This past weekend, in the lull between leading a multi-week workshop and launching Bitterroot, I decided to enshroud myself in the cloak of the student. My MFA alma mater, Antioch, Los Angeles, hosted an online alumni mini-residency in which I enthusiastically took part. Also, I picked up the brilliant Steve Almond’s craft book, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow.
Remember, teaching is stealing. And this weekend, there was a lot to pilfer.
I wanted to up my game, particularly, in the area of building tension. Many clients and students come to me with stories that sing with gorgeous language, but fall into, what I call (I didn’t steal this one), the cul-de-sac of doom. In other words, they tend to drive their narratives into dead ends, thinking that they’re following a salient road. It’s like that time, nearly twelve years ago, when my husband and I rented a car in Germany, and the GPS (we named her Wicked Wanda), kept directing us down goat paths to nowhere.1
What was reinforced for me, during my self-appointed continuing ed weekend, was this notion of “chain of consequence.” The old chestnut: replace “and then, and then, and then,” with “because of that, this happens; and because of that, this next thing happens.” It’s a call to continually immerse your character into increasingly disruptive situations that, in turn, propel the story.
But here’s the catch. How do you know what “increasingly disruptive situations” even are for your particular protagonist? Especially in a first draft when you’re trying to conceive of a character you haven’t yet spent time with.
Ah, well, that’s where we invite Wicked Wanda to take us on a side trip through the Black Forest.
Case in point. I’m slogging my way through a new WIP, for which I’ve given myself a mandate to write 500 words per day. Every day. The low wordcount is on purpose; it’s something I can do in an hour, or even less. The point is to maintain a dynamic thread in my subconscious, where these invented folks continue to kick up dust in between writing sessions.
What I’ve found is that my writing sessions are necessarily non-linear. Like, I have situations, as Vivian Gornick points out, in service to (hopefully) the underlying story. Now that I have a good 70 pages or so, I’m realizing that my 500 word sessions don’t always begin where Word demands that I “pick up where you left off.”
And that, folks, is because my subconscious has been trained to operate in the liminal space between writing sessions.
Here’s a for instance. I had a chapter that started in Vienna, where my newly orphaned characters were sent to live with relatives. Next writing session, a disruption occurred, and the characters were sent back to the U.S. to be split apart and raised by others. But, I realized, the disruption didn’t have enough context. The visual for me would be if a track and field competitor tried to long jump without the run up. So instead of bushwacking forward (yeah, mixing the metaphors like crazy here), I backed up. I built a scene that offered an emotional consequence whereby the decision to extricate these kids from their Austrian grandparents’ apartment not only made more sense, but offered a deeper understanding of the complex issues involved.
What I discovered is, in my particular writing process, I often need to reverse engineer emotional context. And because this novel covers decades in the lives of these characters, and their sensibilities necessarily morph with their life stages, my subconscious aligns with where they are age-wise at any particular time in the narratiuve; therefore, I’m compelled to insert the needed link in the chain of consequence while my energy is embracing that very time period. I don’t think it would be as productive to wait until I finished a first draft to insert that link. Refine the link? Yes. But being a “pantser” by nature, with heavy respect to the benefits of forward momentum, this method of reverse engineering while the iron is hot works for me.
In other news, the Montana workshop I’m running with Natalie Hirt is filling up! There’s still time to sign up though. Email me at the address below for more details, and stay tuned for more Bitterroot news beyond my Powell’s event!
Meanwhile, give me your process questions/comments below! I’d love to hear of your first draft conundrums.
If you’re interested in the exploits of that particular trip—and Wicked Wanda in general—here they are, because the Internet is forever.
Suzy! Look what I just found in my mailbox! 😁😁😁
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y4l_krKdE9gBDXBmPrJiAEQ6ka9wKjWi/view?usp=drive_link
I got Steve's book the day it came out. There's so many gems here and made a bunch of highlights. One of my favorite quotes: "When people ask me how to deal with Writer's Block, that's my essential advice: lower the bar. Blocks result from putting too much pressure on ourselves." There's even a chapter on sex scenes. I have to go back and reread it this week. Was there a chapter or fresh idea that stuck out to you, Suzy?