Written by guest blogger Alex Genetti
I do hope Diana doesn’t mind if I begin by bragging on her a bit. When her first novel, Heritage, came out in 2014, it lit a fire under me. At the time I was pursuing a graduate degree in professional writing, and story ideas were buzzing around my brain. Too long, I realized, had I allowed them to wheel about freely; now it was time to put them to good use. Reading Heritage, I admired that Diana seemed to know from the beginning where her story was headed and how her characters wasted no time in getting there. I admired the color and music and energy that enlivened every page. I don’t know what her real creative process was like. Maybe it was like mine. In any case, a great recklessness seized me. I wanted to follow her example. I resolved to write a novel.
Now, here’s the thing: I like stories for their characters, sometimes, or for their plots, or for their interesting premises or exciting action sequences. But mostly I enjoy them for their atmospheres. When I read a science fiction story, it’s usually not the events of the plot that excite my interest; it’s the bustling streets full of alien creatures, the dusty, red-stained Martian sunsets, the vast impressions of cosmic loneliness. When I watch a hardboiled film noir, it’s the trench coats and rain-slick streets and private-eye monologues that I revel in more than the mystery itself. For me, atmosphere is often the starting point. Everything else – plot, characters, dialogue – is there to give the atmosphere a framework where it can do its magic.
That’s why, when I decided to have a go at penning my own long-form narrative, I considered first what ingredients should go in it. What manner of strange locale did I want to whisk my reader’s imagination off to? What sort of mood, what sort of tone, what sort of ambiance would I convey? What themes and emotional textures were important to me? Well, I reasoned, maybe I should start by telling the kind of story I would like to read. So I let the ideas come of their own accord:
Misty Appalachian forests. Highways littered with abandoned vehicles. A pale, raven-haired woman with a sword. A villain who thinks he’s Nietzsche’s übermensch. Nebulous Christian symbolism. Guilt and fear and faith and hope. Something about fairies. Dismemberments.
These thoughts appeared in starts and stops over several months. At length I pulled a musty, dusty, post-apocalyptic story idea from out of a trunk I kept in the attic of my subconscious – a very lean idea, really, less than a plot, less than the skeleton of a plot – and I tossed it into a big vat in my brain. Then I started tossing the new ingredients in, too. I let it simmer and boil. I started writing down notes and scenes and dialogues. The rising aroma made my mouth water. This story had everything.
But something rather large and obvious was missing – several somethings, in fact. I didn’t have a beginning yet. Or a middle, precisely. I sort of had an ending, though I wasn’t quite sure how I would get there. I was just following my muse: character interactions, fight scenes, mythological symbolism, detailed backstories, pages of philosophical musings about death. I had so much material to work with; surely the minor business of the plot would sort itself out.
So it was that my first attempt at novel-writing fell flat on its face. Even though I had all the ingredients, I had no recipe. Or, put more plainly, I had all the ideas, but no story.
What I ended up with was novel soup: lots of ideas, scenes, objects, events, themes, and characters floating together in a weak broth of atmosphere and mood, sometimes bumping into each other and sometimes drifting off to float around on their own, never really coming together into anything solid, cohesive, or structured. I wasn’t even sure I understood my main character completely. I had ideas, yes. I had pages and pages of notes on her psychology. I wanted to be Dostoevsky and illuminate the complicated, contradictory inner mechanisms of the human soul, but I didn’t have any notion of how I’d accomplish this from sentence to sentence, page to page. I knew her story would deal with lost faith, the challenge of showing compassion in a cosmos that runs on violence, the corrosive influence of secret guilt, and a subconscious longing for an Arcadian otherworld. But how would these themes play out in the plot itself? How would her convictions show in her speech and actions? What choices would she make, and what consequences would follow? Where, in fact, would the story go? To those questions, I had no answers.
Thus, when I really sat down and started writing the blasted thing, I realized quickly that the story wasn’t going anywhere. I had several pages of text describing a forest. I had my main character waking up, going through her odd, post-apocalyptic morning routine, and ruminating about weighty matters. I had a single inciting incident that I had hoped would get the gears of the story turning. Beyond that, nothing. No direction, no substance, no sequence of events that would point toward a conclusion. When I tried to pick up the whole thing and hold it up to the light, it fell apart in my hands: pieces ran away here and there, and nothing held together. It was very discouraging.
I gave up.
Time passed.
More time passed after that, and I realized what had happened.
I had been drunk on my own ideas. The uncanny atmosphere I had wanted to create, the weighty questions I had wanted to wrestle with, the intricate characters whose souls I had wanted to explore – not only had I let them run away with my imagination, I had fallen in love with them all, even the ones that didn’t fit together or make sense. Each idea held me hostage. It was as if I had taken three or four separate jigsaw puzzles, poured out all the pieces into a single pile, and tried to make a picture using every single piece. It was never going to work.
But now I could see more clearly which pieces belonged to which puzzle. It had been a long time since the muse had stopped singing, and in the meantime I had fallen out of love with quite a few details. I still liked my main character, or at least some parts of her psychology. I liked the post-apocalyptic setting, though I knew it needed work. But the bulk of the ideas I’d written down no longer seemed indispensible. That doesn’t mean I disliked them, only that I could finally see I didn’t need them. I was willing to let them go and stick with the simple stuff that I could mold into a real story.
The lesson here is not that you shouldn’t get carried away. By all means, get carried away. Scribble out volumes of worldbuilding notes. Come up with dialogue between characters who probably won’t even appear in the final version. Write a fight scene. Use your passion while it’s still burning. Think long and hard about what your story is going to say and mean and make people feel, and write it all down. Write down every word.
Maybe it will all congeal into something edible. Maybe it will be a disaster. Either way, you have something instead of nothing. New stories and new people and new places that weren’t there before are in the world, even if they’re only in your mind. Then let it rest.
Put some distance between yourself and what you’ve written. Go for a walk. Have a glass of water. Sleep on it for a day or a month or a year or two. Clear your head. Then go back and rediscover the ideas you love.
You’ll find that you need to slim things down, hack through the foliage, locate the best seeds and let them flower to their fullest. The old writer’s adage about “killing your babies” has some truth to it; a lot of the scenes and characters and moments of soaring emotion that you had once loved so dearly just plain won’t fit anymore. But now you’re no longer a slave to them. Passion is perfect for an improvisational jazz trombonist (I should know), but a good composer needs a cool disposition, a patient approach, to write good music. Or, to return to the culinary metaphor, you can’t satisfy every taste in a single dish. I’m no chef, but I know that good cooking calls for restraint, and restraint, more often than not, requires some emotional distance from the stuff you’re working with. You might want to write a story that makes readers weep bitter tears for the harshness of the world one moment and leap out of their chairs to cheer on their hero the next. You might want to write a story that concerns post-partum depression, Slavic folklore, and pirates. You might want, as I did, to write a comprehensive encyclopedia of everything you think is cool or interesting or moving or worth considering. But probably it won’t all hold together. Then it’s best to step back, put some space between you and what you’ve written, let your passion cool, and come back later. You’ll be able to distinguish the good from the bad, the stuff that works from the stuff that won’t. Some ideas will be keepers. Others, inevitably, will go into cold storage.
But, then again, what’s the refrigerator for, in the end? Leftover night is always just around the corner. Maybe soon you’ll root through the cluttered fridge and find an old character or a snippet of dialogue that would fit perfectly in whatever new dish you’re cooking up. The best ideas will always keep calling you back to them, begging to be used.
Patience, whether in cooking, in writing, or in life, continues to be a virtue.
