On Writing
Oct. 23rd, 2014 01:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexisjaneI didn't do a Tuesday yesterday because of the fun but gratuitous art deadlines, and dogs believing I've left them for dead and therefore eating all kinds of nasty out of the garbage even though I was gone about five minutes and now are sick and need to poop every hour reasons.
Ep.Loved it. Loved. It. Pretty much standard fair from the do-whatever-we-want twins but thought Jensen directed really well, even though he had so much screen time.The moment for me though was when he opened his eyes and you could see, without him uttering a word, that he was Dean again. How the everrloving fuck he did that, I do not know but it was truly amazing. I'm also super super happy that even though he's not a demon, the Mark is still an issue. Coz we're gonna need that later for the big bad...who absolutely did not grab me in anyway shape or form given that she looked so much like she should be Abaddon. Still...: )
Anyway, mainly I just wanted to get this out. Been discussing ideas for stories with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deansdirtybb and I was reminded of this portion - swiped and cropped for your reading pleasure - from Stephen King's On Writing. If you haven't read it/don't own it, you should. I thought it was just me but every recommended list and article on being a better writer I've read, leads with this as it's primary recommendation. Plus, it's King, so it's down to earth and a pleasure to read.
In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.
You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted any more than I’d try to convince you that I’ve never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible.
I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible.
It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course). If you can see things this way (or at least try to), we can work together comfortably. If, on the other hand, you decide I’m crazy, that’s fine. You won’t be the first.
When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren’t souvenir tee-shirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small;a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, aTyrannosaurus Rexwithall those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, shortstory or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques ofexcavation remain basically the same.
No matter how good you are, no matter how much experience you have, it’s probably impossible to get the entire fossil out of the ground without a few breaks and losses. To get even most of it, the shovel must give way to more delicate tools: airhose, palm-pick, perhaps even a toothbrush. Plot is a far bigger tool, the writer’s jackhammer. You can liberate a fossil from hard ground with a jackhammer, no argument there, but you know as well as I do that the jackhammer is going to break almost as much stuff as it liberates. It’s clumsy, mechanical, anticreative.
Plot is, I think, the good writer’s lastresort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored. I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story. Some of the ideas which have produced those books are more complex than the others, but the majority start outwith the stark simplicity of a department store window display or a waxwork tableau.
I want to put a group of characters (per-haps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety—those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot—but to watch what happens and then write it down.The situation comes first. The characters—always flat and unfeatured, to begin with—come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate. I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way. In some instances, the outcome is what I visualized. In most, however, it’s something I never expected.
For a suspense novelist, this is a great thing. I am, after all, not just the novel’s creator but its first reader.And ifI’mnot able to guess with any accuracy how thedamned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety. And why worry
about the ending anyway? Why be such a control freak?Sooner or later every story comes out somewhere.
(An amusing sidelight: the century’s greatest supporter of Developing the Plot may have been Edgar Wallace, a best-selling potboiler novelist of the 1920s. Wallace invented—and patented—a device called the Edgar Wallace Plot Wheel.When you got stuck for the next Plot Development or needed an Amazing Turn of Events in a hurry, you simply spun the Plot Wheel and read what came up in the window:a fortu-itous arrival,perhaps, or Heroine declares her love.These gadgets apparently sold like hotcakes.)
Gerald’s Game andThe Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon are two other purely situational novels. If Misery is “two characters in a house,” then Gerald is “one woman in a bedroom” and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is “one kid lost in the woods.”
As I told you, I have written plotted novels, but the results, in books like Insomnia and Rose Madder, have not been particularly inspiring. These are (much as I hate to admit it) stiff, trying-too-hard novels. The only plot-driven novel of mine which I really like is The Dead Zone(and in all fairness, I must sayI like that one a great deal).
One book which seems plotted—Bag of Bones—is actually another situation: “widowed writer in a haunted house.” The back story ofBag of Bones is satisfyingly gothic (at least I think so) and very complex, but none of the details were pre-meditated. The history of TR-90 and the story of what wid-owed writer Mike Noonan’s wife was really up to during the last summer of her life arose spontaneously—all those details were parts of the fossil, in other words. A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot, which is fine with me. The most interesting situ-ations can usually be expressed as a What-if question:
What if vampires invaded a small New England village?(’Salem’s Lot)
What if a policeman in a remote Nevada town went berserk and started killing everyone in sight?(Desperation)
What if a cleaning woman suspected of a murder she gotaway with (her husband) fell under suspicion for a murder she did not commit (her employer)?(Dolores Claiborne)
What if a young mother and her son became trapped in their stalled car by a rabid dog?(Cujo)
These were all situations which occurred to me—while showering, while driving, while taking my daily walk—and which I eventually turned into books. In no case were they plotted, not even to the extent of a single note jotted on a single piece of scrap paper, although some of the stories (Dolores Claiborne, for instance) are almost as complex as those you find in murder mysteries. Please remember, however, that there is a huge difference between story and plot. Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
I also saw an interview with him (which I can't find although it might be in the lecture below, come to think of it) where he was talking about stopping his car on a back road somewhere (for gas maybe) and there being a river nearby, wandering over and looking down into the water and thinking "What would happen if I fell in right now? No one knows I'm here. There's no one around to see it. My body would be carried away. I'd just disappear." Or words to that effect.
Anyway, these two things really stuck with me and this is what my brain does now. Everything is a What If... to me. Plus, you throw in J2 and God Dammit my brain just won't shut up. Luckily, he also had this advice too : )
You can watch his whole lecture here, if you're interested. It's about an hour long.
Anyway, I don't even now if that's interesting, or whatever but, yeah...
Inbox at 793
: ) x
Ep.Loved it. Loved. It. Pretty much standard fair from the do-whatever-we-want twins but thought Jensen directed really well, even though he had so much screen time.The moment for me though was when he opened his eyes and you could see, without him uttering a word, that he was Dean again. How the everrloving fuck he did that, I do not know but it was truly amazing. I'm also super super happy that even though he's not a demon, the Mark is still an issue. Coz we're gonna need that later for the big bad...who absolutely did not grab me in anyway shape or form given that she looked so much like she should be Abaddon. Still...: )
Anyway, mainly I just wanted to get this out. Been discussing ideas for stories with
deansdirtybb and I was reminded of this portion - swiped and cropped for your reading pleasure - from Stephen King's On Writing. If you haven't read it/don't own it, you should. I thought it was just me but every recommended list and article on being a better writer I've read, leads with this as it's primary recommendation. Plus, it's King, so it's down to earth and a pleasure to read.In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.
You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer—my answer, anyway—is nowhere. I won’t try to convince you that I’ve never plotted any more than I’d try to convince you that I’ve never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible.
I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible.
It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course). If you can see things this way (or at least try to), we can work together comfortably. If, on the other hand, you decide I’m crazy, that’s fine. You won’t be the first.
When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren’t souvenir tee-shirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small;a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, aTyrannosaurus Rexwithall those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, shortstory or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques ofexcavation remain basically the same.
No matter how good you are, no matter how much experience you have, it’s probably impossible to get the entire fossil out of the ground without a few breaks and losses. To get even most of it, the shovel must give way to more delicate tools: airhose, palm-pick, perhaps even a toothbrush. Plot is a far bigger tool, the writer’s jackhammer. You can liberate a fossil from hard ground with a jackhammer, no argument there, but you know as well as I do that the jackhammer is going to break almost as much stuff as it liberates. It’s clumsy, mechanical, anticreative.
Plot is, I think, the good writer’s lastresort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored. I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story. Some of the ideas which have produced those books are more complex than the others, but the majority start outwith the stark simplicity of a department store window display or a waxwork tableau.
I want to put a group of characters (per-haps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety—those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot—but to watch what happens and then write it down.The situation comes first. The characters—always flat and unfeatured, to begin with—come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate. I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way. In some instances, the outcome is what I visualized. In most, however, it’s something I never expected.
For a suspense novelist, this is a great thing. I am, after all, not just the novel’s creator but its first reader.And ifI’mnot able to guess with any accuracy how thedamned thing is going to turn out, even with my inside knowledge of coming events, I can be pretty sure of keeping the reader in a state of page-turning anxiety. And why worry
about the ending anyway? Why be such a control freak?Sooner or later every story comes out somewhere.
(An amusing sidelight: the century’s greatest supporter of Developing the Plot may have been Edgar Wallace, a best-selling potboiler novelist of the 1920s. Wallace invented—and patented—a device called the Edgar Wallace Plot Wheel.When you got stuck for the next Plot Development or needed an Amazing Turn of Events in a hurry, you simply spun the Plot Wheel and read what came up in the window:a fortu-itous arrival,perhaps, or Heroine declares her love.These gadgets apparently sold like hotcakes.)
Gerald’s Game andThe Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon are two other purely situational novels. If Misery is “two characters in a house,” then Gerald is “one woman in a bedroom” and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is “one kid lost in the woods.”
As I told you, I have written plotted novels, but the results, in books like Insomnia and Rose Madder, have not been particularly inspiring. These are (much as I hate to admit it) stiff, trying-too-hard novels. The only plot-driven novel of mine which I really like is The Dead Zone(and in all fairness, I must sayI like that one a great deal).
One book which seems plotted—Bag of Bones—is actually another situation: “widowed writer in a haunted house.” The back story ofBag of Bones is satisfyingly gothic (at least I think so) and very complex, but none of the details were pre-meditated. The history of TR-90 and the story of what wid-owed writer Mike Noonan’s wife was really up to during the last summer of her life arose spontaneously—all those details were parts of the fossil, in other words. A strong enough situation renders the whole question of plot moot, which is fine with me. The most interesting situ-ations can usually be expressed as a What-if question:
What if vampires invaded a small New England village?(’Salem’s Lot)
What if a policeman in a remote Nevada town went berserk and started killing everyone in sight?(Desperation)
What if a cleaning woman suspected of a murder she gotaway with (her husband) fell under suspicion for a murder she did not commit (her employer)?(Dolores Claiborne)
What if a young mother and her son became trapped in their stalled car by a rabid dog?(Cujo)
These were all situations which occurred to me—while showering, while driving, while taking my daily walk—and which I eventually turned into books. In no case were they plotted, not even to the extent of a single note jotted on a single piece of scrap paper, although some of the stories (Dolores Claiborne, for instance) are almost as complex as those you find in murder mysteries. Please remember, however, that there is a huge difference between story and plot. Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
I also saw an interview with him (which I can't find although it might be in the lecture below, come to think of it) where he was talking about stopping his car on a back road somewhere (for gas maybe) and there being a river nearby, wandering over and looking down into the water and thinking "What would happen if I fell in right now? No one knows I'm here. There's no one around to see it. My body would be carried away. I'd just disappear." Or words to that effect.
Anyway, these two things really stuck with me and this is what my brain does now. Everything is a What If... to me. Plus, you throw in J2 and God Dammit my brain just won't shut up. Luckily, he also had this advice too : )
You can watch his whole lecture here, if you're interested. It's about an hour long.
Anyway, I don't even now if that's interesting, or whatever but, yeah...
Inbox at 793
: ) x
