Craft of Fiction: Vision (Element 0)

When discussing the craft of fiction, my professor asked us to list the elements of fiction, what craft points did she think we would discuss. She was making a point. Even though we had never sat in a class and had lessons, our experience as readers and literature students had already set a foundation. True to convention, we went for the big two: character and plot.

However, when my formal education in writing was over and I became like everyone else, learning from the haphazard experiences of life and perception, my writing did not click until I discovered something else. I knew the craft, but my stories never came together. I had the character but not the plot. I had the plot but not the character. I had the scene but not the narrative. I lacked vision. I didn't have an overall sense of what I wanted to accomplish.

The elements of crafts are tools, but what can carpenter do with boards and a hammer if he has no idea what he wants to create? Once I had a vision for my story, the writing flowed, the elements of craft reorganized and morphed into a unique palette of creativity which helped me express each story as something unique.

The vision for a sci-fi epic is not the same as the vision for a poetic novella. Once you know what you want to write, you will know how to approach the craft of character, narrative, and prose to express that story. It can change. If you remain open to possibilities, if you resist the urge to limit craft into some one-way-fits-all notions, so you can bring the colossal into the finite for your ego's gratification, then you can write anything. You can write a novel where a woman spends 200 pages contemplating divorce before going to bed, and you can write a 700 page doorstopper filled with lust, betrayal, and death. If you feel you need permission, look to history, look to all that has been written, look to the classics of every genre. Anyone who says a good story is one thing is ignorant. Anyone who strikes against beautiful prose or hard-boiled action is limiting the possibilities of our art to validate themselves. They don't serve expression; they serve themselves.

There is a difference between "craft" and "convention." However, many conflate the two. Craft is universal. Every tradesman has his tools, yet they all create different things. Virginia Woolf and George Eliot each had the craft of characters, yet went about creating their fictional humans in very different ways, in very different styles, through very different narratives.

Convention is a culturally prescribed ways of employing craft. The three act structure of beginning, middle, and end (with their own rules of what should happen in each section) is a convention. The rules for structuring genre fiction are romances. Often the best fiction, through creative uses of craft, twists conventions. When writers make convention their craft, their stories are often predictable and lacking in originality. Everyone knows what is going to happen, because they know the convention. As you learn craft, internalizing it more deeply, you will more successfully subvert the norms of your chosen genre, expressing your own unique vision. You will develop an artistic signature, your own convention, made by you for your stories.

So first think about the kinds of fiction you want to write. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the answer is on your bookshelf. What you are passionate about reading is what you will be passionate about writing. Literary readers who try to write cozy mysteries often fail. Thriller readers who try to write epic family sagas often fail. Your identity as a writer has already been created. Your years of reading and falling in love with fiction has already given you an internalized idea of how fiction should be, how it should work. Your task is to cultivate those feelings into an explicit understanding. But remember, your understanding is to guide you in how to write YOUR novels, not tell everyone else how to write theirs.

And even so, you may still travel far outside your desired reading to find your story. With video games, television, comic book, and movies, you may realize your story lies in one or an amalgam of forms. You read Dickens but love fantasy video games? So write an epic fantasy filled with a riotous cast of wild and quirky characters, following a young boy trying to free his father from a corrupt prison system.

Once you know what you want to write, you will be able to go through each element of craft and know how you wish to approach it. You will know how you will develop your characters, how long your descriptions of setting will be, how to pace the action, whether or not to structure the narrative through character or plot points, how "big" the events need to be and so on. If this has you lost, don't worry. We will be discussing this as we move forward.

Vision does not mean planning every detail in micromanaging fashion. It means having a general understand in what you want to accomplish. For my first novel, I was able to start writing once I knew I want lyrical prose exploring the mundane thoughts of characters with elements of soap opera weaved in. For my second novel, I was ready to begin once I knew I wanted a superhero soap opera in a world on the brink of science fiction. Once I started writing though, I let this go and just wrote. I let my story develop in new and unexpected ways, trusting that my vision was not the main idea but a quiet guiding force. As my superhero soap opera birth surprises in characters and plot direction, I allowed my universe to expand. However, my original vision was still at the core of what I was doing. If I lost my way, I returned to my vision and continued building upward and away. If someone criticized my work, I used my vision as a measuring stick. If the critique enhanced my vision, I contemplated the idea. If the criticism contradicted my vision, I kept moving forward.

For now, just know it's okay to have no idea what you want to write. And if you think you do, remain open. You have a lot of years as a writer ahead. As you learn craft and experience new stories, you may expand into universes you could not have imagined now.

 

 

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