JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #20
October 1, 2020
A couple of months ago I spent a few weeks trying to wrestle a short story into shape until I finally realized that the story I was trying to tell was actually a novel. I want to write a little bit about that discovery in the hopes that the process by which I came to that conclusion might help people think about their own stories.
I originally wrote the first few drafts of this story a couple of years ago, and after submitting it to the workshop I shelved it. I couldn’t figure out what the story was. I’d wanted to write about a specific incident in my life, not something that happened to me directly, but that I witnessed, and I did a passable job of describing the events of a particular weekend twenty years ago in a more or less coherent way. But it never felt complete.
Then, a few months ago, I was inspired to take another look. I rewrote the piece two or three times, trying different arrangements, different focuses in each draft, adding and removing details and situations I remembered, trying to find a way to render it into something resembling a story. The piece stubbornly remained a reportage of connected events with a glancing exploration of the social context and personalities involved.
I soon realized that what I should do was figure out who needed to be the protagonist of the story. Who was the person for whom the story was necessary? In other words, there was a participant in these events who was changed forever by them, who, by their participation, was forced--compelled against their will--to confront something within and about themselves, something that they were not actually prepared to confront. This is the heart of story after all: a character does something, pursues something, and by that pursuit they are required to change themselves.
In considering what I had written, I realized that I was not really writing about the situation I had thought I wanted to convey, but about myself at that time in my life. And realizing this, it was pretty easy to determine what I was searching for at that time in my life and why I had participated in those events. In fact, I had written about it at the time in an email I still have saved.
With new energy, I tried several times to rewrite the drafts I had, now knowing that the story was actually about the character standing in as me. Very quickly, however, I was stymied. In coming to understand the character and the motivations that would drive the story, I realized that the story actually needed to begin much earlier than the events I was trying to depict. Tracing the course of my own life, I also knew that the narrative arc I was beginning to envision had not been resolved in my real life until about two years after the weekend events that had so far been my focus. Those intervening years were filled with people and events that shaped the eventual outcome, and I knew that if I really wanted to write this story, I would need to include quite a lot more than my original inspiration. In fact, to do it justice, the story would need to be a novel.
I felt quite a bit of satisfaction in that conclusion. I’m confident now that I’ve finally cracked open the secret to the story I’ve been struggling to write for a couple of years now, and I know exactly how to proceed. And because I’ve already mapped out the character’s arc, I have a clear plan for how the novel should unfold, and what each twist and turn will mean for the character. Importantly, I know exactly how it will end and what the emotional weight of that ending should be.
But I haven’t started writing it. Even if I do take liberties with the truth, I’m not sure I want to write an entire novel that is mostly autobiographical. And I’m already in the middle of a different novel that I really should finish this decade. So I set it aside, added it to a list of well-formed ideas that I can work with some day. At least now I know for sure it’s a complete story.
Next: On Stealing