No Cliffs Offstage ... No Chairs Onstage

I'll start this note with a confession and a caveat. Confession first: I'm an addict. I am deeply addicted to ...

...acronyms! (And here you thought something else! Shame on you!)

The caveat is that these writing notes are the same as ANY WRITING ADVICE in that no sooner do you say "DO or DON'T DO this" in your story, than some creative writer DOES it and does it SUCCESSFULLY.

What this means for you is to take away from these notes what works for you and for your Story, and ignore the rest. Just don't ignore it out of hand. Deal?

NCO serves two different functions, and yet serves the same purpose: the movement of your story.

The first definition for NCO is NO CLIFFS OFFSTAGE! Think of it this way: if a character is worth killing off in the story, that character is worth killing off ON THE PAGE! Shove them off the cliff right in front of the reader's face! Let the reader experience it! Mourn it! Feel it! If a character's death can take place off stage, then most likely, that character doesn't belong in the story. A character's death should COUNT! It's when we bring the characters' lives onto the page in their full beauty and anguish that the reader feels them, roots for them, hates them.

So the next time you have someone dying offstage, ask yourself "Why didn't I put it on the page for the reader to experience?" Is it possible I'm avoiding writing this, because I don't want to? Now in some stories, it is a death that changes the status quo and kicks off your story, but what happens if the first chapter is that death scene? What is that person's last word, and how will that change your protagonist's life? Great way to foreshadow the central theme/conflict of your protagonist.

The second way I define NCO is NO CHAIRS ONSTAGE. Now it's absurd to think your story cannot have chairs, of course. And it's absurd to think that no one ever sits down. But as soon as someone sits down (or crawls into a bathtub or bed), the movement stops, and at that point, our greatest temptation as writers is to go for the interior monologue. Or two people sitting: talking heads. I recently changed a character from sitting down to refusing to sit down, and the next five pages of talk was effectively tossed out the window. The movement of the Story kept going, and now was at a high pitch. Yes, some of the dialogue was delicious stuff; and yes, it hurt to delete it. But the Story leapt off the page. The problem now is to keep that movement going in the next chapter.

Sigh ... terrible business, writing. Simply terrible.