I’ve established that I’m not an outliner. When I try to sit down and write a rigorous outline of a story, it sucks all of the life out of the story for me, and I end up not writing it because, to me, it’s already written. That happened my first attempt at a novelization of Impressions, though after a several year long intermission, I was able to return to the project (and the first draft is now almost finished). Now, I know that my outlines need to look more like summary blurbs, offering me a few key points of the story to guide my imagination, and my memory, when I sit down to actually write.
Yet, I’ve come to realize that I’m not a “discovery” writer, either. I hear other authors who are true discovery writers talk about their stories taking them by surprise, or their characters wandering off in an unexpected direction, and these things do not happen to me. By the time that I sit down to write, whatever the core idea is has been tumbled and polished in my brain long enough that, while I will invent small scale things as I go, the broad strokes are already present, and the story is always, firmly, in my control. It should be easy, then, for me to finish stories…yet I often find myself stuck around the ¾ mark, gearing up for an end that I haven’t quite figured out how to reach.
In that sense, getting to the end of a story can feel like trying to solve a puzzle, where I know what the end state should be, but I don’t have a perfectly clear vision of how to get there. Take a short story I’ve been working on recently. It’s a three-part piece, about five thousand words each, playing around with a magic system that I developed ages ago without a story, and partially inspired by my recent reading of Shahnameh. I wrote the first two parts in a single day, and the struggled with the final part for weeks. I knew how I wanted the story to end, and I even had a vision for the rough steps that should happen along the way, but getting to that point was tricky.
Again, it wasn’t discovery writing. I wasn’t stumped because I didn’t know what should be happening, but rather that I couldn’t quite express what was happening in a coherent way. This problem arises again and again in my writing, and I’ve finally realized that it is a matter of resolution. Rather like getting a better understanding of a place with a higher resolution picture, I need a higher resolution understanding of the ending when I encounter these difficulties. The whole story needs to end, not just the parts that I’ve specifically envisioned. In the golems story I’ve referenced in this post, I had a clear idea for the ending for two of the characters, but how that ending fit into the world and affected the rest of the characters remained a mystery. Until I solved that puzzle, I couldn’t make the part of the ending that I did fully understand work.
Thus, we come to defining the end. Whether that’s the end of the chapter, the sequence, the part, or the story, if I only have that partial understanding of the ending, I can’t effectively write any part of it. Overcoming that is not a matter of discovering or exploring that which does not yet exist, but of improving what I already know about the story. Acknowledging this may not make my ¾ point difficulties easier or faster, but it will make them less frustrating to me, and if they can be defined in this way, I can develop techniques to improve matters. If I succeed…well, there may be a few extra stories ready for release this year.
IGC Publishing 