WORLD - ALL

Here, I am talking about "substance" in the sense of what the story is about: the ideas, rather than as opposed to the execution of those ideas.

1. The weird opener & the unintegrated opener.

   "Sarah walked down the aisle, still unclear why she had agreed to marry a giraffe. The groom, waiting patiently at the altar, resplendent in black tie, spats and spots, swung his long neck around to watch her approach, all the time placidly chewing his cud." Pretty wild, huh? The whole intention of that opener is to make you, the reader, wonder how such a thing could have come to pass. Well, I wrote it, and I haven’t the faintest idea. Don’t let this happen to you.

   
   

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The first errors I will discuss are in the area of how a story is written, rather than in what the story is about. You might also call these errors of structure: These are errors involving the structure of the story — how it is put together, and the parts used to put it together.

Introduction

Some years ago, I had a chat with a man who repaired high-end fax machines for a living, back when fax machines were still a bit of a mystery to most people. He reported the appalling statistic that fully 95 percent of the service calls he made were unneeded, because the consumers could have fixed their problems with no help from him. Nineteen out of twenty calls involved such technical challenges as machines out of paper, machines not plugged in, machines not hooked up to a phone line, and machines not turned on.