To round out this short series of posts about the Four Elements practice in writing, let’s look at the fourth and final element: Air.
Air is associated with the mind: thinking, mental states, logic. At its best, it’s associated with clarity: strong ideas clearly expressed in conjunction with the other elements, e.g., conjuring up the senses (earth) in ways that prompt action (fire) and evoke feeling (water). In tarot, the element of Air is represented by the suit of Swords, and it’s useful to think of the image of a sharp blade ready to slice through the air with precision and power – imagine, in the photo above, a giant sword cutting through the clouds towards clear blue sky.
In other contexts, though, an ineffective presence of Air lies at the heart of some of the most frequently encountered weaknesses in undeveloped manuscripts: cluttered writing that’s trying too hard, or stodgy prose that’s hard to follow or care about.
Air can also mess with our process, allowing our monkey minds to, say, worry neurotically about finding an agent while we are still only on page ten of a first draft.
With the craft of writing, I particularly associate Air with ORGANISATION and STRUCTURE and FOCUS. With the bigger picture of a piece of writing, this could mean a well-plotted storyline, or the architecture of a book: how events and revelations are paced and presented through time to create suspense or simply keep the reader reading on.
At a more detailed level, Air can be found in the structure of sentences and paragraphs: effectively rendered SYNTAX that achieves a certain speed or mood, and is clearly understood. Mindful choices of words and verb forms and punctuation will make all the difference to a text.
And Air isn’t just found on the open surface of writing. I also think about the THEMES and IDEAS that work with the intellect, as well as FIGURES OF SPEECH that operate on subconscious levels: symbols, metaphors, similes. Bits of cleverness that engage active minds – though not, it’s hoped, in the process overegging things.
As with the exploration of the other elements, it is going to make sense if Air is balanced with Fire, Water, and Earth – grounded with earthly details, for example, to prevent the writing getting aethereal in a dry and inaccessible way.
As a writing experiment: looking back at previous writing exercises that tasked you on writing letters between characters (Compassionately Yours and Earthly Exchanges), plan a series of letters or exchanges that maps out a larger story. The letter is a form that instantly creates connections and draws us into some sort of agreement – or disagreement. Letters offer gifts, extend invitations, send refusals, or deliver news good or bad.
For example, consider how specific letters can be placed within a story as:
triggers or inciting incidents
causes or effects in a chain of consequences
moments of rising tension, or reversals: do we teeter from moments of hope to moments of despair before hope rises again? Or does fortune rise and rise before a deep dive – or fall and fall before an improvement in circumstances? See Kurt Vonnegut on the shapes of stories
obligatory scenes
a midpoint or point of no return, after which there is no going back
a climax
a resolution
To help with this, you might want to think about various theories of on plotting. Which are exhaustive – and can be exhausting! This is one of those points where overthinking can be a problem, and the clarity of Air can be achieved by committing to a simple known form. A few ideas about structure to help:
Map out your letters according to how they might fall with an established story structure. I often recommend Michael Hauge’s Five Key Turning Points and Six Stages of a screenplay (which can be adapted for prose too).
Or perhaps place a letter in every gap for a version of the Pixar Story Spine: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___. And ever since that day ___.
Make yourself a plan. List all of the letters or alternative forms of exchange. Note who they are sent between, and what is exchanged, and what might change in the world of those characters as a result: how do they end up feeling (water) each time? Also note how these letters might be grounded in the world of the senses (earth) with, e.g., settings or objects of desire.
Don’t worry too much (yet!) about gaps, or places where the story feels thin. You can flesh things out in the writing, feeling your way through characters’ intentions and yearnings. What goes on in these letters can’t always be planned, and sometimes you do have to keep on writing to see what emerges instinctively from your characters and settings as you spend time with them.
Eventually it’s likely you will have to put your thinking gear back on to decide how to arrange your material, deciding where to cut or expand – that’s drafting. But too sometimes a good exercise in thinking about our stories lies in actively not overthinking them during the early stages of writing: a balanced sense of Air.
You can take your plan further by committing to a calendar for writing these letters: one a week, or if you have time one a day across the course of a week or so. See where you end up. This might be the whole or part of an epistolary work, or these letters might serve as anchors in the scheme of a larger story to be fleshed out with other scenes. Or they might simply serve as an outline of sorts for a longer work.
Also take a look at the overall energy (fire) charted between the letters: can you identify a clear, focused line (air) that summarises the story they tell in a sentence or two?
Additional elemental activity: set a timer for five minutes and meditate at your desk or wherever you write before you embark on this activity. Keep it simple: each time a thought arises, note it as a thought and then let it pass, and then return your attention to your breath – connect with the air you take in, and the air you send out into the world.
And a date for your diary in the new year: on Monday11 January at 6pm I am the guest at the next Words Away Zalon, where I shall be talking to Kellie Jackson about the Airy topic of mindfulness in writing and publishing: Words In Action.
As a writing experiment, use the prompt I never … to write a list-based piece exploring the inner and outer lives for a main character, starting every sentence with the phrase I never. Write for ten minutes, making this a free write, keeping the pen moving and seeing what comes up; if you find yourself halting or drying up, just write I never … again and let a fresh association surface for your character. Try to include specific and concrete references: project inner feelings on to physical objects, introduce particular settings, make detailed references to other characters, create complications.
I do recommend writing by hand for that organic connection between pen and paper and body and soul. But too sometimes a keyboard works better for some writers – comes naturally. And sometimes we get cramps in our hands, or our writing is slower than our thoughts – though too there’s no harm in slowing down occasionally. Explore, perhaps, and do whatever works for you.
In this instance, think about the choice of the word never, which is often used in contexts related to regret or loss or lack or failings or yearnings on the part of character: super plot drivers. You could even make the nevers a list of blatant denials (lies). What surfaces often goes to the heart of your character’s plottings.
Also: the list form has distinctive effects.
It comes easy, and has a cadence and a rhythm.
It enjoys the simple forward-moving power of the right-branching syntax of everyday speech; variations in the patterning of the sentence can add emphasis and curiosity.
The repetition has a powerful insistence that digs deep into your character’s basic drives, subconsciously drawing on instinct instead of depending on overly thought-out writing.
The list is a straightforward form to write, too – once you run out of something to say about a particular never, you can start a new sentence and find something else. Lean into the scaffolding you have created.
Some of them (I never, I don’t remember, I don’t want) have a tendency of drawing on darker material – what Natalie Goldberg might says ‘pulls in the shadow’, which as Natalie says can be the real ‘juice’ in writing.
Repeat variations of this exercise for your character on different occasions. Maybe try these for ten minutes every day for a week. Let this character’s urges and insistences inhabit you for the whole week. Then, making this a practice, in following weeks repeat these exercises for other characters. See what surfaces. Then take this material into your story.
You could also do simply for yourself as personal writing that might – or might not – feed another creative project.
This is a useful exercise to carry out as part of your planning or alongside your drafting, or perhaps if you are getting stuck in your writing. It’s helpful with plotting – I used this in a couple of plotting workshops for The Literary Consultancy this week. Such simple prompts can really help with the sorts of primal work that writing often needs, that digging for fossils that Stephen King describes in On Writing.
And another powerful use of the list structure is Zoe Leonard’s remarkable I Want A President, which I used recently in a Finding Your Fire workshop for tapping into and expressing our intention in writing. Note the effects of repetition and variation – the emphasis, the accumulations; the POWER.
I always love to hear about those ways into writing that come natural, come easy (well, I should qualify that: we do have to do the work of showing up, which isn’t always easy). Prompts such as these often raise things that nudge our characters into the sorts of situations that make for good plots.
Meanwhile, on an entirely other note: pictures of tulips, above, as it’s already time to think about which ones to order for delivery in the autumn … I think that is Ballerina with, I think, Queen of the Night?
What’s the conflict, where’s the conflict? These questions often arise in creative writing, and sometimes I find them tiresome. Perhaps it’s because they can sound a bit nagging or whiny, and I am an irritable and impatient type who runs to resentment easily.
But really it’s because conflict is not always the obvious or the primary driver of stories for me. Certain types of story do not rely on conflict, even if it’s somewhere in the story.
Many films and plays are all about conflict. Perhaps it’s in the nature of the experience, something to do with the way audiences engage with a performance or a spectacle on screen or stage; their expressive nature so often draws us with some sort of verbal or physical sparring, some visible tension or conflict, particularly in their most popular forms: battling wits between the leads in a Shakespearean comedy or a rom com; a murder mystery or a courtroom drama; the inner turmoil of a guts-spilling Tennessee Williams monologue or a ballad in a musical; a car chase or the combat between fighter aircraft in outer space; even an ecological threat, whether it’s the ancient tale of Noah’s ark or a cli-fi disaster movie.
Such vividly portrayed antagonisms – interpersonal, internal, societal, or environmental – connect with audience powerfully and immediately. It’s not surprising that many of the theories of narrativestructure that have grown out of writing for cinema and theatre put conflict at the heart of stories too.
By contrast, it occurs to me that novels are usually consumed in private and as individual reading (or listening) experiences, and as such can invite a more reflective approach in their subject matter. Reading by its nature tends to be a more meditative and less public act.
I am not saying that novels lack conflict, of course. Many novels are entirely based in conflict, and even if you are writing a less conflict-oriented story it really does help to grasp the fundamentals of narrative structure that are based in tracing the turning points, and complications, and climaxes that are often focused around a central conflict. They’re particularly useful when planning and shaping a story, though I always stress that this is stuff you know deeply and practise lightly. It can help to analyse the structure of novels that inspire you.
Any theory can, though, start to feel formulaic, or even constraining. And it’s particularly this emphasis on conflict that I often find myself resisting. Stories predicated on conflict favour, it could be argued, quite a … violent? and phallocratic? way of looking at/presenting the world. Even some of the guidebooks about this way of telling a story can get awfully mansplainy 🙀🙀🙀
Instead, I often think about the idea of CHANGE, prompted by something Ursula Le Guin says in her wonderful book Steering the Craft. Regulars at my classes might be able to recite this by heart now, as I read it out every time:
Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.
So: what’s changing? What’s being found, lost, borne, discovered in our stories?
I’m currently reading the recently published Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. A lot of great stuff here, and I’m only a few chapters in. Something that’s registered so far is its reference to the ‘psychology of curiosity’:
Information gaps create gnawing levels of curiosity in the readers of Agatha Christie and the viewers of Prime Suspect, stories in which they’re (1) posed a puzzle; (2) exposed to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution; (3) surprised by red herrings; and (4) tantalised by the fact that someone knows whodunnit, and how, but we don’t.
So: I’m also thinking about ways in which curiosity might be used to guide the telling of stories.
And then imagine my surprise the other day when I was prepping for Saturday’s masterclass on revising and self-editing that I discover there is a whole other narrative structure I had never heard of: the Japanese four-act structure called kishōtenketsu. Where have I been, hiding under a neocolonialist mansplained rock of three-act structure?!
Kishōtenketsu a way of looking at form that is found in examples from classical Chinese poetry as well as manga comics. Its four acts (or frames in comics) use:
Set-up
Development, or expansion
Twist, or complication
Resolution, or conclusion
It’s discussed in more detailed in links below, but the idea of the twist really catches my attention here.
I do think the form of kishōtenketsu needs adapting, mind. Just as we don’t need to rely on three or five acts, we don’t have to be limited to four. But thinking about the ingredients of four-act structure, particularly how we look for twists, frees up how we consider the potential of the fluid forms of prose fiction: from flash fiction by Lydia Davis to the 10,000 words of Brokeback Mountain to the 300,000 words of The Goldfinch, which is a novel that uses many shifts and twists to keep the pages turning.
So: instead of the turning points of the conflict-focused three-act structure (triggering moment, rising action, climax, resolution), these other ideas lead me to thinking of different shaping principles: twists, information gaps, surprises, unexpected changes, the spark that’s created by a reversal of fortune (or a turn in a sonnet), juxtapositions, the jump cut, frames, contrasts, dislocation, alignments, questions that prick my curiosity, expanding horizons, cause and effect. There are many subtle energies and forms that are not so emphatically about conflict but are about other ways of relating and integrating experience. Cause and effect (consequence) is particularly important: something happens (a twist), how do characters react?
Here are a few examples from my own (emerging) thinking.
There are certainly conflicts within Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, but much of the page-turning energy arises for me from the twists of its reversals in fortune and sudden shifts in setting. No spoilers, but people who’ve read the book will remember one very explosive moment as well as one very marked move to a (brilliantly realised) fresh location, and then later on there is also a really great twist I really should have seen coming, but didn’t. How characters react to those changes is perhaps more important than defining any particular antagonism; though conflicts are certainly there in The Goldfinch, this is ultimately a book about loss and love and finding your way in the world, and they are what’s most important, particularly in the rising swell of emotion that define the ‘shock and aura’ of its final pages. The resolution of that book isn’t about conflict, or about one person defeating another. It’s about a surprise, and it’s about a character finding something – literally, and also more deeply within, and along the way the reader is rewarded with many moments that are not so much about conflict but about connection and empathy.
Other examples.
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. That Olive is quite a combative character! So there are plenty of conflicts here. But consider the juxtapositions, the contrasts, the different frameworks of narrative that overlap and interlock yet too at times go out on their own, with their own surprises.
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas. It starts with a conflict, and it’s one whose resolution drives the story – but too there is much more going on. Some of the sections of this book that I enjoyed the most involved characters going off into their own storylines, and involved things none of the other characters knew about.
Purity by Jonathan Franzen likewise has plenty of conflicts between its characters, but for me much of its powerful charge arises from changes in POV, shifts in register, and what we gain from surprises and contrasts and misunderstandings and realignments we encounter in the storytelling and characterisation (and we meet some really distinctive characters here). This is more nuanced than what might simply be understood as conflict.
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. A great leap that happens at a certain point in the story is all about the twist that’s delivered, and it’s certainly a twist that draws on the energy of conflicts between characters caught up in the ‘wretched scheme’ of a dastardly conspiracy that’s the fodder of classic Victorian melodramas. But it’s a radical retelling here, and a significant shift in POV and a serious re-examination of characters delivers much of the reward in the reading too. Fingersmith is all about the twists.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It certainly has conflicts, but it’s hard to apply the conventional dramatic arc to this novel, and we derive much of our pleasure from the way in which its Russian Doll form jumps us from one frame of narrative to another.
You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr. A novel I very much enjoyed recently, and again one with plenty of conflicts at its core, though Damian has said that ‘conflict is the setting but not the engine’ of his book: ‘I think in some ways time is what drives this book and seeing how different histories and truths compete over time and how the characters change as those forces act on them and they resist/are crushed by them’. Something I particularly admired is the way in which it is constructed, like Cloud Atlas, of self-contained frames of narrative that are not immediately obvious in their connections. Our curiosity is guided as to how these stories are joined together.
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday. Another book in sections (three of them), and though each has its own conflicts the greater part of the narrative drive here lies in figuring out how these stories are joined together. Connection is a more important shaping principle than conflict, I’d dare to say.
Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott. That Truman Capote certainly was a bundle of antagonisms! Social, interpersonal, and especially internal. But much of the pleasure of this magnificent novel is that it’s not laboriously constructed around the central conflict of Truman spilling the tea on his Swans in his final book, but it frees itself in terms of both form and content to explore a whole life and times, digressing into whole separate strands of storyline for secondary characters. It’s a bold, ambitious novel – and its boldness comes from daring to be unconventional.
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. Swan Song brought this to mind for me – again, the conflict of real lives reimagined (Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky), but again much of the payoff comes from formally playing with the way that stories are told, here in a collage of the often contrasting or unreliable accounts of journals, letters, newspaper reports, and other documents collated by a fictional archivist. What’s also notable is how the reader is left to make sense of gaps in the account – the lacunae.
David Copperfield is a coming-of-age story with plenty of twists and turns and reversals of fortune. And coincidences! Imagine having tea at the house of your nemesis and lo and behold your own landlord walks by and a friendship is resumed. We are told to avoid coincidences in our stories, but Dickens gets away with it! Have a go for yourself, even if you really do have to be crafty. But too I have myself experienced remarkable coincidences. I once sat down on a ferry between North and South Island in New Zealand, and was enjoying the view, when I looked across the deck and saw Celia who used to sit in the next office to me when I first started working in publishing in London! Another time, when I lived in the US, I ran into Bernie from the art department (from that same office in London) while hiking the trail to the Delicate Arch in Arches National Park in Utah.
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is a strange and meditative book about a writer who loses a friend and gains a dog. It does have conflicts, and a plot, and I am sure we can find the conflicts and tensions of three-act structure here if we seek them out. But the emphasis is definitely on the internal musings of how the central character processes change; it’s a nuanced self-exploration, and to my mind lacks an obvious conflict as its central drama.
But how do we shape all of these twists and curiosities and nuances into a coherent form? (Which begs the question, in fact, of how coherent do we need to be?).
In fact, after questioning theories from film, I feel that one of the most flexible ways of thinking about story structure comes from the Pixar Story Spine:
Once upon a time there was ___. Every day ___. But, one day ___. Because of that ___. Because of that ___. Because of that ___. Until finally ___. And ever since that day ___.
Perhaps we can say that twists are what happens at One day ___. And a long novel such as The Goldfinch or David Copperfield has lots of One days? Conventional three-act structure reduces this to a single inciting incident or trigger, but such works amount to a long sequence of causes and effects.
I am not saying that we should write stories without conflict. We do need – and want – tension in our writing and our reading. Conflicts are fun, whether played out in the bitchy undermining that goes on in the juicy narration of a novel such as Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller, or in the more obvious thrills and spills of a battle in a fantasy novel that results in the victorious outcome we desire. The clash of sword and shield provides the basic matter of many tales.
Hold up a minute, though: mentioning battles in fantasy novels makes me think about Game of Thrones, and I am wondering if many of the negative reactions to its tv resolution arose because we have grown used to storytelling that favours outright victors and clear-cut conquests. In Plot Without Conflict, Randy Finch in fact uses kishōtenketsu as a specific way of looking at the story of Game of Thrones. Many characters were most certainly defeated at the end, and many others lost their heads along the way, but the twist at the end saw unlikely characters achieving outcomes that had been speculated upon only in the distant fan-flamed corners of the interwebs. Game of Thrones, it turns out, is not a story with the arc of a conventional hero’s journey.
It’s not really a matter of thinking about plots without conflict. It’s more that conflict doesn’t have to be the primary emphasis, or the HEART of the story. The gender-bias of male-oriented hero narratives – all swords and cock, and not much internal action – is perhaps not the ideal way of thinking about those stories of finding or losing that Ursula Le Guin mentions above.
And perhaps in general we need a less adversarial mode of not only writing, but also looking at the world?
Consider, for example, those essays written in high school or freshman composition classes, where we are tasked on ‘arguing’ for or against a proposition: prove yourself right, which often means proving someone else wrong. (Sound familiar? I wouldn’t know, I’m not reading the news right now.)
Does the conditioning of years after years of writing argumentative essays and creating conflict-driven stories and taking part in debating society result in the squabbling chamber of the Houses of Parliament, and the rise of alt-right and -left trolls, and antagonistic figures such as Donald Trump? Does everything always have to be defined so much by confrontation and conquest? We don’t have to be creationists to think that the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest is not necessarily the way we have to structure our societies, sorry, our stories.
Hello, my name is Andrew, and if I win Miss World my wish is for an end to all wars. [Cue: Imagine all the people, Living life in peace …]
Perhaps this is taking things a bit far, though perhaps it is not. The way in which we rely on conflict in our storytelling is worth serious thought. There are alternatives that emphasise and embody other ways of integrating change and complication in the world: inviting curiosity, emphasising connection.
As the man said: Only connect.
Further reading and writing I’ve added a writing experiment that plays with these ideas as an exercise in drafting and revision: Only Connect.
And further discussion and amplification of ideas can be found in the links below, along with another one on the fragmented novel, a form we discussed in my recent class Density and Speed: Crafting Space and Time in Writing.
* Mythic Scribes – also includes further links to pieces on differences between Japanese and Western styles of arguing/conflict and structure in Japanese horror stories
Footnote * Also, let’s not forget a book is not a film. I recently read a very well-reviewed book on novel writing that has a lot of good content, but a large proportion of its examples are taken from film. I mean: its chapter on dialogue quotes at length from four different texts, AND THEY ARE ALL FILMS. Which would be fine if the book was called Writing A Screenplay, but it isn’t. Novels have options beyond direct speech: indirect or reported speech, summary, dialogue tags, and ways of rendering action and gestures too that can only be achieved in prose. Anyone writing a novel needs to understand those ways in which characters’ speech is rendered too. (If you want a really and truly excellent guide to writing dialogue in prose, check out the chapter on characterisation in the new/tenth edition of Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway, finally available in an affordable edition on these shores.)
And again: a book is not a film, or a play for that matter. A film is something intended for consumption within a block of two hours while you sit in a dark room with strangers, or in front of your telly with your loved ones, or on your iPad by yourself. A play is something that is watched in a hushed room or (further back in time) an outdoor amphitheatre, again over the course of a couple of hours (or a bit more maybe). A book however can be picked up and put down over the course of many days, and in any context (in bed, on the train, on the beach); the duration of that reading experience will be several hours even for a fast reader. Theories developed for one medium need serious adaptation for a differently consumed form.
Also, however many time people try to explain beats to me I. Just. Don’t. Get. Them. (My beats are Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman and Bobbie Louise Hawkins.)
I think the problem I have with beats and some of these other structures is probably that they can feel to me like externally conceived structures imposed upon narrative matter. They are not arising in that intuitive way that I recently heard Anna Burns describe how she wrote Milkman.
And, once again: I do observe that a book is not a film, or a play for that matter. Beats are used in writing for screen and stage, and films and plays are creations that manifest primarily as external expressions of action: performances that rely on spectacle and a choreographed management of time and space.
So: narrative theories based on screen- and scriptwriting have other limits beyond their emphasis on conflict. There are many theories on structure in film, in fact, and I find myself drawn more to the idea of the sequence . But I do note that three- or five-act structures are the ones I come across most in discussions in fiction writing.
The Writers’ Workshop Getting Publishing Day was great fun. It was good to see some old faces and meet plenty of friendly new ones. I saw some really accomplished writing, a lot of it already at a publishable standard. With the right breaks and a good dose of luck, some of these books could be on the way to finding an agent and publisher – and let’s not forget we can create some of our own luck, too.
It was the first time I’d taught a workshop on plotting in an hour-long slot (though I realise we ran over by fifteen minutes, sorry!). In other contexts I’ve been able to assign reading beforehand, so we’d all be able to discuss the same stories together, but yesterday I fell back on examples such as Pride and Prejudice and The Hobbit. I emphasised that plot is best regarded as a verb rather than a noun: though inspired twists never hurt, plot is not some clever thing we have to conjure up – instead, plotting is an active process that brings together other aspects of craft such as characterisation, structure, narration.
Character is especially important: what are your character’s deepest yearnings, and how might they come into conflict with those of other characters? And how are the events of the book character-building?
I don’t dwell too much on what might be seen as the jargon of structure, but it can be useful to think about inciting incidents and reversals of fortune mounting tension towards a climax as a connected sequence of events. Most of all: don’t be boring! (The only rule in writing.)
I read the opening of Notes On A Scandal not only as an example of a strong narrative voice plotting away but also to point out how Zoe Heller chose to put what might be regarded as the most dramatic revelations of her story right into the first paragraph: the first sentence, in fact! So much about plotting is about the ways a writer chooses to handle time.
And those choices, I suggested, are best handled in drafting. Though some writers, especially more experienced ones, work from detailed plans, I propose that beginning novelists might regard the process of creating a first draft as an active part of plotting. By all means work from an outline – you’ll need one – but be free and easy with yourself in your first draft. Let yourself see what comes up. Have fun, be playful. Perhaps write bits off to the side to see how a different point of view or scene might work. Maybe even write notes to yourself in scenes at challenging points, e.g., ‘I need to work out a way to get A to do B to C in this scene here’ – reaching the end might give you the perspective on what B needs to be.
And when you finish that draft, print it off, and read it through, perhaps making a few notes as you go but mostly just reading through for the experience of reading (using a different typeface can help to make things look different).
Then ask yourself: what plotting can I create from what I have here?
And then – the most important thing I have to say – take that print-out, sit it beside you on your desk, push back your shoulders, and type it out again into a new document.
Terry Pratchett once said something along the lines of the first draft being the writer just telling herself the story. The second and subsequent drafts are there to work out the best way to tell – plot – that story, which might of course change along the way. And liberating yourself from your attachments is much easier when you’re not just tinkering with existing words on a screen. In the golden olden days a writer used to clatter out second drafts on a typewriter or redo them by hand. Some writers even put the print-outs in a drawer and never refer to them again, and write the new draft wholly afresh. You know the story, don’t you?!
To help with reading your draft, I also distributed a plotting analysis worksheet, and suggested that writers complete it in different ways, e.g., with reference to: a favourite book of childhood (done from memory); a book you’ve recently read and admired in a genre you’re working in (done with close reading of that book); and for drafts of your own work-in-progress (again, done from memory at least to start – what you contain within you is most important).
* Someone asked for a good recommendation on grammar – I always suggest Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax.
* EM Forster defined story as ‘a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence’: The king died, and then the queen died. And plot as ‘also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality’: The king died, and then the queen died of grief.
Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.
* Stephen King on plot in On Writing:
I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can – I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of a writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course) …
Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.
Plot is … the writer’s jackhammer. You can liberate a fossil from hard ground with a jackhammer, no argument there, but you are going to break almost as much stuff as it liberates. It’s clumsy, mechanical, anticreative. Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort, and the dullard’s last choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and laboured.
I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story … The situation comes first …
A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot, which is fine with me. The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a What-if question:
What if vampires invaded a small New England village? (‘Salem’s Lot)
What if a policeman in a remote Nevada town went berserk and started killing everyone in sight? (Desperation)
What if a cleaning woman suspected of a murder she got away with (her husband) fell under suspicion for a murder she did not commit (her employer)? (Dolores Claiborne)
* And some of the books whose plots I often find myself discussing:
* Zoe Heller, Notes On A Scandal – read the opening chapter here * Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (Best. Plot. Ever.) * Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain * JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings * Nina Stibbe, Man At The Helm * Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap * George RR Martin, Game Of Thrones * Angela Carter, ‘The Werewolf’ * Paula Hawkins, The Girl On The Train * Kent Haruf, Our Souls At Night * Jack Kerouac, On The Road * Jane Austen, Pride And Prejudice * Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn * Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
I’m planning for a workshop on plotting I’m leading at the Getting Published Day on Saturday. I went online earlier to read the news, and I saw this photograph of the audience at the Oscars just as it became clear that the wrong envelope had been opened by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway when they announced Best Picture. A classic reversal of fortune! Everything was going smoothly, and then it turned out someone had made a very human error. An error with a very human cause, and perhaps with very human effects (let’s see who carries those briefcases next year). But fortunately there are systems in place, so it was an error that was caught and resulted in that moment of truth; it all ended happily ever after, with two production teams acknowledging – celebrating – the victory of one of them on stage.
The moment of truth is captured above by Los Angeles Times photographer Al Sei – read the story about the taking of it here: ‘What is happening???’ Times photographer explains how he captured that viral Oscars moment. Look at those big names we’ve seen on Graham Norton’s sofa. Look at those slack jaws, look at those stars who’ve entertained us so often on the edges of their seats. I don’t think they were acting right then.
This unexpected error certainly injected some drama and thrills. Poor La La Land! But how wonderful for Moonlight! As Anthony Lane said in this charming piece in the New Yorker: ‘it was a disaster for all concerned, but it was also, in its harmless way, super, super everything we need in our lives right now. Peace and blessings’.
In reading this story about the wrong envelope, I’m also thinking: what does wrong actually mean? This strikes my imagination perhaps because last week I read another news story about the great, great care that goes into making sure that everything is right and correct in the running of the Oscars. Who knew?! We scoff at contrivances in the melodramatic plots of blockbusters and soaps, but things go wrong all the time in the real world, so why shouldn’t they in fiction? Writers just have to make things feel credible, or at least compelling. (Compelling can probably rush a reader past any lack of credibility. Compelling, and a good voice.)
As a writing experiment: Write a short story called ‘The Wrong Envelope’ in which someone is given a wrong envelope. The story could culminate in this event, or it could begin with this event, or the handing over of the envelope could take place off the page, or before the main action of the storyline begins. The giving of the wrong envelope could result from a human error, or otherwise. A train of events will be triggered: there should be causes, or consequences, or both. There might, or might not, be a moment of truth. And perhaps you can take your readers to the edges of their seats too.
