Failed Writer's Journey: Dead Dogs and Rescue Cats A review of Kill The Dog and A Rumination on Craft Books
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I am a failed writer in the sense that I have never had my fiction professionally published. These posts, which will run on most Fridays, are an attempt to keep myself creatively motivated and just generally discuss the creative process from someone trying to figure it out. I genuinely love the process of making things — any things, from writing to drawing to music to woodworking to baking. Maybe my own failures can be a source of amusement or interest to others.
A confession: I have never really liked craft books. I suspect this is a failing of mine, rather than a failing of the books, because even classics like Stephen King’s On Writing left me cold. I like the personal stories he tells but the craft advice never felt especially relevant to me — perhaps because I never liked his style (I am not a fan of horror, and I never liked his sci-fi/fantasy work). Sturgeon’s law applies to these books like it applies to everything, of course. There have been some books, like Before and After the Book Sale (though that is mostly about the business) and The Snowflake Method (thought I pick and choose what works for me in that.) but craft books firmly adhere to Sturgeon’s 90% are crap admonishment — especially the alleged gold standard Save The Cat.
Save the Cat is of a genre that purports to lay our rules for writing — a structure that stories adhere to and therefor your story must adhere to in order to write a good story. And it always felt wrong to me. In part, it feels wrong because it flies in the face of experience. It denigrates the quality of Memento, for example. But it’s insistence on the importance of rules over story, of structure over writing, runs into the wall of my own professional life. I build IT systems for a living and while we have rules (called best practices) they are never considered more important than good products. Recently, I was put in charge of a critical rush project. I designed a specific piece of the project to do something in a specific fashion. A coworker asked me why I was doing that specific task, if it was necessary. And he was right — it wasn’t. In my rush to get the work done, I was doing something because we had always done something, because the rules said we did that thing. But under these specific circumstances doing that thing would have made that product slightly worse. The rules were wrong, and I was wrong for following them.
Which brings me to Kill the Dog by screenwriter Paul Guyot. This is almost an anti-craft book. It doesn’t really have any rules, insisting that good screenwriting is about the writer’s voice, that as long as you have a setup, a conflict, and a resolution that resolves the conflict, you have all the structure you need. While there is some light advice about the mechanics about getting the words on the paper, the main advice is simply to read, watch, pay attention, write and do a lot of all of the above until the process hones your voice. All of that feels correct. Books with rules, with formulas, feel wrong. Formulas and rules feel too much like a promise. And there are no promises.
Now, as the title notes, I am a failure. No one has ever paid me for writing fiction, and likely no one ever will. With that said, Guyot’s advice feels correct. Most of the best movies, the best books, are, well, the best not because they did or did not follow a specific set of rules but because they told great stories about great characters with compelling writing. They had a great voice, not a great structure. Kill the Dog is the first craft book I have read that doesn’t imply promises of success. And thus is the first craft book I have read that feels useful, or at least not a complete waste of time.