I have never written a story or a poem the way I wanted to write it. Something always gets in the way, interferes with the directional flow I’m attempting to develop on the way to some point I’m trying to reach by the end of the story.
Sometimes I think it’s a question of nerve. That I can’t get past telling the reader too much. Too much, I mean, about myself. My inner, deep self. My urges and desires. All creative writing has pieces of the author in it. The author’s biography, parts of it, leak into the writing, even if it’s far-out speculative stuff or a piece about an invasion of fire ants. Always, always, always the personality of the writer and parts of his or her life drop in. And when that writer reaches a certain critical point, where what’s about to hit the page is something he doesn’t want anyone to know, he has to decide if he’ll reveal that bit about himself.
For me, when I reach that point – and as I say, you always do, consciously in a first draft, or unconsciously in a first draft that you will discover as you think through second drafts and beyond – when I reach that point, I know that what I’m about to say about a character or scene, is beyond the pale in the land of the personal. My nerve almost always fails, I choose not to hit the breach, and I do not put on paper that part of me I wish to keep secret. Until the grave.
Some authors might say that I’ve failed at that point. That I’m no longer being genuine, no longer being true to the essential truths I should be pursuing. Maybe. Maybe not. Arguing about that is like Apple junkies and PC fanatics attempting to convert each other to their side. It’s a waste of time. Time I could be using to write more untruths.
Another thing that might change the way I’m writing a story is losing track of where I was going in the first place. This one hits home hard. So many times it happens that the story starts steering me. I want to stick to my original intent, but I can’t because something happens to redirect me. Usually, a plot twist dropping in to highjack my tale, and I must pursue it. Now that’s a kind of truth in writing. If the story demands a directional change, then I would be going against the grain, against what is “genuine,” if I fought off the organic flow of idea and purpose.
A third reason for not getting a story down as planned is not realizing that what I thought of as a plan wasn’t a plan at all. When you piece together a rough idea of what you want to say in a certain way, you should never assume that this is some kind of outline carved in stone. Writers who physically sketch out a story, the vaunted “outline,” in my opinion, are the ones who are lying. To say “This is what I want to say, and I will get you from Point A to Point B exactly as I am telling you and myself I will do so. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.”
No. It doesn’t work like that. And I mean never. If you’re telling the “truth.” The truth of the matter is, referring back to my second point, that writing, the act of putting words on paper, no matter what length, short or long, will never be “true” unless it adapts as it progresses. Writing, like life, is unpredictable. I may guess that in five minutes I’ll be pouring myself a cup of coffee, but on the way to the kitchen, I may slip and fall, injuring myself, or, in the worst-case scenario, I may kill myself.
This unpredictability comes down to second by second in life. Everyone’s life. No one knows what going to happen one second from now, especially since we are mortal and we’re all moving toward the grave during that second-by-second journey.
But to lighten it up, another thing that may change the telling of my story is that I discover the mood must change. Mood is critical in my writing. Sometimes I think it is Number One on the list of what my story or poem must get right. What I thought should be a meditation on something a bit dark, say, a bit heavy, is not working the way I’d hoped. I must adjust my mood to make the piece say what I see it should say in a different tone. It may even turn out to be quite comical. I’m constantly surprised.
This idea is hard to explain in specific detail, but if you are a writer, I think you’ll know what I mean. The tone must match the content as revealed in the course of composition. Regardless of original intent. Now that I’ve said this, this one too seems to be about unpredictability.
In fact, my first point about nerve is also a kind of unpredictable arrival moment in writing. That fork in the road you must negotiate when it looms.
I don’t want to go on and on about this. Believe it or not, what I’ve written here started as a story about a writer who comes to that fork. What I have here is nothing even close to what I wanted to write about today.
If I’ve bored you, my apologies. For me, as a writer, it’s been good to put this on paper. And I don’t mean that this was something I had to get off my proverbial chest. It’s just the way the story went today, and wanting to say something about what happens. What happened. How it might have happened, more like. The way my mind was steered, moment by moment, as the words moved my mind and pen.
Lanning Lee 