A November Story

In the last issue of this newsletter, I mentioned I was doing the National Novel Writing Month challenge (50,000 words in one month), although I had no plot idea, only characters from a short story that I wanted to spend more time with. Well, it looks like I’ll hit the target. Is the story any good? Hard to say. It will definitely need a ton of work, probably a complete rewrite.

It wasn’t a waste of time, however.

I found about the story while writing it. The writers among you know this isn’t as counter-intuitive as it sounds. Some authors know from the moment they pick up the pen or hit the keyboard how the story develops and where it will end. I’m not sure I envy them. For me, part of the pleasure and nervous thrill of writing a story is not knowing where it will go. If it’s clearly defined from the start, do I still need, or have the desire, to write it?

My process, or lack thereof, is far from unique. Many writers get to work with a thin thread that may or may not carry them all the way. And a not insignificant number are plain winging it.

I’ll give you an example of how it works for me when I sit down to write a short story. Books are different. More on that later.

The story Rabbits (included in the Family and Other Ailments collection) starts like this:

There’s three of us kids on Claw Ridge Farm. I’m Jake, I’m twelve. Lily is two years behind, and Simon, better known as Shoes, because he always loses them, is four years old.

Rabbits was written as a submission to a crime anthology. These kinds of short story collections are usually built around a theme (an artist’s music, a specific location, a seasonal event …). The theme for this one was “Gone”. One word, multiple interpretations, complete freedom for writers to explore, as long as the story belonged to the crime genre, also a vast and varied terrain.

I wrote that first line with a hint of an idea. When I heard “gone”, I thought “gone missing”. Jake, the narrator, says there are three kids on the farm. He could have simply introduced himself, then mention his sister and little brother, but he doesn’t do that. He puts the emphasis on the number three. That was the seed that the story grew from: There should be four kids on Claw Ridge Farm.

I didn’t have much else at that point. There’s a mystery behind this absence and nobody talks about it.

Now acting comes into play: Becoming Jake, talking with his voice, seeing through his eyes. Until the very end I didn’t know all the details of the traumatic events that cause Jake’s nightmares and neither did he. We discovered them together. And so does the reader.

I wrote that story in one week, with very little reworking, only a few adjustments in the beginning, for logic and consistency, once I stuck the ending.

Not all stories come to life that way, but I believe the best ones do.

When I struggle to make sense of a story or get the words to ring right, the results are less satisfying. The effort shows, the joints creak. I have a stack of unfinished tales that may never be completed, and that’s fine. I could probably wrestle them to the ground to make them work, but a spark will be missing. I am not the kind of writer that polishes a sentence for hours or agonizes over a word. When I hear people say they’ve been working on a short story for two years, I shiver. I’d be bored stiff.

A couple of book manuscripts are also gathering dust, mostly for the same reason. Too much bellyaching in the storytelling. Sometimes these shoes just don’t fit. Like the nasty stepsisters in Cinderella, you can press and push all you want, that size ten won’t go in that damn slipper. I’ve occasionally plundered abandoned projects for a scene or a couple of paragraphs that match the mood of another novel. Significant chunks of my current work in progress, from the November challenge, might well end on the discard pile. We’ll see. I’ll finish the first draft, let it rest for a month, then take a hard look at it.

What makes a book work for me, both as a writer and a reader, is the rhythm of the storytelling, the balance of intensity and quiet, tension and release, the running and the pausing. A 2,000-words story can be a breathless run, a meandering stream of consciousness, or an unstructured experimentation, anything goes, it’s the fun of the format; an 85,000-words novel is less flexible. Without purpose and discipline it’s just a hot mess.