One of the plagues of beginning writers is the feeling that they are doing something “wrong.” Not wrong in the sense of technique – messing up viewpoint, for instance – but that they have made, are making, or will make, a wrong decision about “what happens next.” They are haunted by the fear that it would have been a better book if their main character had chosen Door #1 or Door #3 instead of Door #2.
In point of fact, what it would be is a different book. If the main character stops to help the young woman with three preschoolers in tow, and gets mixed up in a scandal at a day care center, that’s not necessarily a better book than the one where he continues rushing to the office and gets involved in a tense corporate takeover battle, or the one where he got a call on his cellular phone at the critical moment and instead of stopping to help the young woman ended up witnessing a murder and running for his life. They’re different stories, that’s all.
But if you are standing at a crossroads looking at 10,000 possible directions in which you could go, you will not actually start moving until after you have picked one of them to move in. Picked it and committed to it – it doesn’t help to take three steps to the northwest and then look over your shoulder, wondering whether you should go back and head southeast instead, or maybe straight east, or any direction other than the one you started in.
You can’t walk in every direction at the same time, and you can’t write every possible plot twist in the same story. Some of them are mutually exclusive; if the main character is running for his life because he’s a murder witness, he can’t be going about his daily routine at the office at the same time. The good news is that you can always come back and do it the other way when you’ve finished this one.
“But that will be a different book,” says the writer.
Well, yeah. That’s my point. It’ll be a different book if you write it later, and it’ll be a different book if you write it now. So don’t worry about it. Write what you’re writing now; when you’re finished, you can come back and look at all those 10,000 other ways you could have gone, and see whether you still want to try one of them. It’s not as if you only ever get one chance. I have one idea that I’ve gotten two and a half books out of already, and I still haven’t used it up.
And this, of course, explains how I can write at all, because when I start, I don’t know anything about the story – I just have characters and a situation and I write on to find what’s happening. And because those characters tend to be pretty good at living their lives and because I can spot the dramatic potential in what’s happeneing, between us, we get a story. I’m trusting my backbrain enough to know that I always will get a story. I have no idea when I start writing what story that will be – in fact, it never is the story that I would make up knowing only a few facts about them and about their world (which is one reason why I don’t outline – my outlines are boring and clicheed) – but I will get *a* story.
Of course I wibble. What if I keep on rambling about various subplots all going in different directions without tieing things up properly?
So far, that hasn’t happened, although I have, at times, needed considerable time to wrap a story up.
🙂 One thing I like to do is invent new stories for the `plot not taken’. Instead of one book idea, you have five or six. On the down side, you always have five or six books on your mind instead of just one. (Sigh.)
Chicory: Yeah, that’s part of how I ended up with a to-write list of 25+ books and counting.
I’ve thought about sticking in things like this:
“Maybe we should try that tunnel.”
“I heard of someone who did. He got caught by the gremlins and [insert cool little paragraph].”
“Okay, let’s stay on the main road.”
Tess: I do that kind of thing all the time: [Insert description of lab] [add anecdote] [reference to cats goes here] [check weather in 1852]. I use square brackets because I don’t use ’em for anything in the story, ever, so it makes the notes easy to find with search and replace. Then when I’m stuck or trying to warm up for the day’s pages, I start by going back and fiddling with the missing bits. By the time the ms. is done, I usually don’t have very many left (but they’re usually the very worst ones!)
The experience of having written all the easy bits first and being left with all the difficult ones has cured me from leaving gaps. Slightly more embarassing was the realisation that, once I was 35K into the revision of my novel-length stack of scenes, the story did not actually have a plot.
I’m now trying to work under a ‘no plothole left behind’ policy. Not overly successfully, but I try.
green knight: I think my missing bits tend to be a lot shorter than yours! It’s not holes in the plot that are my besetting sin; it’s consistency and transitions and the occasional illustrative bit of dialog or anecdote.
On the other hand, I know people whose notes tend to be things like “Insert battle here” and “Prison escape scene,” which tend to be troubling when one goes back and realizes that the wrong side is likely to win the battle or that one has no idea how they escape.
Hmm, interesting … when I leave placeholders for paragraphs or scenes, it’s not for gaps in the plot, but for other kinds of things. I’ll know that I need a section to be, say, funny, or fast-paced action (basically gaps in the dramatic structure—in the levels of tension, etc); or I’ll know that it needs to fill in a particular aspect of someone’s character or background; but I won’t know what actually happens in it until I write it.
I sometimes have some rough awareness of what needs to happen plotwise, but only in a vague way and on a large scale. I guess this gives me leeway to ensure, somehow, that events happen in such a way that the right side ultimately wins the battle, but I don’t know in advance how that’s going to happen.
Characters going off and creating their own sections of plot without consulting me is both a blessing and a curse.
The gaps I leave tend to be descriptive because I want to get the story told but some piece of description is evading being stitched properly so I attach it loosely with a note and get on with the story.
Thank you so much for doing this blog! The group discussions are also very interesting.
I hope some time you will consider having a RSS feed or something like so we can be notified when a new reader comment is posted.
@Tess: threre already is a comments RSS feed. That’s how I knew about your comment 🙂
Thanks, Irina and Antti-Juhani; I’m glad somebody is keeping track of this thing! 🙂 I’m still kind of getting used to how it all works, and what it’s supposed to do, so I wouldn’t have been sure what to point Tess at!
There already is an RSS feed! Look in the sidebar: “All posts” and “All comments”.
I think I had better subscribe to the comment RSS also. 🙂
I don’t think I’ve ever done a spin off story like what you describe: a road not taken story. It’s like its a complete non-issue for me, which is kind of interesting in and of itself.
Most of my to-write queue bloat comes from wanting to develop off of the story I have. To give this minor character a story, or describe some briefly mentioned historical incident at novel length, or whatever. (The most notable example of this would be the romantic graphic novel I decided to do where I now have nine or ten sequels bumping about my head in which I’ve paired off all the children and am getting a good start on the grandkids.)
As for gaps, I think the ones I am most notable for is names.
Or does writing rough drafts in which half the characters are named ???? not count?
Michelle, you don’t write novels, you write sagas!