Jon Franklin's Writing for Story covers so much ground.  I enjoyed reading his own pieces in order to see what you can do with narrative journalism, especially since his two examples were very different.  In "Mrs. Kelly's Monster" you get a snapshot of a couple of hours in a doctor's day while "The Ballad of Old Man Peters" captures a person's entire life.

The way he dissected his writing was helpful because I think a lot of times, writers say they didn't mean to do what they were doing with their writing.  Maybe in certain parts of writing that happens, but he made his writing process very deliberate and said that the writer needs to know where they are going.  That is why the introduction of the complication/resolution process was helpful to me.  He showed how broke his stories down into simple phrases in his outlines to show himself where to go.  He says that the resolution needs to relate back to the complication, which sounds simple enough but sometimes I get lost in that while writing.  A lot of the writing I have done recently is nonfiction so it was especially hard for me to think of the complication and resolution of the character which usually was me.  I don't think of myself as a character so I don't think of nonfiction as having a plot with characters and a conflict/resolution.  But Franklin is right.  When writing about myself, I should think of myself as the character and find where the complication and the resolution are.

I hate doing outlines but he made them look easier.  They don't need to be full of roman numerals.  Outlines just need to be a map of where you want to go and they should describe your story in the simplest terms.  The way he describes the writer without an outline is something I can definitely relate to.  But I've also never really thought about making outlines for more creative pieces.  I use them when I am writing an essay analyzing literature or history but I've never used them for my creative writing classes.  I think of outlines as the opposite of creative but now I can see how they could help to get my story together.  His advice about using action verbs ties into the outline because they are necessary to get the point across in the outline.  Sometimes it is easy to not realizes when I am using static verbs but if my outline contained them, I think it would make me more conscious of the verbs I am choosing.  Since "stories consist of action" (118), I need to get rid of my weak verbs and train myself not to use them.

Another point Franklin has is about getting rid of the woodwork.  This was especially eye-opening for me.  Woodwork is also related to the outline because with an outline, maybe I wouldn't get lost in the woodwork.  Beautiful writing that isn't necessary to the story is hard to take out.  I know there have been times when I've been stubborn about this but in order for stories to flow and remain on focus, the woodwork needs to go.  I think it is definitely something I need to work on and I wasn't always conscious of it because I never had a name for it.

I thought his comment on how the story will affect the reader was interesting.  He talks about this when he was trying to figure out how "Mrs. Kelly's Monster" is going to end.  He says that having a story end on a sad note doesn't do anything for the reader.  It doesn't make them contemplate anything, at the end they are just feeling sad for whoever the character was.  But when he changed the focus of the story onto the doctor and shows how his life goes on and how death is a part of life, the end of the story was then much more powerful.  I've never really thought of about this.  I thought it was really an interesting idea but it also makes me nervous.  How am I supposed to get my reader to do that?  I want my reader to be able to take away some meaningful message and I'm glad he point out how he changed the focus in his story in order to accomplish that.  Maybe that is what I'll need to do with my pieces.

Franklin's book caused me to think about my writing a lot.  While I was reading it, I stopped a lot and thought about what he was saying and how my most recent piece could be changed and how to go about revising it.  It made me want to go and fix my writing problems right away.  Writing for Story also pointed out some ugly truths about my writing process that I intend to work on.  Maybe I'll even start to love outlines.