From The Fire in Fiction: passion, purpose, and techniques to make your novel great.
By Donald Maass
A friend highly recommended this book months ago, and I bought it right away, but am only now getting around to reading it. And should probably read the whole thing before posting about it. But I can’t help myself. I wanted to jump online and at least mention some very helpful passages from the Introduction.
In said intro, Maass discusses what sets apart lackluster books from those that “effortlessly lift off”,where the authors are “at the top of their game.” He says that in his thirty year career, he’s seen authors fall into two broad categories, “those whose desire is to be published, and those whose passion is to spin stories.” He calls the two groups “status seekers” and “storytellers.”
He writes, “Some want to know how to make their manuscripts acceptable. If I do this and I do that, will I be okay? When I hear that question my heart sinks a little. That is a status seeker talking.
A storyteller, by contrast, is more concerned with making his story the best story that it can be, with discovering the levels and elements that are missing, and with understanding the techniques needed to make it all happen.”
And about writers further on in their careers, he says, “. . . status seekers will grumble about publishers, spend on self-promotion . . . and expound as experts on getting ahead. They change agents, obsess over trunk projects, write screenplays. . . . Story tellers are different. Storytellers look not to publishers to make them successful, but to themselves. They wonder how to top themselves with each new novel.”
I’m ashamed to admit I’ve had my own poisonous moments of being a status seeker, of choosing to tangle myself in the webs of HOW TO. How to query, how to conference, how to network, how to avidly follow the market. Which I think is understandable, especially when you’re first starting out, trying to get your work published. But Maass’s perspective was eye-opening for me. Or maybe it’s heart-opening. Because underneath all those tangles, what I really care about is the story. And I don’t want to lose my focus on it.







