If You Say It Enough Times

During the early phase of creating a new novel, which consists almost entirely of talking and note-taking with occasional forays into rainbow architecture, we have to figure out what is and what isn’t part of the story. Basically we have to figure out from scratch what’s true.

That’s a tough process sometimes. There’s a lot of hedging our bets and playing with counterfactuals, and it can become really swampy. If you haven’t ruled out at least some of the theoretical possibilities, then you have to be able to hold all of them in your head. (Good luck with that if your story is complex.) Because that fills your head with overlapping contradictions, none of it will feel true.

So that’s the basic lesson: you have to stop hedging and fix certain events in place, at some point. (Or, you have to pretend they’re fixed. By the time you’re revising a finished draft, it’s unlikely that all these truths will still be true. But most of them will be.)

Kent made the observation the other night that at some point the hypothetical story beats we were discussing had started to feel — a little — like things that had really happened. Where previously had been multiple, mutually incompatible possibilities, there was left a clear notion that “this is how it went down.” Getting to the stage where you can internalize the narrative makes it much easier to write about it. Now you know what happened, which leaves you free to focus on doing justice to the tale instead of being on the spot to invent it as you go.

Working with a partner at the story development stage provides a setting where the tale can be told and retold as many times as it takes, until it starts coming out the same way every time. It lets you leverage the instinctual storytelling impulses. Eventually, it gives you an outline so you can start actually writing.

Don’t think of your outline as a constraint on your creativity. It is an expression of that creativity. It’s your diagram of what’s true, which no one else could know.