To Write a Story-Part Three
But What if You Hate It?
You’ve just finished 20 pages of your masterpiece. A full chapter. And now you’re ready to send it off to your circle of friends, and self appointed editors. But, as you’re rereading it, one thought occurs to you. “This sucks.”
In fact. You’ve been all through it, you’ve edited it six ways from Sunday, you’ve slashed whole paragraphs – and rewritten others. And another thought occurs to you. It has always sucked. Not the whole book, nor the whole concept – just this chapter. But as you’ve been writing the thing, you’ve been hearing that nagging inner voice telling you, “David? Ya there? Hellooooo? This sucks.”
Well, it happened to me. And it was actually a very interesting experience, and a good instructional moment.
First, I had to realize that I was going in the wrong direction. I was getting bogged down in an area I didn’t want to be, and in so doing, I was bogging down the whole story. Here’s my epic adventure – quite resembling Hitler’s tanks at Stalingrad.
I had to ask myself, what role does this part of the story, play in the whole. And of course, I had to rewrite the whole thing. That’s OK, though. I ended up getting a great chapter out of the ashes. Maybe the point here, is to know when to throw in the towel – and start over again from scratch. I might have saved myself a month of exercising my futility muscle. But I wouldn’t have gotten this wonderful insight. I learned that it’s necessary to decode in your own mind, what’s germane to the story you’re telling. And what isn’t.
Maybe you’re hung up on a street dialog that’s taking place between two characters. You’ve tried it as narrative, you’ve tried it in scene, and you’ve tried it as both. It just keeps falling flat. But why are they having this dialog? What is the point – as it fits in to your overall story arc. Maybe you’re better off just writing a completely different scene, in which Character “A” tells Character “C,” that he talked with Character “B.” You don’t need to actually bore your readers with every detail of that conversation. Maybe you need to go back to rule 1. “What are you trying to prove?” If the chapter or section you’re working on, doesn’t help with rule 1, kill it. Start anew. You’ll be glad you did.
One of my all time favorite books – I think I’ve mentioned it, in this series before – is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I’ve analyzed that book from cover to cover, more times than you can imagine. I reread it, about every 5 years, just to refresh my memory. I love the language, and more – I love the flow. The arc of the story. It’s linear, by modern standards. Extremely so, as a matter of fact – but that doesn’t hamper its beautiful arc.
Although Universal Pictures gave great play to the robbing of corpses and the Jacob’s Ladders inundating Frankenstein’s lab, Shelley herself, doesn’t bother with that stuff at all. She gives one sentence to the actual building of a creature. “Finally, it was done.” That’s it. Why? Because the building of the creature had nothing to do with the story she was writing.
I can use this experience to amplify that in my brain. I don’t have to build a creature, if I’m not telling a story about creature building.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll be keeping you in the loop.
Frankenstein is one of my favourites along with Doctor Jekyl and Mr Hyde. You get even vaguely close to writing anything that good in any genre and you have more than made it!
Keep these coming old bean! If nothing else it’ll stop me ever trying and that is a very good thing! 😉
I was going to write a book then remembered how many bad books there were out there and decided not to add to the pile.
David I wish you all the best and I can tell by what you’ve been writing here that you have what it takes. Now I’m off to order Frankenstein.
Dang it! Now I’ve got to go back and reread Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – not that that’s a bad thing…
Ha! I was thinking the same thing Marsha.