Losing the Plot

Recently I stumbled across an article offering advice about how to go from initial idea to story. This author’s prescription for creating compelling fiction? First, outline. Know your beginning, middle, and end. Create character sketches with a list of physical features and personality traits. Next, map out the story’s events. Think of your story as a race, with your protagonist wanting to get to the finish line. Now choose a setting. Got it? Now you’re ready to write.

While I wholeheartedly disagree with this advice, I understand the desire to plot out a narrative, however loosely, before writing the first draft. Let’s face it — first drafts can be scary; all this meandering, getting lost in a maze of possibilities, images and associations, detouring through what feel like unwieldy episodes and characters. An outline provides a blueprint. It’s safe, known territory. It would seem then that knowing where our narrative is going before we write should produce our best stories.

Not so.

Why? Because writing is largely an unconscious process. We never know what we’re going to say until we start writing. Even if you do have an idea at the outset of where your story is headed, it helps to stay open to what your story is telling you about what it’s trying to become. Maybe a minor character takes on a life of his or her own, spinning the story in a completely unexpected direction. Or you discover after several revisions that you’re really probing your relationship with your mother, not your father. If you coerce your characters into doing things that merely satisfy plot, if you pour your story into a preconceived template, the result is likely to be relatively shallow prose that’s not satisfying to you or your readers.

I’m not saying to abandon structure. Structure is essential. It shapes our prose so that a reader can receive it. But premature focus on it can stifle your voice. It can disturb the intuitive flow, the discovery or sublime truth that both reader and writer seemingly arrive at together. As Robert Frost famously said, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

I suggest that rather than begin with an outline, write exploratory drafts. Dive in. Don’t know where you’re going. Structure is an evolving process. As you dive deeper and deeper into your material, as you inhabit your story and your characters through successive re-envisioning, you begin to see patterns and connections; you see a shape emerge. That’s when structure becomes useful.

Writing is a discovery of what we didn’t know was in us. This freefall approach might feel scary at first, but ultimately your voice will let loose. And your work will be richer and more rewarding. Narrative voice and, by extension, our stories, can only flourish if we stay open and, to a certain degree, lose control.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.