23/31 Thought-balls

[darkemeralds]

One day a couple of months ago a coworker of mine decided that she'd like to write a middle-grade novel (that is, a novel of interest to a "tween" readership--the coveted Harry Potter audience.) Ten vacation days later she had a first draft, and invited me to look it over.

I'm all "What? Ten days? What?" I'm lucky to write a chapter in ten days. I'm doing well to write anything at all in three years. Once I got over my speed-envy, I asked her about her moment of inspiration. She said she'd been reading a middle-grade novel to her kid and thought, "I should really write one of these." Then she read a bunch of other novels in the category, dissected them for their components (number and type of characters, types of conflict, number of scenes, acts or beats, etc.). Then she started constructing her own.

I just...gah! Does not compute. I work so differently. She has a box of Legos that she wants to put together. I start with a whole thought-ball, a story-sphere that have to find an opening in. I'm dependent on the damn thing falling on my head from the sky and have never figured out how to make more of them hit me.

How do you get your ideas? And how do you turn them into actual writing?

Comments

[darkemeralds]

I've been thinking about your comment for a couple of days now, and of many helpful ideas in it, the one most helpful to me has been that different fiction writers like to emphasize different things. I mean, duh, but I never really thought about it that way. Which is weird, because I think about everything every which way and that's part of the reason I don't actually get much writing done.

Anyway, for some reason I never quite made the conscious connection between "some readers like X and some readers like Y," and its corollary among writers. I think I've always felt sort of guilty about liking world-building, and long, stately, detailed novels--I like to read them, and that's essentially the way I write. Somewhere in my head there's a "rule" that says first-time novelists must present works of no more than 50,000 words to agents and publishers, and all my novels run to 150,000 or more. The luxury of letting a novel grow to be as long as it needs to be has seemed reserved for the established Literary Greats--Umberto Eco and Gore Vidal--or the Such Bestsellers That The Rules Don't Apply--Stephen King and JK Rowling.

And yet, that "rule" is an artifact of the paper-publishing world of the late 20th century--and kind of a figment of my imagination. A guideline, at most.

My friend the soon-to-be tween novelist was able to get a list of the guidelines for her category and write to suit it. More power to her--she'll be published by real publishers sooner than I will. But your comment has helped me realize consciously that that still doesn't make it the right way for me to proceed. Thanks!

[greghatcher]

Well, I have lots of experience giving this kind of pep talk; there's nothing that clarifies your thinking on a subject like having to teach it. The one single handicap my students contend with more than any other is the fear of sitting down and churning out words. They have an idea but they have no way in, or they think they have to do it all in a burst, or they have no clue how it will end, or... whatever. But it's always about how they don't feel ready to START. The smug answer you hear so often from professional writers, "Start at the beginning," or "start at page one," isn't terribly helpful and all it does is freeze up my young charges with panic, because they don't know what page one looks like. That's really their problem.

This is why I loved the writing workshops we used to do at WITH magazine so much. Because the method we always used was this--

1. Figure out what your story's ABOUT. The 'moral of the story' as we used to say in grade school. The point of the thing. It doesn't have to be an actual moral. Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, for example, are classic mythical adventures dressed in 20th-century espionage drag. They're kid's daydreams in adult clothing. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard both wrote about brawny guys in loincloths fighting evil wizards and such but they were interested in completely different things; Howard's stories were always about the corrupting effect of civilization and Burroughs was a romantic and occasionally a satirist. So there's never any humor in the Conan or Solomon Kane stories Howard wrote, just a dark, world-weary feeling, and the heroes rarely get a clean win. But Burroughs' Tarzan and John Carter yarns were much lighter and full of humor and generally ended with someone getting married. Most of what I've been doing lately is stuff based on the idea of "I always wanted to see this in an adventure yarn and nobody ever did it." But whatever you're interested in doing, you have to kind of know what you WANT to do thematically. Sometimes you start with one idea of what you're doing and end with another, but you should be self-aware enough to know that when your internal compass shifts that's what's happening, i.e., "this is turning into a different thing than I thought it was" and not "I'm doing this wrong."

2. Once you have that, then you think of the character to tell that story with. Fortunately, you can start with templates off-the-rack if you need to, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. The Outsider Looking In and Observing? The Reluctant Hero Thrust Into A World He Knows Nothing Of? The Intrepid Explorer? The Youth Coming of Age? The Weary Warrior Saddling Up for One Last Battle? And so on. Figure out who your lead is.

3. Figure out what your lead character needs to learn-- or FAIL to learn, but readers need to see he failed. Almost always, once you know this, you know where you're going and can see various turning points and how to get there.

4. Once you know the ending, then you put the beginning as emotionally far away from that as possible. In THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME Rainsford ends up being hunted, fighting for his life, so that story begins with Rainsford the mighty hunter sneering at the idea that prey might have rights or feelings. Etc. Set the guy up so you can knock him down and make him struggle.

Get those four things locked down in your head and suddenly it's very doable, you just have to connect the dots. That was always how we workshopped stuff at WITH and it's the best way I know to get yourself to look at what you're actually doing, how to clarify this or hide that, knock all the extraneous stuff off so that all you have left is the actual story. I feel very strongly that stories are BUILT, they're not born or sculpted or lucked into. It's a process. The more aware you are of the process itself and how it works, the more you can use it as a tool to shape what you're doing into the story you want instead of just hoping it all works out. That's that craft I was talking about. There's really no substitute for it.