Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? Matthew 6:26
I am fairly new to fiction writing. For years I wrote poetry and studied with major poets of the day, but I never studied fiction writing at that time. I was a poet then and focused solely upon that. Years later however after real life had accumulated enough of itself in and around me, I noticed that my poetry had quieted down to a near silence within me. In its place fiction began to emerge. And with fiction of course comes story. Upon beginning to write fiction, I quickly realized that this process was extremely different from writing poetry. Poetry is like music. It can just flow out of you, there is more immediacy and spontaneity with poetry. Yes of course there is still much work and laboring over words and enjambment and rhythm and meaning and things to be sure, but the end result can come relatively quickly. The deferral of gratification is not so long and drawn out as it is with writing a short story and especially with writing a novel.
After writing a few short stories, I decided to take a hack at novel writing. I had a fascinating character and a general premise, and immediately I started to dive in. And boy what a learning curve! Thankfully I did have a few things going for me. For one I have read an extensive amount of novels and literature, so I am very familiar with the form and its history not to mention the sound and feel of a good novel, which frankly I think is the most important aspect of literature. I also had a lot of inspiration and creativity. I just needed to learn how to write a darned story here! So I got into some research.
My journey took me all over, but one major milestone was randomly pulling a book off the shelf at the central library in downtown Los Angeles called Writing for Story by Jon Franklin. Although his book is about writing dramatic non-fiction, I found his advice and process extremely enlightening and sensible. So I started to apply it to my project. In short he basically claims you must structure, and you must outline. These are the great secrets of all the master writers. Franklin in his chapter of Structure states the following:
That structure is pivotal to storycraft is obvious, or at least it should be, but if you’ve been steeped in the mysteriousness of art (as most of us have) it’s difficult to think about writing in those terms…For it is here in the coldly logical prefrontal realm of the mind and not in the heart, that the secrets of the masters are kept. He who would comprehend stories, no less than he who would understand universes or temples, must first grasp the nature of their component parts…As a writer you will encounter similar shifts as you move from one structural level to another. When you deal with sentences, for instance, the cliche is a poison. But when large-scale structures are interacting that is no longer the case; at the conceptual levels, the cliche undergoes a strange metamorphosis. It becomes an eternal truth.
Story is universal. There are really only so many stories being told. For example Shakespeare often stole the core stories for his plays from other classic stories whether they be from Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, or even the histories of England. But even though he was clearly re-telling known stories, he would often add a little twist to further complicate or bend the relationships, motives, and larger arcs of the characters to suit his own literary or political ends. It’s similar to how Frank Sinatra and many of the great singers before him would all sing and re-sing the old classic tunes, but in the case of Sinatra, he just did them so well and with such wonderful renditions and twists that everyone loved them. In this respect I view Shakespeare and Sinatra similarly. And both of these cases speak to the larger point Franklin is making in the quote above – stories are universal. They are cliche. We all know them, and as a writer you are better off, far better off, by simply accepting that fact and following the great literary trend with stories. Don’t shy away from telling the “same old story,” because that’s never the problem for any successful writer. Look at all the romance novels out on the shelf, or the crime novels, or even the high-fiction and literary stories. They are all rehashing similar experiences over and over again. So what’s to make any of them interesting then? I mean if everything is all just the same and we already know it so well, then why do we read them at all? Well why do we keep listening to Frank Sinatra? Or any of the musicians we might like today? Or Shakespeare? Or even the CSI franchise on television for example? We engage with these songs and stories because we love them. And the real joy of them lies in the little details of how they are sung, what words and images are used, and of course the larger arc of what happens to our beloved characters.
As Franklin points out so brilliantly, it is vital for a writer to “shift[s] as you move from one structural level to another.” So in other words structure is a relativity issue. Depending on what altitude you are viewing your story, your frame of reference changes. At the zoomed in level of sentences and words and images, creativity and originality really matter. Keeping that reader hooked is important. But as you zoom out and look at the larger over-arching structure of the story and what is actually happening, there doesn’t have to be much originality or creativity at all. In fact the less original you are at that higher level, the better the story seems to flow. This even applies for high-literary fiction as well. Hamlet for example simply tells the story of a man deciding to avenge his father’s death. It’s really so simple! The story of The Grapes of Wrath is a story about a family relocating to California during the dust bowl migration. Simple! Stories don’t need to be complicated, but as writers we can make them interesting and engaging from page to page, sentence to sentence, image to image.
So as I began to understand and accept these concepts about story and how to really tell a story in a novel, I began to etch out my novel in outline format. Since stories have an arc and a transformation, Franklin strongly advocates that a writer outline their story before actually writing it. In fact he contests that all writers outline, even if they themselves say they don’t!
I don’t care what you’ve heard, or what your literature teacher said, or even what the writers themselves said. Every writer of any merit at all during the last five hundred years of English history outlined virtually everything he wrote….Obviously if you can’t think your story through you can’t write it convincingly. That’s why I so smugly assert that Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Shakespeare used outlines. I’ve read their stuff, and it has integrity – that quality of all hanging together, and being an interrelated, organic whole. Integrity in a story is something you just don’t get unless you did a workmanship job of thinking your story through in the first place.
Well that convinced me right then and there that I needed to outline, and I needed to outline yesterday. I needed to know where I was going before I set out on my journey, otherwise how would the novel have all the form and consistency and internal structure and design that I wanted it to have. I didn’t want to totally miss the mark completely and even worse only discover that I missed the mark AFTER I had written the whole darn thing. Oh man please no! So I got to work on my outline pronto. I had already written some pages of inspired lines, and I had a strong sense of the character and her arc and transformation throughout the story, but I just didn’t know how the character was going to actually go through this transformation specifically. I started at the beginning and worked my through the entire story and thought it through. As I outlined and outlined and outlined, I began to notice that I was less focused on the particular words I was going to write and far more interested with the larger events of the story. It was like I was building the frame of a house instead of concerning myself with which furniture to buy. Eventually after numerous iterations and scenarios, I came up with an outline I liked. Whew! Okay great! Now I can start writing finally! For the record I will admit that it took me quite some time to work this all out, and yes it really did help me in weeding out the places that I definitely did not want to go with the story and therefore led me closer and closer to where I did want to go. So that was definitely good indeed, but there were other costs to my outlining that I had to pay which I only discovered later as I finally began to write the actual novel.
I consulted my outline and began writing piece by piece through the novel, developing my character and her story as I had laid out and imagined already. Except there was a problem I began to notice – I wasn’t feeling too inspired to write anymore. It was a very strange experience. I had conceived of this character and her story, and I thought it could even be popular perhaps. Everything on the surface seemed to line up and look good. Except when I sat down to write I found the actual story no longer exciting to me. It was as if the more detailed and thorough outlining I did actually ruined the element of surprise and imagination and intrigue for me as the writer of the story. Not only did I know how the story was going to end, which does seem to be quite important for me as a writer, but I also knew all the ins and outs of each movement and narrative step that led to the end. I basically answered all the questions of the story prematurely in outlining rather than through the natural and slower paced process of the day-to-day writing of the story. Because of this, when I would sit down to write it felt more like I was simply writing straight geometric lines connecting point A to point B to point C to create this per-determined shape of a triangle. In short the writing became boring to me. All the answers were already laid out. Freedom and surprise were destroyed. Everything was known, nothing was left to mystery, to chance, or to interesting accidents. This was a serious problem for me. As I described in a previous post of mine, I ended up abandoning writing this first novel, not so much because of the outline per say but because I realized that I actually wasn’t writing something that I really cared about. So in this case my error in outlining too much wasn’t exactly the cause for the failure to complete the story, but I did become acutely aware that I over-did-it with my enthusiasm for outlining.
The interesting thing is that I am now writing a new novel (is this my first novel or my second only the philosophers can tell!), and knock-on-wood but it appears that I have found something of a happy medium when it comes to outlining. I am not outlining like crazy, but I am also not completely ignoring it either and just trying to “wing it” day by day with fervent prayers to my muse. I am thinking about the story and about the larger arc of my characters and what kind of journeys and issues and challenges I want them to go through and to experience. But I am not going overboard with it. I am not over outlining to the point that I answer every single question, every single turn of events, every single incident that occurs in the story. If the story is seen at 30,000 feet and the form of the sentence is seen at 1,000 feet, then I am leaving much of those mid-level 5,000 – 20,000 foot aspects of the story up for grabs. I know where I am going, and I know what I’d like to say, but I am leaving the page blank and the universe open to guide me on the best and most exciting path on how to get there. As the author, I am bestowing freedom and love to my characters and to my subconscious mind. I am allowing them to show me and guide me, surprise me and make me worry about what will happen next. And honestly this is working far, far better for me as the writer! It’s not a plan without it’s flaws though of course. For example I have found myself a little bit left out to dry about what to say next from time to time, but overall the path with a dash more freedom along with a guiding structure is working quiet well for me. I am much more excited and intrigued at what will happen next and where will this thing go each day I sit down to write. And that is a far cry from what I often felt when writing my previous novel. I don’t know who said it, perhaps it is one of those great quotes by Anonymous, but the saying goes that if you aren’t excited writing your story, then no one will be excited reading it either. God only knows if the story I’m writing now will be interesting or exciting to anyone beyond yours truly, but at least I can say with honesty and conviction that more often than not, I sure am enjoying writing this story.
I suppose writing puts me into some sort of god-like position as the author, where although I know the ultimate outcome for these characters, I don’t exactly know how they will choose to arrive at their destiny. What decisions will they make in whatever limited version of free will they possess? How will they surprise me and thrill me and endear me that much more to them? Whether it be with fictional characters, modes of political governance, or even in one’s relationship with another, the issuance of Freedom is always the hallmark of love and trust and grace. And if authors can hold such loving and adoring views towards their characters, just how much more does God our great Father love and adore us as we too bumble our way through this story of ours called life? Just how much more? I suppose such a line of questioning leads us onto one of the greatest stories ever known, a magical book left forever open for all of life to read, to experience, to enjoy, which ultimately is destined, foreordained even, to be translated into a whole new story perhaps never to be fully told.