Comments on: Plots and Process and Samuel R. Delany

By: Chip Delany

Chip Delany — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:45:03 +0000

Dear Greg,
Thanks so much for citing my essay on “Thickening the Plot” from back in the seventies. I’ve had a couple of thoughts on the topic since then, and they may be useful. When I wrote the piece, the country had been “televisionized” for only about twenty-five years. As someone sixty-five today, I had probably read a hundred or so books before, at age ten, I saw my first TV show (Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, at my friend Robert’s house). I’d had a chance to start the process of absorbing the various models for narrative from written texts, many of them books specifically for the young–Freddy the Pig, Doctor Dolittle, The Wind and the Willows, The Hardy Boys, The Wizard of Oz, Robin Hood, The Door into Summer and The Rolling Stones. That’s not how the process has likely worked, however, with anyone under fifty. While our young writers may eventually get to read all these books and many others, they start the process of learning what a narative is from television and–often–from films on television.
This one reason why recently I have been stressing the importance of the internalization of the proper models, as I do in my recent book ABOUT WRITING. While it includes the essay you so generously discuss, it puts it in the context of a discussion of model absorbtion–and specifically model absorbtion from written sources. What is made (and what you cite) as a small point in that essay is now much more important, with the growth of the visual media. Written stories do things that film and TV don’t do, don’t do very well, or can’t do.
By the way, though I didn’t mention it in that essay (because, in the mid seventies, I didn’t think I needed to), I’ve always been an outliner. There are things that structure –the over arching modular structure of a novel–can bring off
that no amount of “showing not telling” can accomplish.
When, after reading four-hundred pages of Henry James’s Wings of the Dove, Kate Croy turned to Merton Denscher and, to his question, “Why can’t we be as we were?” answered:
“As we were? We can never again be as we were,” I practically fell off my kitchen chair, had to get a class of ice water, and generally calm myself down, because I was so deeply shaken.
Though, forty years later, someone made a very good movie of the book, it did not have the same effect.

That’s structure at work.

By: Gregory Frost

Gregory Frost — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:54:02 +0000

That’s a very good point. And I’ll borrow from Delany one more time to concur with you: Writing isn’t about what you see in your head as the author. It’s about what you cause to happen in the mind of the reader. And a lot of it, it seems to me, is learning what you can and can’t cause to happen. As with your television analogy. A lot of what you can cause in a screenplay, you cannot do in a short story. But in any case, just moving the characters about like chess pawns on a board isn’t getting at it at all.

By: retterson

retterson — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:01:25 +0000

I’m finding it hard — as a child of television — to stop writing the movie in my head. I’m not writing a script; I’m telling a story. I find a lot of aspiring writers who do this and the result is gawdawful. You can almost feel the author’s nervous concern that they move all their characters across the screen: he moved here and she sat there.

There are great differences between narrative on screen and narrative prose.

It’s just too easy to write it the way one would “see” but, truly, the best writers don’t do it that way. They use words, not to form pictures in your head, but to induce a trance state that taps into a wholly different processing center of the brain. They tell a story that speaks to some primal instinct within.

(NB: I gather you know the difference and only used the movie-in-head analogy as short-hand for your internal process.)

I think it’s essential for anyone wanting to write stories to understand that it’s not just a matter of writing the movie they would see. It’s a matter of finding a narrative flow — a cadence of words, a sequence of action, etc. — that incites the reader to turn the page and keep turning as an autonomic response to a trance state.

By: Oz Drummond

Oz Drummond — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:28:27 +0000

I’m especially interested in the comments that the process of writing changes the internal vision. That rings true for me. The moment I try to make my artistic vision concrete, it’s different. The very nebulous nature of the idea, the chasing of it, the process, it all changes what’s on the page.

But the one thing I find frustrating in that is that as my mood changes, so does what I’m writing. While you write of the distraction of everyday ambient noise, you do not mention the ambient emotional noise. While it’s appropriate for me to filter my experience of the world through my writing, it seems to mutate the vision before I can finish the draft. I can’t write the notation fast enough. And if my mood shifts again, there goes the notation. In those situations I find an outline I wrote earlier helps me remember what I was trying to say in the first place.

By: Simon Haynes

Simon Haynes — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:01:52 +0000

I didn’t outline my first novel - in fact, I didn’t know it WAS a novel until I hit 25,000 words. That one took me over six years to write, on and off, and I was still editing it 10 years after writing the first word.

My second and third novels took me 18 months and 8 months respectively, with rough outlines. Each was completely rewritten before publication.

My fourth was comprehensively outlined but I diverged from the plot after a couple of chapters. The further I got the less I was using it, so in the end I sat down and wrote a new outline, keeping the material I already had for my next book.

I do prefer to write organically, jotting down wacky ideas and linking them into a book-like shape by trial and error, but I can’t write to a fixed deadline using that method. Once published, outlines became a necessary evil.