Authors: Ronald B Tobias
To make matters worse, you read over what you've written and realize it's really
good stuff.
In fact, it may be some of the better writing you've ever done. What should you do?
The answer is simple, and too often painful. It's all right to let yourself go when you write, because you're using the best part of your creative self. But be suspicious of what comes out. Plot is your compass. You should have a general idea of the direction you're headed in, and if you write something that doesn't specifically relate to the advancement of the plot, question it. Ask yourself, "Does this scene (or conversation, or description) contribute in a concrete way to my plot?" If the answer is yes, keep it. If the answer is no, chuck it. Fiction is a lot more economical than life. Whereas life allows in
anything,
fiction is selective. Everything in your writing should relate to your intent. The rest, no matter how brilliantly written, should be taken out.
This is often easier said than done, especially when some of your best writing fails to fulfill the intention of the plot. It's hard, very hard, to muster the courage to say, "This must go."
Novels are more generous than screenplays when it comes to accommodating excesses, and it's true that many master novelists loved their tangents. Laurence Sterne, author of the brilliant novel
Tristram Shandy,
called digressions the "sunshine" of reading. Take them out of a book and "you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in
every page of it. . . ." Feodor Dostoevsky claimed he couldn't
control his writing. "Whenever I write a novel," he lamented, "I crowd it with a lot of separate stories and episodes; therefore, the
whole lacks proportion and harmony. . . .[H]ow frightfully I have
always suffered from it, for I have always been aware it was so." All right, you argue, if they can do it, why can't I?
First, you're not a nineteenth-century novelist. The shape of literature has changed in the last hundred years. Books are tighter and leaner. This reflects the age we live in. As readers, we don't want to take the time to wander off in all directions. We demand that the writer get to and stick with the point.
Andre Gide pointed out that the first condition of art was that it contain nothing unessential; a tight book walks the straight and narrow. Hemingway said write first and then take out all the good stuff and what's left is story. (By "good stuff" Hemingway meant all the material that the author has fallen in love with—not everything that was proper for the story.) Chekhov had the same idea when he said that if you show a shotgun in the first act, it must go off in the third act. Nothing in fiction exists incidentally. The world you create is much more structured and orderly than your own. So if you feel tempted to keep a passage that has a particularly well-written or moving scene but doesn't relate directly to the plot, ask yourself, "Is the writing so strong that the reader won't mind the side trip?" That's the trade-off: The more you make side trips, the more you dilute the effect of tension you've been trying to create, the more you dilute the drama itself. The novel is expansive and can tolerate many such excursions; the screenplay is intolerant and rarely allows any.
The writer, once trained, is intuitively aware of the need to stay close to plot. But no writer worth her salt doesn't occasionally succumb to the charm of her characters and head south.
LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR SIX: MAKE THE CAUSAL LOOK CASUAL
The point I've been trying to beat home is that everything in your writing has a reason, a cause that leads to an effect, which in turn becomes the next cause. If you accept the premise that good writing is cause and effect, we progress to the next stage, which says that good writing appears to be casual but in truth is causal.
No writer wants his fiction to be so obvious as to flash a neon sign that says
PLOT!
You don't want your causes to be so obvious that the reader can't fall victim to the charms of the story. You want to write in such a way that what you write about seems just a natural part of the world you've created. In the case of Chekhov's shotgun, we know the gun is important and will prove its importance by the end of the story. We know the shotgun wouldn't be included if it didn't have some relevant purpose to the plot. But that doesn't mean the writer should ram the shotgun down our throat. The writer should be nonchalant,
casual,
about introducing the shotgun to the reader's view. You would introduce it in such a way that the reader almost doesn't notice.
Almost
But when the shotgun becomes important in a later act, the reader should remember seeing it in the first act.
Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" illustrates the point on a larger scale. The title of the story cues us well. This is a story
about
a lottery. As we read the story we learn that a town holds an annual lottery and has been doing so since time immemorial. We focus on the mechanics of the lottery and the people involved. The lottery is the subject of the story, and we have no reason to be suspicious of it until the end of the story when we learn, to our surprise, that the winner of the lottery will be stoned to death by the other townspeople. Jackson's feat as a writer was similar to sleight of hand. She made us look one way when we should have been looking the other. As we read, we're more concerned about the mechanics of the lottery than what that lottery actually represents. We are caught off guard at the end and stunned when we learn the truth.
Ford Madox Ford, author of
The Good Soldier,
explained the concept clearly. He said the first thing the writer had to consider was the story. If you get away from story you will produce what Ford called a "longeur" which was, he said, "a patch over which the mind will progress heavily." You may have a great scene from your own life that you want to put into the story and, what the heck, the novel is big and forgiving and you figure you can put anything you want into it without really hurting the book. As long as it's
good,
right? Wrong, said Ford. If it doesn't push the story forward, it doesn't belong. Don't distract the reader with asides. What you are doing is
diluting
the dramatic effect. "A good novel needs all the attention the reader can give it," said Ford. Focus, focus, focus.
Of course you can
appear
to digress. What looks like an aside (the casual vs. the causal) is in truth important to the story. "That is," Ford said, "the art which conceals your Art." Ford believed the author insulted the reader by demanding attention, and if you gave your reader an excuse to walk away from the book, he would. Other delights always beckon us. So you should provide the reader with what appear to be, but aren't really, digressions. All pieces fit, all pieces are important. "Not one single thread must ever escape your purpose," warned Ford.
Ford's key concepts are that you should appear to digress (that is, make the causal seem casual), and in so doing, let the reader relax. But as the writer, you are always building your story, advancing your plot, with the reader unawares.
Let me explain it in cinematic terms. We've placed the props on the set of the first act. The shotgun is on the back wall. Depending on the director's shot, he can make the shotgun obvious, with a close-up of it, or he can camouflage the shotgun among the other objects in the room with a medium shot. The close-up calls attention to the shotgun, and anyone who's ever seen at least one murder mystery knows exactly what's afoot. But if the director is coy and doesn't make the shotgun obvious, it will appear unimportant. Only later, when the shotgun makes its next appearance, will the viewer realize how important it was.
This same rule applies for conversations and characters. By making the causal world appear casual, the reader accepts the convention that fiction is very much like life.
Only writers know it just ain't so.
LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR SEVEN: MAKE SURE YOU LEAVE LADY LUCK AND CHANCE TO THE LOTTERY
From time to time I hear a writer crowing, "I love being a writer. It's like being God. You create a world and you can do anything you want in it."
Here's where life and art stop imitating each other.
Life is chaos punctuated by short periods of order. From day to day we don't have the vaguest notion of what will happen. We may have plans, we may have schedules that say we should be at lunch at 12:30 with our sister-in-law at the Western Cafe, but, to paraphrase Robert Burns, there's many a slip between the cup and the lip. These are our guesses about how our day will go, but the truth is, as anyone can attest, life is always a gamble. Anything can intrude at any time. "Expect the Unexpected" should be our motto. If there is a chain of cause-and-effect relationships in our lives, it's under constant modification to consider current circumstances. And Lord only knows what current circumstances are from moment to moment. We live our lives provisionally, always adapting to what comes at us. Life is filled with long shots and unbelievable coincidences. The chances of anyone winning Lotto
America are about a zillion to one, but someone does win it. In life we expect things to happen out of the blue.
In fiction, we won't tolerate it.
This is the "hand of God" paradox. If you're God, you can do anything, at least in the world you create, right? Well ... not exactly. You must work under a load of restrictions. The first restriction states that you must create a world that has its own set of rules. Call it the rules of the game, if you want, but those rules must be consistent from beginning to end. Even the world Alice enters through the looking glass has its rules, and once we understand how they work, they make sense in their own way.
The second restriction states that when something happens in this world, it must happen for a reason. You can argue, of course, that everything in our own world happens for a reason, but if we can't make out what that reason is, we attribute it to chance, luck, coincidence. But fiction leaves no room for chance. The reason something happens must always be evident at some point in the story. Readers won't tolerate the unknown in fiction.
So you're not much of a god, after all. You still must play by the rules, even if they are your own rules. You've set up the game, so you're stuck with it. No out-of-the-blue solutions. (Remember Mark Twain's admonition to leave miracles alone?) Your readers won't let you concoct what they will perceive as ridiculous solutions. Avoid the easy way out, where the character just happens to be in the right spot at the right time.
The well-read person jumps out at this point and says, "Ha! What about Shakespeare! And Dickens, he's the worst offender of them all! How come they get away with it and we can't?"
It's true, the characters in both Shakespeare and Dickens are always in the right spot at the right time. They overhear conversations; they find evidence; they see things either at the most opportune or inopportune times. That's okay, because we understand these are devices to make the plot work, and we're more interested in the characters than in the plots themselves. After all, these are works about human character (note the titles:
Othello, King Lear, Hamlet, David Copperfield
and
Martin Chuzzel-wit).
Such conventions were accepted at the time anyway, and
that's not the case now. We demand more from fiction. We don't want plot contrivances.
LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR EIGHT: MAKE SURE YOUR CENTRAL CHARACTER PERFORMS THE CENTRAL ACTION OF THE CLIMAX
It is the essence of plot to ask a question. In
Hamlet,
for instance, the question is whether Hamlet will kill the king once he knows Claudius is responsible for his father's death. In
Othello,
the question is whether the Moor will regain his lost love for Desdemona. In
Cyrano de Bergerac—
whether the original version or Steve Martin's—the question is the same: Will he ever succeed in telling Roxane he loves her? In
Romeo and Juliet,
we wonder if Romeo can find happiness in his marriage to Juliet. And so on. Plot asks a question, and the climax answers it—oftentimes simply with a yes or no. In the case of Hamlet and Cyrano: Yes. In the case of Othello and Romeo: No.
Climax is the point of no return. The question is posed in Act I, and everything that happens between Acts I and III leads to the resulting action, the climax.
When you write the climax, however, don't forget the first rule: Your main character must perform the central action. Keep the main character in center stage of the action, and don't let her be overwhelmed by events to the extent that the events themselves act on her. Too often main characters disappear at the end, caught up in circumstances and events that diminish the purpose of the plot.
And don't let your antagonist or a secondary character perform the main action of the climax, either. Your main character should act, not be acted upon. Romeo kills Tybalt; Hamlet kills Polonius; Othello believes that Desdemona really gave Iago his handkerchief; and Cyrano checkmates de Guiche. These events lead directly to the final events: the deaths of Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet and Desdemona; and the winning of Roxane.