A metaphor that I was exposed to at Clarion West (now nearly a decade ago) still works beautifully for me, and it’s one I use when teaching: the idea of the writer’s toolbox.
In my mind’s eye, it’s a big red metal tool chest, small enough to be carried around, large enough that you wouldn’t want to HAVE to carry it around all the time. Inside, drawers lift out to reveal neatly packed devices and tools, each in their own padded slot.
There’s a blade capable of lopping off awkward paragraphs, and sharper, tinier words designed for work at the sentence level, trimming beginnings till they catch a reader like a fish hook and pull them into the story. There’s a box of punctuation marks, with a special slot for the semicolons. There’s the intricate device of an unreliable narrator, calculated to wobble like a gyroscope yet still remain true to the story’s course. There’s a set of filters, each one a specific point of view, each letting you cast a section in a different light. And a layer of ornamental gadgetry: epigraphs and scraps of poetry. And a valuable gimlet, capable of drilling down to a character’s motivation: the question, “What does s/he WANT?”
I’ve been thinking about it in going over notes for the class on Literary Techniques in Genre Fiction, because my aim in that is two-fold: to give students not just a whole bunch of new tools, but some sense of when to use them and a chance to experiment with them. Because a device shouldn’t be separate from a story, but an integral part of it, something that adds more to it than just a chance to see the writer being clever.
To push the metaphor a little further, stories are like furniture, only without the useful part, like being able to sit on them. You want them to feel like a single piece, not a table with some drawers and ornamental hinges glued on it. In the class, I try to introduce new tools students may not have (consciously) worked with before, including defamiliarization, hyperbole, synthesia, and a lot of other fancy words. And I also try to expand a drawer they’ve already got partially filled: sources of creative inspiration.
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Eich wrote it either in a POW camp at the end of WWII, or shortly thereafter. What’s interesting about it is that he both inventories his own “toolkit,” in which the most precious item is his writer’s pencil, and in the structure of the poem, he starts anew in building a toolkit to relaunch his poetry after the apocalypse that he’d just lived through.
Anyway. Sorry, you just got me thinking about tools. 🙂
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About Writing: Coaxing a Seed into a Story
Last night we had the final session of the Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction class, which is the session where we talk about everything except writing: stuff like going to conventions, and how to submit stories, and how to treat editors and what about audio markets and all that sort of thing. And I’d meant to include a section about plotting stories, because I’d taught a new class the day before, the Moving Your Story From Idea to Finished Draft class, and as often happens had come up with some new things to say about stories from thinking about one specific aspect, but there just wasn’t enough time. So I want to talk a little bit about it in a blog post.
As always, everyone’s writing process is different and the only one I can speak with authority about is my own. So perhaps this will click for you and perhaps it won’t. I hope it does.
Certainly, there are stories that arrive complete. They appear in my head and all I have to do is write them down. This is most likely to occur during the night, meaning I can rise, go to the keyboard, and bang it all out quickly. For example, “Pippa’s Smiles” arrived complete and ready to go, though it had its roots in some thoughts I had been mulling over about gendered narratives. Unfortunately, though, that’s not usually how it works.
A story can start with a particular character. That may be someone glimpsed on the street, or a historical figure that I find interesting and want to write about. Victoria Woodhull is a American from the 19th century who I have used more than once as a character.
It can start with a particular scene that emerges vividly in my head. I may not know who the characters are, or why they’re there, but I know what it looks like.
It may start with a particular theme. A recent story, “Elsewhere, Within, Elsewhen,”started with me thinking about how people accumulate layers of grudges. I decided that I wanted to literalize that metaphor and the story came quickly when I began exploring that idea.
I have on occasion decided that I want to work in a genre that I have not tried before. That’s as valid a place to start a story as any. If I’m doing that, I often try to figure out the genre conventions and decide which I want to violate. A recent piece I finished, for example, is one where I decided I wanted to try writing a piece of horror fiction that drew heavily on very visceral, physical details.
A story can also start with a piece of research. I used to write encyclopedia articles and when I ran across the story of Jumbo the elephant being purchased by PT Barnum, I knew I had to write something about it, because the details were just so fabulous and Jumbo’s eventual fate so moving. That ended up becoming “The Towering Monarch of His Race.”
A story may begin as a deliberate attempt to break a rule or guideline. I wrote “Whose Face This Is, I Do Not Know” as a reaction to one of my Clarion West classmates saying how much he hated stories where the author has a character look in a mirror in order to describe what the character looks like. I started thinking about a story in which the main character had to keep checking their appearance, because it was constantly changing.
A story may even start with a particular title. That’s how “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said” came about. All I knew about it was that there was a manticore somewhere in the story.
Those are all perfectly valid ways to start stories, at least for me, and I’ve used all of them at least once. The question that we explored in the class is what to do with each of those in order to start figuring out the story. One way is always to just sit down and start writing, doing what Samuel R. Delany calls “writing to discover.” Sometimes that works well. Other times it may not. My trick is to usually try to figure out the characters, if I don’t have them, and particularly the main character. The most important thing to discover about that main character is what they want, because that drives their actions and helps you figure out how the story will move along.
Knowing the character and what they want helps you discover how they are being prevented from getting what they want. Once you’ve got that, you’ve got some conflict that will help drive things along.
Part of what to do next depends on your own individual process. If you are someone who cannot write the story until they know everything that will happen, then you need to figure that out, while another person may just need a initial few facts in order to sit down and start writing in order to figure out what’s going on. Personally, I would begin thinking in terms of scenes. Get a list of those together and don’t worry about the order for now. You can always rearrange them once they’re written. This is one reason why increasingly I have been drafting stories in Scrivener; that software makes it very easy to move scenes around.
How does your process differ? Have I overlooked any possible ways stories can start?
I spent the last couple of days wrestling with the plot more than actual writing, but I have gotten some done. Will start posting totals again tomorrow.
My kombucha SCOBY, packed meticulously for the trip in Tupperware and three layers of ziplock bags and packing tape, has recovered fully from its journey and produced two batches of kombucha for second ferments each time. I have mainly blackberry, because there’s a gazillion blackberries out back, but I am going to try some lavender and mint as well. I’ve found the store down at Santa Cruz full of kombucha varieties, go figure. My favorite so far is a lovely lavender melon that I am going to try to replicate.
I’ve also got a loaf of sourdough bread about to come out of the oven, and will proof some starter tonight for sourdough pancakes in the morning. I’ve never done any sourdough stuff other than Herman, so I’ll be curious, particularly since I tried using sourdough with this no-knead bread recipe. Exciting times here on writing retreat.
From “Poppy” (working title)
Poppy’s arms were strong and brawny, and as big around as a young birch tree, and capable of swinging the rosewood truncheon she kept behind the Amethyst’s bar with a solid thunk that would stop a belligerent drunk in his tracks, usually at the first blow, always by the second.
She’d inherited the wayside inn ““ “twice as far as the back of beyond” one traveler had called it ““ when her own parents were slain in the Shadow Wars and she’d taken over from old Dad, her mother’s father at the tender age of seventeen. By a quarter of a century later, old Dad was old indeed, and Poppy knew everything there was to know about the art of running an inn located somewhat remotely, it was true, but at least located on the lesser of the two main routes between the capital and Pickering-on-the-Beach.
Her hair was colored henna and brass, and she was a big woman, with a bigger laugh, one you could hear echoing down the road at night when you were tired of walking and heard her laughter, letting you know the inn was within shouting distance. A dozen bards had tried to teach her one musical instrument or another and she had taken to none but the pat-a-pat drums, and even then did not like to perform before others. While she’d taken lovers enough, she’d never cared to kindle with child, and then one thing happened and another, and before too long, she realized she was no longer capable of having a child in the usual way.
The way she learned it was this: she was on her way to the wellhouse in order fetch a pound of butter when a bear came shuffling out of the woods, rubbing its fur against the pines as it went, as shedding summer wool as it went, with the thicker, darker winter fur coming in underneath.
She paused and looked at it, unafraid but wary, and the bear looked back. Then it reared to its hind legs, pointed a paw at her, and growled out, the words barely understandable through bearish lips, “Woe to you, fruitless woman. With your womb dies the last of your grandfather’s line, and I have come to claim my curse.”
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With the distinct possibility of going off on a tangent, I am reminded of Günter Eich’s poem “Inventory” (English translation; original German (“Inventur”)).
Eich wrote it either in a POW camp at the end of WWII, or shortly thereafter. What’s interesting about it is that he both inventories his own “toolkit,” in which the most precious item is his writer’s pencil, and in the structure of the poem, he starts anew in building a toolkit to relaunch his poetry after the apocalypse that he’d just lived through.
Anyway. Sorry, you just got me thinking about tools. 🙂
I think that’s a great tangent. Thank you for pointing me at that poem!
I would love to take that class, but it will have to wait for next year.