On Planning: Story vs. Novel

Office Hours

First, thanks to all of you paid subscribers who, in the process of a sanctioned day of “self-promotion” created a beautiful portrait of our Story Club community, in all of its humble, energetic, creative diversity. What a wealth of talent and daring and openness!

Now for our question.

Q.

Hello, George,

We naturally spend a lot of time talking about short stories here, but occasionally the conversation drifts into the lane of the novel (as in a few recent Lincoln in the Bardo posts). My question is: how do you think about the application of the Story Club Process (I know, I know, there's not just one process) over a broader canvas? Put another way: I'm comfortable micro-editing over a long period of time with a relatively short text, adjusting things to taste and not worrying about having a Big Plan for the story, but the idea of doing the same thing with the goal of having 80,000 or so words at the end feels...scary.

This is getting dangerously close to the question of "what makes a short story different from a novel?" which could fill an entire semester or more. But...what makes a short story different from a novel?

Thanks!

(P.S. I'd be fascinated to tackle a longer piece in this "class." The Death of Ivan Ilyich maybe?)

A.

Yes, this is a good question and one that I think I can answer relatively simply – but, remember, this is just my answer, and I’ve only written one novel, and that novel had a strange form and was sort of, possibly, a fluke, but:

If there’s a “Story Club process,” it has to do, I’d say, with letting the story (or the novel) tell you, at certain key moments, what it wants to do. 

Another way of saying this is that we are trying to ensure readerly engagement by reading like a first-time reader ourselves (even as we’re editing). 

Yet another way of saying this: we’re trying to make a space for genuine surprise, for that feeling we get as readers when we feel a writer suddenly improvising in response to something they’ve just noticed being present in their own text.       

So the “process” is really just about being alert to what’s actually going on in the text (what it’s evoking, what it’s causing the reader to expect) as opposed to what we’d planned or expected to be happening.

This takes place on the line level and, when I use it to work on a short story, yes - I try my best not to think too far ahead, but let the text lead me, to the next event, to whatever “themes” there’ll turn out to be, etc.

It doesn’t have to be the case that we have no idea where we’re headed.  I’m not even sure that’s humanly possible.  But, in the story form, as I try to practice it, I’m trying to not be so sure that I know where I’m headed that I “drive right past” moments of possible, charming, responsive spontaneity.

In that process, it works best for me to let plot (so-called) evolve on the fly.

In a novel, I’m not sure that this highly spontaneous, “I have literally no idea where to go” process would work.

With Lincoln in the Bardo, as I’ve written about here before, I started out with a very simple, two-laned structural outline:

1. Lincoln, grief-sick, comes to the graveyard, somehow interacts with his son’s body, then leaves.

2. Willie is not supposed to be there, and either stays, or goes.

That was it.

I’d derived this outline from many years of goofing around with a theatrical version of the story, which turned out to be an elaborate form of outlining, really.  During that process I’d already refined that simple outline into something a little more detail-rich – those angelic visitors were in there, as was the matterlightblooming bit, and there was a general idea of motion (Lincoln comes to the grave, goes to the chapel, it all ends there, somehow).

But it was all, in the play form, pretty generic and short on detail, and, to be honest, not very moving.

So, when I started writing the book, I just had that little outline above.

Did I apply the same method as when I’m writing a story? Well, kind of. I was still seeking those moments of fun (improv, spontaneity, responsiveness) but these moments came from the how. I already knew the overall plan. So: how does Lincoln get from point A to point B?  What does he see along the way?  How long does he stay at the crypt?  Why does he leave?  After he leaves, where does he go, and why?  And so on. 

I don’t know how real novelists do it but I suspect my approach is not all that strange.  “A poor man comes back rich to reclaim the girl of his dreams,” becomes The Great Gatsby.  “A man and his son make their way across a dystopian landscape,” becomes The Road.

A general (sometimes very general plan, or shape) that we then color in, scene by scene, sentence by sentence.

I like this approach because it means that the outline is just a frame across which we get to drape the lovely blanket of invention.  It takes the pressure off.  The outline doesn’t have to be brilliant or have some encoded deep idea – it just has to be able to produce the illusion of motion.  Or, it just has to present the possibility that things will be meaningfully different by the end – that something of import will have occurred. 

This is, for me, a way of working against the Curse of the Big Idea - that notion all writers have at one time or another that, before starting, we’d better have this very special, one-of-a-kind idea and that having such an idea is the key to the success or failure of our book. I don’t believe this is the case.

What I’m looking for is some sort of lively scenario, largely unimprinted with ethos or meaning. I don’t know why it’s important - that’s what I’m hoping to find out. Or, really, I’m hoping to make that happen - hoping to find a way to infuse that simple scenario with life.

Still, some opening ideas are better than others.

The Lincoln idea spoke to me because, even in outline form, I found it moving – there was an implied arc and an implied meaning that seemed profound.  A man had lost his child, at a low ebb of the man’s life, when much depended on him recovering from the loss and moving on.

It felt, at the beginning, like no matter how I “handled” that material - no matter what slant I ended up giving it - it would still feel momentous.

So, at the beginning of a project, I take some comfort in the idea that the outline doesn’t have to have any philosophy or theme – it’s really just a pattern for some movement.  The ideas, the themes, will show up.

It’s almost as if a choreographer had this general plan: start the dance stage-left, at the front, and gradually let it expand across the stage.       

We suddenly get to some interesting technical questions: how to expand, for example.  Who moves outward first?  And how?  One person, two, a group of three?  What are they doing as they move?

These are the details of the expansion and the details, as they accrue, will eventually make meaning. 

So: we need a simple pattern on which we can load up detail, a pattern that is not entirely random, and that drops us off in a different place than we began.

How many times should Lincoln go to the crypt?  I didn’t know when I started.  (Twice, it turned out).  Both times he leaves, he leaves for a reason.  Those two reasons, placed one after the other, should look like growth.  (The first time he leaves just because; the second time he rationalizes his way into it and into never coming back again). 

The other advantage of starting with a simple plan is that we can keep referring back to it, to ensure efficiency.  Are we building within that initial, elegant, idea?  Or are we just, lost in the heat of battle, glomming on a bunch of extra, obscuring stuff?  (The great enemy of fiction (or at least mine) is irrational bloat, the kind that comes when we just “throw something in there” for no reason and then decline or forget to ask if it’s doing any work - the stuff that results from a sort of, “Look, I wrote this, isn’t it clever?” vibe).

Starting with a simple, hopefully elegant outline, has the effect of reassuring the reader, too, I think, at some level.

I’ve sometimes used this example: if we set out on a tour of an old mansion and the guide says, at the outset: “We’re going to march up to the attic and then slowly work our way down, a floor at a time” – well, as a member of the tour, I like that.  On the way down, if he stops for a long digression, or reveals a hidden closet, I’m O.K., with that, because I know the long game: we are working our way down.

Same with the outline: the reader will feel its elegance and thereby tolerate more fun along the way.

But, like I said above: this is all on the basis of my one (1) novel.

What do the novelists in Story Club have to say about this?  For a novel that you’ve written, what did it begin with?  How did you proceed?  Any lessons learned, that you can share?

P.S. You asked about what the difference is between a story and a novel - let me take this up a little next Thursday, aided by an additional question that another Story Club member sent it.

P.P.S And yes, I’d love to tackle The Death of Ivan Illych sometime.  What do you all think?  It would be best to work from the same translation, and that would mean buying the book….thoughts?  It would,  I think, be worth it.