Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Commonalities in plot
The collective book of essays/stories
Long-form genres
In this chapter
· Shared plot elements
· Scene and summarization similarities
· Shared use of background information and flashback
· Similarities in prosody
Whether you’re organizing a collection of fiction (stories) or nonfiction (essays) content for a book, you face many of the same challenges. What’s more, because every writer is unique in his or her knowledge, experience level, personality, writing ability, and the way they approach a project, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that might work for you.
However, as with poetry collections (see Chapter 18), you can consider a few similarities in your prose pieces to help decide on an organization. Plot, scenes and summaries, use of backstory and flashback, and prosody are all elements you can work with when arranging your work into a larger collection.
Although there’s no one hard-and-fast rules, the following paragraphs outline a relatively loose strategy that works for many writers and may be of value to you as well.
First, gather your essays and stories. Write down the titles so you can have them recorded for future reference and also so you can better visualize how they might work in different combinations to fit a topic or theme.
As for themes and topics, avoid a topic that will tempt you to summarize rather than discuss or analyze. Don’t choose the plot of Macbeth but how the final scene of the play illustrates its theme. The second topic is narrower and less likely to lead to summary. When considering a topic, ask yourself if it can lead to a reasonable thesis.
Also choose a topic that interests you. If you don’t care about limiting cigarette advertising, don’t select it as a topic for a persuasive essay. You’ll have more to say, and you’ll write better, on something you care about. Generally, if you choose a topic that’s interesting to you, your readers will find it interesting, too.
If your topic requires research, try to choose one on which you can find material. Be sure you select a subject you can develop with sufficient details. And finally, after you’ve picked a topic, don’t be afraid to change it if it isn’t working out.
Next, research competitive publications to see what other books are in print on the topic(s) or theme(s) you’ve chosen for your work. Check out the approach each author has taken in organizing their content. This can help you get ideas on how to make your own collection both competitive and unique.
Start brainstorming what content you want to include in your book, and create another list of these potential areas. After you’ve these written down, you can play with their organization, create a working table of contents, and again compare your list to other publications on similar topics. Use this table of contents as a working document, and modify it as necessary and appropriate as you write, and as any new ideas come to you.
I typically create a paragraph or so about what content will go into each chapter to help refocus my thinking as I get into the actual organization and revision of a book’s content. This helps me stay on track as I write and also gives me a head start on having a synopsis ready for a potential agent or editor.
IDEAS AND INSPIRATION
When you start organizing your book’s content, don’t worry about how pretty the language is at this point, and don’t get involved in endless edits as you write (small revisions are fine as they come to mind). Just capture the major ideas you already have in print. You can always edit and change things later.
Given the time it takes to generate and work with prose—its sheer bulk as opposed to that of poetry—I suggest you have a tentative schedule or timeline for yourself (for example, you write X hours a day, or whatever works for your style and schedule). You shouldn’t have to strictly stay with your schedule or feel guilty when you forsake it, but many beginning writers do. If something comes up or you don’t feel well one day, take time off to deal with it or recharge your brain.
As you read and reread your essays and stories, stay on track with your vision for the final product while allowing yourself opportunities to restructure as needed along the way. You might even ask a friend or colleague to read through the material to see if it flows, if it’s written in an interesting manner, and to offer any suggestions for improvement they might see.
Again, don’t worry too much about spelling, punctuation errors, and small details at this point unless they’re so severe they impact reader comprehension. When you do finish your manuscript, you’ll need to correct grammar, syntax, and punctuation and also evaluate whether you need to do any restructuring. For example, your colleague might point out that you repeat information in several different chapters and suggest you rewrite portions for clarity and effectiveness.
The key to effectively writing any book of collected prose is to have a solid plan at the beginning, make sound adjustments as you go, and make the final product the most professional and effective publication that it can possibly be.
Commonalities in plot
Many writers believe there’s only one essential characteristic of collections, whether it’s prose, novels, or nonfiction: the various prose pieces are both self-sufficient and interrelated. On one hand, the pieces work independently of one another: the reader can read and understand each one of them without reading anything else in the book. On the other hand, a common theme extends to all the pieces in the work, similar to a full-length book.
Unlike the story, essay, or novel, however, this form appears under a variety of names. Many works of fiction and nonfiction carry the subtitle “a collection,” which likely means these books are assortments of linked prose. And to needlessly complicate things further, the jacket copy, like that of Tim Powers’ Last Call, often refers to a book as being made up of “linked stories,” while other recent books, such as Adam Braver’s Mr. Lincoln’s Wars, carry the subtitle “a novel-in-stories.” Some novels, such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, are really collections of linked stories but were published before the term became widely used. Scholars, for their part, often refer to the form as the “short story cycle” or “essay cycle.”
WRITING PROMPT
What are some of your favorite linked collections? Make a list in your journal of those that come to mind and then jot down a line or two as to why you like them. This information could be useful if you decide to assemble your own collection.
In any event, most collections of linked stories or essays do not have a consistent voice nor a central plot. They tend to be unified in at least one (and most often a combination) way, the most common of which are sense of place, central protagonist, time period, and writing style. I’ll provide a description of each of these in the following paragraphs, along with a note on how they might apply to my memoir SCHOOLED, which consists of several essays, many of which were published independently in magazines. (SCHOOLED might have easily had a “linked” subtitle, although I chose for it not to.)
Place
James Joyce’s Dubliners often is singled out as the sterling example of a book in which the author focuses on place as a unifying characteristic. There’s no central protagonist in the book, and the characters in the different stories do not significantly interact with each other, yet the feel of Dublin in Joyce’s time permeates the book and, as some scholars have argued, functions as a character itself.
Place functions similarly in SCHOOLED, although the geography is a bit looser: much of the state of Virginia, rather than one of its cities. Because I was writing nonfiction, this was merely the fact of the matter rather than a conscious decision, although I might have limited its scope to events that occurred only in the city of Richmond or solely in the rural Blue Ridge foothills. In the end, however, it seemed more interesting to mix those environments due to their rather drastic differences.
Central protagonist
Another kind of linked collection is one in which a central protagonist dominates most, if not all, of the stories or essays. Such collections often are named after the protagonist, such as Katherine Anne Porter’s Miranda Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and even Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous The Nick Adams Stories. As with places, there are novels—and even series of novels—that do the same thing with a central protagonist (Nancy Drew, Conan, etc.).
There also exist story or essay cycles that focus on family or group protagonists. These tend to focus on people whose lives intersect across pieces. SCHOOLED happens to be a combination of the central and group protagonist approach. Because it’s a memoir, a younger projected version of myself is the central character. However, other figures also make appearances across the various essays. I didn’t think of this dynamic as a way of connecting the book’s sections when I was writing it, even though in essence that’s precisely what it does.
Time period
It’s not uncommon to think of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his book The Jazz Age when you think of authors and works defined by eras or epochs. My own novel, Confederado, although not a linked collection, takes place during the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
Time plays a more nuanced role in my memoir because it reaches back as far as the mid-1970s, but it’s also contemporary. However, this is a natural time frame for a memoir written by someone my age because it contains some of my first memories from the mid-1970s, yet also has me functioning in the present. It’s true I might have focused it on just the last few years of my life or limited it to a childhood memoir, and either would have been fine. In this kind of writing, you have to figure out what portions of your life are the most significant to you and your readership.
WRITING PROMPT
In your journal, make a list of episodes from your life that might prove interesting to readers as well as yourself. This might turn out useful later if you decide to compose a memoir essay or book-length collection.
Writing style
Finally, some story and essay collections are unified by a consistent writing style or approach across their various pieces. John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, consisting of meta-fiction exploring the nature of storytelling, qualifies as an example.
This also seems like a good place to insert a personal publishing anecdote, since it involves writing style. As I noted, my memoir takes place in Virginia and possesses a great many rural southern and Appalachian qualities. In terms of subject matter, you might think of the rough American regional content of writers like Erskine Caldwell, Dorothy Allison, and Harry Crews (who wrote a blurb for my book manuscript not long before he passed away).
However, the writing style I chose for my memoir was quite formal, especially in its descriptions. So much so, in fact, that American publishers traditionally dealing with such content were not interested in taking the manuscript. Yet it was the book’s very style that eventually proved its salvation in the form of a British editor much enamored of the work of a now-rarely-read modernist novelist named Elizabeth Bowen. This editor felt—whether really accurate or not—my writing in the memoir strongly resembled Bowen’s and, thus, enthusiastically offered me a contract, despite the subject matter, which appeared to her generally foreign and crass.
I offer this anecdote not only to underscore the importance of writing style, but also to emphasize the vagaries of the publishing world. If someone had suggested to me years ago that my southern/Appalachian memoir would be published in Britain by an Elizabeth Bowen enthusiast, I likely would have laughed in their face.
IDEAS AND INSPIRATION
Like the world at large, the publishing world is a strange, unpredictable one. Never give up on your manuscript or close your mind to various avenues, however unlikely they might seem. Opportunity eventually may arrive from one of them.