise: speaking engagements, media, career advancement. The book is like an expanded business card: here’s my process, my story, the challenges I overcame. Ghostwriters also do memoirs, and I’ve done a few fiction novels for people. You’re paying the ghostwriter for his time, and that’s why the credit doesn’t matter.

Story arcs: win, win, lose, repeat

Richard Lowe: With fiction, the first thing you come up with is your story arc. Look at the Marvel movies or Star Wars: you always have an inciting incident, the thing that spurs the character out of ordinary life, a scroll found, an attack, whatever it is, and it needs to come very early in the book. Then the action builds: the character wins and wins, then crash. That’s the first arc. Then the second: win, win, boom, lose. Then the third: win, win, boom, lose big time, and it looks totally hopeless, the creatures are coming down from space, nothing can save New York, and then bang, the comeback and the climax. That’s the three-arc structure; there are also one-arc and two-arc forms and the hero’s journey, depending on your story’s length.

Built into that, you have character arcs. Luke Skywalker starts as an obnoxious teenager you can barely stand, and by the end of the original trilogy he’s a powerful Jedi. Within each movie he succeeds, then gets hammered: loses his arm to Vader, learns Vader is his father. That growth is the arc. Contrast that with a flat arc: Rey in the new trilogy learns nothing, gains nothing, everything just comes to her. That’s what’s called a Mary Sue, or Gary Sue for the men: the perfect character who easily overcomes everything. Captain Marvel is the same: super powerful, nothing can defeat her, one-dimensional, no personality. Luke has so much personality he’s annoying, and that’s the point. For a really good arc, look at Ripley in Alien or Aliens: she learns, grows, nearly gets defeated. If you’re looking for powerful women in film, that character is right there.

Minor characters get minor arcs; they grow a little, learn something. The waitress and the background characters don’t need arcs, and nobody wants the clutter. And the background itself can have an arc: worlds change over time. Look at the book Dune, not the movies: Frank Herbert built almost the perfect story arc, with phenomenal character arcs for Paul Muad’Dib, the Fremen, the Baron, even characters who die early and still show strength and make you feel for them. The sand, the worms, the spice that runs the empire: you build all of this in the brainstorming phase, before you’ve written a word.

Conflict is the engine

Richard Lowe: The antagonist is whoever or whatever works against the hero; it doesn’t have to be evil. Sauron in Lord of the Rings is extraordinarily two-dimensional, evil, period, a big eye, while Frodo is extremely three-dimensional, and the book still works because the arcs and background are so rich. And you can invert it: in Lord Foul’s Bane, one of my favorite books and an extremely tough read, the protagonist is an anti-hero, basically someone you want to die, against an antagonist who’s also evil, and eventually the main character flips and becomes a hero. A character flip, with hints dropped along the way, is a very engaging way to write a story.

Writing is about conflict, all the way down to dialogue. “How’s the weather?” “It’s going to rain today”: extremely dull. “How’s the weather?” “The stupid weatherman said sunny, and it rained. I hate weathermen”: now there’s a little conflict, a little edge, and it’s more engaging. That’s Tony Stark’s sarcasm, Peter Parker’s teenage troubles, qualities played against each other. In Dune, Paul and his mother Jessica love each other, and there’s still conflict: an assassination plot staged to look like she did it, with Paul playing along, and the reader doesn’t know who really did it. Conflicts, puzzles, and hidden things pull the reader forward. Add red herrings: plot lines that go nowhere, the blind curve where the treasure isn’t. Mysteries need whodunit puzzles, thrillers need secrets, horror needs shocks and the monster, know your genre. Balance it all without going overboard; it’s all part of the planning.

The reading: Unlikely Hero, chapter one

Sage the Poet: Can you read some excerpts and share how the books came about?

Richard Lowe: I promote short fiction heavily in my training: Kindle ebooks under 10,000 words, one-to-two-hour reads. I’ve got two under my name and several under pen names. This one’s called Unlikely Hero, one of my favorites just because it was fun to write. Chapter one:

“My gut heaved, the bile rising in my throat. I wanted to stop the car to throw up, but there was no time. No time for anything. My hands were shaking uncontrollably, and I felt the sweat rolling down from my forehead into my eyes.”

Notice there’s a lot of showing there, and a little telling: “I felt the sweat” is telling; the bile rising is showing. You get that he’s sick without me saying he’s sick. He’s weaving through LA traffic at a hundred miles an hour, a cop gets behind him, and he makes the decision to stop. The cop notices the sweat, the marks on his wrists, the dried blood, and asks what’s going on. The driver pops the trunk. Inside: a gunmetal gray triangular object filling the whole trunk, foreign lettering stenciled on top, wires, blinking lights, and a clock counting down. “What’s that?” “As far as I can tell, it’s a Russian nuclear warhead. In 40 minutes it’s going to detonate, and I don’t think we have time to do anything but get it as far from Los Angeles as possible.” The cop suggests disarming it, and my favorite line I wrote: “You know how to disarm a nuke?” “Well, no.” “Yeah, I missed those courses on how to disarm a nuclear warhead too.” So the cop makes the call: go, drive, I’ll clear the way. And as they drive, connected by a borrowed phone, the driver admits what he’s never admitted to anyone: I’m a criminal. My whole life, I’ve robbed people, stolen, worse. It never occurred to me to do anything else. And here he is, driving a nuke into the mountains to save a million people, because even he can’t let a million people die.

The structure is: start in the middle, then the backstory of how he got there, then jump to the end. Ebooks are typically like that: one act, A to B, it builds, boom, done. I wrote it in 14 hours. Fair warning, it has a sad ending, and some harsh language; upper teenager and older. The other one is How to Create Your Own Zombie Apocalypse: an entitled teenager who loves zombie games figures out how to create a real zombie apocalypse and does it, with unexpected side effects for him at the end. Both very fast reads, both on Amazon through coolauthor.com, and by some strange coincidence they’re on Audible too; all of my books are.

Short fiction is where everybody learning to write should start, because you have to write tighter than in a novel. In a novel there’s room to be sloppy; in a short piece there’s no time and no room. There’s even flash fiction: a real story in under 500 words. I dare you.

Genre formulas: what readers are actually buying

Sky Ski (caller): Do you write stories based outside the United States? And do you ever intertwine genres?

Richard Lowe: I write primarily US or fictional-world settings, because that’s what I know, with some historical fiction planned down the road. I actually have a goal to write two novels in each major genre, about 24 books, over the rest of my life. And yes, I’ve ghostwritten several novels, business novels mostly, and written a romance-adjacent book under a pseudonym with several plots going. Mixing genres, a science fiction mystery that’s also a romance, gets interesting to write, but readership tends to drop as you mix.

Here’s what surprised me when I researched the genres: they’re not variations on one format; they’re really written differently, for different audiences with different expectations. Romance is bought almost 100 percent by women, and standard romance follows a very specific formula: they meet, they fall in love, difficulties intervene, and at the end they’re together, happily ever after, virtually always. Science fiction readers want none of that; they want space, aliens, other planets, the technology. Horror wants monsters flashing and burning until the monsters are defeated. Mystery is extremely formalistic: almost always a murder, an inspector or nosy neighbor working the puzzle, and something like ten standard patterns readers expect. Game of Thrones works because it follows the fantasy formula, the one Lord of the Rings set, and then bends it: Martin mixes up hero, anti-hero, and evil until you can’t always tell which is which, and that little difference on top of the expected formula is why it sells. And from a writing point of view, Twilight is trash. Sorry if anybody disagrees. Did I say that out loud?

Warrior Queen: And regarding fantasy, Willow was a book before the film.

Richard Lowe: Bit of trivia on that movie: there’s a two-headed dragon in Willow named Siskbert, named for Siskel and Ebert, the two reviewers who tore the movie to shreds. A terrible dragon that kills people, named after the critics.

Services and the coaching rate

Richard Lowe: My main offering is ghostwriting, described at thewritingking.com/, where there are about 200 blog articles on how it works and what it costs. Second is book coaching: you do most of the writing, I coach, and it’s much more cost-effective than ghostwriting. I charge $75 an hour, in prepaid blocks of four to twenty hours; the lowest block is four hours, $300, and we use them up as you need me. One author bought a ten-hour block and spread it over six months: a 15-minute call here, an hour there, every time he had a question. I also do LinkedIn profiles, over 300 of them, though I’ll be honest, it’s not a lot of fun anymore, and retainer arrangements for miscellaneous business writing, like the client who sends me her letters to polish because English isn’t her strength. Training courses are at fictionmasterclass.com: show versus tell, which is popular, the four genre courses, the five prompt books with 500 prompts each, and promotional courses on using video and your smartphone to advertise books. And Make a Living as a Professional Self-Published Author is on Amazon: 300 pages of everything up to promotion. Promotion will be volume two, and volume three, when I get around to it, will be how to debug your book: when it’s not selling or getting bad reviews, how to find the problems and fix them.

And I’m actively looking for podcasts to be on; my goal is several a week. I’m on one tomorrow night. Reach me at rich@thewritingking.com or the contact form.

Sage the Poet: It’s always a pleasure to have you on this panel. We look forward to having you again, and best success with all of your books.

Richard Lowe: Thank you. My pleasure. Have a nice night.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

Quotable moments

Frequently Asked Questions

Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.