FICTION & THE CREATIVE PROCESS PART ONE
Let’s start with some quotes:
“I don’t tell the story to myself. I see it. I see scenes, and I write down what I see. I hear the characters talking to one another.” – Judy Blume
Many writers describe seeing a story unfold in their minds and just writing down what they see. In a way they feel like reporters simply describing what’s happening in front of them – the only difference is that it’s happening inside their own minds.
Image by Chris from Pixabay
“I have found an explanation that seems to satisfy people. I tell them (writing a novel) is like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” -- E. L. Doctorow
Let’s say you’re driving across the country, New York to Los Angelas. If you’re in Ohio and wondering what it’s going to be like when you get to Colorado, where you are? You’re not mentally in Ohio anymore, but physically, you’re not in Colorado either. When you’re writing, try to be fully where you are at that moment, and keep your eyes on the piece of road right in front of you, even if you can see only as far as your headlights.
“I don’t really know what I’m going to say. In the end it’s a process of discovery, rather than of putting in something that I know beforehand.” – Saul Bellow
The vast majority of fiction writers will tell you something along these lines: writing is an act of discovery – for them to discover what the story is that they have inside them and are trying to get in touch with and bring forth on the page.
“I begin a story with an urge to write a story, but I don’t know quite where it’s going. Usually I’ll find out what I want to say in the act of saying it.” – Raymond Carver
This is another way to echo Saul Bellow’s quote. How much you feel you need to map out or plan a story in advance, there needs to be room for you to discover as you go along, and room for you to allow yourself to be surprised by what comes up. That doesn’t mean you have to write like the madman all the time. The novelist Jim Crace says he plots out a rough outline of the boundaries of his novel, and then he uses that outline as a kind of “fence” that will help keep him from straying too far afield. Because he has that fence around his fictional property, he says, he feels free to go totally madman inside that confined space.
“If I write what you know, I bore you. If I write what I know, I bore myself. Therefore, I write what I don’t know.” -- Robert Duncan
This is similar to the last couple quotes, though stated in a different way. We’re always told, “write what you know,” but Duncan is saying there must be something he doesn’t know in what he’s writing – something he wants to explore and discover. Otherwise, if he simply maps everything out and then follows the blueprint, he’ll be bored (and readers might be too).
“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader–not the fact that it’s raining but the feel of being rained upon.” – E.L. Doctorow
The best fiction puts us in the world of the characters, makes us feel what it might be like to be them at that time in that place. To FEEL
“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.” – Truman Capote
When starting out, learn the rules. Then feel free to break them if you have a good reason. What matters isn’t that you follow all the rules, or “handle that technique correctly.” I know I’d rather my epitaph said something more interesting than, “He never broke the rules.”
Finally, let me add one thing to that old maxim “write what you know”: Jerome Stern, in the book Making Shapely Fiction, says that it’s fine to “write what you know,” but remember that “imagination is a way of knowing.”
So you don’t have to write only about what you have experienced, or write about characters or people who are just like you. You can “know” the world, and know other people, through research, observation, and through your own imagination.
There are a very small number of true emotions human beings feel. You could make your own list: fear, love, lust, anger, sadness – in the end I’d be surprised if you came up with more than a dozen – and I’d bet that you couldn’t come up with one you had never felt, in some form. For example, we all know “loss.” The difference between your knowledge of “loss” and my knowledge of “loss” involves the particulars – what was lost – and the degree or strength of the emotion. Obviously, if I lose my keys and you lose a child, the degree of loss felt is vastly different. But at its core, it’s the same feeling. And if you’ve experienced one, you can make that imaginative leap to the other.