One thing I learned about writing from Michael Crichton’s Dragon Teeth is that…
A story is whatever you want it to be. Crichton took a handful of facts, smushed them together in time and space, added a made-up protagonist, and voila, a story.
He took real people and dramatized their story, while fictionalising other parts. I think the big lesson is that as long as it’s a good story, the reader doesn’t care if X really happened or if Y really met Z on such and such a day in such and such a place.
If your goal is to accurately get down exactly what happened like a court stenographer, that’s one thing. If your goal is to tell a good story, then what really happened doesn’t matter.
Were the characters compelling and well rounded? Was the setting exotic and specific? Did the action rise into a climax then descend in a denouement?
This one ticked all the boxes effectively. I mean, come on – it’s about fossil hunters in the Wild West. There’s gambling and shootouts and cool facts about dinosaurs and the States in 1875.
Crichton had a sick way of combining two or three ideas as the setup, populating it with half-decent characters, and putting them through their paces in tight, Joe Campbell plots. He’s taught me a hell of a lot about how to answer the elusive-ass question – How do you tell a good story?
Read hard. Read wide. Read free.
