Story and Plot

Every now and then I pull off the shelf one of my favorite books on writing. Recently I've been thinking about John Gardner's observation that it's better to be a little slow in making up your mind if you're going to be a novelist. Don't rush to find an answer or fill in a blank in the story line. Slower is better than speed when it comes to letting ideas develop. When I first read this, I was relieved because my mind does take a while to bring all the threads of a narrative together.

 

One of my bad habits is thinking a story is done before it is. The original idea excites me, so I rush to get it down on paper, but near the end I tend to falter and wonder about the ending I've come up with. Instead of setting the story aside at once, I tend to tinker a little and then write to the end. Sometimes that works, but often not. I'm liable to come up with a much better ending if I set the story aside for a couple of weeks or wait until a better idea comes along. That can take months. This is a lesson I have to remind myself of every time I think I've finished something.

 

Katherine Anne Porter said she didn't begin a story with intent for its meaning or significance, but discovered it at the end. She's talking about finding the organic wholeness of a story rather than imposing one on it. Some call this theme or "meaning" of a story, but whatever the term, it is the vision we see when we step back and see the whole. I too hang out in the camp of the discoverers, waiting to hoist my binoculars for the grand view after I've reached the top of the mountain.

 

My copy of Stephen King's book On Writing is dog-eared (and don't complain to me about marring a book by turning down corners; a book is to be read and used and loved). I especially like his discussion on the difference between plot and story. "Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest." He goes on to describe an exercise that is designed to force the writer to be as honest as she or he can be, knowing that without honesty no story is worth the time.

 

When I'm working on the final draft of a novel I have to ask myself how honest have my characters been? Have they admitted, if not to others, then to themselves what their deeper motivations are, their goals and what they're willing to do to get there? Have they admitted to something unattractive, even offensive in themselves? Have I shown them in every aspect, letting the reader decide how to feel about them? We are heavily socialized in this society, and sometimes getting to the truth is harder than we imagine. We're not used to it in daily life. But we have to find it in fiction if our stories are not going to fall flat.

 

These are my thoughts as I contemplate 312 pages of my current WIP. I know the whole "plot" is there, and that all the threads come together. What I'm wondering about is something deeper, more organic. Have I captured a vision of an authentic life, and will readers recognize it? This morning I'm standing on the top of the mountain, binoculars raised, scanning the landscape.

Staying Focused

I envy my dog his powers of concentration. I walk our chocolate lab, Rob, three times a day, and sometimes I let him run through our unfenced and ungroomed back yard. But the walk is the more interesting exercise for me.  

Dogs have focus, and Rob is no exception. When he gets a scent in the middle of the street I assume he'll track it to the nearest tree, since this attention usually means a squirrel or, less likely, a rabbit. But he has to follow each meandering, circling path, and that often means I'm going around in circles trying to keep up with him and not get tied up in the leash. 

 

Day after day I follow this short, sturdy five-year-old down the street. It takes something major to break his concentration and let go of whatever he has found. He breaks off only when he's ready. Or sees another dog.

 

As a writer I envy that total commitment to the moment and the task at hand, to the ability to block out everything else to learn everything he can from that spot on the neighbor's lawn. I'm easily distracted by email, especially if I'm having trouble with a scene. Worse, all I have to do is look up from my computer and let my eye wander to the bookshelves and I can think of a hundred reorganizing jobs waiting for my attention. And then there's the window looking out on the sidewalk and street. The parade of life is always more fascinating than my faltering plot. These moments add up so that at the end of the day I wonder why it has taken me so long to write fifteen hundred words.

 

I'm a big believer in daydreaming, letting the mind wander until a solution shows up. That's one excuse for not forcing myself to focus. But it isn't always good enough. I've learned to shut down the Internet while I'm writing, turn off the phone, and tell friends my writing time is not a good time to call. This works a lot of the time but not all of the time.

 

I've accepted that I'll never have the total focus my pup has. But then he has no interest in creating anything more important than a soft bed at the end of his walk. Even this I occasionally envy. Time to get back to work.

Trimming the Text

One of my flaws as a writer is writing too much. I confess to overwriting, adding in long descriptions because I'm not sure the reader will understand if I'm terse. Sometimes I add a short paragraph to flesh out a setting or a character, how they behaved in an earlier moment to give the reader a sense of this person's identity, quirks, or ways of dealing with others. Unfortunately, I really like some of these paragraphs and they tend to survive repeated revisions. When I reach the trimming stage, I go after them. It isn't always easy, but I know I have to cut them.

 

Most of us have learned to skip, omit, erase adverbs. They slow down the reader, entangle her in an unnecessary stop along the way, and add nothing that isn't better expressed by recasting the sentence and revealing character or behavior through action. Adjectives can be useful, but, again, if they show up too often I rewrite the sentence and remind myself there are better ways of getting the point across.

 

Now that I'm an editor for a new anthology I'm more conscious than ever of overwriting, one of my bad habits and apparently one that a lot of other writers suffer from. This is too bad because some of the stories I read would be good choices for the anthology if the writer had trimmed the text, removing unnecessary words and overlengthy paragraphs.

 

George Saunders recognizes this weakness in himself as well as the rest of us, and addresses it in his book on short fiction, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Saunders includes an exercise in an appendix that asks the writer to cut a six-hundred-word passage down to three hundred words. It sounds easy but it isn't. Of course, anyone can slash three hundred words but the goal isn't just to reduce the number of words but to remove the clutter and let the essence of the piece emerge, stronger and clearer. I think about this whenever I think I've finished a story and have arrived at the final stages of editing. I think I'm looking for typos and missing words, but really I'm looking at all those unnecessary lines, the extras that I couldn't let go of. I reread and trim, I read aloud and trim, I read again looking for more words to trim. 

 

Trimming forces me to find the essence of each line, the core idea and expression. When I do the story moves swiftly and clearly, and the point of each line is made, sharp and quick. The reader doesn't know what has been taken out. She or he only knows how well the story moves, how precise and exact the telling. At least, that's what I hope happens.