So I’m working along, facing my third deadline extension, way behind on everything, with lots of vital-or-at-least-urgent non-writing stuff going on. I FINALLY get past the exceedingly sticky argument scene I’ve been poking at for the last two months, and on into the next bit of wandering-around-the-settlements. I’ve done the go-to-dinner-and-whine thing several times, and I’m pretty sure I know what comes next. I have the scene, I have the characters, I have the technology. Life is good.
For about ten minutes. And then I realize that the scene that wants to come next is not the scene I’d planned. Furthermore, it is another scene that I don’t actually want to write, which means it will be a slog even if I know what’s going to happen in it, which I don’t, exactly. I’m going to need a bunch of new characters, a new settlement, and something else (I’ll know it when I see it, but I haven’t seen it yet).
For years, whenever I got to this point in a book (and I always get to this point at some point, if that makes any sense), my mother would look at me as if I were three again and say, “Why don’t you just have them do something else?” or “Just make something up!” And I would sigh and explain that it’s not that easy.
Whenever I reach a point where things are not going according to plan, there’s a reason. The trouble is, I don’t always know what the reason is, let alone how to articulate it. Sometimes, I can figure out in hindsight why I couldn’t make the characters do that clever thing I’d planned for them to do, or why I ended up putting a particular scene before another instead of after, or whatever. More often, all I know is that this is how the story had to be told, and whatever I’d planned just wasn’t going to work.
In general, this actually a good thing, no matter how much I whine about it, because it saves ever so much time and effort if I just write the correct scene, instead of writing whatever I’d planned on and then needing to delete it later. But I have a tendency to be analytical (stop snickering) and I can’t help wishing I understood the reasons behind whatever I’m doing.
In this case, I can see some of them. I’ve been kind of focused on the action level of the plot for a while (not that this is a slam-bang action-adventure; on the contrary), and I need to develop some of the other plot-levels – emotional and spiritual growth, mainly – and possibly some more background before I get to the big mystery and the family catastrophe I expect to be coming up. Theoretically, I could cut straight to the mystery, but that would wreck the pacing on just about every level I’ve got in this story so far…not to mention messing up whatever thing is behind my backbrain’s insistence on doing this other stuff now, rather than later.
It’s taken me years to get to the point where I trust my backbrain even when I can’t see the reasons for what it’s doing (like I said, analytical personality here), and even now, I whine about it a lot. But I’ve learned through painful experience not to argue when my backbrain presents this sort of ultimatum. Roger Zelazny said it better than I ever could:
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.
Thanks for doing this blog! I bought “The Seven Towers” twenty-some years ago and I’ve been a fan ever since. It’s great to learn more about your writing process. I like that you focus on reminding us that just because something works for one person doesn’t make it a “rule” for everyone.
Where does this Roger Zelazny quote come from? Is it from an interview, or did he do a book on how he wrote?
Thanks!
Matt
In my writing recently I thought the direction was going one way, but the direction has changing so much. I didn’t expect this book I’m writing to so involved with personal relationships and drama. Anyway, LOVED Cecelia.
This is an awesome post. I guess the hard part of trusting the story is that it’s a little like jumping off a bridge into the dark- unsettling, no matter how many bridges you’ve jumped off in the past.
I was just thinking about this very thing this morning, because (big surprise) I write the same way. Feeling my way ahead through the story one step at a time, and I can always sense when something doesn’t work even if I can’t (to the frustration of my own analytical mind) put my finger on why.
I’ve seen so many mechanical ways for working out plot and character issues — diagrams, lists, interviews, what-have-you — and although I’ve tried some of them to help me through rough patches, they inevitably leave me in more of a mess than before. I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to leave all that stuff aside and just trust my instincts if I’m going to be able to tell the story at all.
And sometimes, much as it galls me, my instincts are going to tell me to stop and think for a long time, or back up and delete some hideously large chunk of words, or completely revise and polish up everything I’ve written so far, before I can find my feet again and go on.
I really dislike that middle-of-the-book Slough of Despond, though. I wish there was some way of avoiding it.
Aargh. My sympathies. Also in the sloggy bits right now. And ain’t trying to explain why story and character are not arbitrary… such a great bit of fun? (Serial attempts in this direction have given me a few clues as to why some things I try don’t work, however.)
“Trust your demon” is one of those pieces of advice that’s done best by me over the years. Failure to follow it is also one of the things that’s done worst. Of course, Zelazny is one of my great heroes and influences in the genre. But lately, in the course of revivifying a story that seemed to have died, I’ve been asking myself: what of those times where the demon leads you into the stupid swampy places or the bare ridicule of the mountainside, and dances off leaving you alone and forlorn? It’s happened too often to me, and the impulse is to blame the demon. This is a depressing experience.
…What if it was a good demon after all, though, and the problem is only that I don’t have the swamp-lore or the mountain-craft to follow? Or even the clue to what I’m missing?
I’m starting lately to find that trusting the demon, and keeping on looking for the clues, makes me a lot happier and more productive. Latest discovery: despite my immense fondness for ensemble casting, there are aspects of it I’m not actually very good at. One aspect, I only had to identify to solve the worst of the problem. The others, well, I can at least see what I need to work on, and how… and isn’t that a wisp-light I just glimpsed, between the trees?
Good demon!
Yes, yes, exactly! I’ve always been a plotter to the nth degree, and I still find it disconcerting when my scenes don’t turn out the way I planned or one scene wants to jump ahead of others.
If I have severe misgivings about one of these urges to go a different route, I’ll set myself a one-hour timer and give that idea 100% of my attention. That way, I can try the new direction on for size and only lose an hour chasing it. This tends to pile the “cutting room floor” pretty high, but I’m okay with that.
If someone had told me two months ago that not only would I suddenly decide to kill off one of my favorite heroes near the end of the book but it would also make the overall story work on a whole new level, I would’ve rejected the idea out of hand. But that’s exactly what happened.
Matt – The Zelazny quote is from the introduction to one of the short stories in one of his collections; I copied it out years ago, and now I can’t recall which collection or which story, sorry.
Chicoy – Yup, jumping off a bridge in the dark is a good analogy.
RJ Anderson – Mechanical ways of working out plot, characters, etc. have been around forever. Back in the 60s, I recall reading some study where they talked to actual writers who said they used these things, and then looked at the results, and what they found was that every last one of them basically used the preset “plan” as a jumping-off point; their eventual stories had little to nothing to do with whatever their starting system had come up with as a plan.
Gray – Experience and/or practice is the only way I know to tell the difference between a total dead end and something that looks like a dead end at first glance, but which has a barely perceptible path out the back which one doesn’t actually have the skills yet to traverse. One can, of course, try to get ahead of the game by developing one’s skills faster than one thinks one will need them, but I’ve never had a lot of luck with that. Following the will-o-wisps actually tends to work better…
Dana – I’m going to have to try that one-hour thing. At the least, it ought to give me more scraps to mine later on. Sometimes the only way to kill off a particular character is when it comes up unexpectedly, because if one is too fond of them, one will resist mightily if one realizes ahead of time that the character is doomed.
I’ve tried a number of those plot-making and character exploration techniques, from books as well as software, and they haven’t worked for me, either, at least not straight out of the box.
When I’m dead in the water on a scene, I sometimes write a “Dear Diary” for each of the characters, even if they’d never in a million years have a diary. If this gets me unstuck, I can often use parts of the diary entry by just changing them from first person to third.
Patricia, I totally agree. I *still* hate killing him, even though it’s necessary. 🙂 If I’d known from the start that I’d kill him off, I might not have invested so much emotion in him, which would’ve drained a lot of life from the story.
My local Borders finally got my copy of Thirteenth Child this week. Yay! Really looking forward to reading it before the quarter starts.
Well, since I don’t have any plot, the closest I generally (even if I don’t have a plot, I do sometimes have a story – I hope that made sense! – so there is always the possibility of a mess) come to that, is my characters talking their way past any point I was actually trying to make with the dialogue in the first place. And I can’t go back and “fix” it, because this is what they actually said. It’s frustrating, but I often do feel that the characters know better than I what they would or wouldn’t say and there is no use in my trying to shove my words into their mouths – darn them!