“Think of the book you most want to read and then shamelessly write it.”
– JD Salinger
GOING DEEPER IN THE REWRITE
“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”
– Albert Einstein
At one time or another we have all had our story. The one about how we were wronged. Some of us have perfected it over the years, (I know I have) made it bulletproof, unassailable. It’s a pretty good story. Sometimes it’s even true! However, as storytellers we must remember that every story has an ending.
An ending is simply the natural resolution to a theme. In our personal lives we may go round and round with our story, but in literature, revisiting the same beat gets old real quick. We are interested in what the hero comes to understand as a result of his journey.
Because we are always writing our ‘story’ to one degree or another, being curious about the ending is an invitation to transformation. This is why writing can be so thrilling, because we suddenly realize that time is of the essence. The clock is ticking and we are hurtling toward the end, which may mean the death of our old identity, the death of our attachment to the victim/hero ‘idea’ or ‘belief’ of the first act.
In story, to stay in the same place is to die. As John Gardener says in On Moral Fiction ‘everything that happens in fiction leads to a deeper and deeper understanding’. There can sometimes be a tendency in the rewrite for the writer to want to escape the drama of his story. This might sound strange, since logic would suggest that conflict is our goal, but here is why I think this can happen. Once we begin to gain clarity about our hero transformed, we begin to understand the hero’s victimhood in the first act, and sometimes this can feel embarrassing. The writer might think, ‘yuck, I don’t want to explore that aspect of my nature.’ It feels ugly, too revealing. This can be a disservice to our story, and may sound the death knell to all of the great unconscious work we have done in our first draft. There can be a desire to toss it all out and start again, with more noble ambitions for our hero.
Don’t do it.
We don’t want to neuter the aliveness of our hero’s journey for some idea of a better man. We care about our hero, not because he is good, but because he desires something.
In my experience there is oftentimes an invisible line I approach in the rewrite where the work starts to get quite specific and I begin to glimpse my limitations. This is where I can withdraw or I can be curious about the nature of my limitations and where they live in my story.
What I’m saying is that it can be helpful for us to develop a healthy relationship to our embarrassment. It is natural at this point to shut down or tune out. But if we can develop a sense of fun, or at least an objective detachment, our stories will become more dynamic.
Sometimes we may even replace that aliveness with our idea of something more dramatic that is really just another way of sidestepping the truth.
“Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose — as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.”
- Joseph Conrad
It is necessary to expose the nature of humanity in all of its messiness if the reader is to connect. As we begin writing, we may have an idea of what this entails, but as I keep saying, ‘our story asks everything of us for a reason: if it didn’t, we would never surrender’. Let’s continue to be curious about the nature of our hero’s struggle, his pettiness, jealousies, judgments, fears and desires. As we are specific about these aspects of our characters, when we tell the truth in all its jolie-laide, our story will ripen naturally.
Until next month…
Al