story

Open the Doors. Walk Right In!

/ Gerry Wilson / 2 Comments

We talked recently about the importance of ridding a story of whatever isn’t absolutely necessary and/or doesn’t advance the story. This “excess” can be anything from losing a line of description to cutting out a character. Or a scene. In the case of novels, entire chapters.

But once we’ve reduced a story to its bare bones, what’s next?

We look for opportunities.

A few years ago, in a fiction workshop at The Lighthouse Lit Fest in Denver, I had the opportunity to sit down with an author I admired to talk about the opening pages of my novel. That hour was golden, but it was also hard. What I’d thought was a pretty good start had lots of growing to do.

Image: Jan Tenneberg, Unsplash

Most of his comments—scrawled in the margins beside a line or two of underlined text—said simply “Open this door.” He talked about being alert to a range of possibilities to go deeper into a character’s psyche, to make description more visual and significant to the story, to open up the plot in a different direction.  

How was it he could see those things when I had not? I’ve decided it’s a skill that comes with practice.

As you read through a draft (preferably aloud), be open to possibilities. Be aware of anything that needles you, of passages that feel somehow incomplete or “off,” of words or phrases that nag you. In my experience, sometimes there’s only a vague uneasiness; I can’t say right away “what’s wrong.” It can feel so urgent to “finish” and get a story out into the world that it’s easy to ignore these signs. Chances are, they won’t go away on their own. And the story won’t fix itself.

Here’s an example of what I mean by opening doors, taken from a story I’m still working on, “Fast”:

Paul witnessed his father’s hard life as the pastor of two, sometimes three rural churches at a time. His shortest tenure while Paul was growing up was two years, the longest ten; a cycle that repeated throughout his father’s life.

Became this:

Whenever someone asks how he came to be a minister, Paul likes to say he was called. It’s what his father said, and Paul believed it. Why else would a man choose to serve two, sometimes three poor, rural congregations at once, moving every few years to a different set of churches, a different set of people and problems? Paul witnessed the toll it took—never enough energy or time to go around, never enough money. Paul was eighteen and about to leave for college when his father told him he had one piece of advice. He swept his arm around the shabby office in one of those rural churches. “Whatever you do, don’t do this,” he said.

What’s the difference—beyond more words?

What works for you when it comes to “fleshing out” stories? I would love to see your comments.

[This post originally appeared at Story Circle Network, February 10, 2023.]

Story Surgery

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

I re-read a short story recently that I had put away because I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d submitted it a few times with no luck—a sign the story isn’t bad, but it’s not as good as it could be.

I had never been satisfied with the ending, so I started there. I pushed words around. I cut them. I agonized. I lost sleep. I worked on the last two paragraphs for days (yes, sometimes that’s how long it takes), and finally, the ending seemed to gel. No small victory. I thought the story was almost ready to send out.

But then I read it again—one last time, I told myself. I checked white space and typos. I read for clichés, sentence variety, scene and narrative summary balance, tension, character arc and change . . . If you’re a fiction writer, you know the drill. As I read, I remembered a masterful writer of fiction once asked in a workshop: “Does every sentence belong? What does it add to the story?” And my heart sank. The story was still heavy with gratuitous details and phrases, even whole sentences that didn’t contribute much.

So I started cutting. By the time I was done, the story was almost 500 words lighter. Tighter. Stronger. Why had it taken me so long to see what it needed?

Sometimes, time and distance give me perspective. I agree with the advice to “put it away for a while,” then reread with a sharp, critical eye. I often puzzle over a story for a long time before I figure out what it needs. Occasionally, I never figure it out, but that’s another post.

“Does every sentence belong? What does it add to the story?”

Someone—surely more than one writer of advice on story craft—has said that nothing should go in the story that doesn’t advance it in some way. 

I believe that’s the crux of revision whether you’re writing short or long fiction.

Ask yourself: Does this scene (substitute paragraph, dialogue, sentence, image, particular word—yes, it comes down to word choice!) move the story forward and/or grow the character? What does it add? Strike it out and read the passage aloud without it. See if you miss it, not because it was a brilliant turn of phrase but because without it, something absolutely essential has gone missing from the story. If not, cut. Cut. Cut. Painful, but necessary.

Be wary of language that calls attention to itself. In this story, I threw away a metaphor I loved, a beautiful image, but it didn’t do anything for the story. Sometimes we do have to “kill our darlings.”

Granted, it’s possible to chop the life right out of a story. I know. I’ve done it. But sometimes, if we cut a story to its bones, we find a better way to tell it.

How does “chopping” figure into your revision process?

This post has also been published at Story Circle Network.

Image courtesy of Vecteezy.com.

Crossroads

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment
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Crossroads, Corinth, Mississippi / Gerry Wilson

Last spring, I attended a family reunion, a gathering of distant cousins who were mostly strangers, all linked to my great-great-grandfather who settled in middle Tennessee in the early 1800s. We cousins are a diverse group–all ages, many different professions, some with strong genealogy interests and knowledge and some, like me, more or less novices. I am an only child. Until the last few years, when these cousins surfaced, I’d felt isolated and wished for a big, extended family. Now I have one. We swapped a lot of stories that day.

For the reunion, my husband and I stayed in Corinth, Mississippi, the nearest town of any size to Selmer, Tennessee, where my father’s family roots are.  We visited the Civil War Museum in Corinth, a museum that doesn’t glorify the war but portrays its heartbreak and deprivation. We also discovered the little railroad museum built beside the tracks that, as in so many little towns, run right through the heart of things.

The rails in the photograph mark where the east-west and north-south railroads crossed–a significant crossroads for both North and South, thus the battles nearby for the control of that area. Those railroads and the nearby Tennessee River were major conduits for goods and soldiers.

At the war’s end, my great-grandfather reached a crossroads of his own. His oldest son had been killed at the Battle of Corinth. (My father was named for that soldier.) A younger son was arrested for passing himself off as a Confederate soldier and commandeering a horse and a mule. My great-grandfather posted bond for him, using his land as collateral, and when his son failed to show up in court at the appointed time, my great-grandfather went on the run, too, taking his family, including the wayward son, with him.

I imagine him rushing into the house, the door banging shut behind him, telling his wife to hurry, throwing things into the wagon–a feather bed, a chicken crate, pots and pans, maybe my great-grandmother’s travel trunk she refused to part with–settling in the children, and setting off into the night. Leaving much behind: house, land, family, friends, debts, a dead son. They moved to Mississippi, and that’s where they stayed. My grandfather, the youngest child, was six years old.

Colorful stuff, this. The stuff of story.

Think about your parents’ or grandparents’ crossroads. Whose choices have shaped your life?