Highly Recommended

Jon Franklin is a man with a mission. He learned to write the hard way, and he wants to save everyone else from the pain. He wanted desperately to be a great writer. And eventually, through sheer persistence and determination, he figured out how to write. He discovered The Rules.

According to Franklin, one can become a great craftsman writer (as opposed to an artist) by applying The Rules religiously (incidentally, he never calls them The Rules; that's my name for his philosophy). He faces this squarely in Chapter X: "But, you may object, is that all there is? Is it really so ... mechanistic?" (ellipsis in the original). To a large extent, says Franklin, writing is mechanical. If you learn the mechanics, you can become a good writer.

Franklin eventually gets around to discussing what lies beyond the mechanics - the art and soul of writing - but he deliberately leaves that to the end. This follows his own chronology - he learned the mechanics through painful experimentation and study, and only after mastering them did he discover how to include art in his work. Like a musician who must learn all his scales and chord changes before playing an emotional solo, Franklin prescribes a highly structured approach to writing that must be mastered before one can tell a moving story.

He's also not a shrinking violet by any means. Franklin tackles Aristotle bluntly on page 85, stating "I believe firmly, as I suspect every good writer does, that character is the central element of any short story, be it real-life drama or the sheerest fiction." And may the best man win.

Franklin does know what he's talking about. He's won two Pultizer Prizes for nonfiction - basically newspaper feature storys that are told in a dramatic narrative form rather than straight-ahead reporting. And as he makes clear in two fascinating appendices, he practices what he teaches.

Franklin's philosophy has two facets: structure and production. Any story must begin structurally; one must work to develop a sound architectural basis upon which the words of the story are hung. This structure gets captured in an outline. Then the outline is broken down into pieces, which are themselves broken down further and further until one arrives at the fundamental building block of the story: what Franklin calls the image (more on that later). Then the writer works his way up, hanging words on the images and groups of images, working his way from one image and group to the next, creating a rough draft.

The first step in writing, according to Franklin, is the development of the architectural foundation. This is built from two types of building blocks: the focus and the transition (pg. 96). The focus is a thing - it's a moment, or a picture, or an event, or an action. It's something specific that you can describe. Transitions are the hinges that join one focus to the next. A cluster of related focuses can be clustered together and put into sequence. If there's a narrative development to the sequence then we have a developmental focus. A developmental focus is a little story: a complication is established, our hero attacks the complication, something is acheived, and there is a resolution.

Franklin's type of stories are a variant on the standard Hollywood three-act structure. He begins directly at the conclusion of the first act, beginning almost immediately with the complication or basic conflict. He then flashes back to provide the first act (when necessary), and proceeds with act two, the escalating problems of the protagonist. Usually his third acts are short. Franklin calls this the "complication-development" form, which is a pretty good description. He breaks down the structure into five pieces:

• The Complicating Focus
• The Developmental Focus (containing three smaller focuses)
• The Resolving Focus

I think of this as "Uh! Oh, Oh, Oh! Ah." In words, you get a problem, you stab at it (or its related problems) three times, with some sort of resolution on the third try. The focuses in this high-level outline are typically many levels up in the hierarchy; one of the developmental focues can contain a few dozen of the smallest focuses.

Franklin doesn't eschew cliches. At this highest structural level, cliches become Truths: People want to live, Love is a powerful force, The pen is mightier than the sword. These are cliches, Franklin feels, because they are true for many people across many cultures and times.

At the lowest level, cliches are deadly. A perfectly good focus is a young girl standing on a chair screaming because there's a mouse on the floor. It's clear and concise and precise, but it's also horribly familiar and dull. You may want to show that girls and boys are different, which is a cliche that works at the highest structural level, but you ought not use tired old images at the finest level to do it.

Like Egri, Franklin lives and dies by the three-word summary statement. Each focus should be expressed in a tight, three-word image. He offers (pg. 121):

• Complication: Company fires Joe
• Development:
• Depression paralyzes Joe
• Joe regains confidence
• Joe sues company
• Resolution: Joe regains job

Notice that each of these statements represents the end of a focus (or piece of the story), not any other part. These are the resolutions of the climaxes; they describe what the focus builds to and how it turns out. Franklin has much more to say about structure, but that's the general thrust.

He then moves on to the actual selection and sequencing of words. This process is completely governed by the structure of the story, and the selection of focuses is subservient to the needs of the outline. Extraneous focuses and developments are omitted, necessary but missing ones are created and inserted. Franklin also advocates starting at the most important point in the story - the final climax of the last developmental focus - and working his way back to the beginning. Along the way one is simply trying to lay the general thrust of the words - there isn't much attention paid to exact word selection, but themes and ideas are laid in.

For example, foreshadowing and payoff are sketched in. Verbal tricks such as repitition and alliteration are applied; they may be crude approximations of the final, but they serve as placeholders. Finally, working backwards until the first line has been written, one has a rough draft.

Then comes the polishing stage, where the writer selects words, examining them, discarding them, searching always for the perfect needle in the haystack. This goes on until everything is perfect, or one hits the deadline. In any case, at the polish stage it's all language, no structure. The walls and beams have been placed and shored up, and the craftsman can turn his attention to getting each screw flush with the wall, and each door hung secure and level.

Franklin's approach is classical in nature. As with the musical analogy above, and with many of the sciences and arts, he stresses principle and structure above free expression and creativity. Franklin believes in The Rules; he feels that they are the tools one needs to build great structures. A sculptor who does not know how to cut stone, or a mountain climber who does not know how to place a piton, will fail at their tasks. Similarly, a writer without structure and The Rules will flounder, creating unbelievable characters and unbelievable - or worse, dull - stories. This is the time-honored approach whereby a novice moves from apprenticeship to journeyman, then craftsman and finally master.

Franklin actually includes his masterpiece, "Mrs. Kelly's Monster" (which won his first Pultizer) twice. The first time it's simply an example. The second time he annotates it with 91 footnotes that clearly reveal many of his choices, and show his principles in action. There can be no doubt that his set of The Rules are a good set.

The greatest flaw of this book is that Franklin believes his own rules a bit too much - they aren't the only set of rules, his journey isn't the only journey, and his truth isn't everyone's truth. But his path, so clearly marked and meticulously described, is undoubtedly a good one, and one could serve an apprenticeship to the principles in this book and come out, I am sure, as a good and competent writer of short non-fiction in the Franklin style.