Two weeks or so
ago I wrote a short story. It was started as a collaboration with my writing
friend, Julie, the process of which I blogged about here. I sent it to Julie
for feedback and she loved it, then I sent it to some other writing friends,
who agreed it was beautiful but said it was too mysterious, and made suggestions
about how it could be improved. I was in a quandary. Which advice to
accept? I made some changes to make it less enigmatic, and emailed it to yet
another writing friend, Les Zig, who’s an editor. He said that it was now a
little too clear, and it was what he called static. Characters stand on their marks, he said, say
their thing to establish or move the premise, and then there's a
denouement. He went on to break down the
story, like so:
·
boy
comes in disgruntled with grandfather
·
boy
talks to grandmother
·
grandfather
comes in and there's minor conflict with boy
·
boy
goes out and chops wood
·
grandparents
talk off the page
·
grandfather
comes out and gives boy his consent.
This last
thing was an even bigger issue as far as static went, he said, because the
grandfather acts through no journey or action of the boy. So in terms of an
arc, the boy's development occurs on autopilot—his life shaped by his
grandmother, who’s done the talking off the page to the grandfather—when really
the story is about the boy finding himself and his independence and choosing a
life for himself.
Needless to
say, none of this had occurred to me.
He suggested
that I think about “the unexplored possibilities of the story”. One thing I often query, he wrote, (particularly
in movies, where it's often overlooked) is how did the characters get to the
scene in which they appear? What happened just before, off the page? Saying all
this, let me give you some examples of what's I think are unexplored
opportunities, and the characters hitting their marks. For instance, the boy
comes in and says nothing he does makes the grandfather happy. Now does he
deliver this dialogue simply to set up the story? That's the way it seems to
me, given the grandfather comes in and there seems no connectivity to this
statement. By connectivity, I mean something like this: maybe the boy storms
into the house and says, 'Nothing I do makes him happy' because he's trying to
help the grandfather fix the car, but the grandfather is unhappy with his work.
Now you have a motivation for why the boy's unhappy, why he comes in, and the
statement he makes.
I have a dog
and a cat in my story, and Les pointed out that there were a number of props in the story—the
dog (does nothing), the cat (does nothing), the oily engine part (does
nothing). They become scene-setters. In the case of the engine part, why not a)
introduce it much earlier into that scene, and b) have it an object of contention?
Again, just for example, the reason the boy comes in originally is to fetch an
engine part, he's upset because the grandfather is unpleased with his help, the
boy picks up the engine part, he talks with his grandmother, she cuts herself,
the grandfather comes in to find what's become of the boy and the part the boy
was sent to get, and at the end of it all we find the boy's actually picked up
the wrong part. That's a bit more telling about the differences.
You can see
that Les is an awesome editor. (You can look up his fees and charges here.) You can also see that although readers said
the story was beautifully written there were some problems that maybe only an
editor would’ve picked up.
What I’m
saying is that Les has taught me to look more closely at my work in the
future. To examine not only every word, but
every prop, every action and reaction, before I think my work is done.
As an aside,
here’s something interesting. Les said my cat was just a prop and served no
purpose, yet at least three of my readers said they particularly loved the bit
about the cat. I should mention that my readers were all female, except for
Les. My conclusion: keep the cat!
