Featured image by Drew Coffman
This week, my editing efforts seemed to have run into a brick wall when my approach to a (by design) exposition-heavy chapter started as a light edit and ended up as AAAAAARGH. Part of the reason was that the Piece of Sci-Fi Technology Used for Evil I was introducing in the chapter had been conceived a good five years ago, and when I wrote out exactly what it could do, my concusion was that 90% of the Technology’s capacity was not science fiction, but the story of Cambridge Analytica. My main problem wasn’t the need to ramp up the fi in the sci-fi, though – it was the realization that I’ve never really put the Technology’s ultimate purpose into words.
I mean, I knew that Technology existed to spread propaganda of Isolationist Message for the benefit of Evil Corporate Government. But at no point before had I actually asked myself: okay, but how exactly does the ECG benefit from its citizens believing in Isolationist Message? That marked the transition of the ECG’s image in my mind from a vague capitalist blob into a collective of people with interests, opinions, egos, and history. (More on that in another blog about the perils of writing a story without a supervillain.)
This is hardly the first “brick wall” moment in my writing or editing process. In the past, whenever I’d find myself rewriting the same chunk of story over and over again, the problem usually lay either before or behind the problematic piece. In the former case, I’d likely railroaded my characters into an unnatural place – so no wonder I couldn’t get them to act naturally anymore. In the latter, I had likely tried to build story without laying some backstory groundwork, so now I was trying to bullshit my way through instead of getting to the point.
Going even further back, when I tried to write the synopsis of First Original Novel I Ever Finished, I would fail miserably time and time again. I managed to cobble something together eventually, but looking back now I can see what my real problem was: it wasn’t as much of a story as of a string of events happening one after another. Try to synopsize an average day in your life, and you’ll see what I mean.
My conclusion from the numerous run-ins with these brick walls is: when the story seems to fall apart or get stuck in place, maybe it’s trying to tell you something. Maybe that’s the story’s way of saying “It’s not you, it’s me”. As in, there’s nothing wrong with you, the writer. You’re not blocked, you’re not stupid, you didn’t suddenly lose the ability to write. The problem’s in the story itself. Maybe you need to back up and figure out something about your world or your characters. Maybe you need to rethink some bigger things, like what are the stakes, what’s the conflict, where’s the growth, etc. Maybe you actually need to take your narrative apart and reassemble it in a different way. In the past year, I’ve done all of the above, to a varying extent, and my gut tells me that I’ve got a much better book to show for it (and I’m not even done yet).
Anyone having similar writing experiences? Tell me about your brick walls!
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