I distrust the term “plot” (not to mention “theme” and “setting”) in discussions of writing: it (and they) refers to an effect a story produces in the reading. But writing is an internal process writers go through (or put themselves through) in front of a blank paper that leaves a detritus of words there. The truth is, practically nothing is known about it. Talking about plot, or theme, or setting to a beginning writer is like giving the last three years’ movie reviews from the Sunday New York Times to a novice filmmaker. A camera manual, a few pamphlets on matched action, viable cutting points, and perhaps one on lighting (in the finished film, the viewer hardly ever sees the light sources, so the reviewer can hardly discuss them, but their placement is essential to everything from mood to plain visibility) would be more help. In short, a vocabulary that has grown from a discussion of effects is only of limited use in a discussion of causes.
A few general things, however, can be noted through introspection. Here is an admittedly simplified description of how writing strikes me. When I am writing I am trying to allow/construct an image of what I want to write about in my mind’s sensory theater. Then I describe it as accurately as I can. The most interesting point I’ve noticed is that the writing down of words about my imagined vision (or at least the choosing/arranging of words to write down) causes the vision itself to change.
Here are two of the several ways it changes:
First—it becomes clearer. Sudden lights are thrown on areas of the mental diorama dark before. Other areas, seen dimly, are revised into much more specific and sharper versions. (What was vaguely imagined as a green dress, while I fix my description of the light bulb hanging from its worn cord, becomes a patterned, turquoise print with a frayed hem.) The notation causes the imagination to resolve focus.
Second—to the extent that the initial imagining contains an action, the notating process tends to propel that action forward (or sometimes backward) in time. (As I describe how Susan, both hands locked, side-punched Frank, I see Frank grab his belly in surprise and stagger back against the banister—which will be the next thing I look at closely to describe.) Notating accurately what happens now is a good way to prompt a vague vision of what happens next.
Let me try to indicate some of the details of this process.
I decide, with very little mental concretizing, that I want to write about a vague George who comes into a vague room and finds a vague Janice …
Picture George outside the door. Look at his face; no, look closer. He seems worried …? Concerned …? No. Look even closer and write down just what you see: The lines across his forehead deepened. Which immediately starts him moving. What does he do? … He reached for the … doorknob? No. Be more specific … brass doorknob. It turned … easily? No, the word “brass” has cleared the whole knob-and-lock mechanism. Look harder and describe how it’s actually turning … loosely in its collar. While he was turning the knob, something more happened in his face. Look at it; describe it: He pressed his lips together—No, cross that line out: not accurate enough. Describe it more specifically: The corners of his mouth tightened. Closer. And the movement of the mouth evoked another movement: he’s pressing his other hand against the door to open it. (Does “press” possibly come from the discarded version of the previous sentence? Or did wrong use of it there anticipate proper use here? No matter; what does matter is that you look again to make sure it’s the accurate word for what he’s doing.) He pressed his palm against the door … And look again; that balk in his next movement … twice, to open it. As the door opens, I hear the wood give: You could hear the jamb split—No, cross out “split,” that isn’t right … crack—No, cross that out too; it’s even less accurate. Go back to “split” and see what you can do; listen harder … split a little more. Yes, that’s closer. He’s got the door open, now. What do you see? The paint—No, that’s not paint on the wall. Look harder: The wallpaper was some color between green and gray. Why can’t you see it more clearly? Look around the rest of the room. Oh, yes: The tan shade was drawn. What about Janice? She was one of the first things you saw when the door opened. Describe her as you saw her: Janice sat on the bed … no, more accurately … the unmade bed. No, you haven’t got it yet … Janice sat at the edge of the bed on a spot of bare mattress ticking. No, no, let’s back up a little and go through that again for a precise description of the picture you see: Janice sat on the bare mattress ticking, the bedding piled loosely around her. Pretty good, but the bedding is not really in “piles” … the bedding loose around her. Closer. Now say what you have been aware of all the time you were wrestling to get that description right: Light from the shade-edge went up her shoulder and cheek like tape. Listen: George is about to speak: “What are you doing here …?” No, come on! That’s not it. Banal as they are, they may be the words he says, but watch him more closely while he says them. “What—” he paused, as though to shake his head; but the only movement in his face was a shifting—Try again: … a tightening … Almost; but once more … a deepening of the lines, a loosening of the lip—“are you doing here?” Having gotten his expression more accurately, now you can hear a vocal inflection you missed before: “are you doing here?” There, that’s much closer to what you really saw and heard. What has Janice just done? She uncrossed her legs but did not look at him. Ordinary grammar rules say that because the sentence’s two verbs have one subject, you don’t need any comma. But her uncrossing her leg and not looking up go at a much slower pace than proper grammar indicates. Let’s make it: She uncrossed her legs, but did not look at him …
Now let’s review the residue of all that, the admittedly undistinguished, if vaguely noirish bit of prose the reader will have:
The lines across his forehead deepened. He reached for the brass doorknob. It turned loosely in its collar. The corners of his mouth tightened. He pressed his palm against the door, twice, to open it. You could hear the jamb split a little more
The wallpaper was some color between green and gray. The tan shade was drawn. Janice sat on the bare mattress ticking, the bedding loose around her. Light from the shade-edge went up her shoulder and cheek like tape.
“What—” he paused, as though to shake his head; but the only movement in his face was a deepening of the lines, a loosening of the lips—“are you doing here?”
She uncrossed her legs, but did not look at him.
And if you, the writer, want to know what happens next, you must take your seat again in the theater of imagination and observe closely till you see George’s next motion, hear Janice’s first response, George’s next words, and Janice’s eventual reply.
A reader, asked to tell the “plot” of even this much of the story, might say, “Well, this man comes looking for this woman named Janice in her room; he finds the door open and goes in, only she doesn’t talk at first.”
That’s a fair description of the reading experience. But what we started with, to write, was simply: George goes into a room and finds Janice. (George, notice, at this point in the story hasn’t even been named.) The rest came through the actual envision-ing/notating process, from the interaction of the words and the vision. Most of the implied judgments that the reader picks up—the man is looking for Janice; it is Janice’s room—are simply overheard (or, more accurately, overseen) suppositions yielded by the process itself. Let’s call this continuous, developing inter-change between imagination and notation, the story process; and let us make that our topic, rather than “plot.”
A last point about our example before we go on to story process itself: by the time we have gone as far as we have with our “story,” all this close observation has given us a good deal more information than we’ve actually used. Though I didn’t when I began (to momentarily drop my editorial stance), I now have a very clear picture of George’s and Janice’s clothing. I’ve also picked up a good deal about the building they are in. As well, I’ve formed some ideas about the relationship between them. And all of this would be rescrutinized as I came to it, via the story process, were I writing an actual story.
The general point: the story process keeps the vision clear and the action moving. But if we do not notate the vision accurately, if we accept some phrase we should have discarded, if we allow to stand some sentence that is not as sharp as we can make it, then the vision is not changed in the same way it would have been otherwise: the new sections of the vision will not light up quite so clearly, perhaps not at all. As well, the movement of the vision—its action—will not develop in the same way if we put down a different phrase. And though the inaccurate employment of the story process may still get you to the end of the tale, the progress of the story process, which eventually registers in the reader’s mind as “the plot,” is going to be off: an inaccuracy in either of the two story process elements, the envisioning or the notation, automatically detracts from the other. When they go off enough, the progress of the story process will appear unclear, or clumsy, or just illogical.
It has been said enough times so that most readers have it by rote: a synopsis cannot replace a story. Nor can any analysis of the symbolic structure replace the reading experience that exposes us to those symbols in their structural place. Even so, talking to would-be or beginning writers, I find many of them working under the general assumption that the writer, somehow, must begin with such a synopsis (whether written down or no) and/or such an analysis.
This, for what it’s worth, has not been my experience. At the beginning of a story, I am likely to have one or more images in my mind, some clearer than others (like the strip of light up Janice’s arm), which, when I examine them, suggest relations to one another. Using the story process—envisioning and notating, envisioning and notating—I try to move from one of these images to the next, lighting and focusing, step by step, on the dark areas between. As I move along, other areas well ahead in the tale will suddenly come vaguely into light. When I actually reach the writing of them, I use the story process to bring them into sharper focus still.
As likely as not, some of the initial images will suggest obvious synopses of the material between (one image of a man on his knees before a safe; another of the same man fleeing across a rooftop while gunshots ring out behind; a third of the same man, marched between two policemen into a van) that the story process, when finished, will turn out to have followed pretty closely. But it is the process, not the synopsis, that produces the story. The synopsis is merely a guide.
Writers are always grappling with two problems: they must make the story interesting (to themselves, if no one else), yet keep it believable (because, somehow, when it ceases to be believable on some level, it ceases to be interesting).
Keeping things interesting seems to be primarily the province of the conscious mind (which, from the literature available, we know far less about than the unconscious), while believability is something that is supplied, in the images it throws up into the mind’s theater, primarily by the unconscious. One thing we know about the unconscious is that it contains an incredibly complete “reality model,” against which we are comparing our daily experiences moment to moment, every moment. This model lets us know that the thing over there is a garbage can while the thing over there is a gardenia bush, without our having to repeat the learning process of sticking our nose in them each time we pass. It also tells us that, though the thing over there looks like a gardenia bush, from a certain regularity in the leaves, an evenness in its coloring, and the tiny mold lines along the stem, it is really a plastic model of a gardenia bush and, should we sniff it, will not smell at all. The story process puts us closer to the material stored in our reality model than anything else we do besides dream. This material is what yielded up the splitting door jamb, the strip of light, the mattress ticking. This model is highly syncretic: reality is always presenting us with new experiences that are combinations of old ones. Therefore, even if we want to describe some Horatian impossibility “with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle,” our model will give us, as we stare at the back of the creature’s neck, the tawny hairs over the muscled shoulders, in which nestle the first mottled, orange-edge pin-feathers. Come to it honestly, and it will never lie: search as you want, it will not yield you the height of pi, the smell of the number seven, the sound of green, nor, heft hard as you can in the palm of your mind, the weight of the note D-flat. (This is not to suggest that such mysterious marvels aren’t the province of fiction, especially science fiction; only that they are mysterious and marvelous constructions of the equally mysterious and marvelous conscious mind. That is where you must go to find out about them.)
When writers get (from readers or from themselves) criticism in the form “The story would be more believable if such and such happened” or “The story would be more interesting if such and such …” and they agree to make use of the criticism, they must translate it: “Is there any point in the story process I can go back to, and, by examining my visualization more closely, catch something I missed before, which, when I notate it, will move the visualization/notation process forward again in this new way?” In other words, can the writers convince themselves that on some ideal level the story actually did happen (as opposed to “should have happened”) in the new way, and that it was their inaccuracy as a story-process practitioner that got it going on the wrong track at some given point? If you don’t do this, the corrections are going to clunk a bit and leave a patch-as-patch-can feel with the reader.
Writers work with the story process in different ways. Some writers like to work through a short story at a single, intense sitting, to interrupt as little as possible the energy that propels the process along, to keep the imagined visualization clearly and constantly in mind.
Other writers must pause, pace, and sometimes spend days between each few phrases, abandoning and returning to the visualization a dozen times a page. I think this is done as a sort of test, to make sure only the strongest and most vitally clear elements—the ones that cling tenaciously to the underside of memory—are retained.
Masterpieces have been written with both methods. Both methods have produced drivel.
In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can’t be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.
Among those stories that strike us as perfectly plotted, with those astonishing endings both a complete surprise and a total satisfaction, it is amazing how many of their writers will confess that the marvelous resolution was as much a surprise for them as it was for the reader, coming, in imagination and through the story process, only a page or a paragraph or a word before its actual notation.
On the other hand, those stories that make us say, “Well, that’s clever, I suppose …,” but with a certain dissatisfied frown (the dissatisfaction itself, impossible to analyze), are often those stories worked out carefully in advance to be, precisely, clever.
One reason it is so hard to discuss the story process, even with introspection, is that it is something of a self-destruct process as well. The notation changes the imagination; it also distorts the writer’s memory of the story’s creation. The new, intensified visualization (which, depending on the success of the story process, and sometimes in spite of it, may or may not have anything to do with the reader’s concept of the story) comes to replace the memory of the story process itself.
Writers cannot make any wholly objective statement on what they were trying to do, or even how they did it, because—as the only residue of the story process the reader has is the writer’s words on the page—the only residue of the story process in the writer’s mind is the clarified vision, which like the “plot” synopsis, is not the story, but the story’s result.
— New York City
1972