Stories are Discoveries
Image by Yerson Retamal from Pixabay
3 minutes
Stories are not what we think they are. In your high school English class, when you learned about Mr. Hawthorne and his Scarlet Letter, or about his friend Mellvill’s White Whale, you were likely given the impression that the figures in question were the keys to grasping certain BIG IDEAS: themes, and purposes, and the authors’ mysterious intentions. And this is true enough; just not in the way you were told it. For the implication of such academic analyses is that authors start with a BIG IDEA, which they then flesh out in the form of a story, more or less from the top-down. In reality, good stories are found out.
I do not mean that the authors channel their stories, like Romantic mediums, speaking forth the dictated speech of some ethereal realm. Writing is a lot of work, and involves a lot of planning. The best idea in the world must still be executed, and execution in writing happens at the level of craft and detail, as it does in every other human venture. Nevertheless, stories have a certain logic to them, and this logic governs both plot and theme. Once the author has found his entry point into the story, that mysterious egg —which I like to call the story germ — what comes after is bound to follow the logic of the the germ.
Many things aren’t set in stone. If they were, no story, no piece of art, could be surprising. And yet a story cannot go in just any direction, otherwise it cannot go right. The readers can feel when a story is right. The author feels it. Given certain germinal realities, certain problems, certain vexing questions, only certain outcomes really work. In this way, story-telling is like musical composition. The notes must resolve.
That is why the process of writing a story is so much like discovery, so much like archeology, from the writer’s point of view. At certain moments, it is discovery, and many writers have had the strange, almost mystical experience of looking for an answer to a difficult point of plot or character, a necessary passage from A to B, only to run into it in real life in a manner that does not seem coincidental. So, yes, there is some mystery here. Call it common mysticism. Call it quantum weirdness. Call it according to whatever cosmological theory you happen to embrace. But don’t call it architecture. Writers are not architects.
The story-teller may try to craft “from the top-down” in the manner of an architect, but, like an architect, he will invariably run into problems when dealing with the technicians, (who must build the damn thing.) Moreover, his process of planning, be it ever so elaborate, is really a process of pre-creation, of discovering the story in broad details before he ever sets out to write a particular scene. Inspiration happens in the outlining, and then again, and in a more unwieldy manner, in the actual drafting. When he is finished with his first draft, or before he’s even halfway through, he will often discover that his characters do not speak, and act as he thought they would. The notes will not resolve as he’d anticipated, but will only do so by taking some wayward side-path. And some strange image, or word, or scene will continue to recur, sometimes shouting at him from the page. Maybe blood, or a white mountain, or an old-fashioned washing board.
It will suddenly occur to him that washing boards — which he only added as a detail when it seemed to come up in a scene he hadn’t ever intended to write — keep popping up, in one form or another, throughout the story. The old woman who spoke that important line was using a washing board. The man who does that thing that shocks the reader is standing before a corrugated steel building when he does it. A climactic moment later on is an obvious instance of mass washing, like a rough baptism. He certainly didn’t plan this out, but neither can it be a coincidence that things keep getting washed. Then, with hair standing up on the back of his neck, he realizes that the character he named months before outlining is named Arthur Baptiste, and that his description of the character sounds like Mr. Clean. Instead of going mad, or over-analyzing the situation, the writer simply goes with the logic that is there, happy to write any book that holds together, even if it wasn’t the one he set out to write.
And that is the way books work. They are a bit like ant-colonies. Unlike the movies, there is no “Brain Bug” who understands the master plan. Each ant is simply doing its own, stochastically isolated work, with the result that a super-organism emerges, perfectly organized from the top-down. It’s not an accident. It’s not on purpose. It's teleology. It's the music of the spheres. The symbols that the English teacher detects (with his superior education) are there, but they did not get there in the way that the English teacher imagines. Being a scholar, he supposed they were the product of careful planning. He therefore teaches novels as if their authors were the most obnoxious kinds of people imaginable; the sort of people with Big Ideas, whose one goal in life is to force those big ideas down the throats of anyone who will listen. But story-tellers are not people with big ideas. They are gardeners, little people with little handfuls of very potent, very mysterious seeds, and willing to take the time to plant, and prune, and watch them grow. The finished novel is like a finished garden, and the author shares his story (and hopes someone would even be willing to pay for it) as the gardener shares his tomatoes.
Anyone who teaches Literature should know this. Which is another way of saying that anyone who teaches stories should try his hand at writing some of them.
© 2021 Joseph Breslin All Rights Reserved