Archive for the ‘Writing Process’ Category

The long awaited journey into Spring is finally coming to an end. April turned out to be the snowiest month of the Winter. As I gaze out my office windows at all the white where brown is suppose to be, I guess the stats are probably right.

You would think all this extra time I would normally spend searching the garden for perennials would have been put to proper use by writing. Alas, you would be mistaken. Sure, there have been bursts here and there of something akin to inspiration; another plot point added to the outline of my overdue book. Beyond that, however, lies resignation and depression. Instead of typing away at my keyboard, I have sullenly hunkered down in front of the television and waited stubbornly for that warm sunny day that’s been hiding just out of reach.

What fates await my neglected characters? Am I bored with them? Have they become passé, mere shadows of their former vibrant selves? I don’t think so. If anything, they’ve become more rounded, fuller. Their relationships are constantly shifting with every new discovery and every harrowing adventure.

Am I bored with place? Hardly. This chunk of real estate that I call home is so ripe with history and culture. Maybe someone with a more sophisticated mindset might not use those two adjectives to describe this odd little neck of the woods. But I think the best history is discussed in whispers of gossip over abundant but weak coffee. As to the culture, it may be course and reserved, but the characters it creates almost always deserve further examination.

So I still have faith that I will write again. That ray of belief and self affirmation will shine on my face and warm me before I know it. A story can seem monotonous and daunting one moment, then suddenly turn on a dime and take me where I wasn’t expecting. Like the weather. Like life.

I equate writing a novel to growing an onion. However, it’s actually more like growing the onion, pealing the layers down, then building them back together again and trying to present the onion as its pristine form, and hope the recipient doesn’t notice the difference.

It’s a necessary but daunting task. If you leave the onion untouched, you don’t know if it’s rotten in the middle or not. You can’t take that chance. So each layer is carefully removed, examined, and either discarded and replaced or left to be worked back into the onion later. Every bad layer must be replaced with a new one, or your onion will have a big hole in it. You can add layers but they must fit with the onion you’ve already grown, or it won’t peal correctly. Well meaning but ill fitting layers of onion can be used to grow new onions later.

I apologize profusely on beating my metaphor into a French-type soup, but hopefully, I made the point. A story is only as strong as its structure.

The way the plot moves along needs to reflect the needs and the goals of the characters experiencing the plot. Subplots need to stand on their own, but they must also support the main plot or they are unnecessary. Your plot must remain interesting and somewhat mysterious to the reader, yet it must make cohesive sense as a whole when the reader is done. The reader needs a reason to finish your story, but they also need a sense of satisfaction at the end, even if it’s some big cliffhanger to continue the story into the next installment.

In my metaphor the originally grown onion is the outline to your story. Don’t’ be afraid to reconstruct your outline. If it’s good to begin with, the basics will hold up to scrutiny. Your creative impulses created the original outline, but creativity is only a vague concept without the work required to make it something worthy of sharing with the world. It’s garnering the gumption to do the work that’s the challenge at least for me. And that’s where I’m at now.

Of course once I hand off my reconstructed onion to my editor (or editors, we’ll see), they’re just gonna peal it back down and make me reconstruct it all over again. I’m quite surprised when all is said and done that the final recipient doesn’t just end up with soup.

Change is an uncomfortable process, especially for a self-righteous Lutheran. The answer, “because we’ve always done it that way,” is very popular where I’m from. So is, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It’s that stubborn resolution to remain constant in the inevitable face of change. It comes from stalwart farmers who refuse to back down from the elements and bitterly judge folks who try try sully their traditions with “progress.” “Different” is a derogatory term here.

Yet things must “progress” anyway or nothing gets done. This is especially true in writing. No matter what you write, until it’s printed, until the control of the story is out of your hands, things must change.

Writers are artists. Writing is an act of personal self expression, just like painting, composing, sculpting, etc. In some ways that’s wonderful. A writer plays with rhythms in dialog. A writer sculpts a description with a plethora of adjectives at their disposal, weaving metaphors and clever turns of phrase through their story. A well written story will emotionally move a reader, much in the same way a well composed song will move a listener. It’s a work of art.

There in lies the rub. Because writers are artists, they are stubborn about changing stuff, sometimes even a single word. That word is beautiful. That word makes the whole paragraph, maybe the whole thought. How dare anyone have the audacity to mess with that word. It’s sacred.

Um, no it’s not. It’s just a word. A paragraph is just a group of words that progress a story. And a story is only as good as it’s reception. If you want to live in a cave like Gollum; clinging to your “precious” story, savoring every word like it’s air, and reveling in your own self-importance, that’s your business. If you want your work to be appreciated by others, to be “received” publicly, you must be willing to change it.

Your story will only become something that deserves an audience if you allow it to evolve. It needs to molt off all those precious descriptions. It needs to pair down all that witty banter, and it needs to streamline all those thoughtful metaphors. A word is only sacred when it has earned its keep in the valuable real estate that is your story.

In the words of my people: “Don’t put on airs. Who are you trying to impress anyway?”