The Story Writes Itself

I think it might do some good to discuss structure at this point, or at least the concept of structure, where it pertains to writing. What the story is, where it's going, how it's relevant... and what our motivations are from moment to moment. Let's take a plain, ordinary piece of writing as a stepping-off place:

Janine set the plate before her husband, knowing how much he liked sausages and hoping that it might give him strength to face his day. Fridays were always hard for him, she knew that. It seemed a little odd, sometimes, how far they had come together, to where the day of the week mattered more than things like the birth of their two daughters, now ten, or the angst they once felt when they'd struggled through university together, almost two decades ago. Sitting in her own seat, she thought with a smile about the cute boy that had sat next to her, across the aisle, whom she once pined after in hopes that he'd ask her to the upcoming dance. Now that boy was across the table from her... with a big grin on his face at the prospect of the sausages.

On a small scale, we're invited to look at this not as something grand or mechanical, but rather as an unfolding of details. We start in the present, tether that to things that are ongoing, then stretch out to provide more context as to their lives. Then, we stretch back first to one memory, failing to dwell upon it, then further still to the beginning of their lives, seeing them at different ages... then looping back to the present again by invoking the effect of the first action we described. This is plain nuts-and-bolts writing; any time that we want a paragraph that grounds our reader in a given moment, we can repeat the structure again; not so stringent that it might be noticed, but comfortable in knowing that this structure has been used reliably for centuries.

Yet here the tendency is to ask what genre this is — and therefore to suppose that this structure adheres to a specific sort of genre, that relating to family, personal history or even love. But this is a superficial reading, one that many new writers perform without thinking. It supposes that because the overt subject is sausages, this itself defines the purpose or "nature" of the thing being described, an error that unfortunately assumes words are not bricks, but inherently fixed to certain kinds of structure.

We haven't said enough in the above to delineate it as a specific genre. Janine and her husband could be having their breakfast on a space station. Her husband's "Friday" could be the day he takes the ferry to dump the body of whatever hapless person these two murder each week. He might have to deal with the local home owners' meeting on Fridays while she dresses and heads off to the legislature as a congresswoman. A truck, being chased by police, might be mere seconds from crashing through the wall; it might kill her husband; it might launch them both into some horrific kidnapping scenario. We don't know what the next paragraph might say, but it may well say anything we want.

Consider this problem with regards to our story's greater inherent structure. Suppose, knowing nothing about the plot, we begin with the idea that Jack is going to shoot Ray in the fifth chapter. That's all we know. What do we need? Well, we need a motive for Jack to do it, which requires the presentation of incidents within the story that supplies and explains that motive before the bullet begins its journey. We need an opportunity for Jack, so in some way he must be able to find Ray, arrange the meeting, expect the meeting to happen and have a pretense for the space itself. We must build Jack's character in a way that plausibly explains a person who is willing to shoot another person, regardless of whom that is. This plausibility extends to others who know Jack, who must in turn plausibly be willing to be married to him or friends with him... which creates a number of sequences we must invent to explain to the reader how those relationships function. At the same time, all this has explained nothing about Ray. Why is he, why is shooting him the best plan, what does Ray want, what are the consequences of Ray's being shot at... because, as yet, we've said nothing about the success of Jack's plan. Does he succeed? Or is Ray merely injured, or missed? And after the shooting itself, we still need to express Jack's reaction to his own choice, the reaction of those who find out, Ray's reaction, the general fallout and much, much more. We don't need to invent a plot. We need only start with this character makes this choice, then suss out all the implications of that.

A story built this way is never arbitrary, never contrived, because every piece of it has to fit precisely together like a jigsaw puzzle; any piece that must be pounded into place will inevitably look, to the reader, that it doesn't belong. Moreover, because we, as the writer, are solving the problem before writing the story, our peculiar way of solving that puzzle defines a necessarily unique, personally-affected approach. I wouldn't find the reason for Jack to search Ray that my best friend might, or that my daughter might, or that the neighbour across the street might. We aren't the same person, so our view of what makes Jack, or his wife, or his children, or Ray, or the detective going over the details or any other character in the story, will always differ. We can use the same premise a myriad number of times... but change any puzzle piece in our initial conception, and every other piece has to change in turn.

The plot evolves from the premise; the characters also, because they must plausibly exist in a specific way, that we guess at and settle into, as we become more familiar with their voices. But where, in all this, does genre do any heavy lifting? How does knowing the genre of the story I'm telling contribute to the character's choice of actions. It might suggest a setting, but then, it would have to be a setting we could manipulate to fit the premise... and we might find ourselves incapable of placing it in an urban ghetto, in Indonesia, or in an Edwardian setting. We are limited by our understanding of place and time, and our capacity to research and grasp those things. The genre we pick is far more defined by where we can imagine ourselves, than the reverse of imagining ourselves in genre we don't understand.

A premise like "Jack shoots Ray" might seem to adhere to a classic action or thriller... but it could just as easily be a western, a conflict between professionals in a factory setting, a family drama, a science fiction story or, of course, a murder. The shooting could be premeditated... but we haven't actually stated that it must be. The shooting might be accidental. It might happen while Jack is cleaning his gun, or while two friends are hunting together, or in a slow-paced crime drama where Officer Jack mistakes Officer Ray for a perp on the run. We might be on a battlefield, we might be rounding the horn on an 18th-century frigate, we might be two boys aged eight. We absolutely have not, through our premise, established anything yet except that a bullet flies between the two named persons. We can't even say for certain that they're both men.

In building a narrative, it's up to us to confront our own blind spots. The naivete of our writing, its ordinariness, is based not on the premise, the supposed plot or the characters, but upon our limitations in seeing what's possible, as well as our prejudices about what kind of story we want to write. If our interests in stories are extremely narrow, that will define the hard boundaries surrounding the writers we can be. Even in any particular genre — a term invented for the purpose of selling books, not writing them — our fluidity of mind and capacity to think outside the norm provides infinitely odd and engaging possibilities. Writing isn't limited. The number of plots, the concept of newness, the so-called impossibility of originality, these things reflect the limits of individual human beings, who are expressing their limitations, their incapacity to see further than they can, their unwillingness to drop suppositions and inflexibility. Their limitations need not be ours. We need not measure ourselves as writers by their standard.

How much skill we have is a limitation, but it is one we can train ourselves above. Vision, very often, cannot be trained. It is often shaken by a staggering, usually unpleasant, metaphorical blow to the ego. But if that doesn't happen, our vision, or lack thereof, can cripple us no matter how good a writer we are. "Seek, therefore, the sight of the world you know not," was the 19th century approach. In this present, it is merely to open pages on an internet that we shy from opening. Unbind yourself, Prometheus. We must look outside our curated realities, our safe, familiar algorithms, our ideological comfort zones. There is no barrier between us as writers and the knowledge, perspectives and realities we lack — except willful blindness. Nothing is definitely true where it comes to expressing the story we have to tell. We need only have one.