Week 3 Reading Response: Writing For Story

I'll admit: I was threatened by this book. It seemed to efface everything I'd ever learned about writing, both in creative writing classes and from my own experiences. Coming from a background in poetry, I had always been taught that there is no way to plan a piece of writing beforehand; one simply had to let the words come out. The emerging poem would make clear what it wanted to say, and the act of writing the poem would often lead the writer to some unexpected discovery that could never be planned in advance.

In the creative non-fiction course I took last quarter, the pieces were longer and in prose, but the concept was the same: writing is an act of discovery. If you come in with an unshakable plan, you're missing out on the fun. It was not that my instructors didn't stress the importance of finding a focus and developing it over multiple drafts, it was that they explained the writing process as a bloody, painful battle. The writer must strip herself naked, exposing the most vulnerable parts of herself, and wade through the muck of the initial writing until she stumbles upon the true point, the "so what?" of the story. Then she basically has to write the piece over again in order to make everything converge on the main point.

So when this Jon Franklin guy started talking about outlining, I got a little panicky. I rely heavily on outlines in my academic writing, but outlines in creative writing have always seemed to me to paralyze the piece before it even gets off the ground. However, my panic turned to shame when I realized that the amateur writer he's always talking about is actually ME: on p. 112, when Franklin describes "spaghettiing," I recognized the feeling all too well. Like the amateur writer in the book, I have always dealt with this issue by using the "bull-your-way-through" approach that Franklin describes on p. 114. And it sucks...writing that way is more draining than a day at the gym. I've also never thought to start writing a piece anywhere other than at the beginning, which for Franklin is a big no-no (p. 158).

Now, in addition to feeling stripped of the "art" component of writing that I had worked so hard to cultivate over the years, I was feeling utterly belittled and demoralized. But when I got to p. 160 and read Franklin's explanation of "calibrating" the story, I finally found the discovery component I had been missing. Franklin describes that moment during the writing of the rough draft when the writer discovers that "the story is taking over and making course corrections for [him]." He says, "[T]he simple (or not so simple) process of writing the story through, if you've invested yourself in it, has changed YOU. You're no longer the same person who found that story and analyzed it. In a sense you have lived it, and you can see it from the inside now as well as from the outside. As you reconsider the story now you should be able to see it with much more insight and a keener understanding of the forces at play in the character and his story."

After reading this book, I've come to accept the concept that a story can be tightly structured from the start AND contain a process of discovery for the person writing it. And, as Franklin points out, as the rough draft evolves, the writer will often tweak the outline in order to accommodate a change that has come about through the writing process. I'm excited to try Franklin's method; it seems a lot less painful than the blind stumbling I often find myself doing when I sit down to write.