The Two People That A Writer Has To Be
I heard an interview with Scott Frank the other day. He’s the guy who wrote the screenplays for Out of Sight, Get Shorty, and Minority Report, clearly a man with a serious handle on how to put stories together. So it was incredibly gratifying to hear him say this:
I find that when I really conscious of thematic things at the beginning, and I try to write from a thematic idea, or even structure … whenever I’m that clear, it’s bad. It just comes out awful, because it feels built — it feels like either the theme was built, or the characters were being plugged in in a way that doesn’t work.
I’m making it sound way more pretentious than it really is. You just don’t want to think about it too much — you want to just kind of do it and think about it afterwards, and kind of shape it and apply your intellect to it, once you have this blob. It’s a very messy process.
This is more or less exactly the same way I write, with almost exactly the same caveats. If I try to start with anything even resembling a theme, or a style, or a structure, the story implodes after a couple of pages. I’m sure other writers are able to build their stuff around thematic scaffolding — but I can’t. It’s too damn hard.
And there’s a reason for that — Frank hints at it when he talks about shaping the blob, and it’s why writers are generally such neurotic insecure people. The source of story, buried inside all of their heads, is a mysterious, flighty, cantankerous cipher. You don’t know what it is, you don’t know where it is, and you don’t know why it does what it does. All you know is that you can sometimes sit down at a desk and fumble around in your mind and open a spigot and wait and coax and hope and finally a couple of drops of raw id spill out and if you’re lucky and patient those drops quicken into a little stream and if you’re even luckier the stream becomes a river.
The important thing to do when fortune smiles on you this way — the crucial thing — is to leave everything the fuck alone. Do not attempt to divert the flow, or shape its contents, or interfere in any way. Just let it happen. It’s a djinn’s gift — real and tangible only as long as you play by its rules. Mess with it, even a little, and it disappears into a puff of cackles and derision.
I’ve taken this maxim entirely to heart over the years. It’s gotten so that I’m even suspicious of plots. They seem like an dangerous imposition on the whole, delicate apparatus. Whenever I try to intervene in a story that’s going in a direction I’m not entirely comfortable with, I feel like some cigar-chomping studio exec: prying himself out from behind my desk, waddling over to the writer, informing him that his screenplay needs more explosions, or tigers, or boobs, or transvestite werewolf hunters. It’s no way to motivate the talent.
So that’s the first part of the job — ride the beast for as long as it lets you, and do everything in your power to make it happy.
I’ve had some minor success with this anti-technique in the last couple of years — not the kind where any actual stories are sold, of course — more the minor, incremental kind that keeps things interesting, and worth doing. More importantly, I’ve had nothing but failure when I try anything else. The mysterious djinn inside my head gets its way, or it melts back into the shadows and disappears for days, or weeks, on end. Period.
But that’s not everything, of course. Once you’ve got all the raw material, you have to step in with your conscious brain — the part that you actually own — and finish it. That’s the second part of your job. Everything you need is there, pretty much, it’s now a question of chiseling it down into something presentable. The chunk of raw id you’ve just dumped onto the page may be sparking with potential, but until you shape it into something palatable, something that someone else might actually want to read, then it’s just that — potential. It’s like sculpture — you may see the statue embedded in that giant hunk of rock, but until you chip away at all the stuff that isn’t the statue, you’ll be the only one who does. The only difference between a sculptor and a writer is where they get their rocks — sculptors coax them out of quarries, writers coax them out of their brains.
So a writer actually has to be two, distinctly different, people: a passive conduit, and an active shaper. Part of the difficulty lies in know when to be which: at what point do you step in and start directing the show? Jump too soon, and you dam the flow, or redirect it into canals of your own making — you tame it, contain it, render it worthless. Jump too late, and the story floods its banks, drowns the countryside, submerges all the machinery that was waiting patiently for a chance to fashion it into something coherent.
There aren’t any answers here. Every story has its own rules, which it doesn’t tell you about. The process of writing is, always and everyday, a journey into the dark parts of the map, where getting lost isn’t just inevitable — it’s the whole point.
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