Two Trajectories to Creative Success

October 18, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

The idea I’ll be teasing out here is a mash-up, which is itself the first lesson: creativity comes from putting things together that haven’t gone together before. Which in turn immediately needs two further qualifications:

a) Most mash-ups fail. There’s a reason you like tomatoes with basil, but not so much tomatoes with turnips or basil with caramel. You probably could find a way to make the latter two combos work, but they would be the culinary equivalent of a novelty song.

b) Most mash-ups that dominate the internet these days are not creative mash-ups, but the rather sad retreads of a culture that is increasingly incapable of creating anything new, so it resorts to nostalgia instead. (Why that should be so is a topic for another time.) See also sequels that never come close to the genius of the original, and reboots-because-money.

Anyway, back to the beginning: my mash-up is the result of studying the indie publishing phenomenon for the past three years or so, with the goal of becoming part of it myself, plus learning more idly and just for pleasure about the history of rock-and-roll. (Most credit for that learning goes to the podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.)

I’ve also dabbled in big-idea-nonfiction lit about creativity and entrepreneurship, such as Range by David Epstein, Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, and various works from Derek Sivers and Mark McGuinness, among others. Not to mention following the nose of my own fandom.

Thus I’ve developed, in the same idle, fandom kind of way, a working hypothesis of two trajectories toward creative success…

What I Learned from Agatha Christie, Part 1: Every Novel Is a Mystery Novel

March 8, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

About halfway through my college career, I spent a summer in a house chockablock with Agatha Christie novels. Without access to a library, bookstore, and this being well before the days of ebooks, my voracious need to read was met by the Christie canon.

I have two distinct memories of that binge. First, that I loved Third Girl. Turns out, upon rereading it recently, the book I was remembering was not in fact Third Girl but The Pale Horse, which holds up in quality to memory’s halo. Third Girl doesn’t.

The second memory I have is that Agatha relied on what I termed “the second wife in Dorchester” trope far too often. Secret bigamy felt like a violation of the fair play rules of the classic puzzle mystery. Turns out this memory is also false: I’ve found only three instances in my recent effort to read every single one of her sixty-six novels.

Let us pass over in silence, for now, the anxiety and despair prompted by such false memories, especially (and ironically) where murder and justice are concerned…

Singing the Praises of a Story Grid Edit(or)

September 5, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Story Grid Editor Roundtable podcast.png

I’ve enthused before about Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know. Once I’d read the book a few times, in addition to bingeing my way through every single episode of The Story Grid and The Story Grid Editor Roundtable podcasts, I was emboldened to take the tools and apply them to my memoir. I knew I more or less had the story arc in place, but I also knew from reader comments that there were some gaps that fuddled or distracted. It’s always amazing what you don’t realize has to be said because it’s so obvious to yourself!

Armed with Story Grid tools and reader comments, I did a close analysis of the entire book—and saw what was missing.

In short, while all the pieces of the external genre were in place (in Story Grid lingo, Love/courtship), a few key scenes were missing from the internal genre (Worldview/maturation). And this was a serious problem, because while the love story is the hilarious-and-heartbreaking narrative that should drive readers on chapter by chapter, the real meat of the story, and its final payoff, is in the maturation of worldview. Less obviously dramatic, but ultimately more meaningful.

Once I saw that, I also saw exactly what to do—where I’d missed an opportunity or failed to realize the stakes of an event. Corrected and embellished, I now had a plot with two strong and interrelated plot tracks to take the reader all the way to the end. I even charted the revised version one more time to make sure every last scene was carrying its weight.

And then I was done, right?

Not quite…

Memoir Update, plus, the Best Writing Book Ever

January 24, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Late last fall I finished a second draft of my memoir about moving to the newly minted Slovak Republic when I was seventeen and all the adventures, both linguistic and romantic, that befell me there. Then it was time to let the book lie fallow for awhile—since, you know, I had other things going on at the time, like getting used to living in Japan and all. Since then the book’s been farmed out to a handful of trusted readers for feedback, and next month I plan to launch into the third edit, which hopefully will bring it to a place ready to seek publication. Eeek!

The idea of a fallow period is a bit misleading, though, because in this time between edits I have made a marvelous discovery that—I do not exaggerate—has changed my life. It is The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne and the companion podcast he does with Tim Grahl (whose Book Launch Show podcast is also awesome).

First, an embarrassing admission: this is actually the second time I’ve discovered The Story Grid, which just goes to show that if the life-changing thing comes along when you’re not ready for it, life doesn’t actually change. (Apply this wisdom to your own life as appropriate.) I read a library copy a couple years ago and thought it was really cool, but for whatever reason was not in a place to implement its strategy.

Then this past November I had about drained my podcast queue dry and was casting around for something new, so I looked for writing-related podcasts. There are zillions of them, and most of them bored me so I quickly moved on. Then I got to the Story Grid Podcast and frankly binged on approximately 150 episodes. I was so disappointed when I caught up to the present that I bought the book, read, marked, and inwardly digested its contents, and life will never be the same! Or at least writing…