We’ll deal with the challenge of using interiority well later on, but meanwhile, watch for it in your reading, and be conscious of it in your writing.
A note: You will already have noticed that I am asking you lots of questions and making suggestions for ways you can study novels to learn how they are put together. I’d like to think you would attend to every prompt, now or later. You might underline something you want to come back to, or make a note in the margin or in your journal. The more analysis you do, step by step, the more you will absorb the principles I am presenting to you. The exercises will help you master concepts. The easier the work will become. And the more you will accomplish.
EXERCISES
Select one of your shorter scenes, a page or two. Go through it and underline all the sentences that convey action. Then double-underline the sentences that convey interiority (response, reflection, interrogation, commentary). (Alternatively, use two colors.)
Now write the scene out as all action and read it for its effect. You may find holes in the action, or the scene may be just fine. Consider each of the sentences of interiority and make a new decision about whether to include them (a) at all or (b) at the same place or (c) at the end of the scene.
Try more than one arrangement and see what you think of the new scene. Look at it on another day. Obviously this is an analysis you can perform for all scenes. It helps you confirm the line of action as well as the usefulness of interiority.
Select a scene from a published book. Choose one that has a lot of interiority. Using the definitions from this chapter, catalog the kinds of interiority the author uses in the scene. Is the character’s thinking focused on right now, or on the past or future? Does the interiority feel close to the action, or does the character link what is happening to other events or concerns?
An afterthought
Do successful novelists think about all the aspects of writing that I have raised? I can’t say. I suppose there have been many storytellers from whom stories flowed much less self-consciously than I am suggesting here. Literature, like music, science, and the visual arts, has its geniuses, and I wouldn’t dare to suppose how they produce their work. But I know that there are many fine essays about writing that indicate a deep level of analysis of process by gifted writers. (You could spend a nice month reading interviews in past issues of The Paris Review.) There are many letters among writers about the toil, thrill, and mystery of writing. Gustave Flaubert famously agonized over every detail of his writing and complained about it often. He once told George Sand that he worked to avoid assonance in his sentences. He wrote a friend that he was very weary of Mme. Bovary. (He spent five years writing that novel.) And Henry James, bless him, seems to have written down everything he ever thought about writing. We know he was always observing, always “taking notes,” always questioning human behavior, always imagining how circumstances produce stories and, most of all, how he was going to use what he was learning.
Taking prose apart in order to identify and discuss its components doesn’t mean that each type of text “stands alone” in a manuscript. Of course scenes will often have exposition and interiority and not just action. Of course summaries will have fragments of scenes. The more accomplished the writer, the more difficult it is to parse a text; elements are expertly interwoven. That said, I encourage you to identify the major narrative structural component you are working with at a particular time. If you know you are writing a dramatic scene, you know that action and tension are paramount. When you write exposition, you know to ask yourself: Is this where I need this? Does it interrupt the scene too much? Or does it add to the scene by creating understanding and context? When the character is thinking, you ask those same questions. And of course there is a reason for interiority: It enriches our understanding of a character; it fills in context; it reminds us of things that have already happened, and if it involves a conflict of intention or emotion, it creates tension. Knowing that, you have standards to which you hold your passages of a character thinking. You recognize when you are spinning too far away, or taking up too much page space from the ongoing drama. Always, always, your concern is to keep things moving.
If interiority is long-winded, it must enrich the reader’s understanding and empathy. It must be pleasurable to read. It must occur when the narrative needs a break, at a place that slows the pace, or when the reader needs to understand a character’s feelings. Sometimes interiority can be breathless, anxious, conflicted. Sometimes it is melancholy and measured. It reflects the events through the emotions and intellect of the character.
You should always be conscious of the temporal relationship of the thinking to the present action: Is the character looking back, looking forward (and building tension about what is coming), or deeply interrogating or responding to this moment.
Does the progression of thought fit?
Does it enhance the story?
Is it in balance with the overall function of the passage?
Am I carrying the reader along in the stream of story?
Exercise
You will need pens of three colors to mark a passage.
Choose a novel that can serve you as a model. Find a passage or section of a chapter that is three to five pages long.
Make a copy you can mark up.
Color 1: Block out scenes. Underline the sentences that are action.
Color 2: Block out narrative summary or exposition. Some may be in scenes.
Color 3: Double-underline interiority. This is likely to be in scenes, often at the end of a scene or, if set within a scene, entering and leaving it with sentences of transition.
Now describe the passage you have studied in terms of its structure.
What did you like about the way the author handled the balance of action and interiority?
II
Revision of a Novel Draft: Discussion and Exercises
Stages of Revision
THIS SCHEME WILL give you a way to think about your story with both a “long arc” and a “short arc.” The whole manuscript adds up. That’s the long view. The story can be talked about in terms of structure, plot, character, etc. Each of those perspectives is a short arc, and addressing them assists your overall ability to express the sum of your purpose and your craft.
You have to have a strong purpose in the second draft
This is the draft in which you understand the complexities of your story better and learn more about what you were trying to say all along. The primary goal is to strengthen the story.
If your first draft was too “thin,” now you develop a greater robustness, whether it means rebuilding scenes, adding new action or subplots, or exploring character emotions more deeply.
You weed out what you now perceive to be extraneous.
You may decide to write a second draft before you begin the analytical work of revision. The key is to feel you have a story.
Walk and write
Early on in my writing, I got in the habit of telling myself my story while I took walks. The more times I told it, the more I learned about it. Most of the shifts were subtle, but sometimes I discovered a missing building block or an insight into a character. And when I say I told myself the story, I mean I talked aloud as I walked around my neighborhood. Back at my desk, I tried to tell the story in a page. When I felt I’d done okay at that, I wrote a longer summary—three or four pages. The story, condensed in this fashion, wasn’t clogged by my problems with description or dialogue or scene structure; it didn’t matter how I was going to fashion the chapters. What mattered was the story—what happens, to what consequence—and character, the protagonist whose deeds and fate are the heart of the novel. This work took a week or two, and after that, all the way through my revision, I wrote a one-page summary at least once a week, without looking at the old ones, usually after a walk. It made me feel grounded and in control. It freed me from one aspect of invention to foc
us on other aspects. It was like having a picture of a dress on the wall and a bolt of material on my table. I just had to make one from the other.
The scenario: A valuable tool
You know that in a scene you play out the narrative in dramatic action. In narrative summary, you compress scenes for economy’s sake, or because the action isn’t dramatic enough to merit the space. There is a difference in the level of detail. You can do the same thing as a planning tool, reducing text to its essence so that it can be part of a list or outline.
A scenario is an economical dramatic narration that is a functional summary of what happens in a story; it is a tool, not a product.
A scenario isn’t written for style, it is written for narrative information. It serves a function similar to a study drawing for a painter. You can write a scenario that covers the whole narrative of the whole novel. You can write a scenario of a single scene. Ditto with a chapter. You can write a summary of a paragraph. In every case, it is easier to consider the story globally when you have compressed it. You also find a summary makes it easier to talk about your story in a writers’ group. And you can write a guide to your revision in scenario form at different levels of detail. Think of the scenario as a reviser’s basic brick.
Here is an excerpt of a scenario of The Spoils of Poynton, a novel by Henry James, which I found online at www.henryjames.org.uk/spoynt/, under “Story Synopses.”
1st Level Synopsis (Summary)
Fleda Vetch, a principled but ultimately weak-willed young lady, becomes involved in a dispute between an antique collector and her son: he has inherited her collection on the death of her husband and wishes her to move out of the house but is planning to marry a girl she views as a ‘philistine’. Through her nature, Fleda is unable either to prevent the marriage or arrange an accommodation between the disputants.
2nd Level Synopsis (by Chapter)
1
Mrs Gereth is enduring a weekend at Waterbath, the ugly, overstuffed country house of the Brigstocks, because she suspects that her only son Owen wishes to marry the vulgar Mona Brigstock. She finds a kindred spirit in a young unattached woman of somewhat straitened circumstances, Fleda Vetch.
2
Back in London, Mrs Gereth takes Fleda under her wing to give her experience of Poynton, the Jacobean house filled with art treasures collected by Mrs Gereth and her late husband, ownership of which has now passed by will to Owen.
Henry James himself famously wrote scenarios about everything. The woman he met at last night’s concert. The couple bickering at a luncheon. The story he heard third hand. His mind was always in narrative mode. He tested and decorated story endlessly, constantly. His Notebooks are a wonder to read.
Some writers prefer to compose lists of “beats” (steps of action), rather than to summarize narratively. (I often do both, finding the beats to be a good way to dissect the summary.) Beats work especially well when your passage is full of robust action and you want to track what’s going on. They are also helpful when you recognize that a passage is too slow and uneventful (usually because of too much interiority and too little action). Writing the beats of a scene will reveal to you that it is a weak passage. Here is such an example from a writer’s first draft:
Jean is at her computer, looking at photographs.
She thinks about her career as a photographer unhappily.
She hears a car coming up the driveway and thinks about how long it has been since she and Daniel were a couple.
She closes her computer and stands up and looks out the window.
She feels ugly and wishes she had worn something different.
She lets Daniel in the house. (And so on.)
Once this writer had gone through her scene, she recognized how little was going on, how slow the action was, and how much was interior but not very intriguing. Here is her revision of the beginning of the scene:
Jean, awaiting her lover, stands at her study window observing two birds who appear to be fighting over a nest.
Suddenly aware of her dowdy at-home outfit, she starts unbuttoning her blouse and turns to go to her bedroom.
She hears Daniel’s truck as he turns into her driveway.
She greets him at the door, blouse half undone.
As a scenario, this would read:
Jean is watching birds at her window while awaiting the arrival of her old lover, Daniel. She realizes how dowdily she is dressed and begins unbuttoning her blouse, intending to change. At that moment, Daniel turns into her driveway, and she meets him at the door, blouse undone.
As you probably discern, this would be a short scene, not a lot longer than the scenario, but with details and a sense of movement.
Scenarios are helpful before writing, as a planning tool; they are also helpful after writing, as an analytical tool. If you are writing a scenario before writing text, keep a tight focus on action. If you can pin down what is going to happen in the scene, sequence, or chapter, it frees some of your consciousness from that part of the invention. The writing itself can be raw, sketchy, clumsy, and still serve your purpose of putting ideas down so they don’t fly away.
If you are summarizing what you have already written, think of your story as being somewhere in the draft, and write a summary of the story you meant to tell or want to tell. If this produces an alternative version, consider whether it is better than the original. In revision, the scenario serves as a transition from the old version to the new. Think of the scenario as a map of what you will write in the new draft. In fact, you can also “write” a scenario visually, by laying out a scheme that represents steps in the story, or a circle with spokes, a house plan with rooms, and so on. The idea is to create a cheat sheet that reminds you of the key elements of whatever narrative component you are summarizing.
Compressing your story is efficient. It is also an excellent heuristic, enabling you, through trial and error, to grasp something that you couldn’t quite define before. The harder it is for you to do, the more you need to do it!
See “Notes on my revision scheme for A Chance to See Egypt” under Sample Scenarios in the Resources section.
EXERCISE
Write a summary of a scene from your draft. You can also practice by summarizing scenes or chapters from a published novel. The skill will be important as you progress in planning your revision. I usually have my students who are writing novels write a chapter-by-chapter summary of an entire published novel, and they tell me it is eye-opening and empowering.
Try reducing the summary to a single sentence, a “caption.” In the above example, it would be, “Jean greets her lover, blouse undone.”
Reading your draft
Before you begin revision, read your manuscript. Yes, again.
Take the manuscript someplace you don’t usually work: a coffee shop, a library, a park bench. Tell yourself this isn’t the time to criticize or fret; you aren’t going to make notes. Just read. If you can read it in a sitting, all the better; don’t let it go more than another day or two.
Here is the big question about your novel draft: Is it what you thought it would be?
Even though the story is sooo familiar to you, there should be a kind of surprise at the end: Did I write that? There should be a satisfaction and release, followed by a buoyancy and urgency to get back to work; but there might be a sick feeling that you’ve missed the boat.
If the story is weak, you can’t fix it by fussing with sentences. Don’t confuse the need to rewrite sentences with the quality of the story itself. Step away. Come back to it the next day. If you still feel disappointed in the story itself, you may have to rethink the story. You have to believe in it. Follow it. Find it. This is what revision is about.
If it is the writing that disappoints you, tell yourself fixing comes later. Don’t let your self-consciousness get in the way of your courage. If the story is there, you can
strengthen the way it is told in the next draft. I don’t know how to tell you the difference between enough and not enough, but my measure lies in passion.
I think you’ll know if you shouldn’t carry on, but it won’t be because the first draft isn’t great writing. (Sometimes a failed draft is written well. Sad, huh?) A good story can look like a holy mess in the first draft. It can be hidden behind ellipses and muddle. If you still like it, if you want to tell it, keep going. Start over. The questions and exercises in this book will provoke new ideas.
Write fifty scenarios if you need to. Draw cartoons. (Seriously.) Write another draft. I can think of a lot of writers who took five, six, or more years to get their books written—and published.
As long as you feel that somewhere in there you have put down the bones of a good story, you are ready to move forward. If you feel uneasy, or just plain downhearted, but you don’t feel defeated, give yourself a break and start writing scenarios. Or take the heart of a chapter and write a short short story. The impulse is there. If you have a patient friend, try telling the story, letting the person ask questions. But get a pretty solid story in your head before you try to revise how you tell it. That doesn’t mean that you have to recite all the details. You need a strong sense of the protagonist’s central dilemma and the big events. Then you can work it out, using the information and exercises in this book.
The Last Draft Page 7
