The Leap, part 1

On exiting the plane of original conception, or, How do we make ourselves want to write our work?

How do we make ourselves want to write our work?

The question may sound silly. Of course we want to write our work. All we want is the time to write our work!

But there often comes a point when you get stuck. The ending won’t come right; or we’ve had a gust of energy for the start of a story, and then it ebbs; or we’re adding words, but listlessly, with a nagging sense that what we’re doing now is not up to the snuff of the earlier part of the work.

Personally, I have a folder I call “stubs”: stories that made it to 1200 words, novels that made it to 25,000 words, essays that made it to 800 words. All of them stuck somewhere around halfway. My commitment to them didn’t run out, but my energy or ability to write them forward did. For the most part, I think these stubs are pretty good. In some cases, I think they meet the criteria for the kind of work I want to be spending my time on: a voice that genuinely compels me, and that no one else is going to write except me.

So how do you get un-stuck?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The partly-right way

Robert Olen Butler says you have to reread, re-dream, thrum again to your own work. In his book From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, he explains:

The primary and only necessary way of experiencing a work of literary art is not by “understanding” it in analytical terms; it is by thrumming to the work of art. Like the string of a stringed instrument you vibrate inside, a harmonic is set up. So to edit your work, you go back and thrum to it. Then…instead of consciously and wilfully applying what you understand with your mind about craft and techniques, you redream those passages.

Rewriting is redreaming. Rewriting it redreaming till it all thrums.

He’s talking about editing here, but it’s just as true of continuing from a point of having stopped.

He’s saying that we need to get back into the original gust of the project, the energy and the voice that brought us to the page in the first place. And often, this strategy works! At the very least, we need to know what we’ve already said, and how we’ve said it, in order to continue in a voice that’s of a piece with what’s come before. And not just to know that voice, but to inhabit it.

Butler’s book is all about trusting the subconscious or unconscious mind, the place from where you dream rather than from where you think, as the source of creative wisdom.

Sometimes, getting caught up in the gust of voice puts you back into the original gust of your enthusiasm for a project. In much the same way that you can’t jump as high from a standstill, it gives you the running start to scale the block.

If that’s what it takes for you to re-energize yourself for the work—if you simply needed to recapture that initial set of brainwaves—then keep writing from there.

But sometimes, recapturing the initial mindset only gets you as far as the blockade in the first place. You don’t need only to return to your initial gust of enthusiasm and initial engulfment by the voice. That’s what didn’t bring you further. You need to shift from there.

The right way

So how do we make ourselves want to write our work? That is, if re-entering the original gust of the voice is not enough.

My answer: shift the narrative gaze.

The question of narrative gaze is among the elements of writing I’m most interested in right now. That is, what is the story paying attention to? Is it forward-moving action, scene-making, backstory, interiority, setting, the history of a given place or relationship or conflict, a singular character perspective, etc.,

The key insight, I’ve found, is: You are never stuck in the story you’ve built.

This has been a revolutionary idea for me.

The tyranny of the scene, the forward-moving story, is often what’s keeping us stuck. If we’ve spent six pages meticulously establishing a situation, a conflict, a rise in tension, then we feel that the next thing we have to do is write the climactic scene where it all explodes.

We don’t have to. This is your story. You are never trapped.

You can always shift the gaze out the window, into the past, across the room, across the world; away into the character’s mind; away into a fantasy about what the character merely might have done instead of what they did. You can use exposition and escape the tyranny of having to show in-scene. You can use the quick cut to cast the gaze elsewhere.

This is the way I understand and implement George Saunders’ advice from his craft book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:

No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.

(Rather hilariously, he credits this aphorism to Einstein, then tells us in a footnote that what Einstein actually said was, “Let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels,” which to my mind is not even close.)

What does Saunders mean by this?

He says that an author has exited “the plane of original conception” when he has:

denied himself the obvious, expected source of resolution. …This is an important storytelling move we might call ‘ritual banality avoidance.’ If we deny ourselves the crappo version of our story, a better version will (we aspirationally assume) present itself. To refuse to do the crappo thing is to strike a de facto blow for quality. (If nothing else, at least we haven’t done that.)

The leap

I understand Saunders to be saying that the terms of the story can change from where we started. I refer to this change in terms as a shift in narrative gaze, or “the leap.”

If the story started in straight realism, does it leap for a moment into the imaginary or magical or surreal? If it started as a love story, does it leap for a moment into a story extolling friendship story instead? If it started with scenes that progressed chronologically, does it leap for a moment into exposition about a decade ago, or a century hence?

This is what I mean by a change in terms. A shifting out of the plane of original conception.

In the Saunders case, he’s talking about a point in Anton Chekhov’s story “In the Cart,” at which a lonely woman encounters an unmarried man. The initial terms of the story might suggest that romance can solve her loneliness.

But, Saunders says, romance would be a first-order solution to her loneliness. To not-write romance requires the writer to seek some other set of terms by which her loneliness can be solved.

The Chekhov example, then, is a kind of problem-and-solution–based change in the terms of the story.

In our own work, we might also change the terms of the narrative interest. Perhaps we’ve been telling a straight chronological story, and now we break and simply turn the narrative head. What does the narrative gaze see then? What’s out the window? What’s happening in the other room down the hall? What’s depicted in the painting on the wall?

Or we might change the terms conceptually. Maybe we move from realism to some form of non-realism. A character’s imagination, at the least, is always available to writers, whether we are operating in the realist mode or a magical mode. We can always break into the character’s head. Into an imagined scene, involving what the character wishes would happen or what doesn’t happen, or a memory, or another invented scene or world entirely.

This move to the unreal is not limited to stories that are magical, fantastical, or science fictional. The advantage of realism is that, realistically, we disappear into our minds all the time. There, anything can happen.

Or maybe we shift the narrative gaze chronologically or geographically: We leap out of the present setting and tell the history of what happened in this exact place one hundred years ago, or what is happening now across town. Maybe we trace the history of that painting on the wall.

Maybe, in a story about Thomas Jefferson shipping an American moose to a French naturalist, we stop and give the scientific history of the antler. (I did that in an episode I wrote for iHeart’s Noble Blood.)

Maybe, in a story about a parasite invading one member of a couple, we stop and give the history of parasitic invasion. (Karen Russell does that in her story “The Bad Graft.”)

Novels take these leaps all the time. The novel seems like the natural place for this shifting of gaze. Chapter to chapter, we are used to a novel leaping in perspective, in time, in geography, etc.,

But writers of any genre can take these leaps at at any point when our verve for the writing has run out. Maybe we just need to turn the narrative head.

What next?

Since arriving at this idea, I’ve gone back in and resurrected three stubs: two stories and an essay. It’s revitalized my interest in my own work. I am always looking for where I can make the leap in my writing, whether it’s a permanent or a momentary departure from my earlier sense of what the story would be—that is, of how narrow or capacious its gaze would be.

Down the line, a shift in the narrative gaze will have the secondary advantage of re-energizing the reader, as well. But this is distinctly secondary to the primary work of guiding our writing to its end.

I think of the leap as a shifting of the Boggle board: suddenly, I’m seeing all kinds of paths and connections that I couldn’t see before. And suddenly, the verve to keep going ignites again.

*Read The Leap Part 2 here*

—

Looking for a small-group guided writing, accountability, and inspiration group for your longer project? Join The Lab now.

—

P.S. Curious about how you might shift the gaze? A step-by-step breakdown

I mentioned that I resurrected a few story stubs by using this shifting of the gaze.

One of them was particularly instructive, so I thought I’d show