Figuring Out How (Macrowriting vs. Microwriting)

Every writer I know is a voracious reader, and has been for a long, long time. Most of us are omnivorous as well as voracious – we not only read a lot, we read widely, from literary classics to pulp fiction, and from every genre available. Reading a lot, and reading widely, gives one a sense of what unites stories under the umbrella of “fiction,” as well as what separates them into genres and marketing categories. A writer’s first stories are informed by what they’ve learned from reading, and sometimes from classroom analysis of what they’ve read. Most of the writers I know had early writing experiences falling on a continuum, depending on how much “just reading” and how much formal analysis they did before they started.

At one end, there are the writers who simply “picked up” a lot of things by osmosis, from seeing them over and over and absorbing them subconsciously. They’ve gotten a feel for what stories look like, and which parts they like best/least. At the other end, there are the writers who’ve learned to analyze stories and compare them to some Platonic Ideal of Story. These are the folks whose Internal Editor is so highly trained that they can look at virtually any story – including, or especially, their own – and spot every place that doesn’t fit that ideal model.

In both cases, the fundamental difficulty is that these writers have some idea of what they want their finished work to look and feel like, but they don’t know how to get it to that point. The main reason is that all their osmosis and analysis comes from looking at the final published version of the story. They never get to see the steps that get the story from start to finish.

A secondary reason, I think, is that so much of the focus is on the story as a (finished) whole. The “hero’s journey” model, the three-, four-, and five-act structures, and an enormous amount of the way we talk about and analyze stories focus on either the whole story, or on large chunks or elements of the story (“the dialog,” “the characterization,” “the plot”). We say things like “The dialog in this story is great!” Really? There’s not one single line of dialog that clunks, or that’s a tongue-twister no one would actually be able to say, or that seems out of character in that moment? “The plot really moves along” doesn’t mean there were no slow spots anywhere; “I love the characters” doesn’t mean that you didn’t want to punch one of them (or perhaps the author) in that one scene where they did that stupid, out-of-character thing.

But stories are written on the most micro level possible – one paragraph, one sentence, one word at a time. Pile up 100,000 perfect words, in the right order … and you have a dictionary. What is totally non-obvious is how one gets from 100,000 words in alphabetical order to 100,000 words in an order that makes people say “The dialog is great, the plot moves, and the characters are wonderful.”

There are three ways to figure out this how part of writing. The first is basic trial-and-error. The writer has some idea what a finished story is supposed to look and feel like; they write something; it doesn’t look or feel like that; they change a bit here and a bit there to get it closer to their mental model of “story.” After a couple of rounds of tweaking, they write something new; it also doesn’t look or feel like their ideal mental model, but it’s a lot closer than the first one; they tweak it a few times. Gradually, they figure out what works and what doesn’t. Some people can speed this up by working with a class or how-to books; for others, this just feeds back into the “looking at the finished whole” problem.

The second is to study someone else’s writing at the micro level. There’s that book that everyone says has such great dialog; pick one page of conversation and look at what the writer is doing, not at what the words say. How long are each person’s lines? How does the reader know who is speaking? How much of the text is speech, and how much is something else (description, action, emotions, etc.)? Where does the writer use speech tags and where don’t they? Where do the speech tags sit – at the beginning of the line of dialog, in the middle, or at the end? How much white space is there? And so on – think of at least ten questions about the mechanics of the text, word choices, how things are flagged [e.g., how does the writer let you know that this is plot-important information and that is character-important?]

The third is to get and give critique, which really is a combination of the first two methods on steroids. Getting good critique, or even just good reader-reaction comments, is feedback on what the writer may or may not need to tweak during their rounds of trial-and-error. Giving good critique requires one to study other people’s writing, figure out what is and isn’t working and why, and perhaps even come up with alternatives that would work. (That last is “perhaps” because it’s someone else’s story, and they may have other ideas in mind, or they may simply prefer to figure out their own solutions. It’s their story, so it’s their choice.)

Giving critique is probably more useful than getting it at the start of one’s career, because it is, in my experience, ever so much easier to see micro-level writing problems in someone else’s work than in one’s own, and also much easier to see what that other writer should have done instead … and once one has figured that out, one tends to spot the same problems in one’s own work and can quietly (and smugly) correct them without being embarrassed in public.