Absolutely one of the best dicussions of story structure I’ve read. Resonates on so many levels for me! I just wrote to a writing group colleague that a story that’s working tells me what it’s about, and I think that sentiment jibes with this discussion. Let me know what you think!
“It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.”
— C. J. Cherryh
The goal of the rewrite is simple, but not easy. You want your story to live. To accomplish this, it’s helpful to have a basic confidence in the arc of your heroine’s journey before getting more specific with character, dialogue, and the refinement of prose. You’re seeking to create a story that amuses and entertains, but also captures some complexity and truth about the human experience.
This is a daunting task because—be honest—there’s a bit of inflexibility in your relationship with your first draft. On the one hand, you fear that if it’s not told as precisely as you imagined it, it won’t work. On the other hand, it feels somewhat unsatisfying as written.
So the biggest challenge in the rewriting is being able to make a thousand little painful paper-cut changes while avoiding…
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“a story that’s working tells me what it’s about…” — I couldn’t agree more, although one has to take care not to be heavy-handed, I think. No one likes a writer who’s didactic, or who feels they have to spell out the theme for the least among us as readers. But by exploring what the characters want from their story (regardless of the random arrangement of plot-bunnies between them and their goal), through the characters own voices and actions, the reader will organically come to understand the overall theme, even if it’s only subtly related to the plot-bunnies at large in the work. This is how a book like “Heart of Darkness” succeeds both as an adventure story and also as a commentary on madness and the evils of colonialism.
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Thanks! Listening to characters, and letting them do the talking for themselves and not for you (as author), is one most important and hardest tasks. I struggle with it every day.
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Just so. Sometimes a story can be idea-driven, where an author has an idea in mind to explore, and has strong opinions about that idea, and the idea itself drives the plot and characters. But if the characters don’t speak honestly for themselves, in their own voices, about that idea, then the author might as well be writing a non-fiction academic monograph. But shutting out the world to listen to the voices in one’s head and capture them honestly and accurately on the page? Yeah, not so easy as it might seem. 😉
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Incredibly difficult–and takes a lot of patience and persistence. :-0
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True of anything one wants to be good at. If it’s easy, it’s not worth doing, and if it’s worth doing, it’ll take patience and persistence to become good at it. 🙂
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🙂
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