________________________
My nephew Luke likes to take things apart. He's a curious little cat. He likes to fit things together. He wants to see if my cell phone will plug into the computer, the tv, the karaoke machine, the GPS, the toaster. One day he says to his father, "I can take the muffler off your truck, Dad. It's just two little bolts." He's nine. Yesterday, he was installing my mother's computer in a different room of her house (one he won't be allowed to enter). A few weeks ago, he stuck his finger in a light socket and discovered electricty. Little Ben, we ought to call him. He is going to be an electronics tycoon, we tell him. He's already developed a logo, picked out a company name.
Writing is tactile, hands-on. We are parts collectors, rummaging through the tool sheds of our minds and the world at large. We gather up a bunch of stuff, good stuff that we know has practical value. This is a gesture I can use later. There is the image I need. Over there in the produce department is the dialogue I need. We collect and stock-pile, and then we don't know what to do with it all. We plug this thing into that one, try arranging it one way then another. But what good is a banana hot-wired to a cell phone?
There's only so much other writers can teach us. Even after you have a good grasp on the elements of fiction writing (plot, character, setting), there is something missing, that spark that makes story. And the only way I know to discover electricity is to tear apart all the books I love and touch all the wires, run them down. Oh, yes, here's the cog that turns that wheel that presses that spring that fires that cylinder. This is why READING is so important to learning how to write a novel. It takes us a while to realize this fact sometimes, but sooner or later we have to recognize that reading is probably the single most important thing we can do to make us better novelists (or short story writers, or essayists, etc.).
Having someone show you a story's heart on a chart is not enough. Here's the aorta, the left ventricle. See? Yes, but seeing is not knowing. To know, we must choose our own cadavers, for starters. Dissecting work I don't myself have a heart for is the equivalent of performing open heart surgery on a crock pot. It may be useful in terms of understanding circuitry, but my own heartbeat has a role to play in making a book come alive. Writing isn't so much about imitating, I think, as it is understanding. We can imitate without understanding, and we can sometimes pull it off. But don't ask us how we did it. To know is the thing. How? How?
I think we sometimes set off prematurely to write a novel. I know I have. Twice before I have wandered around, shopping aimlessly, filling my shopping cart with things that look interesting-- plastic flamengos, pinatas, Celtic crosses, orchids, carnival glass, cherry lip gloss, organic lettuce. But where's the story? Which aisle will I find that on? It never occurs to us to ask for that. Why not?
Story. This is the thing I find most elusive about writing fiction. I have finally learned, after years of practice and dissection, what a story is in the shorter form. At least I think I have. I'm no ace at it, but I do know that generally speaking, a short story involves a single incident or a limited series of incidents that are tied to a single experience of some kind. There has to be change or revelation in some manner.
But to understand story in terms of writing a novel, we have to stand back and take in the bigger picture, not just of our story, the one we're trying to write, but all stories. The same writing instructor who urged me to hand over 50 shimmering pages was notorious for saying, "Your [short] story starts on page 14" -- ouch. He warned us not to write what he called "navel gazers," whereby our characters sat around thinking and daydreaming and complaining but never actually did anything. Back then I thought he was talking about plot, and partly he was, I think. But more importantly, he was trying to make us understand what a story is. "What does your character want?" he would ask in frustration.
I'm still struggling with this. What does your character want? want? want? What do any of us want? Life doesn't come with neon signs lighting up our single, innermost desires. But fiction isn't life either. We can trust experienced writers who pass on what they know. One of my favorite observations about story is John Gardner's: "There are only two stories— someone takes a journey or a stranger comes to town."
Beginning novelists should start here, I think. Don't try to reinvent. Simply trust this piece of advice and be grateful for its simplicity. We have too many options these days. And options are distractions. Listen to Gardner.
Now, re-read the novels you love most and try to determine which kind of story each one is. Some are easy to spot. Others appear to be both a journey and a stranger comes to town. Look closer. You don't have to be right, but pick one or the other and trace the story line backwards through the novel. See if you can boil it down to one or two sentences or a short paragraph. Don't cheat by reading the jacket copy. The author has already done this exercise, but that won't help you any more than looking at a diagram on the blackboard. Understanding comes from doing. Jot down what you have on an index card, and then pick up another novel you love and do it all again. When you have an odd number of index cards, five or nine, count how many are journey stories and how many are stranger comes to town stories. Set aside anything that doesn't fit one place or another. Save those to study later.
Hopefully, what you'll discover is that you're drawn more to one than the other. Isolating things in this way broadens your vision. You shouldn't feel obligated to model after one or the other, but don't deceive yourself by thinking your story is original either. Just as in life, fiction is circular. It's all been done before. The important thing is to train yourself to look down at your novel from some distance, not to burrow through it blindly. You may never come out the other side.
Huckleberry Finn is a journey story. Mark Twain was aware of this as he was writing. The river runs through the story like a thread. Twain allows Huck to get off the raft at various places and explore, but he was fully aware of the need to bring his protagonist back to the raft and move him down the river. Apocalypse Now, as one of my friends has pointed out, is the same story under totally different circumstances.
For me, understanding this at the outset of sitting down to write the novel is critical. I like Jesse Lee Kerchaval's book Building Fiction because it explains the importance of whole-system thinking rather than looking at story as an accumulation of parts.
An outline is not a story either. It's not even a part to be dropped in at some point. It's safety glasses to keep dust and flying particles out of our eyes so that we can always see what we're doing, where we're going. Some writers worry that outlining is the surest way to kill the juice in their work, and I agree that it can be tricky to monkey around too much, to try too hard to nail everything down before the writing. But soft outlining can keep us from vascillating.
The electricity itself will come sometime later by some fluke we can't anticipate until we get in there and write. But just knowing that the wires have been properly installed before I start plugging in the appliances, before I start placing the furniture and making things look good (whether anything's working or not) helps me sleep a little better at night.
0 comments:
Post a Comment