Growing Stories on the Book Tree: Or Why Sometimes it Pays to “Do Nothing”
Everyone has their favorite writing manual, the one they found most useful (probably when starting out.) My own personal favorite is Damon Knight’s “Creating Short Fiction.” Knight’s manual is full of the kind of detailed advice that can save a writer years off their apprenticeship.
There’s something Knight said in the book that’s always stuck with me, and it looms larger in my mind the more time passes. He describes a moment in an L. Frank Baum book, maybe even “The Wizard of Oz.” In the scene in question a young Dorothy is wandering through the woods and comes upon a tree with books dangling from its branches, blooming like fruits. Intrigued, Dorothy approaches the tree and plucks one of the books from a branch. She opens it up and begins reading. The story ends up being a page turner, and Dorothy is enjoying herself, until suddenly the story stops, mid-page. Frustrated, Dorothy begins thumbing through the rest of the pages, only to find them blank as well.
She looks to the tree—maybe it has the same long face as the one in the film—and asks it what gives. The tree, bemused, tells Dorothy, “You picked the story before it was ripe.”
Knight’s point, at least as I see it, is that it is sometimes not enough to just write a story. You have to live with it before writing it, think about it from several angles. Let the cliched outcomes play themselves out in your mind rather than on the page. Seek the faults in the story’s construction that might exist even before Word One gets written.
“Nothing is ever absolutely so,” though, as Theodore Sturgeon said, and sometimes it’s better to sit before the blank screen and just start typing without a plan. Improvisation and even a Ouija board-esque form of “automatic writing” probably have their places as weapons in the writer’s arsenal. Hell, slicing up one’s already-written sentences and rearranging them to find deeper meanings, a la William Burroughs’ “cutup technique” might yield interesting results as well.
Still, there is something in Knight’s anecdote that appeals to me, the idea of treating a story like a bank robbery. Driving around the place a few times, casing the joint, thinking of what could go wrong in advance so that it doesn’t go wrong on the big day. I realize I switched from the metaphor of growing fruit to robbing banks, but you’ll have to forgive me. I like the idea of robbing a bank more.
Me personally: I’d rather write one great story a year (or in a lifetime) than a thousand decent ones in the same time span.
Of course, time is an unaffordable luxury for many, and the traditional pulp writer has always been more concerned with paying the rent than “growing” the perfect story. And some artists actually work better with deadlines than when left to their own timetables. The quest for perfection can become its own trap, an excuse to procrastinate indefinitely.
A lot of this debate is academic at this point though. For while the exigencies that drove writers in the past to write fast still exist—baby still needs a new pair of shoes—those markets have mostly dried up. Everything from the eBook to the ease of self-publishing and the rise of the internet has involved a lot of “creative destruction.”
Go back to the twenties and thirties and you will discover a profusion of pulp magazines that paid semi and even professional rates to authors. They were sold at newsstands all over the country, at carousels in pharmacies and at counters in tobacco shops. It was normal for everyone from workmen on construction sites to bellboys at fleapit hotels to keep a magazine handy for breaktimes. TVs were rare in houses, the personal computer barely a reality even in science fiction. The short story writer had far more opportunities to sell their work and far less competition from other media.
Even after these markets dried up, they were replaced by others that helped to sustain many a pulp craftsman through the lean times. Some of these magazines—“Gent” or “Cavalier”—were only a step up from Vonnegut’s fictional “Wide Open Beaver”—but they still paid better than almost anything else today.
I make this detour into the golden past not to bemoan our own age, but instead to make another point. And that is that while the dearth of pro paying outlets today will hurt the pockets, it also is likely to improve the quality of what gets published for pay. The winnowing process—both in the selection process by the publisher, and in what the writer is willing to send out—becomes more fierce. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand, applied to the real estate that exists between the covers of a magazine, slick or matte.
It might have made sense to grind out five stories a week about a ray-gun bearing spaceman when “Argosy” and “Amazing Stories” needed content to fill their mags. But now it probably pays better—both figuratively and literally—to take it slow. The writer has less reason to pick stories from those branches prematurely, and can instead wait longer for them to bloom on the branches.
Also, there’s no reason to feel guilty for thinking about writing rather than writing, since many times the thinking is part of the process. Even when it looks like those apples dangling from the branches are doing nothing, they’re still growing. And though a writer puttering around his garden or staring into space might look like he’s idle, this apparent idleness is part of the process.
There’s another anecdote—this one related by the late great Charles Willeford, not Knight—about a famous artist.
This painter (I forget who) was sitting in his backyard, staring at nothing. His mailman happening by looked to the artist and asked, “You just relaxing?” To which the artists responded, “No, working.”
I suspect this confused the mailman, who perhaps thought the eccentric artist was being a bit cheeky or glib.
A few days later the painter was in his backyard again, palette by his side, easel before him, making deliberate brushstrokes on the canvas. The same mailman happened by again, and this time asked, “You working?”
To which the painter replied, “No, relaxing.”
I imagine this confused the mailman, but I think I get where the painter and Willeford were coming from...
Now it’s time for me to get back to work, by which I mean having a staring contest with my dog while idly scratching an itch on my lower back.
There’s something Knight said in the book that’s always stuck with me, and it looms larger in my mind the more time passes. He describes a moment in an L. Frank Baum book, maybe even “The Wizard of Oz.” In the scene in question a young Dorothy is wandering through the woods and comes upon a tree with books dangling from its branches, blooming like fruits. Intrigued, Dorothy approaches the tree and plucks one of the books from a branch. She opens it up and begins reading. The story ends up being a page turner, and Dorothy is enjoying herself, until suddenly the story stops, mid-page. Frustrated, Dorothy begins thumbing through the rest of the pages, only to find them blank as well.
She looks to the tree—maybe it has the same long face as the one in the film—and asks it what gives. The tree, bemused, tells Dorothy, “You picked the story before it was ripe.”
Knight’s point, at least as I see it, is that it is sometimes not enough to just write a story. You have to live with it before writing it, think about it from several angles. Let the cliched outcomes play themselves out in your mind rather than on the page. Seek the faults in the story’s construction that might exist even before Word One gets written.
“Nothing is ever absolutely so,” though, as Theodore Sturgeon said, and sometimes it’s better to sit before the blank screen and just start typing without a plan. Improvisation and even a Ouija board-esque form of “automatic writing” probably have their places as weapons in the writer’s arsenal. Hell, slicing up one’s already-written sentences and rearranging them to find deeper meanings, a la William Burroughs’ “cutup technique” might yield interesting results as well.
Still, there is something in Knight’s anecdote that appeals to me, the idea of treating a story like a bank robbery. Driving around the place a few times, casing the joint, thinking of what could go wrong in advance so that it doesn’t go wrong on the big day. I realize I switched from the metaphor of growing fruit to robbing banks, but you’ll have to forgive me. I like the idea of robbing a bank more.
Me personally: I’d rather write one great story a year (or in a lifetime) than a thousand decent ones in the same time span.
Of course, time is an unaffordable luxury for many, and the traditional pulp writer has always been more concerned with paying the rent than “growing” the perfect story. And some artists actually work better with deadlines than when left to their own timetables. The quest for perfection can become its own trap, an excuse to procrastinate indefinitely.
A lot of this debate is academic at this point though. For while the exigencies that drove writers in the past to write fast still exist—baby still needs a new pair of shoes—those markets have mostly dried up. Everything from the eBook to the ease of self-publishing and the rise of the internet has involved a lot of “creative destruction.”
Go back to the twenties and thirties and you will discover a profusion of pulp magazines that paid semi and even professional rates to authors. They were sold at newsstands all over the country, at carousels in pharmacies and at counters in tobacco shops. It was normal for everyone from workmen on construction sites to bellboys at fleapit hotels to keep a magazine handy for breaktimes. TVs were rare in houses, the personal computer barely a reality even in science fiction. The short story writer had far more opportunities to sell their work and far less competition from other media.
Even after these markets dried up, they were replaced by others that helped to sustain many a pulp craftsman through the lean times. Some of these magazines—“Gent” or “Cavalier”—were only a step up from Vonnegut’s fictional “Wide Open Beaver”—but they still paid better than almost anything else today.
I make this detour into the golden past not to bemoan our own age, but instead to make another point. And that is that while the dearth of pro paying outlets today will hurt the pockets, it also is likely to improve the quality of what gets published for pay. The winnowing process—both in the selection process by the publisher, and in what the writer is willing to send out—becomes more fierce. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand, applied to the real estate that exists between the covers of a magazine, slick or matte.
It might have made sense to grind out five stories a week about a ray-gun bearing spaceman when “Argosy” and “Amazing Stories” needed content to fill their mags. But now it probably pays better—both figuratively and literally—to take it slow. The writer has less reason to pick stories from those branches prematurely, and can instead wait longer for them to bloom on the branches.
Also, there’s no reason to feel guilty for thinking about writing rather than writing, since many times the thinking is part of the process. Even when it looks like those apples dangling from the branches are doing nothing, they’re still growing. And though a writer puttering around his garden or staring into space might look like he’s idle, this apparent idleness is part of the process.
There’s another anecdote—this one related by the late great Charles Willeford, not Knight—about a famous artist.
This painter (I forget who) was sitting in his backyard, staring at nothing. His mailman happening by looked to the artist and asked, “You just relaxing?” To which the artists responded, “No, working.”
I suspect this confused the mailman, who perhaps thought the eccentric artist was being a bit cheeky or glib.
A few days later the painter was in his backyard again, palette by his side, easel before him, making deliberate brushstrokes on the canvas. The same mailman happened by again, and this time asked, “You working?”
To which the painter replied, “No, relaxing.”
I imagine this confused the mailman, but I think I get where the painter and Willeford were coming from...
Now it’s time for me to get back to work, by which I mean having a staring contest with my dog while idly scratching an itch on my lower back.
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