Icon by Peg Ihinger
Last week, I had to put together a gadget I’d ordered. It wasn’t particularly intricate, just “ fit tab into slot and push gently until it clicks into place.” No problem.
Except pushing gently didn’t work. Neither did pushing with steadily increasing effort. I finally had to put it on the floor and jump on it to get the piece in place. (I was sure that would break something, but at that point I didn’t care.) By the time it finally clicked, I felt like the most incompetent direction-follower in the world, even though I was lucky and nothing broke.
The same thing happens with my writing from time to time. I’ll be starting a new book or moving into a new scene, and I’ll think, “I’ve done this twenty or a hundred times, so of course I know how to do it.” I know where it’s going for at least a chapter, and it’s obvious what needs to happen to get there, but it isn’t working. Easy-peasy…until it isn’t.
At this point, I usually do one of three things— jump on it, give up and move on to a different project, or ignore the instructions and try a completely different angle. Regardless of which alternative I pick, I always feel incompetent. I thought I knew what I was doing, and I was wrong.
Except that last bit isn’t quite true. What actually happened was that I latched onto a notion of what the scene or opening would be like (usually because I was in a big hurry to get through the scene or get started on the book). I was too focused on what the scene needed to do, and not enough on what it needed to be.
Let me unpack that a little. Scenes are in a book for a reason. When that reason is obvious—the heroine needs to get kidnapped on her way home in order to kickstart the plot—it is easy to focus on that one event. If it’s a complicated scene with lots of important information coming out, it is often helpful to make a list of what has to happen: the heroes have to find the “suicide note,” recognize quotation, mention gun on mantlepiece, hint at friction between two characters, establish red herring A, list obvious suspects, remind readers of Character X’s insecurities, etc.
Those are things the writer wants to do in the scene. But if the only thing the writer focuses on is how fast they can get through the kidnapping or the laundry list, it can turn the scene into a mechanical checklist. It goes flat.
Most writers notice, on some level, when this happens. It feels…unpleasant when the scene goes flat. As long as one focuses on what the scene has to do—whether that is introduce the characters and situation, plant information for later, or solve the mystery at last— it’s hard to figure out what the problem is. The writer can see that the scene has to fit this tab into that slot, but it just isn’t working. The impulse is to shove harder.
Unfortunately, “shoving harder” often breaks the tab or the slot. The writer then has to either find another way of handling things, or give up entirely. It’s usually much more efficient and effective to start hunting for a different approach well before one gets frustrated enough to jump on things. And the most common way I find other approaches is to look at what the scene is, not what it has to do, because that is almost always where the problem is.
For instance, opening scenes have to set up the situation and introduce the reader to the main characters. That’s what it does. But it can also be a lighthearted scene or uncomfortably ominous, fast-paced or slow, surprising or predictable, exciting or boring. Those are all part of what the scene is. A light-hearted scene can set things up and showcase the key characters; so can an ominous one, a predictable one, a fast-paced one, etc. But each type of scene does the job in a different way, and therefore one approach may fit a particular story better than any of the others. (Although I cannot think of a single situation in which a predictable, boring scene would be the most effective opening for a story, even if it ticks all the boxes for introducing characters, setting the scene, and kicking off the plot.)
A writer who only focuses on whether or not their scenes do what they need to do will very likely have a hard time recognizing their real problem. Sometimes, they have an even harder time figuring out how to fix it, because if you have a string of flat check-the-boxes scenes, the fix is not to add a couple of exciting, fast-paced scenes that check no boxes at all. The fix is to figure out what the scene needs to be, as well as what it needs to do, and then how to write both ways at the same time. And at least for me, it’s a lot easier to see what needs to be done than to recognize which of the many ways of doing it is what it needs to be.
When I was a new writer, the first years of producing juvenilia, I learned that if I lost interest in a story it was probably because it required me to do something that I had yet to master
Huh. You know, that might explain why I’m always jumping from project to project. I mean, I suspect I may be at least slightly ADHD, but it’s also possible that I just don’t know what I’m doing yet, and so jump around to keep working on stuff where I DO know what I’m doing.
Here is a technique to determine: sit down with a pile of half-finished projects and read through them. If there’s a pattern, it leaps out.
I have done that. Some projects don’t get fully fleshed out, and so don’t make it past the beginning. Other projects are pretty well fleshed out, but I hit a sticky spot I don’t know what to do with and lose my flow. And the last kind of project is the kind that I’ve worked on so long that I have to take a very, very long break from it before I can work on it again (ie. the novella I thought was finished eight months ago, but that has required so many revisions since that I’ve burned out on it. Oh, well, I guess I’ll dust it off a year from now and see if I can figure out what’s wrong:)).
Always fun. My only advice there is to keep circling about as much as possible.
The way this epiphany came to me was to realize that every scene has to do two things. It has to advance the story — move the plot, develop characters, bring background to life, any of those things. But it also has to be good reading on its own: it has to be interesting, or fun to read, or moving, or entertaining — *something* that will keep the reader satisfied by the experience.
That’s why a writer who simply writes enjoyable prose has such an advantage. I may not even care where the plot is going: someone like Robert Heinlein or Lois McMaster Bujold or Rex Stout is so pleasing to read that I’d be willing to stay with the book anyway. (Which is exemplified by some of the late Heinlein stories. There may hardly be a coherent plot, but each episode is so darn much fun to read that the book may earn a place on my bookshelf anyway.)
This was just driven home to me by a video series. I watched the first one because it was an in-depth analysis of a topic I find interesting, and she’s a good analyst. But the second video was 12 minutes of her gushing over stuffed animals, and I watched it because she’s amazingly entertaining, even though my interest in stuffed animals is negligible.
I am unexpectedly at a point in my story where I have to do something with point of view that I don’t know how to do. I can’t write anything downstream of this scene because the POV is guaranteed to be wrong if I don’t figure it out here. It is kind of tempting to say “Well! Evidently that’s the end, let’s write a brief epilog and stop” but I’m pretty sure it’s wrong.
Been here a week, more or less. Trying different things: falling off the narrow edge I’m trying to stand on, either in the direction of “it’s still Kay” or the direction of “it’s not Kay anymore.”