Q.
I’m writing you from Holland, and my mother language is Dutch, so please forgive me for any faults or flaws below.
First of all, thank you for doing this amazing project with us, and for all the energy you put into it. And thank you for answering all of our questions with so much attention and kindness. You are an amazing teacher and human being. That said, I’m still really nervous and anxious about sending a question…
Plus, it might not be the most appropriate question for Story Club, since I'm writing a novel. It's my debut actually, and I'm thrilled that it will be published exactly one year from now. That said, there's still a lot of work to be done. And it's an elephant of 1200 pages!
I've been working on the elephant for ten years now, and it has seen many forms and different time structures. My editor cut the whole thing into pieces so it would seem easier to reorganize the chapters since there are two different time layers, one storyline follows the main character in the present and the other one focuses on her childhood. Kind of cliché, I know. But with all these different loose chapters and possibilities, I seem to have lost sight of the book as a round, completed thing, with a clear structure.
I feel like it's been cut and pieced back together and cut into pieces again over and over and now I'm unable to reach the so-called helicopter view or decide what would actually be the right order in which to tell the story. I could switch between past and present using different chapters, or parts even, or use flashbacks imbedded in the present time, to make it a more dynamic read, or stick to a chronological timeline, and so on. I simply can't figure it out anymore. It seems like the possibilities are endless and none of them clearly stands out saying, 'It's me! I'm THE ONE!’
So, as desperate and lost in the world I created myself as I am now, I was wondering if you have some novel -advice for the ones of us (for there surely must be more of us here? ) struggling to find the best structure for a larger story.
Perhaps you are all into memos, or cards, or Scrivener, or some other tools ( I can’t imagine that, though). Or perhaps you can tell us which novels with multiple timelines are very well written in your view.
Are there any other novelists out here, who are able to shine a light on how they found the right structure? Perhaps my problem is that I wrote the whole book first, without worrying about it until later, and now that the later-thing has turned into the present, I can't seem to figure it out.
Anyhow, this is why I send this question, because when you are your own judge, and you have read and revised something a thousand times, it also becomes dull and flat. At least my work does, to me. It excites me only while I’m actually writing it for the first time. So, I’m still baffled about the fact that my book actually got accepted by a publishing house right away. But I don’t know a single thing about where to put in flashbacks or where to cut something that doesn’t work. The only thing I can do to teach myself is read a lot and try to identify these underlying structures.
A.
Thank you for your question. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling like it came from right inside my own brain.
In a sense, it’s the only question for we writers: How should I tell this?
And it branches into so many other difficult and important questions: On what basis do we edit? What matters and what doesn’t? What is the point of telling a story anyway? What are we trying to honor, with all of our fussing over voice and structure and all of that?
When I’m revising, I often think of a line from Dr. Seuss’s The Sleep Book: “And that’s why I’m bothering telling you this.”
I ask myself: “Why am I bothering telling them this?”
Or: “What, in this text so far, is undeniable?” “What, at the end of the day, justifies this story?” “What would be sure to move or interest anybody?” “What’s the ultimate rationale for telling this story?”
In answering these questions, I often find myself looking for the wheat in all of that chaff, the “hot zones,” if you will.
Those zones – the sure-to-be-compelling zones – kind of light up on the page. I try to see the whole story or book as a series of zones that are either lit up or not.
Finding the structure, then, is about 1) considering losing some of the non-lit zones, and 2) arranging things so that the lit zones glow more brightly. Asking questions like: “How does this zone cause the next? How are these two zones in essential relation? Is any of this text there just because….I wrote it?”
That is: I’m trying to increase the intentionality of everything.
The essence of this, for me, is trying to find a throughline that will actually mean something to the reader – something emotional and visceral and relevant to his or her actual life, something that, in the telling manages to move and amaze and, at the highest levels, comfort them.
Now, if I’m understanding your issue correctly, you’re asking about ordering, and about the movements between time periods in the book.
So, if you’ll allow me, here are some exploratory questions.
At the end of the day, what’s your essential story?
See if you can say it in a few quick sentences. Try to avoid justifying parts of the text (“I need Chapter 4 to establish Vance as a selfish person”) and just….tell it. Tell it in a way that emphasizes causality. (“Because Vance was a selfish person, he stole all of his new wife’s jewelry and pawned it.”) Find the line through it that feels most mythic and human and elemental – the version you’d blurt out to the person sitting next to you on a plane who just asked you what your book was about.
Now: try to regard all of the other stuff as being possible support for that main story. Look at the various movements and sections as being there to shore up that main story – to make it more powerful. Consider that some of those sections, though perfectly good, aren’t actually doing much to feed your main story. Then ask: “Is my main story more shapely and vital with some of that taken out?”
What are the five or six main events that propel the story forward?
Make a picture or outline, to see where and how often these are occurring. These main events (events that move the story forward/seem consequential/raise the stakes) are like pillars in a building: they ought to occur regularly. The reader is waiting for them; understanding every line of text to be preparing him for the next meaningful, story-altering, event. If we go too long without moving things forward, the energy drops (nothing is there for a reason; it’s just there).
What are the “rules” by which your book moves between time periods?
That is, what prompts the leaps back and forth in time? The reader wants you to convey meaning in this way. She wants to feel that these jumps are caused by, and/or cause, something; that they are not random.
For example: if you have a lovely bit where a character recalls her childhood room - why is she doing that, just then? That bit, if it’s good, is going to be even better if 1) that memory is cued in a natural way, and 2) that memory causes her to do something).
Again – these are not universal rules; these are just rules that I’ve internalized, because I like the story-feeling that results from them. (Although, I’d also argue that these “rules” come, to some extent, out of what we might call story physics: the way most people read and process narrative.)
So, for your book, dear Questioner: what rationale are you using to move from one time period to another? Why, in each case, is the story improved or bolstered by that move? To think about this, you might want to go into the text and look at three or four examples – what at the end of a section set in, say, 2023, causes the leap back to (say) 1940? Does it just happen because enough pages have gone by? Or does something happening in 2023 seem to cause or prompt that “remembering?” It doesn’t have to – no, not at all – but I think it’s good to study our own book in this way, to learn about it and the way it tends to make meaning.
A book we’ve been working on for awhile has internal rules by which it tends to behave; if we “know” these, we can enhance them and make it more like itself. (We can also, over the course of the book, escalate within these, by recognizing a tendency our book has and challenging it to keep varying the way it enacts that tendency.)
The more intentional these kinds of moves are – the more we’ve taken ownership of them in one form or another, the more the result is a work of art and the more meaning the reader is going to infer from those leaps.
For your book, which moves between present time and childhood, I think I’d ask myself, along with the above: what is the foregrounded story?
(It’s likely, I bet, the present-time one – for the example that follows, let’s say that it is.) You might do a little thought experiment, in which (don’t faint) you consider cutting ALL of the childhood stuff. (Just think about it, don’t do it, ha ha. Or, you know: model in a draft that you can later discard.) The thinking here is: if you can tell the essential story without flashbacks, wouldn’t it be more elegant to do so? If nothing was lost? What work are they doing, these leaps back in time?
The real game is to look somewhat skeptically at your flashbacks, like a bouncer in a club, asking, “Hello, why do you need to be in my book?” The best answer, as I’ve suggested above, is something like, “Hello, bouncer. I am here to increase/support/bolster the power of the real-time narrative. I am not here merely to supply additional facts or local color or any of that. Step aside and let me in.”)
We want to ask: How does the move back in time make my story more genuinely powerful, more beautiful?
Finally – and I’m truly not sure about this – but because this sounds like an immense and confusing Rubik’s cube (and 1,200 pages!) I wonder if it might be useful to just go back to what you initially sent – to what initially sold, to what that editor initially found compelling enough to buy. And then just try to read through it as if you’ve never seen it before – forget all the rearrangements and insights and cuts you’ve made since, forget the editor’s initial round of advice (easier said than done, I know) – and just see what you think about it. Try to see it afresh. It obviously had power. As you read through it, are there hitches? Slow places? Edit accordingly.
I guess I’m asking you, in a sense, to give yourself a chance to recall why you told it that way in the first place – I’m betting there was likely some wisdom in that, in that period of writing before all of this reconsideration set it. This might give you a fresh, real-time feeling of what needs to be done – as opposed to, you know, “What I need to do is service/accommodate that long list of things that have been proposed, by me and my editor, a list which is now forming a confusing fog over my book.” With this approach, you think, “Well, I have all of those suggestions over here, in this corner of my mind, but let me forget about them and read this manuscript as if I just found it on a bus bench – what would I think of it? When would I (I right now) feel inclined to change something, and why? (Is anything on that list over there useful?)”
Above all, dear Questioner, I wish you luck and, if any of this is unclear (or intriguing) please feel free to follow-up with me at storyclubwithgeorge@gmail.com.
And I hope our fellow Story Clubbers who have written, or are writing novels, will now chime in.
I think Mr. Saunders has given you a superb answer. And I feel your pain. I know what it is to have a big huge manuscript that leaves the writer feeling overwhelmed and baffled. There's a certain fatigue that sets in just from dragging it around. It's like working on a huge quilt--the damned thing is so unwieldy and drags on the floor; the octopus is so muscular, refusing absolutely to be put to bed.
The one thing I know is that when you're trying to make sense of it all, you should handle it it physically. If you have a typed summary, cut it into sections with scissors, and tape the parts that you know fit together. Or cover your dining room table with graph paper, and use colored post-it notes for different themes or characters or plot points. Don't try to think with the computer. Draw maps of the story with crayons or charcoal. I don't know why chopping up the story and manhandling it helps, but it does. Computers can be damned deceptive at a time like this. They make everything look too much the same. You need tape and color and torn paper. Maybe even a stapler.
My debut novel was originally going to have flashback sections that then later turned out to be memories from a whole different character. It was all fun and games, but I noticed while writing that I felt I ‘needed’ those sections to make the book interesting, when in reality they caused mostly confusion for the reader. It’s this idea we often have, don’t we, this imposter syndrome, that makes us think we need the glitter and the pink paint and the feather dresses to somehow upscale a simple human story, which in it’s simplicity can feel almost too vulnerable to share. I ended up only telling the main story, and while I do sometimes regret cutting those things cause they would have made the book more unique maybe, I’m happy that I let the bare essentials shine and didn’t try to rely on tricks and twists.