Accidental Alchemy
Us fiction writers are miners. We prospect through space, time, cultures and anecdotal experience for the raw material to process into ideas, fantasies and plots. Sometimes we call it cultural appropriation, or plagiarism. Other times we don’t even recognise its value until it drops into a scene like a coin from the heavens, transforming, even transmuting the scene into something completely different. Accidental alchemy.
Like the forging of bronze requires ten percent tin and ninety percent copper, so the cliché goes that story writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration.
But are there ways we can shift that percentage a little bit towards the middle, perhaps by prospecting through the very story we are writing? If we lay the groundwork.
Thinking back to my first attempt at a novel, there was anxiety around getting a draft right, pure as gold if you like, assuming it was going to be publishable after a bit of polishing. Working on early drafts now, I already know that it’s not going to be the last. Not even close. That frees things up; for burying things in the ground that could be dug up later.
In early drafts of my latest manuscript, Mohenjo Melbourne, I wrote ideas, pieces of dialogue, objects in the environment, and larger segments of scenes that, as I was drafting, I doubted would make it to the final manuscript. Instead of dismissing them outright, I included them anyway and immediately after writing them, either highlighted them in yellow, which meant ‘could be in, could be out’, or struck through them, which meant ‘delete later unless …’
This allowed the creative process to continue whilst fencing off holes not to go down - yet. You could ask why I didn’t write these seemingly extraneous ideas and sections in a notebook or separate document. Personally, I don’t end up reviewing them and if I do, they’re out of context.
This is not hoarding; it’s putting the old furniture out in the driveway but not yet chucking it in the skip. The musical equivalent is turning off an unwanted instrumental or vocal track instead of deleting it, in case it becomes useful later to fill a gap or boost a section in the final mix.
Midway through Mohenjo Melbourne, I was considering an extension to a chapter which already had a nice snappy ending. In other words, the chapter from a dynamic point of view didn’t need to continue. Because the extension raised an interesting question which could be answered in the story later, I wrote it anyway and then immediately put a strike through it for probable deleting. When I got near the climax of the story, it proved a good set up for an idea that otherwise seemed out of the blue. I prepared the ground for my own prospecting.
A minor character fainted when she appeared to witness something horrific. I nearly deleted it as an irrelevancy which wasn’t going to pay off anywhere. Instead, I just highlighted it. Later, her divulging of what she had seen twisted the plot for the protagonist.
There are other things that you can insert into a draft for activating later if needed: ornaments in a room, a character’s favourite saying, a health condition, a neighbour’s dog barking, an usual house your protagonist walks past, an old boat moored on the river …
Does leaving these highlighted or struck through sections muddy the read through afterwards? I find not, because my mind still follows the path through the ‘clear’ lines. The strike throughs etc you can quickly consider before deleting only if needed. When you think about it, a stroke of a pen is what a writer would have done before computers and typewriters, unless you believe the movies where every author got dramatic and screwed up passages in the fire.
There are times in my own life where I would like to go back and delete a line of dialogue here, rub out an action there. Perhaps even replace whole characters. Fortunately, as writers of stories, we can do that, just not, ironically, of our own story. Then, you realise that, like it or not, they have made you who you are now. Without them it may have been a smoother journey. But then, it wouldn’t be a story; as a storyteller, they would be the very bits you thought were gold.
Photo by Gabriel Kraus on Unsplash