Ever since the invention of the assembly line, one of the fundamental assumptions of our culture has been that the most effective way of getting something done is to break the job down into small pieces or steps that get you from where you are to where you want to be. It’s a very effective approach for doing everything from making an omelet to assembling a car or a space station, from planning a wedding to learning to speak a foreign language.
To apply this approach to things that don’t have actual physical pieces that need to be put together, one has to begin by defining and describing the pieces. This can be tricky to do when you can’t see an actual widget in front of you. Nonetheless, the break-it-into-steps approach is basis of nearly every get-organized-and-accomplish-stuff system I have ever seen, from really high-level business models like Gant charts and critical-path models to magazine articles on how to arrange your kitchen.
The models that deal specifically with non-physical things like setting goals or managing business projects or learning a language differ in their details, but they implicitly agree on one thing: the importance of “edges.” By this they mean that when you define and describe the pieces that you are later going to assemble as part of your plan, they need to be clear and crisp and not overlap. It’s like drawing out the shapes of jigsaw puzzle pieces; if they don’t have nice, clean edges that interlock neatly, they won’t fit together later.
We do this with writing, the same as with everything else. English and literature classes teach us to analyze fiction into parts: character, setting, plot; theme, idea, atmosphere. Critique groups and writing blogs encourage it, because you have to break things down into pieces in order to figure out what’s wrong (and often, what to do about it).
The trouble is that the pieces of writing aren’t like the parts of a toaster. They aren’t made of metal or wood that stays in one specific shape and belongs in one specific place. They’re more like bits of wet clay: You can line them up in a row, and each bit is distinctly itself and clearly one particular shape and size, but as soon as you start putting them together, the edges disappear. They become one mass. Not only that, but if you pick up one of the bits and squeeze it or roll it between your fingers, the shape changes. It still has edges, but they’re in a different place.
This is extremely confusing for people who have been raised to break things down into pieces, on the assumption that this will help them put the pieces back together in the right places. With wet clay, there isn’t a “right place” for a particular bit of clay, and the bits of clay are pretty interchangeable because of the way you can reshape them. You have a shape that you are trying to create, and it needs a bit more mass on this side, but it doesn’t matter whether you grab one large bit or three small ones to bulk out that section.
And while some bits of writing can belong very clearly to one category or another, it is far more common for them to do several things at once. For example: “Martha had always hated the heavy bronze statuette of MacBeth’s three witches that stood on the corner of her grandmother’s mantelpiece.” That sentence tells the reader something about both Martha and the grandmother who owns the statuette; it also describes part of the setting (the statuette and the existence of the mantelpiece). So it has both characterization and setting. It could very well be related to theme, plot, or idea, depending on where the story goes (the statue is a murder weapon three chapters later; the witches are a recurring motif; the statuette is actually magical).
That sentence does not have the kinds of edges we’re used to. It’s possible to break it apart somewhat to provide them, but doing isn’t an improvement, to my thinking: “A heavy bronze statuette stood on the corner of the mantelpiece. It depicted the three witches from MacBeth. Martha had always hated that statuette. It belonged to her grandmother.” And even then, there’s really no way to separate the “setting and background description” part from the “plot relevant set-up for murder in Chapter 3” part.
In short, it is highly desirable for fiction to have muddled-together edges. To use another metaphor, writing fiction is like making a cake in this regard – it can be very useful to lay out all the ingredients in advance, all measured and methodical, but if you then dump the flour in a pan, set the two eggs on top, lay half a stick of butter next to the eggs, pour a cup of sugar on top of that, and then shove the pan in the oven without mixing, you aren’t going to get a very good cake.
To stretch the cake metaphor a bit more – if you take all your ingredients and mix them in the proper proportions and put them in an oven of the correct temperature, what do you have?
A raw cake.
You still need to add time.
(I’m not going anywhere with this—at least nowhere I’m aware of.)
I love your analogies here, both the clay and the cake. So very true! This is one of the reasons I disliked my high school English teacher who insisted on breaking everything down and was adamant that everything in the novel had an ulterior motive. (For example, if the author says the wall is yellow, it’s because he wants to imply the main character is feeling sick. Sometimes, the wall is just yellow for no reason!) Writing can be broken down, but it also needs to be mixed. One approach isn’t going to be the end-all for everyone.
More bad writing advice.
When more of us were still posting on rec.arts.sf.composition, I mentioned the how-to-write book I once encountered … I would warn you against it if I could remember either title or authors (two of them), but what they said was, that every novel should have a Purpose.
And that the Purpose of the novel should be able to be summed up in one sentence containing the words To Prove.
E.g., The Purpose of _To Kill a Mockingbird_ is To Prove that racial discrimination is Bad.
Or, The Purpose of _From Here to Eternity_ is To Prove that a peacetime army becomes degenerate.
I no longer have that book.
I, with my experience in ceramics, immediately took that analogy one step further — because while there are methods that involve putting together lots of separate pieces of clay (coil pots, for one), in many other styles it is a VERY bad idea, because if you join faces of clay of any size, you risk trapping air bubbles between them. And when heated, air bubbles expand at a different rate than clay, which generally leads to explosions in the firing process.
Air bubbles are such a problem that even schoolchildren working with clay (hopefully) know that you can’t just pick up a bunch of scraps from the table, smash them together, and keep working. You need to ‘wedge’ the clay, smashing it against the table repeatedly (the process is actually a lot like kneading) before it’s safe to work again.
. . . which has all sorts of fascinating implications as applies to writing, rather like Wolf’s comment about trying to analyze a cake’s ingredients from the finished product.
(Green Knight’s comment. That’s what I get for trying to reference things quickly.)
Nice post, and I quite agree. I’m an old computer wonk, so I’m long on the analysis side of life, and yet I have artistic “outlets” (music, photography, writing) so I have fun “analyzing” why those creative activities are indeed different. Your posts often speak to that part of me.
I’m a gestalt thinker, and I’m finding that a lot of computer programming isn’t sequential and can’t be broken down into neat sequences, particularly with an OOP paradigm. It’s much harder to find resources that cater to this style of thinking – the myth of computing being strictly sequential is a pervasive one – but it’s just that, a myth.
Arguments about genre boundaries is another case of where the edges can be vague. Most stories can easily be classed into genres, but most is not all.
A story with spaceships is probably science fiction, but what genre is it when they operate using magic and that is a plot point? I am thinking of Melissa Scott‘s Roads of Heaven trilogy.
… and even worse, if you have a cake, you cannot break it down into its ingredients and learn how to make one by analyzing each crumb. That’s kind of the point. A cake it not a flour-butter-sugar-eggs agglomeration, it’s a cake.
And in order to make a cake, you need to have a concept of cake-ness, of the whole you’re trying to achieve, because you can put the same things together and have pancakes, which are also a fine thing.
For me, analysis is not just about breaking something down into small parts but looking at a whole and picking one aspect of it to be examined in greater detail. And then you focus on something else. The advantage of that is that you can look a ‘inner monologue’ one day and ‘the plot’ the next and the choice of words and their rhythm the third day, and you can be looking at the same passage every time, – Martha thinking of the statue – and it’s ok (in fact, it’s great) for that piece of writing to have several purposes and fit into the whole in several ways.
Excellent suggestions. I use the clay metaphor a lot when talking about writing, but I’ve never really thought of it in those terms.
Has anyone heard of the literary theory known as “Narratology”? It does that. It basically breaks down words, sentences, paragraphs, and whole novels into what are essentially math equations. It takes all the love and creativity out of writing.
And unfortunately I had an English professor who was IN LOVE with it. Ew.
That;s starting to sound like the Auditors of Reality in Pratchett’s Thief of Time.
You’re not wrong. I’ve done a narratology-like read and evaluation of favorite books in the past. (I learned to do this while getting an English degree.) It was equal parts fangirl squee and scientific dissection. Where Pratchett’s Auditors of Reality and I differ is that they have no affection for, no independent experience with, no connection to the reality they audit.
Which is why, in my experience, many writing instructors preach the “write what you know” thing. Some people have trouble connecting with the fantastic or inhabiting imaginary/unknown places in their mind. It’s like they’ve forgotten (or never knew) how to play make-believe.
I never heard of it, so I went looking on-line for examples. Glad I missed out on it. Not to say that it looks all bad, but it does look like a limited-use “I need to self-edit and can’t get the mental distance” tool for writers. Narratology looks like it was designed by lit-crits to talk to other lit-crits about “value” and not writers/authors wanting to create.
Having said that, my creative process kinda-sorta works in a similar way to narratology. But then I’ve always been fascinated by processes. I’m the kind of person who picks something apart so I can figure out how it works. That way, I can do it myself and tweak things to fit my taste in the process.
The problem with Narratology is that it’s for the “academic” side of writing, not the WRITER’S side of writing. And often academics are really removed from the whole writing experience. Heck, sometimes they’re just removed from reality.
I know. I have one fit in the academic world (I’m a college professor) and one foot in the writing world… It’s strange how often they try to meet up and completely fail to see each other while passing by. It’s like the academics can’t see beyond the symbolism and literary techniques to actually see the STORY there. It’s why a lot of “academic” books are really boring to read, because they’re so focused on things other than the story.
Sorry, I got ahead of myself. XP Maybe I should do a blog post on this.
I remember when I wanted to be a college English professor. You have my respect and admiration for completing the journey. I’d love to read your take on it.
I got my bachelor’s in creative writing and ran screaming into genre. A lot of what I got taught by the creative writing instructors was like Narratology, only without the defined, codified connections. Even though I had to re-train myself how to write stories, I don’t consider my time wasted or what I learned worthless. But you’re very correct, there is a chasm between academics who study stories and the writers who write them.
One of the (many) things that sent me screaming into genre, was the realization that academic authors write for each other and that was why they insist on writing what you know. Because if it wasn’t a biographical/ auto-biographical work with serial numbers filed off, it was “inauthentic.” They were having cultural dialogs with each other via fiction rather just hanging out and going down the “my family is sooooo effed up…” conversational road.
I also boggled one of my Lit professors by reducing Gertrude Stein’s “impenetrable alienness” to “they’re just Grandma Stories. You must not have any German ancestry in your family tree.”
It sounds like something one of my Horrible Ex Writers Group(tm) would have loved. Eww, indeed.
In hindsight, I think she was just too insecure to have an opinion of her own, and so kept trying to shove some Ultimate Authority or (pseudo-)objective Fact in place of it. Being able to strip an emotion-laden scene down to a provable equation would have been right up her alley.
I have to say that, in addition to offering some of the most cogent and insightful articles on the creative process, this blog also has some of the most intelligent and thought-provoking commenters on the ‘Net.
Hear, hear! 😀