Mountain Climbing

When a writer starts writing a novel, he or she is essentially standing at the bottom of a mountain, looking up. That writer is facing a zillion different moving parts that have to come together to make the climb successful, and which parts are important often change as they climb/write. At the beginning of a mountain climb, when you’re hiking up the foothills, you usually don’t need special equipment like ropes and crampons. It’s work, and it gets more and more strenuous as you go on, but you can still probably do most of it with a good pair of hiking boots and a few supplies.

At some point on the climb, though, things start to change. If you’re climbing a mountain that has a walking trail all the way to the top, like Mt. Fuji or Pike’s Peak, you may not need any more equipment, but you’ll start having more trouble working at the increasingly high altitude. You won’t need skills with ice axes and crampons and safety ropes, but the basic skills you do have will be tested to a greater degree than you were probably expecting. It may be a relatively easy trip compared to, say, Everest, but it still takes strength and stamina to get up 10,000+ feet and back down in a day.

Novels work the same way. If you’ve started with a story that gives you a fairly clear template to work from – which could be anything from a Harlequin Romance or “police procedural” mystery to a fairytale retelling – you may be taken by surprise in mid-book when the “standard plot” suddenly doesn’t quite fit what you’re writing any longer, or when you think you know what needs to happen next, but struggle to get it down.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to climb something challenging, like, say, Mount Everest, you have a whole different situation. You need those same basic hiking skills to walk in to the first base camp, but that’s barely the beginning. You have to progress in carefully planned stages; in the last phase, most climbers take supplemental oxygen. You need to adjust repeatedly to higher and higher altitudes, with less and less available support. You need skills with ropes and axes and safety gear, and you still may not make it to the summit.

It’s harder to judge whether that’s the situation you’re in when you’re writing a novel. If your lungs give out partway up Mount Everest, it’s pretty clear that you need more training or altitude adjustment, but there isn’t a place in a novel that’s guaranteed to give you that kind of unmistakable feedback. You don’t always realize it when a scene is coming out wrong because it’s well beyond your skills or because you’re stressed out by no sleep and/or the rest of your life.

And there’s one other thing that changes as you get higher and higher on a mountain: the view. This matters to mountain climbers because for at least some of them, it’s the reason they decided to take on the challenge. For writers, though, the change in perspective that happens as a draft progresses can alter everything the writer had initially intended to do, and mean a ton of revision and work on the things that have already been written.

When this happens, there are four possible things the writer can do:

1) They look at all the work this new view of the story will mean, and give up. It’s too much, so the manuscript gets stuck in the bottom drawer or file cabinet and the writer starts a new story. Sometimes, one does need to do this. Most of the time, though, it’s a recipe for ending up with a huge pile of unfinished manuscripts.

2) They look at the new view of the story and immediately dive into revising the part that’s written, without finishing the story first. Again, sometimes this is necessary because the changes are so enormous and far-reaching that they have to be incorporated before the writer can move on. Often, though, the writer’s perspective will change again in a few chapters and it’s better to get as far as possible to avoid doing multiple rewrites.

3) They look at the new view of the story and all the possible work it will take to do this thing they just thought of, and they decide to stick to the safe, known vision they started with.

4) They decide to take a chance on this new, crazy perspective of their story. The late Roger Zelazny said it best:

“Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don’t know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you’d mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.

“Trust your demon.”

On March 27, 2019   /   Writing  

Tags: metaphor, process