The Big Why

The essentials of a good story are who, what, where, when and why. The who is your character(s), the what is the plot, the where / when your setting, and the why is by some distance the most important aspect. This is because the why is not only your character’s guiding motive (wanting to escape a marriage / planet, say, or commit / investigate a murder) and their psychology (the unique thinking that has brought them to this crucial juncture), but the reason you’re telling the story.
 As a species in general, but especially as readers, we are obsessed with why. That’s probably because, as a species, we’ve successfully answered the questions of who we are, and what we are, our where and when. The why, however, will likely remain unanswerable.
 But even if the implicit promise of some ultimate revelation is the most important element of storytelling, a good story is the Buddhist principle of pratītyasamutpāda in action. Pratītyasamutpāda is the principle of dependent arising, or dependent co-arising, where all phenomena – physical, mental, psychological – arise in dependence on multiple causes and conditions. Nothing, the principle tells us, exists on its own or forever; everything is related and interlinked with everything else.
 Most stories foreground character; good writers understand that character and plot are essentially a Möbius strip; the setting goes a long way to defining a character, either because she belongs there or because she finds herself in opposition to the world around her (or both); and the why – the character’s motivation, and that of the author – will shape the character, the plot and the setting.
 That sounds like a lot to juggle all at once. The good news is that you don’t need to know the why starting out. As often as not, the whole point of your writing the story is to discover the why.

The Blank Page and the Dizziness of Freedom

‘Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard said, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.’ Normally I’d disagree; for me, anxiety is more of a response to the claustrophobia that comes with a dearth of options. But if you’re starting a new book, as I am, then Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety makes sense.
 The dazzle of the blank page can certainly be disorientating. There are too many options and no wrong answers; the whole world is available for inspiration; and just as there is no wrong way to tell your story, there are myriad ways in which you might start. Who are your characters? How do they speak? Who is telling their story, and why? Why is it being told now, in this way?
 Too many options can cause writer’s block just as surely as too few. Visualise it and it makes sense: a host of ideas, all struggling to emerge at once, can very easily create a mental bottleneck.
 And the danger there is that, in our rush to say something – anything, just to feel like we’re not wasting this precious time we’ve eked out for writing – we can fall back on the tried and tested. Echoing another writer’s style or phrasing, repeating clichés, allowing ourselves to slip back into those well-worn grooves that are the deadly enemy of good writing.
 At times like these, it’s worth remembering that we have been told all our lives how to behave. That we are conditioned to seek out the rules so as not to break them, to ask for permission to proceed. We are socialised, and perhaps even hard-wired, to act according to the accepted conventions, to fit in, to adapt to the prevailing wisdoms.
 The problem there, of course, is that this all runs contrary to the writing of interesting fiction.
 I’m not saying that good fiction requires the breaking of every rule, or a wilful disregard for every single literary convention. What I’m saying is that the blank page is both a challenge and an opportunity, and that every interesting writer implicitly understands what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich made explicit: that well-behaved women seldom make history.

Setting: If You Build It, They Will Come

A story can take place across a span of galaxies or it can take place at the bottom of a well. Every story, unless it’s an especially experimental tale, has to take place in some kind of physical environment – we need to give the characters somewhere to stand (or, if it’s taking place in space, or underwater, float).
 In some cases, the setting may be crucial to the story; this is why, for example, world-building is considered an integral part of the sci-fi author’s skill-set. In other cases, the setting may not be as important to a story as its characters and plot, but we still need to afford it the attention to detail that will persuade the reader that they have stepped into what John Gardner calls the ‘vivid, continuous dream’.
 If you’re a writer like me, you simply won’t be able to start a story without having a very clear idea of where it takes place. In fact, it’s frequently happened that I had no idea for a story, nor any plan for writing one, until a setting presented itself. In a way, it’s the equivalent of a bare stage when the curtains are pulled back, and we know that the actors will soon appear. Once I feel the dart of recognition – that this place, this very particular place, would be a wonderful setting for a story – then I know it’s only a matter of time before the characters will start strolling into place. If you build it, they will come …
 Oddly enough, the initial setting, the one that provides the inspiration, isn’t necessarily where the story takes place. I first got the idea for The Lammisters while we were on holidays in Donegal, visiting an old stately home where the Anglo-Irish owner would host Hollywood stars from the 1920s. It seemed to me the ideal spot for a PG Wodehouse kind of novel; but for the purpose of the story, I needed, as it began, for Young Archie, the foolish third son, to travel to Los Angeles to encounter some Hollywood stars. And so the story opens on the terrace of Musso’s in Los Angeles; but Young Archie and I both enjoyed our brief sojourn in Los Angeles so much that we never made it back to Donegal, and the whole novel played out in Hollywood.
 But that initial setting gave the story a kind of palimpsest quality. Its physical environment and its history, its economics and its culture, set the tone for who Young Archie was, and what he needed to escape, and what he wanted to achieve. It was as if that setting underpinned the story’s immediate setting of Hollywood in the Silent Era, invisible but informing Archie’s motives and aspirations.
 Setting isn’t just about giving your characters a place to stand. Setting is what your characters emerge from, where they’ve evolved, the place they learned to speak and think, where their loves and hates and prejudices were formed. If you’re prepared to look and listen – to observe, as Joyce Carol Oates says, with reverence – then your setting will tell you more about your characters than you realise you know.

The Tyranny of Perfection

Reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds recently, I was reminded of an Intro I wrote for Knock and Enter, a book I edited during my stint as Writer-in-Residence with UNESCO / Dublin City Libraries. To wit:

I’ve always thought that an octopus would make for an ideal Editor, with its eight arms and a complex nervous system that consists of one main brain and eight mini-brains that operate each arm independently.
 Of course, most writers would likely also wish that their editors were octopuses, given that octopodes possess three hearts, one of which might be given over to compassion for those who toil at the coalface creating the imperishable prose which the editor, having nothing better to do, then proceeds to blithely deface with his or her ‘suggestions’ and ‘advice’.
 Happily, whilst all octopuses are venomous, only the blue-ringed octopus is actually deadly to humans. And while the business of writing can feel like a tiresome chore – planning and writing and editing, and rewriting, and re-editing, and then rewriting some more – it very rarely proves fatal.

 Writing advice is hedged about with clichés (‘Write what you know’; ‘Read, read, read,’ etc.) but some clichés have their kernel of truth, and none more so than ‘Writing is re-writing’ – and if you’re a writer who doesn’t like the idea of reworking your stuff, then you’re in for a long, hard uphill slog.
 There are very good reasons, of course, why new writers might resist the idea of re-writing. Whether it’s schoolwork or sport, or life itself, we’re socialised from a very young age to get it right first time (‘Do you want it quick or do you want it good? Both, you say? I see.’) and to view mistakes as some kind of personal failing. And we’re all time-poor these days; if we can only get it right at the first attempt, think of all the time we can save.
 Except getting ‘it’ right – when ‘it’ is the creation of a whole new world peopled with complex characters – is virtually impossible. Even if you’ve plotted your story out before you begin, even if you know exactly who your characters are and will become, there’s simply too much to get exactly right at exactly the right time.
 This might sound like something of a downer; in fact, it’s one of the great opportunities that writing offers. In life, we have no choice but to stumble ever onwards, tripping over our mistakes and fixing them on the hoof (or ignoring them and hoping no one notices); in writing (or re-writing, rather) we get to go back in and fix it until we’re happy (happy-ish).
 Accepting that you’re not going to get it right first time might come as something of a blow to the old ego, but it does allow for an enormous amount of freedom. The freedom to get it not quite right; to make and acknowledge mistakes; to allow yourself, for the purpose of this draft at least, to be less than perfect (‘Perfect is the enemy of good’).
 We can waste a lot of our energy in worrying about getting it immediately right, turning what should be a positive (creativity, imagination) into a negative (the grinding, Sisyphean pursuit of perfection). But perfection can wait. Instead, take a deep breath, open yourself up to the inevitability of temporary failure, and allow yourself the delicious freedom (dare we call it fun?) of getting it wrong for now.

Mailer, Democracy and Huckleberry Finn

Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art (2003) is a rattlebag of memoir, criticism and testosterone-fuelled opinion (sensitive readers might wish to skip his piece on Last Tango in Paris), one of the highlights of which is the essay ‘Huckleberry Finn – Alive at 100’, which concludes like this:

What else is greatness but the indestructible wealth it leaves in the mind’s recollection after hope has soured and our passions are spent? It is always the hope of democracy that our wealth will be there to spend again, and the ongoing treasure of Huckleberry Finn is that it frees us to think of democracy and its sublime, terrifying premise: Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings. Mark Twain, whole embodiment of that democratic human, understood the premise in every turn of his pen, and how he tested it, how he twisted and tantalized and tested it until we are weak all over again with our love for the idea. – Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art