JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #24
October 29, 2020
In order to bring a story to its final draft, we have to figure out what the story needs to be, and the final draft is our best attempt at realizing it. In the creative act of composing a story, the best advice is usually to just get it down, to write as much as we can and not worry too much about revision or whether we’ve got anything worthwhile on the page. But once the fount runs out, we have to contemplate what it is we have in front of us and determine what it needs to become in order to be the best version we can make of it.
In broad terms, writers are often broken into two kinds, "plotters" and "pantsers." Plotters are those writers who outline and plan their stories as much as possible before they begin writing. They know how the story will end before they begin drafting as well as all the twists and turns along the way. They put most of their work into planning. "Pantsers," or those who write "by the seat of their pants," are those writers who dive in and hope to discover something. They let the words and ideas flow without plan, letting the composition wend where it will, and only once they get something down do they go back and see what they’ve accomplished and whether there’s anything worth pulling out of it, which they can then polish into a finished story. These writers put most of their work into revising.
In truth, most writers engage some combination of these two methods in various ratios whether or not they’re deliberate about it or they’ve fallen into it by habit. The key to either method or the myriad hybrids is that at some point within the process the writer must stand back from the work and examine the story that is beginning to emerge. Story, importantly, is the meeting of character and plot and the conflict of intentions that arise within that meeting. Story does not arise causa sui as a collection of events or within the actions of a character--it must be deliberately shaped out of those materials. Story also requires resolution, even if the resolution is that the story’s conflict will be forever ongoing. In order to best accomplish the telling of any story, the writer must at some point acknowledge the story’s structure, where it begins, where it ends, and what its playing out consists of.
In the workshop, I find the most useful feedback to be that which acknowledges and works off of a clear vision of what the story is trying to be, whether or not that matches up with the writer’s vision. This is also the writer’s own best analytic course for revision and the means of accomplishing a story. We must at some point during the project, or perhaps several times along the way, stand back and determine what is the full scope of the thing we are trying to create, and having done, use that framework as a guide for digging out and cleaning off the appropriate pieces.
Next: On Dialect