Office Hours

If and when to bail on a story.

Before turning to this week’s question, I wanted to share some news that made me really happy this week. An old and dear friend, Lee Durkee, got this killer review in the New York Times for his new book, Stalking Shakespeare. And the review was written by Dominic Drumgoole, no less (artistic director of the Globe Theater.)

Lee Durkee: Novelist, Shakespeare-sleuth, dear friend.

Lee was the first friend I made when I came to Syracuse to study writing all those years ago and he’s always been, in my mind, a model of what an artist should be: seeking, restless, playful, always curious about, and leaning into, real life.

He’s written two beautiful novels (Rides of the Midway and The Last Taxi Driver) but in this new book he took a wild swing at the fences by writing non-fiction about his longstanding obsession with Shakespeare portraiture. The book is a case study of what can happen when we let our joy lead us to our form. We might find ourselves, as Lee does in these pages, inventing exciting new narrative shapes and voices out of the urgency and glee of trying to express something that has possessed, mystified, and fascinated us. The reader feels the necessity of the invention and, as Drumgoole did, happily leaps aboard, because he can’t help it, so evident and contagious is the fun in the air.

It was really gratifying to see all of this acknowledged in the review, and in the other attention this one-of-a-kind book is receiving.

Congrats, Lee.

Now, on to our question of the week:

Q.

First of all, thanks for everything you do for Story Club. I was delighted to come across this group, and I am proud to be a part of it. As an unpublished writer, self-doubt is perhaps my worst enemy, but the way you talk about writing gives me hope. It makes sense to me. Even as an amateur writer whose built-in shockproof shit detector might be malfunctioning, I find your advice immediately actionable, and your hearty writing spirit excites me like good old-fashioned writing workshops used to when I was in college. 

My question is: At what point do you give up on a story? Do you ever? Or is someone of your skill level capable of turning any chunk of text into a story? I'm 27 years old, and I want to be a writer so bad! I want to write stories and novels, but I run into this wall with every story I write; that is, I get to a certain amount of words or scenes and suddenly nothing seems to cohere. My plot rises into action and then falls again into exposition, rises and then falls, looking less like Freytag's Pyramid and more like the vital signs of someone on life support. To be honest, I don't feel like I'm in control of my stories at all. Instead, I try to coax the story out one sentence at a time. One wall that I frequently run into is I create these interesting characters (interesting to me, anyways), and the exposition of the story seems to steep them in all this potential energy, but, as I try to convert this potential energy into kinetic action, it gets confusing and disjointed or, as happened to me in my most recent story, I get to the end of the story before I get to the climax! I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I don't plot or plan before writing; instead, I try to write one true sentence at a time, and I really operate on a sonic level, paying close attention to the sounds of the words and how they flow together. 

I'll spare you of the details, but I can't really afford to go back to school for my master's in creative writing. (If I could, I'd join you at Syracuse!) I've come to accept that I'm on my own when it comes to strengthening my writing skills, which is why I was, as I said, delighted to come across your blog, and even more delighted when when I stumbled upon A Swim in a Pond in the Rain in a local bookstore. I was Christmas shopping at the time, and I'd bought the book for my brother (who is also a writer), but on the way home, I couldn't stop reading it, so I had to buy a copy for myself. I'm on Tolstoy's "Master and Man" now. (I know, I read slowly). 

A.

Thank you for this astute question. 

Up until a year ago or so, I would have said: Right, my feeling is, I can make a story out of any small scrap, by way of this process of iterative revising we’ve been discussing. 

I still think this is mostly true, although I’ve had two recent stories that felt somehow flawed from the outset.  I’ve got them both on hold while I think about things.  (One started out with a too-transparent political agenda and the other somehow immediately hopped into what feels like a too-familiar groove.)

But, leaving aside these two recent anomalies:  When I was young, I would often let stories go.  I could feel that, at some point, I was making them worse – obscuring what power the early draft had, or just adding and adding to them without knowing why.

Then, at some point, it felt like my process had advanced to the point where I’d figured out how to edit and reshape and reduce and rewrite any chunk of prose until it would sort of “spit out”….well, something.  Sometimes it was an obvious next beat; sometimes it was a nugget of knowledge about a character.  But it was as if the refining of a brief passage, by taste, to make it funnier or faster or clearer, would then suggest the next thing.  The story had been put on a narrower path.  I could just feel the next thing that needed to happen or could feel that character’s tendency hanging over the story, waiting to be used/reacted to. 

So: that heavily revised section had become clear enough in itself that not just anything could follow it.  The level of ambient randomness in the story had been reduced.  The story had declared itself to be one thing or another (although I couldn’t have said what, exactly, or, at least, shouldn’t have been able to). 

The operative skill, then, moving forward, was attentiveness…to what this refined version of the story was saying; to what questions it was implicitly posing; to what the reader would be curious about, and so on. 

But none of that was possible until the section had been revised into (let’s call it) clarity.

After that, completing the story became a process of responding to that thing or quality that had become clear.

The reason I felt (and still feel, really) that I could make a story out of anything was because anything, written clearly, is saying something – it’s putting something into play. 

As long as we can feel that thing, we can respond to it.

And that’s a story.

We often talk here about a story as a form of communication.  As with real communication, one thing that will mess it up is dishonesty.  Or, to say it the other way: good, responsive storytelling depends on honesty.  Honesty, in this context, means: the second section is in a responsive relation to the first. 

Why wouldn’t it be? 

Well, one reason is if the writer has a too-hearty intentionality.  We “want” the story to be about something, but it has another idea – and yet we insist that we’re right.  So “our” Section 2 doesn’t exist in relation to Section 1. (Section 2 is behaving like a person to whom you are talking, who has his fingers in his hears as he intones, “Not listening!  Not listening!”). Section 2 isn’t responding to Section 1; it just happens to follow it.

Here's another thing that can happen. 

If we haven’t figured out our particular flavor of revising (how we go from a loose, messy Draft #1 to a tight Draft #X that we really love), then the story will fail to indicate precisely enough in its early sections for us to know what the latter sections are there to do.

That is, revising might be defined as “something we do to our text that makes it clearer what we should do next.”

I like to use the word “stride” here.  In our editing, we are trying to discover our best prose stride.  (It has to do with speed and the extent of omission, I think, mostly.  What do we value enough to leave in?  How willing are we to cut out the assumed or habitual or merely anecdotal?) 

A writer who is in the zone (who has found her stride) will be revising the early text until it produces whatever she needs in order to construct the rest of the story in response to that thing. 

Whereas, if the text doesn’t pop into shape (the writer fails to hit her stride), the story is essentially giving off too many (and mixed) signals. 

We are trying to make a tight, organic system that is at a high level of responding to itself.  But if that “itself” is blurry and too broadly indicating, it’s hard to craft a coherent response to it. 

How can we make a highly organized system out of components that are demurring when we ask them what they are? 

I see this in stories by newer writers: lots of information, often charmingly delivered, but the writer hasn’t decided which information is pertinent.  Without making this decision, it’s hard for the story to escalate; it is, in a sense, just a bunch of facts or observations (again, often well-written). 

But the future pages of the story, looking back at this unshaped mass of wit, don’t know what to be; it’s as if the early pages aren’t offering the later pages enough guidance.  

This is the kind of story a writer will often abandon, since she sees no clear way forward and very naturally, thinks: “This is not one of my stories.  I made a bad choice of subject matter (or voice, or whatever). Otherwise I’d know what to do.” 

This brings us back to a few essential questions: What are the steps I follow when revising?  What does my polished draft look like relative to my first draft?  What qualities am I trying to honor when I revise? 

And some related questions:  Have I ever tried an experiment wherein I purposely revise “too much” (i.e., a period during which I’ve resolved to spend, say, three times as long editing a section as usual?).  Most of us have naturally tried the experiment wherein we revise too little, but if not: have we ever tried writing a first draft more recklessly?  Have we ever taken a random page out of a “finished” manuscript and just tried to cut it in half?  Or taken a paragraph and tried to open it out into a full page?

Here I’m just trying to suggest that each of us capable of a range of prose strides, and maybe part of the job is to force ourselves to explore different strides.

We could easily spend our whole writing life in the “wrong” stride, just because it’s the first one we got used to using.

The way all of the above relates to this week’s question is that if we haven’t found our ideal prose stride, certain things will tend to happen: 

The early sections will be blurry and therefore won’t be telling us what we need to do in the later ones.

No coherent character traits will appear for us to challenge.

The story will not be felt to be asking a central question (i.e., it will fail to create any definite expectations or a palpable sense of curiosity).

Now, having dispensed all of the above, rather certain-sounding, advice, let me say something about this whole enterprise of writing instruction.

One of the things I’ve noticed in my 35+ years of writing is that, in my process, everything is always changing.  The method changes.  The truisms become untrue.  What worked last book is worn out now.  I can be giving advice while not following it myself.  The catchphrases I use (“Always be escalating!” “Enact cause-and-effect!”  “Specificity is king!”) may be “true” but I can declaim them while failing to do them.  (A hitter can be telling himself, “Become one with the ball!” even as it zings right past him.)

In other words, writing fiction is not a certainty-heavy enterprise. 

(Certainly = autopilot = non-responsiveness to the reality of one’s text.)

I like to remind myself and my students that there are really only a handful of writing questions that we writers ever ask. 

To list a few: How do I know when I’ve edited enough? How do I find an ending?  How do I find my true voice?  How do I nudge myself out of the exposition portion of my stories?  How do I generate rising action? What place do my political and moral feelings have in my fiction? 

And so on.

There are no universal answers to these. There is only an answer for you, at this precise moment in your trajectory.  (And almost as soon as you find it, it may expire.)

It is so tempting to want to find, and then settle into, a particular approach forever.  But that’s a form of artistic death. (Mastery in fiction-writing might just involve really believing in and accepting the impossibility of a permanent, enduring method. Wah!)

So, the real answer to the question, “At what point do you give up on a story?” has to remain indeterminate.  The Yoda-like answer might be something like: “Yes, exactly.  When do you?”  (“When do you?”)

The fact that the questioner felt moved to ask this question tells us that something about where he finds himself at this moment, artistically. There’s an obstruction happening. We can see by the question that he’s already started to unpack and self-diagnose, by asking himself, “Why do I think I should abandon this story?” And: “What are the symptoms that keep coming up in my work, that make it hard to finish a story?”

So, that’s good.

Sometimes the best work I do with my students involves just hearing them out, as they try to explain what’s frustrating them (staying as quiet as I can, so they can work through the issue, past the point of comfort). Then I just go, “Yeah, I hear you. That is a really valid worry. What a tough problem. I’m still working on that myself.”

Good teaching is, I think, like judo: we’re always trying to use the student’s natural energy. And this includes having trust that if the student is on top of things enough to articulate the question, he’s already begun working through the thing on his own.

Let’s hear your thoughts on this.  Do you ever give up on a story?  If so, why?  What has to happen in your process before you call it quits?  Ever had a story come back alive after you’d pronounced it dead? What is the nature of the confusions or blockages you feel midway through a story that might make you want to abandon it?