Ask A Seasoned Semi-Pro: Bad Love, Scary Tasks

In my years of writing, I have made every mistake possible, and a few previously thought to be impossible. I’ve also had some victories. With Ask A Seasoned Semi-Pro, I’m here to share what I’ve learned!

Question 1 (from @Goose): [Can you talk about] the perils of falling in love with your main character (plotwise)?

Yes! In fact, I just this week had an issue with that very thing. Writing is a tricky proposition: You have to fall in love with the thing you’re writing, or you wouldn’t be able to go back to it every day and push on a little further; at the same time, you can’t be so in love with it that you become blind to even its most obvious faults, like the people who keep marrying Newt Gingrich. The key to this, as with all things, is time and distance.

I’ve been writing a book with three main storylines and four main characters. This week I threw one of these main storylines (and two characters) out of my rewrite, representing about a third of what was in my original manuscript. I did this because it was actually siphoning off my main story, to the point where I was actually bunting on the climax of the main character’s storyline so he could go aid in bringing about the climax of this other storyline.

Now: I could (and did) say to myself, “But maybe that means the other storyline is the real main storyline!” It was not. I was in love with this (now gone) storyline because I knew it would hit certain emotional buttons for the reader. The reader would have no problem falling in love with the two characters from this (now gone) storyline. Except they are not who the book is about, ultimately. And I was leaning on them because I wasn’t doing the hard work of making my main character so interesting and so engaging that you’d want to follow him anywhere, even when he was selfish or terrible to people. It’s like a band adding crazy instrumentation or production techniques to distract from the fact that a song is unable to stand on its own.

Here’s a fact: Your main character IS your story. If you’re not serving your main character, you’re not serving your story. But serving doesn’t mean letting them run away with the whole deal. Serving means doing what’s best for them, even if they don’t realize it at the time. It’s a little like having kids. They may not know what you’re doing right now or why, and they may resent you, but later they will appreciate it. Unless what you’re doing is  locking them in a cupboard or bonus room.

This is why a little healthy skepticism about whatever you’re doing is key. Check yourself, and frequently. Does this make sense? Is this what I set out to do? If it’s not, is it better than what I set out to do? You may not be the best judge of this, which is why, again, you have to show your work to — and discuss your work with — other people.

Question 2 (from @isplotchy): How does one approach writing a BOOK? A book is overwhelming. How does one tackle that? Example: I’ve made short films, written short scripts, but the idea of a feature film script is daunting. Very large and scary.

Let me ask you this: Have you ever driven a car or received an education? I’m guessing yes, so let me ask a follow-up question: Did you just do each of these things all at once? Or was it a gradual process?

Here’s the thing: We all know how to tell a story. It’s not only something we learn from our earliest days as newborns, I believe it’s probably in our DNA at this point. That’s how long narrative has been alive in the world. It’s only when we sit down to write a story that we suddenly freeze up, as if someone has asked us not only to drive a car for the first time, but also to assemble it from a massive tarp full of loose parts.

But here’s the thing part 2: Even if you were (weirdly) forced to assemble a car from parts, there are only so many ways a car can go together in the end in order to be a car, no?

Luckily, you do know how to tell a story. It’s in you. So I think what we worry about is telling a good story. And while I don’t know that everyone can tell a good story, I do know that if you have a good character who wants something in an interesting way, and if you understand that you have to either not let that character have that thing at any goddamn cost — or that they may ultimately have it, but only at a high cost — then you can probably write a good story. I’ve left out language, of course, which is the camera (and editor and sound guy and score and props master) of literature, but it really does start with a character and what they want and what they fear.

In terms of the mechanics of it, the best illustration I know is the one used by Anne Lamott in her book Bird By Bird. When she was young, her brother was trying to do a huge school project on birds, and he was just stuck and frustrated and furious. And their father simply sat down, put a hand on his son, and said, “Just take it bird by bird, buddy.” I think of that every time I sit down to work.

I wrote a book. Now I’m writing another one. The first was a collection of stories. Which is really just a collection of scenes. Which is a collection of moments arranged in paragraph form. Which is a collection of sentences. Which is a collection of letters, and you only have 26 choices there if you’re writing in English. (Cherokee, on the other hand, has 84 distinct symbols. Sorry again, Cherokees!)

Maybe you’re not a long-narrative guy. Maybe you were born to work in the short forms, and there’s honor in that. No money in it, but plenty of honor. You know who worked strictly in short-form their whole lives? Charles Schultz. Alice Munro. The crazy motherfuckers who wrote the Bible. We love the short forms.

(My two cents about the short forms, by the way: They may be small, but don’t write them small. They need to rumble and ring just the same as a novel. And don’t have characters just looking at each other at the end. If you do, you’re probably not done.)

Or you are a long-narrative guy and what you need to do is just start somewhere and go from there. Start in the middle if starting at the start gives you a touch of the tingly panics. Start at the end. Think of the craziest or worst situation you can imagine and then ask yourself: Who would do that? Who would get themselves into that situation? And then work backwards and solve yourself a mystery. By the time you get to the front, you’ll be at least partway to a story.