Sans Fig Leaf
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"Finishing"
15 May, 2008
I take too long to finish
things.
If I don’t have a
deadline, I will tweak and fiddle and revise and procrastinate in a
million ways. This is why I have dozens of unfinished stories sitting
on my computer hard drive. From time to time I resolve to finish a
certain number of them in a particular time frame. What usually happens
is I finish one or maybe two, and come up with the beginnings of four
or more new stories. Which languish on the hard drive next to the
others.
Sometimes there is a
legitimate problem. There’s a particular tale I’ve been working on for
years, which I’ve finished several times. But each completed draft,
when I would read it for one group or another, proved to have serious
flaws. I didn’t have to be told by the listeners that there were
problems. I could hear the troubles as I was reading the story aloud. A
sub-plot comes from nowhere and takes over the story. The problem I
opened the story with is disposed of in the first scene, revealing the
main plot. The main plot is resolved in the middle of the tale, so that
everything that follows is something of a let-down.
This would be bad enough
if this were a novel or even a novella. Unfortunately, it’s a short
story of less than 8000 words. A story that short should have only one
central conflict and perhaps one sub-plot.
The first three or four
times I tried to re-do the story, I simply moved the problems around.
And just as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic won’t prevent
the disaster, simply rearranging this tale has not saved the story.
The last time I read it to
a group, I decided that I needed to follow a piece of advice I’d
received from another writer many years ago: if you have a favorite
sentence or scene, delete and read the story without it. The opening
scene was exciting, thrilling, and attention-grabbing, but since the
central plot wasn’t introduced until the very end of the scene, it was
superfluous.
I said as much to the
folks listening, but after a bit of discussion, most of them thought
the scene should stay.
Over the next two years I
would open the file from time to time and poke at it. I tried adding
some scenes that had been suggested. I made changes to other scenes as
had been suggested. I removed a character a lot of people found
annoying. I put the character back in. I fiddled and tweaked, but felt
less and less happy with the story.
Then I just stopped
looking at it for a long time. I hadn’t given up on it. Sometimes a
story just isn’t ready to be told and we have to move on to other
things. Yet, I wasn’t ready to do that with this one, because the story
keeps bubbling up from the back of my mind.
Recently, I started to
open up the file and look at it one more time. I stopped myself. Maybe
I needed to start from scratch—stop looking at the old drafts and
trying to figure out what to keep, what to delete, and what to revise,
and just begin on a new, blank sheet of paper.
So I pulled out a journal
and one of my favorite writing utensils, and started writing.
As soon as I put pencil to
paper, a completely new and different opening came out. A few minutes
later, I had a new opening scene, one that introduced the central
problem in the very first sentence.
As a writer, it’s my job
to bring stories to life in the imaginations of people who hear or read
them. Sometimes that means hammering away on a draft, revising and
reworking until the story is ready to put out in the world. Other
times, that means throwing out everything and starting from scratch.
The story isn’t in that
file on my
hard disk. It’s not in the print-outs of previous drafts with my notes
scribbled in the margins. The story exists as a seed in my imagination.
It isn't a story, until it takes root somewhere else.
So I have to stop fiddling, and start finishing.
Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.
--Lillian Hellman
.