Edges
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.
