Writing

One of the most difficult things to do with a piece of fiction is to diagnose what’s wrong with it. That’s one reason we writers often pull in Beta Readers and other folks to offer up objective feedback, because as the creator and adoring god of our fictional universe we sometimes can see its flaws clearly.

Recently, while working on a novel I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a while, I was reminded of a basic mistake you can make when writing any fiction: Hanging onto ideas long after they’ve been proved to be not working.

Kill Them So Your Story May Live

Every story begins with ideas — interesting bits and pieces you want to explore. Sometimes that’s a character who pops into your head and demands attention, sometimes it’s a great sci-fi premise or a perfect murder mystery. And that main idea will inspire a bunch of other ideas that at first blush often seem perfect and foundational.

But sometimes ideas don’t stay fresh, and they can actually sour to the point where they’re actively hurting your story. But it’s hard to let go. Sometimes it’s the Fallacy of Sunk Costs that makes us think since we’ve already spent 20,000 words and several weeks of our lives on developing an idea we have to keep carrying it to the end. Sometimes it’s just the belief that if the idea was part of our original inspiration for the story, we have to carry it to the end.

You don’t.

Jettisoning an idea that might be cool but isn’t working with the story as it has evolved is tough, but often yields a burst of energy. That novel I mentioned earlier is set in a prison, and part of the original idea involved a group dedicated to planning an escape. The main character is jaded and disinterested in escape, believing it to be pointless, and I originally imagined getting a lot of tension out of that dynamic.

But as I worked on the story, I found myself continuously having to remind myself about the escape stuff, and shoe-horning it in. Eventually the novel kind of collapsed on itself, and I took a step back, trying to figure out if it was salvageable. I concluded it was — but decided I needed to lose the escape stuff. On paper it was a good idea. In practice, it was getting in the way of the emerging story I was interested in. Dropping that idea turned out to be the secret; after ditching it, I tore through a revision with renewed energy.

The moral of this post is simple: Don’t get too attached to ideas. With ideas, being “good” isn’t enough — they have to work. Being willing to drop a perfectly good idea is often the difference between a successful first draft and a novel that just sucks your energy dry and refuses to take its final form.

Of course, sometimes every idea is terrible, like that time when I had really long hippie hair as a teenager and went to my old Italian barber and asked for a ‘trim’ despite his clear hostility.

Writing a story can be hard work. There’s a huge difference between a premise and a plot, and bridging that gap can be difficult. I’ve certainly had plenty of experiences where a bright, shiny inspiration that seems destined to blossom into a robust novel turns out to have just enough gas to make a short story. Or the realization that the story I’m working on is boring me to death even though it’s technically novel-length and a real story.

In either situation, the weary writer will lean back from their keyboard and scratch their chin thoughtfully and contemplate how to salvage the situation. And sometimes they will make the terrible mistake of ginning up a Busy Emergency, which is a term I just made up.

The Midnight Sky

I started thinking about this while watching The Midnight Sky, a film directed by George Clooney, currently streaming on Netflix.

Some mild spoilers to follow.

It’s an okay film in which Clooney plays a dying scientist who remains behind at an isolated Arctic research station when it’s evacuated due to a global catastrophe that soon leaves pretty much the whole of humanity dead. He stays behind to contact the crew of the Aether, a spaceship returning from a mission to determine if one of Jupiter’s moons is habitable. They don’t know they’re returning to a planet that’s become a deathtrap, and Clooney’s character wants to warn them.

That’s an intriguing premise! The film itself is a bit slow, but well made. At one point about forty minutes in, however, someone lost faith in the forward momentum of their story and introduced a Busy Emergency.

A Busy Emergency is when you thrust your characters into a panic situation just to give your story some oomph, some sudden energy. It can serve to demonstrate their skills or the way they handle stress, and it can even tie into your larger plot. But even if it does, it’s generally a meaningless jolt of action designed to juice up a sleepy story. It’s easy to diagnose: If you can remove it and its consequences without changing the core of the story, then you know it exists just because the writer was worried they needed something to wake up the reader/audience.

In The Midnight Sky, life on board the Aether is presented as pretty comfortable. It’s one of those spaceships with perfect simulated gravity and lots of creature comforts. Everyone is nice, and two of the astronauts have started a relationship and gotten pregnant. The crew experiences some mounting anxiety when they can’t contact anyone on Earth, but otherwise their sole purpose in the story is to give Clooney’s character a reason to do things (there’s also a twisty bit that you can see coming from a mile away that emotionally links Clooney to the crew).

Suddenly, the Aether veers off course! Everyone on the ship leaps into action, fiddling with this or that and analyzing the situation. They determine they can still get to Earth, but will have to pass through an area of the solar system that has never been charted, so they don’t know what to expect. This Busy Emergency leads to some tragic consequences for the crew, but ultimately has zero impact on the trajectory of the plot. If you removed it entirely and just had the Aether sailing homeward in untroubled space waters, not much would change.

Busy Emergencies are usually a sign that you are stretching a premise, like taking a short story and making it into a novel. They can be short, intense scenes designed to offer an adrenaline spike, or they can be lengthy action sequences — possibly very good action sequences — that just don’t accomplish much.

The rule of thumb is, if you can remove a sudden infusion of action without requiring extensive rewrites, it’s probably a Busy Emergency and you should contemplate why it’s in there. Of course, you can make a Busy Emergency into a more organic bit of plotting if you figure out how to make it essential, if you can get it to do some plot work or character work — if you can make it into a sequence that would actually matter if it was removed.

Of course, a Busy Emergency is better than a Busy Disaster, which is what I wind up calling most of my failed novels. It’s also, not coincidentally, a cocktail I invented in which I pour the dregs of whatever’s left in my bar into a glass and chug it, then wake up a week later.

LIKE a lot of writers, I read a lot of books. If you’re a writer who doesn’t read a lot — and read widely — reconsider your life choices, because I can tell writers who don’t read, or who only read narrowly. The former write like they’re describing a movie, and the latter write in a specific, usually quite stilted style (I have one writer acquaintance who thinks everything written after 1950 or so is trash, and their work reads like a gentleman of leisure in 1870 decided to try his hand at popular fiction).

Reading widely can be a burden, of course. In my professional life I review books, which means I sometimes encounter truly terrible novels written by people with more ambition and discipline than talent. I admire anyone who writes a novel — truly — but the desire to write isn’t always enough to produce something great.

But reading these bad novels gives me plenty of insight into what people get wrong. An example that’s come up a few times in recent books I’ve read is the Vanishing Character. It goes like this: The story begins with Character A, an spends a goodly amount of time with them — sometimes dozens of pages, multiple chapters worth of story. Then Character A vanishes for a long, long time. Like, completely, totally, entirely vanishes.

John Travolta in Pulp Fiction Looking Around in Confusion

There’s nothing wrong with vanishing a character, even for a very long time. But you have to consider how your reader will react, and you have to have a very clear purpose. If your character is vanishing because you ran out of story to tell about them, you need to rethink your story and its structure. If you have a plan for that character that involves making the reader forget about them so you can surprise them later, you need to think objectively about whether you’re pulling that off — about whether your readers will be fooled, or if they’ll spend the middle section of your story wondering why the character disappeared.

Because the real risk is that your story will feel like two separate books, pasted together — especially if your vanished character never turns up again, their purpose served. If the character’s purpose is purely back story or set up, think about how much time you’re spending on them. Readers can more readily accept a vanished character in what’s clearly a prologue or short back story chapter as opposed to half the novel.

Finally, consider tone and genre. I recently read a book with a vanished character where the beginning of the story is soaked in magic and occult happenings. Then the character vanishes, and the middle section of the book reads like a completely different story, with exactly zero of those things. You can get away with one of those things, but rarely both.

Some people ask me if reading bad novels can rub off on you and make your own writing worse just as great novels can make your writing better. The answer is, gobs, I hope not <uncorks bottle and drinks directly from it for several seconds>.

Just about every writer has That Book. You know the one: You started it when you were a much younger person, filled with hope. It keeps dying on the vine. Sometimes you make it 50,000 words through before it melts away like an ice cream in the rain, sometimes you write 65 versions of the first paragraph before setting yourself on fire.

But you always go back.

You go back because there’s something there. Maybe it’s a premise you love, but can’t make work. Maybe it’s a character that continues to live in your brain rent free. Maybe it’s just some especially good writing you haven’t been able to marry to a coherent story yet. Whatever the reason, the project goes in and out of drawers and recent files lists, never quite abandoned, never quite finished.

The Balance

I have a writer friend who has been working on the same novel his entire life. Literally, one novel. He’s written a very small number of other things, but this one novel has been his obsession for decades. Technically, he’s finished dozens of versions of it — complete, coherent novels. But he’s never quite satisfied, and he keeps going back to it and starting over. He tries different approaches, tweaks the characters, updates the setting, changes the rules. Sometimes he stops work on it for years at a time and just lives his life, not writing anything.

That last part is alien to me, but I wonder sometimes if I should take a note or two from the rest of his approach. I’m generally a fast writer. I like my first drafts (probably too much) and usually tear through a story pretty quickly. But I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t, if maybe I might benefit from letting more stories sit and marinate for long periods. But who has time? I’m going to die someday, kids. I can’t take the risk that I’ll be leaving a notebook filled with idea I never got around to working on.

I do have a novel I can’t quit. It’s been two years now, which I know for some writers isn’t very long, but for me that’s unusual. I love all the parts of the novel, but I don’t like the whole they Voltron into. And so I keep putting it aside, then tearing it open and trying to find a new path for the characters and setting and bits of business in there that I do love.

I’m not sure this book will ever be a success, but unlike almost all my other weird failures, this one is still alive in my head. Usually when I hit a certain level of frustration with a book I start to drift away from it, and slowly forget it. Sometimes, if I’m 95% to an actual novel, I’ll put in the effort to cruft up a serviceable ending because I’m a completist, but that’s with the full knowledge that the book is going into a drawer probably forever after that. But this one keeps whispering to me that there’s a plot that will pull it all together, I just have to find it.

Strategery

So, if you’ve got a book that won’t gel but also keeps flopping around, refusing to suffocate, what can you do. Here’s how I’m going to try and get this thing finally off the ground:

1. Plantsing. As some of you no doubt know, I’m a Pantser by nature. I take an idea and run with it, and sometimes after several months of running I have a novel, sometimes an enormous mess. But when I’ve got a novel that’s a hot mess like this one, it can sometimes be very helpful to chart the plot I have, then plot out the rest of the book. The shift in approach often clarifies things.

2. Brain Salad Surgery. Sometimes when your plot sputters out halfway through like this, the problem isn’t figuring out where to go next, but to figure out where you went wrong 100 pages ago — or even further back. So if the Plantsing doesn’t yield fruit, I’ll probably try starting fresh with a brand new beginning, then slowly fold in stuff I like from later in the story. Sometimes that jolts things back to life.

3. Go Episodic. And sometimes the solution is to just keep writing. Just keep writing little vignettes and short stories and subplots and backstory and whatever else I can think of. The material produced probably ends up being cut in the theoretical future of this novel, but in the mean time my Underbrain might tease a solution out of the material. And if nothing else, some of those episodes might turn into standalone short stories.

I’ll keep y’all posted. In the mean time, if you’re working on a novel that just won’t give in and become great (or at least coherent), maybe try one of these tricks. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to start drinking. Don’t look at me that way. It’s my process.