TIPS FOR MAKING YOUR FICTION AS
TANTALIZING AS FINE WINE
October 1988
I always liked those dotty wine commercials Orson Welles used to do. In a tone we might properly label stentorian, he would announce, “We will sell no wine before its time.” He managed to convey the implication that such a policy represented the highest possible moral and ethical stance on the vintner’s part, that there was even something self-sacrificing in postponing immediate sales for sake of the consumer’s palate.
If Mr. Welles were here, I might just quote William Blake at him. “If you trap the moment before it’s ripe,” the poet noted, “the tears of repentance you’ll certainly wipe.” Now it seems to me that—yes, Arnold?
I didn’t realize that Blake wrote for the Hallmark people, sir.
The couplet does have a sort of greeting card cadence to it, doesn’t it? I’d say it’s as well for Mr. Blake’s reputation that he also wrote other things. But never mind. The point here is that it’s no more than enlightened self-interest to sell no wine before its time, lest you wind up peddling wine that no one much wants to buy. The ripening process is an essential one, and to cut it short is to court disaster.
And this, I would suggest, is as true for fiction as for claret. A story must ripen in the mind as surely as must wine in a cellar. The metaphor goes only so far, because the ripening stage comes at a different time with the two delicate commodities. Wine is aged after it has been produced, while fiction often needs aging while it is in the idea stage, before a single word has landed upon the page.
I was not born knowing this. When I first began writing, shortly after the invention of movable type, I would generally sit down at the typewriter as soon as an idea came to mind—or even before. A few years ago I went through a batch of my early stories while putting together an anthology, and in a few instances it was easy to see that I had not given my ideas time to ripen. The stories were thin; one idea imperfectly grasped had been rapidly spun into a story. And in a couple of instances it looked to me as though I had started without an idea, simply sitting down and writing a scene and letting a plot find its way to me. Sometimes this had worked well enough so that a marginally publishable story had resulted, but I could see the story’s genesis in the finished work; it took too long getting started, and it wasn’t shaped and crafted as well as it might have been.
Rachel, you look troubled.
Sir, I just wonder if you should be telling us all this.
Admitting I have in years past occasionally written a less than perfect story?
No, sir. I think we all knew that. But you seem to be saying there’s an advantage in putting things off, and I think it’s dangerous to give that sort of advice to people for whom procrastination is so often a problem. Sir.
Procrastination’s not a problem, Rachel. I’ve told you that. Procrastination is a symptom. When you have a cold, Rachel, sniffling isn’t the problem. The infection is the problem, and sniffling is the symptom. Writers do often procrastinate, and we do tend to think that’s the problem, when the real problem is the particular self-doubt or anxiety or fear or mental conflict that leads us to procrastinate. But I’ve told you all that before.
Repeatedly, sir.
Letting a story idea ripen isn’t procrastination—or, if it is, it’s what I called it in an earlier column, “Creative Procrastination,” which you can find as a chapter in Telling Lies for Fun and Profit (Arbor House). I find myself returning to the theme because of experiences I’ve had writing a pair of short stories this past month.
Several months ago I got the idea of writing about a grown man who sleeps with a teddy bear. I wasn’t sure—
Sir, how did you happen to get the idea?
That’s none of your business, Arnold. As I was saying, I wasn’t sure what it was an idea for. I thought it would probably work best as a short story, then gave some consideration to the idea of writing it as a novel, then decided I’d probably been right the first time, that it would go best as a short story.
But it wasn’t a story yet. It wasn’t even the plot for a story. All it was, really, was the tiniest germ of an idea. A good idea, it seemed to me, and one that might well develop into something nice, but a long cry from a blueprint for a successful piece of fiction.
Fortunately we were traveling at the time, somewhere between Buffalo, Mississippi, and Buffalo, Texas. Otherwise I might have tried to write the story then and there, and I don’t think I would have done a very good job of it. Instead I thought about it for a while, and then I forgot about it.
Some people would criticize this last step as unnecessarily perilous. I could have made a note to myself, as I occasionally do and often recommend to others. Lately, however, I find myself rarely making notes of ideas, trusting that the good ones will linger in some dark corner of the mind while the rest are better off forgotten. I’m by no means certain this is true, but it’s the way I seem to operate.
In this instance, I did not completely forget the idea. It would come now and then to mind, occasionally after a glimpse of a stuffed animal, but sometimes with no obvious circumstantial prompting. All that happened on such occasions was that I would recall the idea and agree that it was a sound one, and that someday I would have to do something with it. But further plot elements did not surface. It remained, to all outward appearances, the same mere fragment it had always been.
Then in May I found myself in Sedona, Arizona, with a month to work on a novel. After a few days it became clear that I was not really ready to write the novel. I sifted through that rag-and-bone-shop I call my mind, and the teddy bear idea presented itself.
I thought about it. And, mysteriously, a plot began to form itself. I still didn’t really know exactly where the story was headed, but I had a sense of who the lead character might be, and what kind of circumstances would lead him to start sleeping with the bear, and what effect this might have on his life.
The next day I sat down to write the story, and within the week I had finished it. It was, I am certain, a vastly superior effort to what I would have turned out if I’d gone to work on it earlier, and not because of anything I had done. Because, in point of fact, I hadn’t done anything—not on a conscious level, at least. I had simply allowed the idea to ripen, and some other-than-conscious area of my mind had taken the opportunity to work on it. And, when I was ready to write it, there was something there to write.
“Some Days You Get the Bear” was one of two stories I wrote in Sedona. The other, “A Date with the Butcher,” was supposed to be a novel. It illustrates another stage in the ripening process, and I think it may be instructive.
Early in April I spent a sleepless night on a train. While it was not an experience I would hasten to repeat, some good did come of it; as I lay there bouncing around, the plot of a mystery novel came to me. It came in a flood, as such things sometimes do, with scenes and characters all vitally alive. I had the feeling that, if I were able to sit down immediately in a room with a typewriter and a stack of blank pages, I could turn out an entire book as rapidly as I could type.
Well, I often have that feeling, especially when I dream an idea or hatch it during a sleepless night. There’s a certain suspension of the critical sense that may be essential in order for creativity to surge that way, and as a result I may think I have a more fully developed notion than I do, or that everything’s sound when in fact there are some snags. In this case I did indeed have a good plot, and it was indeed quite well developed, but when I settled in to write it I found out I wasn’t really ready. I didn’t know as much as I ought to have about several of the characters. And the book needed a strong secondary plotline or it was going to be awfully thin. I found this out after I’d written 30 pages of it, and I think I probably could have pushed on and finished the book, and that it probably would have been acceptable, that I would have been able to publish it. But I was able to visualize a better book than I was at that stage able to write, and I knew the only way to realize that better book was to let the story ripen.
In this instance, I decided to aid and abet the ripening process by writing the idea right away—but as a short story. By condensing my central plotline into a long short story (it ran about 9,000 words by the time I was done with it), I was able to strengthen my grasp of the story enormously. I knew a lot more about the characters, about the pace and mood of the story, about its whole shape and tone and flavor, than I had known before I wrote it. And, by writing it as a short story, I programmed my subconscious to play with it in the coming months. Sometime in the fall I’ll probably be ready to write the book version, and at that point I hope and trust it will be ready for me to write it.
Sometimes this same ripening process happens with projects that look as though they’ve been abandoned. As I’ve noted often enough, I have on many occasions had books go dead on me after 20 or 50 or 100 or even 200 pages. There’s something wrong, with either me or the book, and there’s no point going on. Sometimes I save those stillborn darlings, hoping there’ll be a way to save them. More often I toss them.
Years later I’m apt to find that what I thought was rotting actually was ripening. In 1977 I wrote almost 200 pages of a book about a pimp; four years later elements of that failed effort transformed themselves into elements of Eight Million Ways to Die. Similarly, a key component of “A Date with the Butcher” had its origin in a detective novel that petered out after 40 pages back in ’83.
This is not uncommon, and it’s one reason why many writers save every scrap they write. I tend to take the opposite tack, feeling that what’s worth saving is not what I’ve put on the page (which after all didn’t work in the first place) but what remains rooted in the subconscious. Even when I do save aborted manuscripts, I’ve found I almost never reread them before using the material anew. The manuscript of my pimp novel was right there in the drawer while I wrote Eight Million Ways to Die, and I never once hauled it out and looked at it.
I suppose there’s a moral to all of this. Can any of you think of it? Yes, Rachel?
We will publish no fiction before it’s ripe.
I’m not altogether sure I like the sound of that, Rachel. Arnold?
Never put off until tomorrow what you can postpone indefinitely.
Ah, there’s the rub! Because I quoted only part of Blake’s poem to you: here’s the complete quatrain:
If you trap the moment before it’s ripe,
The tears of repentance you’ll certainly wipe;
But if once you let the ripe moment go,
You can never wipe off the tears of woe.
The trick, of course, lies in judging the moment of ripeness, and different fruits have different ripening times. Random Walk, my latest novel, was ready to be written ten days after the idea for it flashed into my mind. It would have been folly to delay. On the other hand, one major component of Random Walk had its origin in a novel I tried to write four years ago, and discarded after 140 pages. I suppose the answer may be that none of a writer’s time is wasted—not the time you spend writing, and not the time you spend not writing, and not even the time you spend writing stuff that doesn’t go anywhere. It’s all part of the process, and perhaps it’s the nature of the process to remain mysterious.