Through the Fog ...
I can see it in my head: The Story. What the characters look like. How they talk. I know where they live and how many siblings they’ve got. I understand the thematic as well as the dramatic arc everything must take to reach the explosive conclusion.
I can see it, and everything works perfectly.
Until I start writing it down. That’s when the flaws creep in.
A sequence of events makes perfect sense in my head, yet once I start laying it out on the page … Nope, there’s a hiccup. This event can’t possibly occur in the order I imagined. Everything’s out of place.
The neighborhood mutates. One house is monstrously large, while next door they can’t decide if the front lawn has a maple or an elm tree. People who live next to each other now decide they need to be on different streets. Even the layout of the streets undergoes transformations as I discover the breadth of the landscape.
Characters insist on shifting the dynamics. Relationships change. One character stubbornly refuses to do what I have plotted out. Another character doesn’t fit in with the family I’ve provided. They are all asserting their independence, and no matter how hard I discipline them – literarily speaking – they insist on going their own way. And like a parent (I suppose) I step back and give them the space they need to be the people they want to be.
And yet it eventually works. Through draft after draft, the story takes on a concrete form. It sifts through its difficulties, shakes out the unnecessary bits, realigns the crucial facts, and eventually solidifies into a world different from the one I imagined. And somehow it’s all the more beautiful because of it.
No matter how much I want to translate the perfect vision in my head, I am always much more pleased with the bumpy, incongruous, messy, unexpected, devious, and startling reality that winds up on the page.
Tell it like it is, E.L.E.L. Doctorow: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
I can see it, and everything works perfectly.
Until I start writing it down. That’s when the flaws creep in.
A sequence of events makes perfect sense in my head, yet once I start laying it out on the page … Nope, there’s a hiccup. This event can’t possibly occur in the order I imagined. Everything’s out of place.
The neighborhood mutates. One house is monstrously large, while next door they can’t decide if the front lawn has a maple or an elm tree. People who live next to each other now decide they need to be on different streets. Even the layout of the streets undergoes transformations as I discover the breadth of the landscape.
Characters insist on shifting the dynamics. Relationships change. One character stubbornly refuses to do what I have plotted out. Another character doesn’t fit in with the family I’ve provided. They are all asserting their independence, and no matter how hard I discipline them – literarily speaking – they insist on going their own way. And like a parent (I suppose) I step back and give them the space they need to be the people they want to be.
And yet it eventually works. Through draft after draft, the story takes on a concrete form. It sifts through its difficulties, shakes out the unnecessary bits, realigns the crucial facts, and eventually solidifies into a world different from the one I imagined. And somehow it’s all the more beautiful because of it.
No matter how much I want to translate the perfect vision in my head, I am always much more pleased with the bumpy, incongruous, messy, unexpected, devious, and startling reality that winds up on the page.
Tell it like it is, E.L.E.L. Doctorow: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
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