Office Hours

Getting a Bumpy Floor Smooth(er)

I want to start here by thanking and congratulating all of us – we’re just entering our third year of Story Club. 

I’m very grateful for it, and for all of you.

I’m here in Corralitos, on a writing retreat that has included, so far: 1) writing, 2) getting and decorating a Christmas tree and 3) a freakout by my good friend Our Septic System that I am still in the middle of trying to fix.  There I was, on page 27 or so, madly editing - and next thing I know, I’m “digging out a clogged distribution box,” with my writing shed in tantalizingly close view, only I was too filthy with mud to go in. (I’ve found that no writing retreat is perfect and, mostly, what you get, is, say, ten or twenty percent more time and focus – which I am definitely getting.)

I want to, once again, commend you all for the good sense and precision and kindness of your Comments.  That last batch, on the 1200-page book, was a wonderment. 

Over across the paywall, we’ve been having a luminous discussion of James Baldwin’s “The Rockpile.” Please join is, if you’re so inclined.

Now, our question for the week:

A.

Adoring fan here. After years of thinking: 'I'd love to have a really stellar book idea' I had one, back in Autumn 2019, and before I knew it I was neck-deep in a novel. I began with a character and from her came a family and a world and some resonant themes and ideas and soon I had a slightly batshit inside-out children's fantasy novel set in a near-future that has spun out of control.

I have loved writing it. I'm a journalist so I have no problem filling pages but this felt right - like opening all these exciting boxes. When I described this to a distinguished writer friend of mine, he said: "There are planners and there are seat-of-pants writers. Sounds like you're a seat-of-pants writer." Yes! He was too by the way. 

Then I reached the final third - the part where you have to start closing boxes - and it all became extremely confusing. I felt like I knew who my protagonist was and what sort of an emotional journey I wanted her to go on. It's a sort of 'X is looking for Y but finds Z' type plot (cf Elif Batuman). But I just couldn't jam all these squirmy things I'd created back into those boxes at the end. Well: I just about got it over the line but then Covid happened and we had a baby too... and it's only now, three years later, that I have had the space to revise it. 

And it's going OK. I still like it! And time is a miracle: lots of answers are now presenting themselves to me. But I'm still hitting that same core problem. That "seat of pantsness" that makes the first two-thirds funny and propulsive and emotionally compelling presents problems when it comes to tying up that final third. There's a wonderful character who gets the heroine off on her quest... but who I have no further use for. Or I realise: 'But wouldn't X have known about Y?' And I have to come up with many strata of backstory to explain why not. And I just can't work out which mysteries to leave dangling and which to explain or even where to deposit the story (I mean... is saving things for a sequel a cop-out?!) 

Anyway: what is a seat-of-pantser to do? I don't want to destroy what's vital in the book for the sake of neatness. But neither do I want it to feel like a thrill ride that leads nowhere. I'm hoping that this will be a question of wider use to other Story Club fans struggling with the end game!

Q.

Dear Adoring Fan (and how often do you get to start a letter off that way)?

Thanks for this question and congratulations on the baby, and on the draft.

First, let me say (and this also applies to last week’s question, about that “Thousand Pound Elephant”) that there are, obviously, limits to advice like this, advice that comes from the writer’s description of his or her book and not from a reading of the book itself.

This is one of the implicit limitations of something like Story Club and one of the great advantages of being in an MFA program where, if you were in ours, I’d be reading this book and making line edits and then (and only then) might have some more general advice.

All this to say that we have to be careful about giving or taking advice from too distant a vantage point.  (It’s easy to do so, and kind of fun, but, in being so general, might be more theoretical than helpful.)

What I try to do here, sometimes, is use an interesting question like this one as a springboard to talk about….well, something adjacent (in hopes that this might prove beneficial to the writer).

What I feel inclined to do here is poke, a little, at the term “seat-of-the-pants” writer.  I think what you mean is that you wrote the first two-thirds quickly, spontaneously, for fun, and got some good results: nice lines, funny bits, an unfolding story, a feeling of life and liveliness.

So, hooray for that.  (I try to write that way myself.)

But – and here we enter the land of the Big But, ha ha ha – that’s only the first phase, or at least it is for me.

In the next phase, we go back and revise our text.  It sounds, maybe, that this is where you’re getting hung up: in that phase where you note certain problems (“Gak, it’s not perfect after all) and then have to go back in and reshape the text, by excising certain things (even whole bits), adding new things, getting the logic to add up, ironing out certain logical issues, and so on.

Imagine if our task was to take a lumpy, uneven concrete floor and sand it down into a perfectly flat surface.  One way we could start is simply by walking across it.  Wherever we tripped or felt our feet scuff against a rough place, we’d know there was work to be done. 

Our manuscript. Well, our manuscript might be a little lumpier than this, at first.

Or, we might think of a friend who has very long hair, who’s just gone swimming in a swamp, and has asked us to brush the knots out of her hair.

So: the process we’re talking about is one of going through the text again and again, gently, aiming to not let even the slightest “bump” or “knot” persist.

This is what, dear Questioner, you’re experiencing as you read your manuscript (if I’m understanding your question correctly): you’re feeling the places that don’t add up, that contradict, that bug you, etc – those “knots” and “bumps.”

This can be a drag, I know.  What felt perfect as our mind spontaneously produced it suddenly has – what!? – knots and bumps?

Sheesh.

So, it’s time for revision.  (And, of course, this revision can take place months or years after that first burst – or later the same day.  I tend to do it the latter way.) 

When we revise like this, we might sometimes feel that we’re (resistantly) “fixing” something – we’re sort of repenting/paying for the sin of having had so much fun (we screwed up, while having fun, and now we have to make reparations).  I also sometimes hear people bemoan the fact that this sort of work feels somehow less than the first phase – more methodical and rational and analytical.  They don’t trust it; they prefer the “freshness” of that first outburst.

But, really, what we’re doing, is continuing the exploration we began in Fun & Free Mode, but using a different set of tools.  Or, we might say, we’re continuing that exploration in a deeper way, by consenting to view the text the way our reader might. (“I don't want to destroy what's vital in the book for the sake of neatness,” you wrote, to which I would say: I’m guessing that you won’t. You’ll refine what’s vital in the book. And maybe we can think of “neatness” as a positive virtue, approximately equal to “taking responsibility for every line.”)

The way to approach this, in my view, is to believe – really believe – that this process will elevate your story to a higher level.

But, this phase involves some hard decisions.  Some things are going to be lost – and you’re the one who’s going to have to excise them.  These are often vexing decisions, because something DOES get lost.  We’ve written ourselves out of the zone of easy editing decisions. But: this is where our book starts becoming radically itself – when we start making these radical, costly, sometimes heart-rending choices.

So, in terms of your book - I don’t think you should despair about the issues you’re finding, or take them as any sort of proof that the book can’t be finished.

Instead, I’d suggest that you’re now ready for this second phase of writing.

And it starts with resolving to address the issues you’ve identified.

That “wonderful character who sends our hero off on her quest” – might there be someplace for her to reappear?  There might be!  That is: there might be a moment, later, that is currently feeling wobbly, that might be calling out for her to reappear there.  (By its wobbliness, you will know it – that is, a wobbly place is often asking you to do….something else.  Something more.  Something different.  The goal is: eliminate the wobble.  And, as we discussed recently re “avoidance moments,” such wobbly places are often exactly where the book’s larger-scale logic issues end up getting solved.

For example, that “wouldn't X have known about Y?” dilemma you mention– yes, you have to fix that.  Why?  Because, as you noticed yourself, while reading it, it’s a buzzkill/pitfall.  It drew attention to itself.  (It deflected your needle into the “N” zone.) Finding the best fix is, now, going to be a valid part of your revising.  There won’t, likely, be a perfect fix – but there will be a best one.

The amazing thing is that this whole process – pain and all – is one hundred percent good for the book. Or at least, while doing it, we have to believe this.

So many times, in writing, we beat ourselves up, by acting as if the problems we encounter are proof of our inadequacy. But what if (in order to be more powerful artists) we could train ourselves to respond to a problem in our text by instead saying something like: “Well, working with this sort of problem IS writing.  That’s all writing ever is.”

That is: having vexing problems and then trying to fix them = process.

It sounds like (per me) you’re about to enter a zone of super-close reading/revising – what I once heard Tobias Wolff call “lapidary work.”  That’s the way (the only way) these problems get solved.   We have to inspect our work very closely and then be prepared to say, rather giddily, “Dang, that is a PROBLEM.  And, therefore, as the creator of this work, I not only must, but I get to, fix it – and thank God I noticed it.”

This is not “seat-of-the-pants” mode anymore, exactly– although there can still be (and should be) a spontaneous aspect to it.  It is a matter of combing through each and every line with one’s P/N meter cranked way up, to “Detect and Eradicate Even the Slightest Twinge of Discontent.”

Finally, we might see this lapidary mode as a mechanical way of forcing ourselves into closer relation to our work – like, let’s say, getting down on that earlier-mentioned cement floor, putting our face real close to it, and also we’ve got a bright light and a big old magnifying glass. 

Then, those places that previously were annoying tripping places will be seen to have actual topography – they have particular features and, therefore, can be fixed/sanded down in particular ways – ways we can actually discover.

We can.

We can.

A pre-writing walk at a nature preserve near our house.

Story Club, meet Guin.