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Rebel Yell: A Short Guide To Fiction Writing
8. Is It Ripe Yet? Cultivating and Developing Ideas
Or, on the other hand, let's say you have a ton of ideas. How do you know which one's right for a good story?
The honest answer is you don't.
Ideas don't necessarily make the story. A killer idea presented in a dreary or fumbled fashion isn't worth the price of an 800-number phone call. On the other hand, a fairly commonplace idea can start shouting and jumping up and down on the page and waving its tiny arms over its tiny head because of the language used to present it, or the characters who accrue around it, or the fresh formal approach through which you articulate it.
Moreover, writing is discovery. As E. L. Doctorow commented, he rarely knows what he believes until he's written about it. Many times it's only through the act of composition that we locate what we really think and feel about something. Dostoevsky would begin authoring a scene in which he reckoned he understood exactly what he believed, only to find his characters would convince him otherwise by the end and leave him in a quandary.
Many times we don't have an idea for a story so much as a vague sense of some character we want to probe, or an issue we'd like to ponder, or maybe the dimmest sketch of a scene in our heads, or maybe little more than an image, a group of words that may or may not be a full sentence, the foggy outlines of a place or an action or a sound or a smell.
But if you intuit you're ready to start writing, then you're ready to start writing.
If you're pretty new to this stuff, or just want a stronger sense of purpose before you begin, there are three questions you can ask yourself to find whether you're driving up the right on-ramp:
• Does your protagonist (a word from the Greek meaning "first actor," or chief player in your narrative) want something he or she can't have?
Stories are all about the thwarting of desire. Create a character who needs something more than anything else in the world—to be loved, to get away with murder, to remove that annoying sirloin gristle stuck between his or her front teeth—and refuse to let him or her have it for a while.
If there's a person preventing your protagonist from getting what he or she wants, then you've got yourself an antagonist.
• Do you have a sense of your story's plot, of how its action is shaped and where it's heading?
It's okay if you don't. Some authors barely know the opening of their narratives, and some only have an unformed sense of something that's going to happen in the middle, and some can sort of see the end point but not how to get there.
Half the fun in writing is surprising yourself with how you're able to travel to Z from B.
The other half is your characters surprising you.
But—particularly when you're just starting out—it sometimes helps to know where you're beginning and where you're ending and why, even if the middle is unformed and blobbish. If nothing else, it will almost surely save you several drafts of narratological hunting and pecking.
• Has it been said before in the same way?
Here's a little secret: Ecclesiastes botched it . . . there are all sorts of new things under the sun.
Granted: there are a limited number of human emotions, a limited number of tastes and smells, a limited number of core plots (the journey, the love story, the education, the revenge story, the heist, etc.), even a limited number of words in the English language.
And yet there are also an infinite number of ways to discuss those emotions, to capture those tastes and smells, to retell those core plots, to combine those words. Mutate the world and thrive.
Think about this: You can hear a sentence today, and then listen for that sentence to be repeated just once more for the rest of your life in just the same order, and chances are you'll be disappointed.
Now that's sorcery.
Early in the twentieth century, Ezra Pound advised young Imagist poets to MAKE IT NEW. At the beginning of the new millennium, that's still splendid advice for all authors.
If you're saying the same old things in the same old ways . . . well, why bother?
Find a new angle.
Imagine telling your narrative from a strikingly different point of view from how it's usually told, or employing an innovative structure you've never come across before, or breaking up traditional chronology in a method that both interests you and puts a new spin on your story, or recasting your sentences in an inventive form, or twidgling with tense or metaphor, or throwing a fictive wrench into how a certain kind of story unfolds (if a tale of education, maybe your protagonist doesn't ultimately learn anything; if a murder mystery, maybe the bad guy doesn't get caught, or maybe the murderer is really the good guy, or maybe there hasn't been a murder after all), or . . . or . . . or . . . the possibilities, you can begin to tell, are mind boggling.
Now Read This
Barthelme, Donald. Forty Stories (1987). One of the masters of making it new in contemporary fiction.
Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (1955, 1956, 1958). Tremendously important and blackly funny Irish anti-novellas.
Borges, Jorge-Luis. Ficciones (1956). You've never read stories quite like these. By the guy who in many ways began both the Latin American magical realist and the global metafictional traditions.
Calvino, Italo. If On a Winter's Night a Traveler . . . (1979). The detective story as epistemological fable.
McCaffery, Larry and Sinda Gregory, eds. Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s (1987). Interviews with Walter Abish, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula Le Guin, Tom Robbins and many more on the how's and why's of edge writing in America.
McCaffery, Larry, ed. Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers (1990). The title's a little misleading, but super idea-generating interviews with the likes of William Burroughs, Octavia Butler, and William Gibson.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction (1987). The finest overview of techniques and approaches used in pomo anti-narrative. Sure to get the ideas boiling.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow (1973). The most important post-war American novel, with a new technique on every page.
Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy (1759-1767). The side-splittingly funny proto-pomo British novel.
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