![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhGiven the number of times I mentioned it, I'm sure most of you are aware that I was in a fiction writing class last quarter. You may also have noticed that I never posted the story I wrote for it.
I had been planning to, actually. But the class was organized to require two rewrites of our stories based on the criticism we received, and every rewrite I did ended with me hating the story more and more. That's not the way I usually work. That's not at all the way I usually work and it bothered me because I couldn't figure out why things were getting worse; I'm used to rewritings making me happier. I may eventually get sick or tired of messing with the same idea over and over again, but I'm always aware on some level that the time and effort I've put in has had discernible results. I didn't get that sense at all this time.
And I think I've finally managed to articulate to myself why that was, so now I'll babble at you all about it.
First off, I had a revelation about the way I think about stories. In my opinion (and, you know, feel free to disagree with me), they should either attempt to answer a question or make a statement. I've probably believed this for a long time, but I wasn't consciously aware of it, because fanfiction provides so many questions and theories without even needing to look for them. "What would happen if Tsuzuki flirted with Hisoka just a little too obviously?" is a perfectly valid question for a story to answer. Theories that I would be interested in reading about range from "Perhaps Gojyo and Sanzo are secretly long-lost brothers" to "Jeep is secretly a mack daddy, and he gets all the hos" to more serious ones.
But these kinds of questions don't quite translate to original fiction. You cannot write a story about "This is what it's like when Bob and Sue have sex" and expect anyone to care, because no one outside of my head knows who Bob and Sue are (and actually, no one inside my head knows them either, because I just made those names up). There's no reason to be interested in it, there's no emotional investment. A slight change to the phrasing of the plot-idea could give it a more universal concern, though; maybe "This is what it's like when two people divorcing have sex for the last time".
I thought all of this out while I was trying to come up with what to write for my class, and it did prompt a story I wanted to tell. Being me, of course I ended up finishing the first draft at 3am the night before it was due, so the story likely did not express coherently anything of the things I was trying to say, but I had the same sort of good-starting-point feeling that I get from most first drafts. Sure, there were problems, and I desperately wanted just a little more time to rework, but it was a story, and it said things I wanted to say about loneliness, and about how the choices we make affect who we become.
I turned it in, and people read it, and mostly liked it, and I got lots of helpful concrit. What I was told most consistently, by nearly everyone in class, was that the main character needed to change. There had to be a reason for why I told the story of "this day", and not the day before or the day after.
And that sounded good to me. I liked stories where things happened and people changed. So twice I tried to rewrite the story with that idea in mind, and just came to hate it more each time. Now- helpfully a month after the class ended- I think the problem is just that: it was never meant to be a story about someone who changed.
Part of it was the stubbornness of the main character; if she changes at all, it should take months or years, and a novella to tell it, not a 10-20 page short story. Trying to convince her to evolve in that short of a space kept feeling too easy to me, like cheating, and anyway I wasn't nearly as interested in the new version of her as I was in the old version. I liked it when she was bitchy.
But more importantly, that just wasn't what I had been trying to tell. I wanted to say things about a static situation, about something entirely different from a character arc. The common wisdom is probably right that things shouldn't be the exact same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning, but the change in this story should probably have been something more along the lines of a new self-awareness than turning a new leaf. I wish I had realized that sooner.
What do you all think? What's the essential nature of storytelling? Do characters need to change? Have you ever done rewrites that just kept getting you farther and farther away from what you were trying to do?
I had been planning to, actually. But the class was organized to require two rewrites of our stories based on the criticism we received, and every rewrite I did ended with me hating the story more and more. That's not the way I usually work. That's not at all the way I usually work and it bothered me because I couldn't figure out why things were getting worse; I'm used to rewritings making me happier. I may eventually get sick or tired of messing with the same idea over and over again, but I'm always aware on some level that the time and effort I've put in has had discernible results. I didn't get that sense at all this time.
And I think I've finally managed to articulate to myself why that was, so now I'll babble at you all about it.
First off, I had a revelation about the way I think about stories. In my opinion (and, you know, feel free to disagree with me), they should either attempt to answer a question or make a statement. I've probably believed this for a long time, but I wasn't consciously aware of it, because fanfiction provides so many questions and theories without even needing to look for them. "What would happen if Tsuzuki flirted with Hisoka just a little too obviously?" is a perfectly valid question for a story to answer. Theories that I would be interested in reading about range from "Perhaps Gojyo and Sanzo are secretly long-lost brothers" to "Jeep is secretly a mack daddy, and he gets all the hos" to more serious ones.
But these kinds of questions don't quite translate to original fiction. You cannot write a story about "This is what it's like when Bob and Sue have sex" and expect anyone to care, because no one outside of my head knows who Bob and Sue are (and actually, no one inside my head knows them either, because I just made those names up). There's no reason to be interested in it, there's no emotional investment. A slight change to the phrasing of the plot-idea could give it a more universal concern, though; maybe "This is what it's like when two people divorcing have sex for the last time".
I thought all of this out while I was trying to come up with what to write for my class, and it did prompt a story I wanted to tell. Being me, of course I ended up finishing the first draft at 3am the night before it was due, so the story likely did not express coherently anything of the things I was trying to say, but I had the same sort of good-starting-point feeling that I get from most first drafts. Sure, there were problems, and I desperately wanted just a little more time to rework, but it was a story, and it said things I wanted to say about loneliness, and about how the choices we make affect who we become.
I turned it in, and people read it, and mostly liked it, and I got lots of helpful concrit. What I was told most consistently, by nearly everyone in class, was that the main character needed to change. There had to be a reason for why I told the story of "this day", and not the day before or the day after.
And that sounded good to me. I liked stories where things happened and people changed. So twice I tried to rewrite the story with that idea in mind, and just came to hate it more each time. Now- helpfully a month after the class ended- I think the problem is just that: it was never meant to be a story about someone who changed.
Part of it was the stubbornness of the main character; if she changes at all, it should take months or years, and a novella to tell it, not a 10-20 page short story. Trying to convince her to evolve in that short of a space kept feeling too easy to me, like cheating, and anyway I wasn't nearly as interested in the new version of her as I was in the old version. I liked it when she was bitchy.
But more importantly, that just wasn't what I had been trying to tell. I wanted to say things about a static situation, about something entirely different from a character arc. The common wisdom is probably right that things shouldn't be the exact same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning, but the change in this story should probably have been something more along the lines of a new self-awareness than turning a new leaf. I wish I had realized that sooner.
What do you all think? What's the essential nature of storytelling? Do characters need to change? Have you ever done rewrites that just kept getting you farther and farther away from what you were trying to do?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-01-12 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-13 05:04 am (UTC)