Writing-Systems and Structures

The numerous books on writing systems and story structure, etc., are always hard for me to relate to. I suppose I might be able to apply some of the principles they describe if I've already written the story, using theory as a strategy for restructuring a piece. But I just don't write that way, and my best fiction (based on how much kudos I get, and on how satisfied I am) arrives on the page as a surprise, an adventure, a process that evolves as I write. For me, writing is, ideally, a discovery that unfolds as I explore some concept or scene or character.

Many years ago I tried to write a screenplay. I constructed a treatment, and expanded it, and then started breaking it into scenes, beats, rising action, etc. I accepted the experts’ advice that if characters A and B have something to say to each other, it should be done in a stimulating and photogenic location -- an airplane hangar, on a boat in a storm, etc. And I learned that if the script were destined for television, the “acts” of the plot must be timed to accommodate regular commercial breaks. Even in theaters, timing for popcorn and pee breaks was highly recommended.

As I laboriously rejiggered my treatment, the whole project was transformed into a technical craft that reminded me of designing a crossword puzzle. The joy of writing — the process that I personally find so satisfying — was getting buried in technique and mechanics.

Of course, I realize that a writer who does this again and again, presumably as a career, must become so familiar with the mechanics that the burden I felt would no longer be a factor. And I realize that for any of these writing systems to work well, they have to be ingested and digested and become second-nature. At that point, they would no longer occupy the writer's mind and crowd out the story itself, the art and the natural flow.

I wonder sometimes if these systems emerge from the study of “successful” stories, more than from the process that successful writers actually went through. I should expect that starting out with the system, rather than starting almost anywhere else — especially that ineffable inner wellspring that’s virtually impossible to describe in a manual -- might, in practice, prove less helpful than these teachers suggest.

Still, understanding the structure is useful knowledge, and some sense of the stages inherent in compelling fiction may well be inherent in successful story-telling. Perhaps a viable, practical approach is to go back and forth between thinking about the mechanics and just writing, without committing to any one scheme for producing a good story. That is, come to know some of the principles, but leave them in the pre-conscious corridors of the nervous system while actively writing. Later, remember some of them while editing what has already been written. Leave the manuscript alone for a while, and then explore some of the how-to books — but with a skeptical eye. Return to the work and see if these principles rise up in response to what's been written. Then, perhaps, restructure, redesign, reconceptualize, re-plot, etc.

But the writing itself -- surely it has to start there, with the whacking of keys, the skritching of a pen, or the thumbing of a record button. I don't think it can ever start with method, and I fear that studying method prior to the writing will only kick the creative can farther down the road.