A Roadblock at a Crucial Point

Office Hours

Dear George,

I've been a silent but avid participant in Story Club since the beginning. Although I haven't yet posted a comment, I read all the stories you set for us and await each email with huge anticipation. I can't thank you and the Story Club community enough for all the teaching offered here, and in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I honestly don't think I could have carried on writing these past years without all the support, generosity and judgement-free encouragement. Thank you George, thank you all.

I wondered if I might ask you and the Story Clubbers for help. I'm working on a historical novel, the story of which takes place on one day in the 1860s (actually during the American Civil War). The characters are fictional but the events of that day are real. While I think (think) I just might be doing okay in terms of nailing my little cast of characters and moving the story along (no small thanks to your advice on action-acceleration-'irreal'; set-ups/deliveries etc etc), I've hit a roadblock at a crucial point near the end of the story, where two characters (a sister and brother) confront each other and, through this confrontation, show who they really are.

Without weighing you down with too much detail, the place they confront each other is where a terrible act of violence is being perpetrated against a particular group of people. This event is a historical fact. One of the characters has ended up implicated in the violence, the other not. Morally then, it's pretty clear cut. And this, dear George, is where I've got stuck.

Up to now I've been threading an imagined story around the facts, hopefully making the characters interesting for their own personal challenges set against this historical backdrop. Now, however, I find myself unable to introduce any of the ambiguity or uncertainty that makes characters compelling because, basically, one character is right, the other wrong. How boring is that? I keep recalling what you said about a writer who sets out to write a story about two dogs at it, and of course that's what the writer ends up doing, because she has allowed no space for the unexpected to enter the story. In my case, I'm finding that fact is overshadowing the fiction. The story is suddenly flat-lining, when it's supposed to be a character-defining moment. I've tried several things, such as making the 'innocent' character find her voice and confront the baddies, but my own response to this tends towards, 'So what? Too cliched.'

Am I going about this the wrong way? I really hope so, but I can't seem to reframe the problem. I'd so appreciate any suggestions you and members of the Story Club might have. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Thank you for everything. 

A.

Well, I’m very interested to hear what Story Club might suggest for you, but here’s my ten cents’ worth.

First, it’s hard, even impossible, I think, to give meaningful advice from this altitude, i.e., from just the general outline of a story, as opposed to reading the thing from beginning to end, line-to-line.  But the one thing I think I can safely point out is that it seems you have a fairly well-defined idea of where the climax of the story is, and what it consists of . 

And this might be why the novel is resisting you. 

**

Another way of saying this: I’ve found that, for a certain period of time, I’ll labor under an idea of where a story’s going – what it’s about, what it’s all going to mean, what each character represents and so on.  Part of this process is, sometimes, ascribing certain moral valences to a character’s projected arc.  (Character A begins to represent this, and then, if that happens, and she responds as follows, then the meaning of the story is (whatever).)

I think it’s natural for us to do this and that, really, we have to – we’re making vague shapes, in order to steer toward them. We understand that they’re conditional and may change and all of that.

Meanwhile, the book has its own plan, by which I mean: things have been happening all along (in the language, in the things characters are doing and saying, even in the structure itself) that are actually indicating a sort of shadow book - the book your book really wants to be.

Actually, of course, this is the real book, but often we aren’t able to see that book (because we are so wed to our original idea of of the book). 

(There’s the trip we imagine we’ll have when we set out for NY to LA - and then there’s the actual trip. The sooner we get over our attachment to the imagined trip, the better we’re able to see and enjoy the reality of the actual trip.)

**

Let me see if I can be a little more specific. This process of failing to see the real book for the assumed book occurs (it must occur) at specific moments in the compositional/editing process.

I try to be especially on the lookout for presumptions that I’m making as I work – those little moments where I find myself auto-steering toward an already known outcome.  (The climactic scene has always taken place in the warehouse. But…why? Could it be otherwise?)

Often, these presumptions are right. We got to them by editing, after all, and hours of work. But sometimes…they’re wrong.  We could think of a work-in-progress as being littered with dozens of these detrital moments, and then our job, every day, is to poke at these moments a little and see if any of them are there because….because they’re there and always have been.

**

Practically speaking (from my experience), when we’re involved in a longer work, certain (good) lines will start to get locked in.  We’ve read past them a hundred times…and they’re good.  But sometimes – sometimes – I’ll feel one of those lines, under the pressure of the surrounding lines, and seen freshly for whatever reason, say, softly: “Change me?”  And in the same breath it will tell me what to change it to – and then I make that change all of the surrounding text sort of lights up with gladness - they come back to life, in a sense - because that slightly false line, a holdover from an earlier vision of the book, has left the building, and everything now is free to make a different kind of sense- AND, the book is now saying something a little different than it was before, AND this frees things up downhill, in the latter portions of the book.  It suddenly presents me with different ideas about how to end it, for example; a certain quality of overdetermination has been relieved, thank God. (Anything, or almost anything, could happen.)

**

A book is better - it reads better, it’s more fun to read - when we let it go its own way.  It starts throwing off sparks of happiness whenever we honor its intentions. 

How do we “let it go its own way?”

The skill here, as always, is: alertness.  Alertness especially to the lines. Every line is always, every pass, auditioning. I am trying to ask it: “Are you still the best line? Are you being honest right now? Are you just here because I’m used to you? Or is there still truth and freshness in you?”

So, we’re trying to see that big book we’re so used to in a fresh way.  (Easier said than done, however, I know, believe me, I know.)

Taking a break from it can help. But so can just making that slight mental adjustment…saying, to ourselves, that none of it is cast in stone, no matter how long we’ve been at it.

**

A third way of saying this, tailored a bit more to your project. 

It sounds like one of the siblings is involved with the violence, the other opposes it.  And that your idea of the moral valence of the book has to do with this opposition.  Some of your frustration, it sounds like, is that the outcome and the moral takeaway seem, therefore, predetermined.  The bad guy is just…bad, and the good guy is…correct.  And how do we get an ending out of that?

Something like that, maybe?

But: what if the book concedes that state of affairs (the one sibling is wrong, wrong, wrong) and then you let it go in search of another meaning?  In other words, don’t try to complicate that simple moral outcome.  No: the one sibling is on the wrong side of history and compassion and he or she will have to live with that forever (and/or face whatever other consequences there are). 

Then what? 

If you grant that, what’s left to do?

Is there a world (just as one example), in which the “good” sibling is faced with the choice of protecting the “bad” sibling – of somehow saving the other sibling, or hiding what that other sibling has done?  And in the process, the “good” sibling drifts off into badness?  That book is suddenly about….well, about something else.  Not about right vs wrong in the context of your historical event, but about right vs. wrong in a family context.  (As Springsteen once wrote, “A man turns his back on his brother/he ain’t no friend of mine.”) 

So, this is just a thought.  But the approach might be to, essentially, start looking for a next beat.   Allow yourself to take the pressure off of the scene you now think is the climax – just let it occur and make it convincing and powerful and so on. Don’t ask it to be load-bearing, in other words - treat it as just one more incident in your book.

Then look around.  What bowling pins are still in the air? 

Let the violence happen, let the guilt fall where it may (as, in real life and history, it does) and then ask, “Well, what other questions has my book, with this shocking scene, just put into play?  Who’s unhappy, or filled with anger or longing – who is, now, newly uncomfortable?”

I think here of the ending of “Enemies,” and the way that Chekhov found a new emotion in that sequence; the doctor was angry and offended and then that emotion morphed into something worse – a generalized hatred of a type of person (with that type to be defined by him).  Chekhov, we might say, found another valence in Kirilov’s anger, and that led him to the ending.

If everyone is at peace – you’re done.  But everyone will not be at peace.  There will be some unresolved feeling in the air.  We might think of a story as a weather system.  Clouds gather, the sky darkens.  Then the storm comes.  The system gets rearranged.  But once the storm is over, there’s still weather.  There’s a new situation.  There are, now, overflowing streams and fallen trees and the cold and hot air patterns are readjusting and so on.  But there is, always, we might say, conservation of energy: there’s not less situation, just a different situation. 

All of this might fall into place if we simply say: what if the climax of my novel or story is not what I expected, and not where I expected?  It is still to be determined.

Helpful, dear questioner?

Thoughts, dear Story Club?

P.S. This is off-topic, a little bit of housekeeping. I wanted to let you all know that I’m not going to be accepting these direct message requests that Substack has enabled, mainly just because I already spend too much time on emails etc. I’m just telling you this so that, if you made such a request and I haven’t responded, you won’t be offended. :)