Grids and Trees

So last weekend, I got the first batch of editorial revision requests for “The Dark Lord’s Daughter.” They are reasonable and doable, and I need to get right to work on them. Naturally, I spent the entire week…reading how-to-write books. It’s my way of settling in before I start work, and it always turns up something interesting, and occasionally something useful.

In this batch, the only one that seemed both interesting and potentially useful was The Story Grid, by Shawn Coyne  published in 2015. And it still annoyed me.

Unlike most authors of complicated story-telling systems, Coyne emphasized repeatedly that his system was a tool, and stated up front that it wouldn’t apply to some books. If I remember correctly, he even said at one point that it would be most useful in analyzing an existing rough draft so as to fix its weaknesses, rather than in trying to construct a plot before one actually started writing. He then spoils it by imagining that he is an author creating a novel using his system – Thomas Harris, in fact, writing The Silence of the Lambs –  but he does keep reminding his readers that he isn’t Harris and he’s only imagining what the author might have done if he’d used the system.

It’s an interesting and exhaustive analysis, involving a massive Excel spreadsheet breaking down each of the sixty-five scenes in the book across fourteen columns of different data. And for all that he does remind readers several times that his system is a tool and not everyone will find it useful, I am still left with the feeling that he secretly believes it ought to work for most novels and most novelists. (For myself, I found only five of the columns useful. It would still be a lot of work to fill out his grid.)

The difficulty is that his system is excruciatingly complex and relentlessly analytical. I expect that it will appeal enormously to many of the would-be writers who are looking for a recipe for writing a novel … and it is going to be utterly opaque to the sort of intuitive writers who find Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing helpful.

In addition, it’s pretty clearly not the recipe those would-be writers are looking for anyway. Coyne is explicit about the need to do your own research into the sort of book you are writing; he talks a bit about “obligatory scenes,” but makes no attempt to provide an exhaustive list. Instead, he says bluntly that the author needs to go out and read a bunch of the kind of thing they want to write, and figure out for themselves what the “obligatory scenes” are. Which is a thing I totally agree with, especially since he doesn’t include teen, YA, or children’s fiction anywhere in his formulation, and acknowledges only three subgenres for Fantasy (real world, whether contemporary or historical; invented magical world; and science fiction… I am not kidding here).

Coyne is an editor, and it’s his job to analyze books to figure out why they don’t work and how to fix them. As near as I can tell, though, he’s not a novelist. He can take a novel apart, which can be useful (diagnosis is always the first step – if you can’t see it, you can’t fix it), but I don’t think he’s thought much about the process of putting it back together.

It’s like this: Before you learn any biology, you look at a tree and see a tree. Then you start learning about plants, and you find out that trees are composed of different parts – leaves and bark and wood and roots – and that those parts are made up of different kinds of cells, which are in turn made up of parts like nuclei and mitochondria and cell walls, each of which is involved in complicated energy systems like photosynthesis and the KREBS cycle that take you down into biochemistry and plant genetics at the molecular level, until you have almost forgotten what it was you started looking at. And then somebody – a friend, a spouse, a relative – drags you out of the lab for a picnic, and you look around and see trees again, informed by all the nitty-gritty details you’ve learned, but whole and complete things in themselves.

Nobody seems to have dragged Coyne out on that picnic. And the thing is, if you want a tree, you don’t get one by sitting down with a bunch of atoms, fitting them together into molecules and DNA, and then using those to build mitochondria and nuclei and cell walls in different combinations. You don’t put different cell types together into bark and roots and leaves, and then stick those things together into a tree.

If you want a tree, you have to grow one. Biology can help you decide about light and soil and fertilizer, but the tree still has to grow. No matter how much biochemistry you know.

So I can’t recommend this book unreservedly. If you are a highly intuitive, non-analytical writer, this is probably not for you. If you tend to take elaborate systems onboard and then fret about how every detail of your plot and characters fits The System (or doesn’t), you probably also don’t want this book. If you have a fondness for analysis and experimentation with this kind of system,  if you want a look at the spreadsheet analysis of Harris’ novel, or if you just want to marvel at the weird ways other writers/editors look at fiction, it may interest you.