Finding Out

I’ve heard variations on some writing advice many times now, it goes pretty much like this. Write a sentence, write another sentence, write a page. Get all the words down in whatever form you can, until you get to the end. After that you can revise and no one has to see your first draft. All it’s clunky dialogue, shallow characterisations and huge plot holes can be fixed in the second draft, or the third. You can make it look like (to paraphrase Neil Gaiman) you knew what you were doing all along.

Like a lot of advice about writing, this seems sensible and simple, but the reality of it can be quite different. For one thing, it’s not always that easy to finish that first draft. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of finding the time, or the right headspace, or finding out what the hell your story is about. Or perhaps the words come easily, but when you read them over at the end of the day, they seem dead on the page and you despair of having to make more of them.

But clearly, if you want to write, you need to keep going, and it’s there’s more to it than just persistence.

When I did my MA, I remember one class where the novelist Damien Wilkins sat in for our usual convener. We talked about (as I remember it) how to keep going, but more specifically about what to do when it felt like the writing had hit a wall. The possibilities in the story, so rich when you began it, had all somehow vanished. The temptation then was to give up on that work, and start on a new idea. An idea that, because it had yet to be written, seemed much more exciting – almost (as it glowed softly in your mind) a perfect idea. This temptation was made all the more alluring in a one year MA, when you felt the pressure of time, and worried about wasting even a little of it on an idea that didn’t seem to be working.

But Damien urged caution. How can you know, I remember him asking (sorry Damien if I’m misquoting you!), what a story is until you have finished writing it? How can you know what it’s really about, where the characters might go, what turns the plot might take? If you give up on a story, it will by definition stay incomplete and unsatisfying in your mind. And maybe even if the new story seems better the original story, with a little more time and work, could be better still.

One reason to keep going then is simply to find out what happens.

There’s another reason too, which is I think a common one that many beginning writers encounter. I’ve seen it myself in a few writing classes, or when assessing a manuscript in progress, but I didn’t really understand it until George Saunders wrote about it in his (essential) book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In it he’s taking the reader page by page through a Chekov story In the Cart, and talking about how Chekov has eschewed an easy route for the narrative. There’s a moment where the main character Marya encounters a rich but somewhat dissolute and unmarried landowner, Hanov. For a page or so, Chekov holds out the possibility that Hanov might be the answer both for Marya’s loneliness and also her poverty. But then he has Hanov leave, and that possibility is gone. By doing that, Chekov is practising what Saunders call ‘ritual banality avoidance’. By getting rid of the easy idea, using it up and moving on, Chekov opens up the possibilities of other, much better ideas.

Saunders urges writers to do the same thing. ‘If you know where the story is going, don’t hoard it. Make the story go there, now.’ Give yourself the chance to have a new, better idea, don’t hold back. Surrendering the easy idea, as Saunders says, an act of faith. Both in the further possibilities in the story, and in you as the writer to realise those possibilities.

 Of course, if you stop writing the story, then you never get to take that leap.

One other thing about writing advice is that, in the midst of writing something, it’s so easy to not remember it. Or to think there must be another solution, one that is unique to the thing that you are writing, and so of course you’ll have to think of it yourself, alone. I came across this very thing the other day, when writing a new scene for a work in progress. I knew where the story was and where it was going next, I knew the obstacles that had to be overcome by one of the main characters, and I knew the struggles he might find along the way. But still the pages seemed dull and mechanical. The character was in danger, there was a lot at stake, but he moved through the pages like a robot. Somehow I couldn’t find the emotional charge to bring the scenes to life, to make the reader (or even myself) care all that much. The answer was, of course, that I was holding something back.

The book twists and turns around two main characters who meet and separate throughout the narrative, and I’d been keeping a scene at the back of my mind that I thought would be the climax of all those intersections. But I realised that if I used that now, inserted it just before the scene I was writing, then the energy from that idea would permeate all the pages that followed it. The stakes, both emotional and physical, were immediately much higher, the dangers much more real. The sense the character might not survive much more present.

Naturally, then I had to come up with a new idea for the climax. But as I rewrote the pages and went on into the next chapter after it. As I kept writing, letting the story go forward sometimes as I’d planned it, and sometimes in a new direction – well, it was the darndest thing…