First, thanks to all of you paid subscribers who have weighed in our story of the week, “The Legend of Lough Gur.” It’s always amazing to me how just setting a story in front of this group leads to such depth of analysis and insight and also spins us out into bigger questions of art, life, love, etc. THANK YOU!
And now for our question of the week:
Dear George,
Thank you for Story Club, I’m grateful to be here. I especially loved a recent answer you gave to a writer asking about editing and the impulse to just rip every line to shreds sometimes. Your advice (in a nutshell: do the dishes and have compassion, or at least that’s how I remember it) has changed how I come to the page. For example, I try to get outdoors before I write, exercise a little, pick up my toddler and spin him around a few times for the endorphins prompted by his delighted squeals. I keep the dishes out of the sink. All this makes me a gentler draft-handler. Perhaps your advice changed my life?
My question has to do with an obstacle I keep encountering in the early stages of drafting a short story.
Let’s say I’m generally following your advice when it comes to writing (or at least, I hope I’m about to distill your advice accurately): I’m coming to the nearly-blank page from a place of joy and curiosity, not frustration; I have just a scene or sentence or a whiff of a character in mind, and I want to build from these seeds without knowing too much too soon; I’m willing to write freely and at great length, at peace with the fact that (extensive, joyful) revision is coming. I start small, and try to follow the music. I try not to have an agenda for the story.
Before I go on, I’ll give an example of an actual story I’m working on so I can better illustrate my question (and of course I feel a bit vulnerable doing so, but I find it hard to talk in abstractions and I know everyone here is kind). My scene, or “seed,” was this: Three people are together for a weekend, a married couple in their 30s and their visitor, a mutual friend they were both close to in college. On the first night of his visit, in a drunken moment when the husband is out of the room, the friend kisses the wife. She is stunned, and he is extremely apologetic, mortified. He begs her not to tell her husband and to forgive him and forget the incident.
My thought was that I’d follow these characters over the course of their weekend. I spent only an hour or so working on it, I was very early in the process. I had just a page or two but I was already excited, pleased with the process and the general energy of this little story’s beginning.
And then something happened – my brain, without having a “point to make” or at least trying not to have such a thing, jumped ahead. It went something like this: oh, what if the wife does not tell her husband in the end, because she enjoys having something of a secret to keep, but the friend is actually the one to fess up? Ooo, fun, I like that!
As soon as this happened, I thought: drat, I’ve ruined it. Because I’ve learned, from you and all the teachers in my MFA program, that this kind of thinking is no good. I shouldn’t be deciding on a direction like this; I should be going step by step, sentence by sentence, working on going from “Frank was an asshole” to “Frank was rude to the barista,” etc. I should not, as Charles Baxter says in this essay “ On Defamiliarization” (which I think is really good and congruent with the things you teach), be the author that knows too much too soon. I should not get excited about potentially making commentary on male friendships and young marriages and the 20s vs the 30s or whatever else is happening there – I should just follow the breadcrumbs and create one little thing at a time. But now I can’t get back into a headspace where this ending never came to mind.
So, have I ruined it? Is this the right way to catch myself? If I’m very early in the drafting process, but in it nonetheless, and I have an idea about where it could all lead, how do I know when to count that as an honest bit of material that I can work with, and when to throw it out because I’ve gotten ahead of myself? Should I throw this draft away and start anew, even though I like it?