Writing by a "Dossier" Method (?)

Office Hours

Hi everyone,

Over behind the paywall, on Sunday, we’re reading a really interesting story by Katherine Anne Porter, called “Theft.”  Join us over there if this sounds intriguing.

Now, our question of the week:

Q.

Dear George,

The collective reading adventures around short and long stories as well as the chance to get glimpses of the backstage of your work as a writer are opportunities I am mostly grateful for.

I read most of your past Substack posts and the comments - but honestly not yet all of them, so in case this was already discussed I will certainly find it at some point. If not: Do you think it is possible to create a story starting from a construction of the characters?

You outlined a similar process while describing the writing of “The Falls,” where you set off from the voices of those two guys and then put them in relation and in a context and made the story grow. But, in this sense, you had already been writing the story itself which indeed begins with those internal monologues.

What I am thinking of is rather: One has a character in mind and first just gets to know her/him as a person, with no narrative intention to start with. It might be through the construction of a biography, maybe some historical research, or just by some attributes like in standard creative writing advice: she/he needs to have a motto, a goal, one essential contradiction... and then elaborate on that. And then, if needed, one creates another figure as a counterpart or complement to the first one and so on. And when the characters are there, only then you start putting them into some kind of action/interaction and making your story.

I am aware that "anything goes" regarding inspiration, so this is probably no exception (or is it?). But I am wondering if you have any example of this kind and some concrete advice to play around with this approach.

A.

Yes, I think this is a perfectly great way to write a story.  In fact, this is exactly the way the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev wrote his stories and novels. I’ve written about this at length in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (page 95, especially).  Henry James, who knew Turgenev well, wrote: “The germ of a story, with him, was never an affair of plot…it was the representation of a certain person….To this end, he wrote out a sort of biography of each of his characters, and everything that they had done and that had happened to them up to the opening of the story.  He had their dossier, as the French say.”

My feeling is that any approach, seen passionately through to its end, can produce good stories. Even if the method is idiosyncratic or odd.  Because all methods of writing stories are idiosyncratic and odd. There is no “normal” way to invent a narrative that, though invented, seems truer than true.  The whole thing is excessive and indefensible.      

In my experience, it works better if we admit this up front and lean right into whatever it occurs to us to do (whatever we can do with some measure of confidence and verve).  “Yes, my approach is odd, but it’s mine, and I stand by it, and part of my talent lies in getting this crazy approach to bear fruit.”  And then we go off alone into that highly personal land where art actually gets made.

A story, as I’ve said here before, is essentially a machine that works in reaction to itself. 

That is, let’s say, its last half reacts to its first half.  So, any excess engendered in the first half is fine.  If it’s too slow, the second half can “acknowledge” that.  If there’s some logical inconsistency, it can get relieved in the second.  And so on. (Also, this first half/second half notion isn’t quite right, because a story does this responding to its own excesses in much smaller increments than that – even line to line.  And by “excess” I really just mean “noticeable feature.”)

This is the case for “The Singers,” the Turgenev story I wrote about in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. His dossier method has a built-in issue, which is that, in places, the story seems to be just dossier after dossier, with little action. But then, in one of those deep intuitive moves that artists sometimes make, the story becomes about that - about the idea of overcoming innate shortcomings in one’s art (a technically accomplished singer is beaten in a competition by a less adept but more emotionally present competitor). So, the story feels like it’s about itself, in a way; it seems to acknowledge its own struggle.

So, there isn’t ever a “wrong” approach. There’s only an approach that fails to notice what it has engendered (and fails to react to it/take it into account).

Also, we might bear in mind that all of these things we talk about – rising action, causation, efficiency, and so on – are not rules that a story must abide by but, rather, they’re symptoms of a good story.  They’re not there because we consciously put them there, by way of our fool-proof approach; they’re there because the story is compelling and, when a story is compelling, it just “has” (or “manifests”) those things.

Just like, if there’s a person who’s really fun to be around, we can, sure, break that person’s appeal into descriptors (“joyful, thoughtful, alert,” and so on).  But really…they’re just fun to be around. All the rest is descriptive blather.

So, let’s say, dear questioner, that you write a story by the method you describe above: (“One has a character in mind and first just gets to know her/him as a person, with no narrative intention to start with... And then, if needed, one creates another figure as a counterpart or complement to the first one and so on. And when the characters are there, only then you start putting them into some kind of action/interaction and making your story.”) 

If things gel at that point, the action will start rising and there will be causality and so on….just because that’s the stuff that compelling stories start giving off – a feeling of rising action, a feeling of causality.

And, I bet, if your story isn’t giving off those feelings, you’ll feel a need to adjust things so that it will.  Because you understand yourself to be in the business of being interesting.

Now, how might we get a story written that way to start to “gel?”

Practically thinking, and using “The Falls” as an example, there’s an idea I’d like to introduce here, that I think of as “crossing the wires.”  If two characters are in a story, are they exerting “positive interference” on each other?  Are their respective presences in the story warranted? 

Sometimes, in early drafts, I see that I’ve made two characters but they are somehow not reacting to one another.  The writing is good enough but the scenes haven’t come alive in that particular way that happens when two characters start exerting an influence on one another.  They have traits and ways of speaking but they are a bit like two video game avatars, standing there in the same setting, moving around and gesturing….but not to one another.

In “The Falls,” I had two stand-alone monologues I’d written, in two very different voices, and at one point I just thought: I have nothing else going on, writing-wise, and I like these two bits….so let’s put these two guys in the same story.  I already had the first guy (Morse) walking along a river, so I adjusted the second guy’s (Cummings) section so that he was walking along that same river.  The work was, literally, just adding a few lines her and there. And then I had to decide who was where.  I thought to put them on the same path, going in the same direction.  (As I remember, Cummings pauses, Morse walks past him, then Cummings follows.)  Then I just designed in a little riff for each of them in which they both briefly thought about the other. 

Voila!  The wires were crossed.  I didn’t know, at the time, what they were walking toward, but it turned out to be two little girls in a canoe, about to go over a waterfall.  I didn’t know what this would mean, for Cummings or Morse, but it was more likely to mean something, since I’d established that they each had feelings about the other man and the way that other man was living. 

This wasn’t deep, philosophical work – it was just stagecraft, really, done quickly and crudely.  (Those two avatars were suddenly looking at one another and commenting on one another and on the things they saw around them.) It was, I guess, a way of asking, “Hey, any reason you two guys are in the same story?”

In the end, I’d set it up so that they would both see, and react to, the same unfolding tragedy and that, in a sense, made the story philosophical.  It came to be about action and passivity, and connection and disconnection, and so on. Cummings makes one decision, Morse a different one, and these decisions, set against all that we’ve come to know about them, felt like representations of different worldviews.

Here’s another way of thinking about it. 

The big problem for any of us writers is a blank page.  How do we fill that page in, so we can start revising it and making it better?  Well, my answer is: by whatever way is easiest for us.

Personally, I try to do a little mental bar-lowering, the equivalent of a self-whispered, “Look, just type something/anything.”  I do this because I know that I can revise bad writing into slightly better writing and, if I do that, some forward motion will appear. 

So, that approach works for me.

If, for you, dear questioner, making these “dossiers” will get the pages to fill up with words, so you can then revise them – well, then, that’s a perfect method for you - and part of the job will be to become conversant in that approach - to come to know the pitfalls and special moves and challenges within it.

I often think that, in art, we should do exactly what we feel like doing - what we can do with confidence and joy - and then clean up “the mess” afterward. (But it’s not really a mess, it’s “the state of affairs” there within the story.) That feeling of proceeding with confidence and joy seems to me like a message from the deep self, saying, “Look, trust me. Let’s make a mess. The cleaning up of that mess - the organization of that mess into something shapely and inevitable and meaningful - that is your true artistic self, revealing itself.

Do any of you Story Clubbers use a version of this “dossier” method? If so, what can you tell us about it?

Finally, there’s a really wonderful book about journaling and writing prompts, The Book of Alchemy, coming out on April 22 of next year, by Suleika Jaouad, and my contribution (a prompt) basically follows the approach you suggested above, dear questioner.       

I hope you all have a great week, and I’ll look forward to being with some of you again on Sunday, for the Porter story.