Writing for Traction.

When I start writing a novel (or anything), there’s some initial force to it. The words come onto the screen and I keep going to a point, but there’s no traction yet. If I pulled the e-brake, the writing would still carry itself awhile before it stopped. The traction-test only comes when I get to a hill, the first resistance to the writing. If I get over the hill, I can keep going. If I stall out, that’s usually it—mark it abandoned and move on. Sometimes the first hill is all it takes. Sometimes it’s another, later hill.

There was one novel that I finished a first draft of, but I decided not to move forward into editing with. That’s some other issue, mainly one I’ve seen in film: I like the characters, I like the world, but I don’t think the story gels. I’ve seen a few dozen movies like that. I think everything was there, but the story isn’t to my taste. I’d rather the actors were saying different things, doing different things, but the rest of the world is fine, everyone did their job.

On a couple, it was more that I hadn’t really nailed-down what I wanted to get to, didn’t know which fork to take, got frustrated with research, so I canned them and went back to the drawing board. That’s the hill moment. You either right your way over it, you find a detour, or you stall out and find something else to write or to do.

Outlines can help. But I doubt any novel (outside of novelizations of real events, perhaps) went from draft to published completely adhering to the outline. The outline is a map, but until the words are building mountains and bridges, it’s still all vague.

The hills-and-road metaphor works on another level. The story itself should have its own ups and downs. Rare is the story that can start at a peak and race the whole way down, and even rarer is one that can crawl up a mountainside, step by step, pausing at camps for rest, but with no momentum ever building. So it’s useful to use writing-hills to help inform story-hills. That bit there, the aside, where I had hit the hill and slowed, it led me to take a turn that I feel is useful.

Now we aren’t heading straight up, we’re going around. If we had kept going up, the view would have continued to be boring: a slope we have to keep trudging into. Now that we are winding around the hill, we get to look out over the nice vista with happy little accidental trees. Birds and squirrels are romping on the branches, tweeting and having fun.

Back in reality I’m getting close to getting a story-complete draft, which is how I work. The first draft has most of the story together, certainly enough material for a beginning, middle, end. But it isn’t necessarily a coherent narrative yet. You leave home to go to the movies. But there are bits of the road missing between there and stopping for gas, and again between gas and the theater. Story-complete means a continuous stretch of road has been connected up. After that, it’s about polish, tone, finding character moments that might have been missed.