For starters: you can’t know how to say it unless you know what you’re saying.
And if you really want to know how to say it, it’s best to know why you’re saying it. If you’re writing to communicate—that is, hoping someone else reads it and gets something out of it—then you probably want to bring something to someone that they’ve never known or thought about or quite seen in that way before. Ask yourself who you want to be saying it to (roughly). But, even more importantly, ask yourself why it matters to you to put the time and effort into saying it.
Knowing what you want to say can be a lot harder than it sounds; when most of us come up with a story idea we’re not thinking in those terms. We usually start with a situation we want to capture or a character we want to describe or a plot idea we want to play with. But deep down, there almost certainly is something we really want to say. These ideas are speaking to us for some reason. The work of this class is largely about going inside to discover (or remember) that reason.
In order to find your story:
Simplify.
Find the heart of it.
See your story as one whole entity, not a series of events.
A good story is organic, not a structure of brick or timber. It’s one living thing, every cell growing from the original seed, and it needs all its components to keep it alive.
A story is also a river. Elements come together into a single course that carries us to its destination. It’s not a series of pieces, it’s a single flow. The substance at the start becomes the substance in the middle and then the substance at the end.
Your job is to discover that organism and that river. I say “discover” and not “create,” because when the pieces come together I usually feel as though I’ve unearthed something—or liberated something or breathed life into something—that was there all along. Our ideas, and the way they connect our scattered experiences, thoughts, and feelings, nearly always hold the implication of a story within them. The more I feel I’m inventing something, the more likely I am to be going off course.
Which isn’t to say that that you’re not going to be doing a lot of conscious creating and decision making. My gut feelings help me understand whether something works or not, but I usually have to do some thinking and analyzing to narrow my options enough for my gut to have something to work with. There’s a lot of “what if I try this?” before I get to “okay, right.”
Beware of thinking, though. It can be treacherous. Our thinky brains love to run and play, but sometimes they need to be brought back to focus. I’ve found that exercises like the ones I’m assigning to you help with that focus.
For that matter, beware of writing. Writing can fool you. Your own fun prose and clever inventions can distract you from noticing that you’re not sure where you’re going. A snazzy scene can pave over a gaping hole in your story—for the moment. Soon enough, though, that hole’s going to show up again.
So your first job, before you can simplify your story, is to simplify the job itself.
The most useful tool I’ve developed in my decades as a writer: anxiety reduction. And the best tool for anxiety reduction I’ve found—better than solitude, better than breathing exercises, better than Xanax, better than bourbon—is task reduction.
One of the tricky parts about writing stories is that they contain so many elements that we can find ourselves trying to stay on top of ten things at once. Tone, structure, plot, character, voice, how we’re going to end it, the scene we’re working on, the scene coming up, and that scene fifty pages ago that still doesn’t feel right. Which summons those two unwelcome visitors so well known to every writer: confusion and anxiety.
Pick one aspect of the story to work on at a time. In this class, you get to work on finding the heart of the story and put all the rest on the shelf. For the moment, stop asking yourself how the story should begin and how much should be in flashback and how to make your protagonist more sympathetic and whether it’s going to be funny or sad. Those questions will still be there when you come back to them, and you’ll probably discover that the answers will be much easier to find once you understand your story better.
In fact, I’ve often found that a lot of those answers become not only easier but obvious. Now that I know what I’m saying and where I’m going, some choices become simply inevitable. Which is a wonderful feeling: one less thing to agonize over.
Which brings me, at last, to the first exercise: Try to tell your story in briefer and briefer forms without losing its emotional, intellectual, and thematic essence. You can lose plot mechanics and details of milieu—in fact, you’re going to have to—but keep your eye on the essence of what you’re saying. Start by telling it in under 200 words. Then bring it under 100. Then 50.
To keep this from getting too abstract, here are the “hearts” I’ve found in some other people’s stories, told in roughly 40 or 45 words. Mind you, these aren’t intended as literary criticism. I know they’re oversimplified. But I think they’ll help you get what I’m saying:
• “A woman is so caught up in romantic dreams that she can’t appreciate her unglamorous but steady husband and throws herself into a disastrous affair that brings such disgrace upon her family and herself that she commits suicide.” (Madame Bovary)
• “A boy who wants to feel worthwhile creates something that makes him a big deal for a while but then lets him down, forcing him to learn that he can only feel worthwhile by living his own life.” (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay)
• “A bunch of sheltered aristocrats are lost in assorted self-preoccupations and existential riddles until they have to defend their nation from an invader, tossing them back on the basics of life, death, and love, enabling them to see the hand of God in human events.” (War and Peace)
• “A people build a vast, secure empire but over time focus more on personal or otherworldly rewards and fail to teach their offspring civic virtues, so more and more of the running of the empire is handed over to foreigners who eventually pull it apart.” (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)
• “A man is abandoned by his lover and detaches himself cynically from human affairs. When she returns he learns she left him for a higher cause. He seduces her away from her cause, until through his love for her he realizes that the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” (You know!)
Note that each one starts by telling you clearly who the story is about. (That’s usually one person, but stories can be about multiple people, or whole nations, too.) Then it tells you what the protagonist’s initial situation is, which usually means what’s wrong with his or her or their situation. Then it tells you what they try to do about it: affairs, superheroes, wars, foreign mercenaries, seductions. Then it gives you a sense of how that goes and where, through reacting—or failing to react—the protagonists end up.
Note also: these summaries don’t sound all that interesting. All the catchy twists and offbeat milieux, all the dazzling touches of the authors, have been left out. This exercise isn’t about writing a springboard or an elevator pitch or a back-cover blurb. Your boiled-down story not only doesn’t have to sound exciting, I promise you it almost certainly won’t sound exciting. I’ll even say that it shouldn’t, at this point. What it should sound is clear and solid.
In this exercise, don’t be afraid of simplicity. Simplicity is your friend.
In finished writing (as we’ve all heard a million times), it’s usually important to show more than tell. But for this exercise: tell, don’t show.
Don’t be afraid of your story sounding too familiar, either. The basic stories have all been told countless times and people will be telling them again forever. Good human stories will always feel as though we’ve heard them before. Which means your summary may sound trite when you first read it. Banal, even. But no more banal than my summary of Madame Bovary, which isn’t bad company.
It’s what you ultimately do with the story that will make it new and unique. And you’re not going to think about that now, remember? It will be much less frightening to do something dazzling with a story once you’re very clear on what the story is, because then you won’t be freaking out about technique and content at the same time. (Anxiety reduction: your other friend.)
You’ll also note that these summaries all include the end of the story. Not the specifics. We don’t know that she swallowed arsenic, he admitted he was gay, Moscow was burned, the Vandals sacked Rome, and Louie rounded up the usual suspects. But we know whether our protagonists succeeded or failed in what they wanted and we have a sense of how they changed or what they learned.
So when you summarize, include the ending, as best you understand it now. You’re not marrying it; you may change it completely as your understanding grows. But you won’t really know your story unless you know where it goes. It’s the end that makes clear the meaning of the whole thing. It’s the end that determines what you’re saying to us.
There were two basic possible endings to Casablanca: Rick gives up Ilsa so she can help Laszlo; or Rick wins Ilsa away from him. Those two endings create different themes: a great cause matters more than any romance; or a great love matters more than any cause. They’re both worth telling. Just know which one you want.
The ending trumps everything else. You can have every character telling us that great causes matter more than romance, and countless moments throughout the movie supporting the same idea; but if Ilsa stays in Casablanca with Rick, then you’ve told us that, really, the romance matters more than the cause. If your ending doesn’t line up with the intent that’s implicit from the beginning, then you’re not saying what you think you’re saying. And if you try to say contradictory things at once, your readers come away confused and dissatisfied.
(This goes back to what I said about the story as an organism. I’ve never found the “beginning-middle-and-end” description of stories very useful. Isn’t the end implicit in the beginning? And the beginning still continuing to the end? How do you separate the “middle” from either? Once separated, how do you keep it from becoming just a receptacle for narrative miscellany?)
This exercise has multiple benefits. Boiling down will force you to decide what’s most central to the story and what’s more peripheral. In the course of that you’ll have to go deeper toward what your story’s really about. You’ll probably find elements that you thought mattered but turn out to have been distractions.
It will also usually reveal things about what you’re doing that you’ve tried not to notice. Like the fact that you have a ton of fascinating material, but you don’t actually know how it’s going to fit together. Or you have a great starting point but only a vague idea where you’re going from there. Or you don’t know who your main character is. Or you’ve been trying to convince yourself that the ending will take care of itself, but really you’re terrified of having to confront it. Or you know this setting or material is compelling to you but you don’t know why. Or you just plain have no idea what you want to say.
This will expose your weak spots. That’s a good thing. Go right at the scariest stuff. Don’t put off the part that makes you most nervous, expecting it to be easier later. It’s probably the most important thing you need to look at.
That doesn’t contradict what I was saying about anxiety reduction: it’s about feeling the fear actively as you work through the confusion that keeps stirring up the anxiety. It’s about feeling the bad stuff more intensely as part of the process that leads to dispelling it. (That’s why focused task reduction is better than Xanax. Or even bourbon.)
This short summary is that “heart of the story” I was talking about. The germ from which the organism grows. Bring your story down to this and then start building it outward, letting everything unfold from that essential story.
Write from the inside out.
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