Evolving Story Process

I put those three words in the title because a story has a certain neatness that is missing from real life. Real life is messy, random and, most of all, a continuous process. Although I'm comfortable these days saying "I am a literary editor", it would be more accurate to say that I am in a continuous process of becoming a literary editor. This is much like becoming a writer; we often call it 'development' as that has a suggestion that as time passes we improve (which I rather hope we all do), but 'evolution' is more accurate: we adapt and change.

My daughter and I play a game, usually at bedtime, of telling eachother subverted stories. It is as good a way as any of illustrating what a story is. Every story starts as follows:

"Once upon a time there was a lovely little pig called Margot and she wanted…"

The game is to find something she wanted, and thwart the desire as fast as possible:

"…a bedtime story, but her parents were both too tired, so she went straight to sleep the end."

This subverts Story#1, which is expressed as follows: person/conflict/resolution.

The more you write, the more you will develop a sense that most stories have a sort of underlying structure, built out of a standard set of characters and actions*. Initially, you will see the underlying shape of the story start to emerge as you write; presently, you will start to see alternate shapes, often in superposition, and you will start to steer towards the story that best satisfies you. Later, you may reach a point where you form a complete story before you start writing, however at some point before this stage, many writers settle into a personal process that suits their desire, temperament and creative preferences.

Some writers start recognizing tropes and archetypes and making use of them consciously. This is something that can be learned, but many writers are leery about learning tropes because they feel it will injure their spontaneity or otherwise prejudice the creative process.

The more you write, the more the process of writing evolves, and this evolution tends towards a stable, describable process, though the process may vary greatly from one writer to another. Writers who wish to allow their creativity to develop organically may want to stop reading here.

There are those artistic purists who claim that studying the art will stifle uniqueness in creativity. There are those hardened professionals who claim that only mastery of the requisite skills opens up the possibility of great achievements. I find I can walk a rather wavy line between these two points of view. What I seek to do when working with my author is to encourage him to follow a path that is natural for him, and I do this by trying to raise his awareness of his own process. If anything is essential, it is knowing the nature of your own creative process. Even if your process is to blind draft** everything, and if you aren't happy with a chapter, to throw it away and blind draft it again, you should be sufficiently aware of that process to be able to provide the best conditions for it (and to know that you don't need a literary editor, only a proofreader and a copy editor).

Most writers go through the evolution where they start by writing something and discovering the story as they go (or having the story pointed out to them by an editor after the writing is finished), and finish by consciously choosing the shape and structure of the story, either before or while writing.

In conclusion, here are some tangential thoughts, in parenthesis:

(By way of contrast, I know a writer whose characters are so well developed that she only has to drop them into a situation then watch what happens; if you are this instinctive with characters, then a story will appear with only a minimum of nudging.)

(Plot is something that I'll deal with in more detail another time. Plot is simpler than story to explain; nonetheless it is subservient to story. How conscious and explicit your plotting becomes is very much a function of the type of story you prefer to write.)

(As a literary editor I am conscious of the privilege of my position; I get to observe independently the development of writers and their skills. One of the reasons why I argue that storytelling is something human beings do naturally and instinctively, is that I have never known a writer who did not improve with practice (with or without my help).)

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* commonly called 'tropes' but more properly called 'conceits'. The former is likely to replace the latter before too long.

** you start with a very vague idea of where you want things to be by the end of the chapter, and you sit down and write it, ideally in a single session, without any changes edits or corrections as you go.

How to Write a Your First Novel

Following on from yesterday, supposing you sit down to write your first story (if you can remember this event I'd like to hear from you).

Maybe you're arrogantly assuming that you are the next big thing, or humbly supposing that this will be the first of many failed attempts, or anything in between. None of that really matters. What matters is that you get it onto the page.

My process with my first book was that I would write like a demon for a few days, then gradually lose interest, then be inspired anew a few weeks later, at which point I would re-read everything I had written so far, make a few small changes, and then carry on writing. This is a slow and painful process, but thankfully at the time I wrote it I was not a professional editor, and I tended to think everything I wrote was great. Many first time writers spend a great deal of time going back over previous parts of the book to "improve" them instead of doing what they should be doing, which is getting to the end.

When you write your first story, possibly even your second or third, getting to the end should be the first, second and third priorities of the writing process.

There are a number of reasons for this:

As soon as you complete a first draft, you have become a writer. This is a psychological nicety, but an important one. Few but the most arrogant can actually think of themselves as a writer until the first draft of the first novel is written. Once that watershed is out of the way, it becomes possible to devote more time to redrafting and to thinking about getting started on the second book.

You can't edit a story that isn't complete. Actually just having a completed first draft doesn't mean you have a complete story, but it does mean that the editing process can begin, and you can start digging about in there to find a complete story. I've never actually seen a manuscript that did not contain a story. Sometimes it isn't the story that the writer thought it was. Usually its just buried. Sometimes it has features missing.

As you write your first draft, your style will start to develop. It will develop very fast in your first book, and start showing itself (on approximate average) around the 50k word mark (give or take anything up to 30k words). In the first book, there is a conflict between what you think is good style and the style you are developing as your own. It is worthwhile to become conscious of your style, but expect it to take at least three books to find something both personal and natural.

In your first draft, your vocabulary will develop, both consciously and unconsciously. You will also begin adventures in grammar, syntax and punctuation. A little more consciously, in general, you will also develop your ability with imagery. Much of our language is figurative*, and we use imagery both consciously and unconsciously. If you are unaware that, for example, the word "beady" in "he fixed a beady eye on me" is figurative, then you need an editor, or at the very least, you need to sit down with a volume of poetry, and bring yourself up to speed.

THESE reasons and many others all point to your reaching the brow of the learning curve of writing. A curve that will continue indefinitely (but which is an inverse exponent) as you continue to write.

In practical terms, this means that the last third of your first draft will be substantially and characteristically different from the first third. In short: you will have to rewrite much of the first half of your book, just to make it as good as the last third.

People will frequently tell you that the first three chapters need to be the best so you can capture the reader's attention. This is true. It is also true that in the first draft of your first novel, the first three chapters will be dreadful**.

The next step, therefore, is to find some kind friends and family who are prepared to read it for you. I suggest that for your first 1-3 novels, you ask them to read with an open mind, to avoid dwelling on details, and just to tell you:

1. what the story is about
2. which parts they like the best.

Repeat several times that you expect there will be plenty to dislike, but that this is a first draft and what you want is to take from it what's good and rework it. People tend to think that they are being helpful by pointing out your mistakes. A first draft is too early for that. A first draft reader who points out all your typos is wasting their time, as half the typos might be in parts of the draft that get cut or wholly rewritten***.

The feedback to this will tell you the most important two things: what the story you wrote might really be, and what you are doing right. Proceed to the second draft with that in mind.

Repeat the process with the next working draft, but try to vary the readers. This can start to get difficult. There are limits. But if this is your first novel, it's well worth it. Each of these read-feedback-redraft cycles improves your awareness of your own writing.

All the time in redrafting, be on the lookout for that feeling I mentioned yesterday, that the story feels right. If it does, and you can explain why, then the shape of the story is starting to crystallize. Go back and re-read with that in mind.

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Next time I will talk about the process of writing once you have 3 or more completed novels, as the sense of story becomes more conscious and deliberate.

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* rather wonderfully, the word "figurative" it itself figurative - though it became so before the Romans started using it... figuratively.

** this is not an absolute, and if you are going to be a good writer sooner rather than later, then those chapters probably contain material suitable for a first chapter, with a little, or possibly a lot of, editing.

*** that doesn't mean you shouldn't bother with a spellcheck before you give it them to read; that's only polite.

Where to Stories Come From?

I felt it only appropriate after the excessive ambition of my last post to give this one a similarly ambitious title.

Where do stories come from? I, as many writers, can write a story on demand, given a few basic ideas, or even no ideas at all. This is because I know what makes a story. Knowing what makes a story seems to have two elements, the academic and the emotional. The academic elements of a story are those that can be readily named, if not always easily described: plot, character, protagonist, antagonist, etc. The emotional element of what makes a story is a sense of when a story feels right. Part of this feeling is personal, but most of it is a shared feeling, shared between writer and reader in the same way that a play is shared between actor and audience. This means it isn't wholly subjective, and you can learn to judge when a story will feel right to more readers.

Often you can rationalize the successful story post-hoc in the hope of producing an academic explanation of why it works. Often this is spurious. Usually it is a waste of time. Sometimes it advances your understanding of what makes a story work. But not where stories come from.

When most people set out to write their first novel, they do so with an idea of the story already forming, perhaps completely formed. That idea has arisen from their experiences, upbringing, culture—especially, from all the stories they have read or heard or seen. It is especially common for people's first novel to arise from their experiences as child and adolescent; to arise from the difficult or traumatic experiences and relationships of growing-up. This is a pretty broad sweep—so much so that it could pass as a cold reading. But I stand by it because the more stories he writes, the more they will leave his personal experiences behind; the more the story itself will come from the writer's invention.

Most writers will have heard the advice given to first timers to "write what you know"; the apparent truth is that you can hardly avoid it; the story you have tapping away in your chest that makes you sit sown in front of the keyboard in the first place is a story that comes from you and will tell you. I wonder how many writers realize how much of themselves they have bound up in that first story. That's the major reason why it's so important to write that one before you get on with really developing your skill and art. That one story you've carried with you since whenever you were first aware of it needs to get out because it's holding you back.

Some writers (DH Lawrence, I'm looking at you) try to preserve the spontaneity, the emotional wellspring of that first story through all their stories. I find that even in the case of writers as good as Lawrence, they end up telling the same story over and over. (For goodness sake, man! The Rainbow is the same story as Sons & Lovers told three times in the same book!)

In telling that first story, you start to learn about how to get the story out of your chest and onto the page.

I think—tentatively—that subsequent stories are, at first, echoes of that first one. If the writer then tries to imitate others more consciously, whether imitating content, style or story, then other influences come to bear, and the stories diverge more and more from that first, personal story. Through this process, the writer develops more and more his awareness of those two elements of what makes a story; the academic and the emotional. Through this, he can develop the ability to develop a story from a few simple ideas, and as such begin to create as an artist.

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More about the process of writing next time.