The Gap Between Intention and Execution

The book I intended to write was not the book I ended up writing. Oh, there are some similarities: I wanted to write a book about how we cannot truly process the environmental catastrophe that we are currently experiencing. I knew that I wanted the earth to send signals about this environmental catastrophe to my protagonist, and for her to almost – but not quite – understand. But alongside these similarities are also some major differences – for example, the draft with which I queried my agent featured an antagonist named Ricky, a man attracted to the anarchy that exists in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Ricky, along with other characters and plot beats, never made it to the finished project.

When I began writing the novel THINGS YOU WOULD KNOW IF YOU GREW UP AROUND HERE, I wanted a road map of where the novel – and I as its writer – would go. I had an idea of where I would begin, and I had an idea of where I would end, and so, to bridge that gap in the middle, I wrote an outline. But in the process of writing, sticking to that outline became difficult – as the characters developed, it felt as if I were marching these people through plot points, as if you could see the author and her scaffolding and not the characters themselves.

I have heard a lot of conversations about plotting versus pantsing (writing a book without a plan, or “by the seat of your pants”). I have tried both ways, and I have come to believe that, for me, the ideal method of developing a novel is somewhere in the middle. Plotting gets you started – you map out major conflicts and you have a destination – but, for me and for this book, sticking to the plot made every action feel wooden and false. I have to have some sort of destination, but I also have to leave space for the discoveries made along the road. 

In her book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott quotes E.L. Doctorow’s advice for writing a novel. Doctorow argues that writing a novel is like driving home in the dark: with your headlights on, you can only see a few feet in front of you, but the light is enough to get you home. So much of writing for me is tricking myself into the work – how do I keep going when the work gets hard, as it inevitably does? If having that destination helps me move forward in the moments where I am stuck – lighting a bit of the dark way for me – then I find that having an outline of a plot is helpful.

But there are also points when I dread the work and the blank page, and I can’t figure out what happens next. I have discovered that often when this happens, I have made a misstep, taking a wrong turn in the dark night. I have forced my characters into situations in which neither they nor I can figure out what they are supposed to say or do. Every step feels false, and I have to trace the story back to the last real moment and reassess – where do we go from here? Where has my plot outline failed me?

In THINGS YOU WOULD KNOW, I made it all the way to the end of drafting with Ricky the antagonist, but I struggled with the decisions that he made, and with the decisions he forced the protagonist to make. In revision, I thought a lot about how the journey would naturally unfold, and I spent a lot of time erasing the author scaffolding – erasing the plot that I had carefully built.

The story needed this erasure – it wasn’t working as it stood. The book was not what I wanted it to be. But one of the things that I learned by forcing the plot all of the way to the end is that the book is also not quite what it wanted to be. There were decisions made along the road that changed the final destination.

When I teach how to workshop in a creative writing class, one of the first things I teach is the importance of the author’s and the story’s intention. As workshop participants, we should not make a suggestion for a story without first understanding what the story wants to be and to do.

I think about that instruction now, as THINGS YOU WOULD KNOW is out in the world, and I think about the two paths of that novel, and how they diverged in a yellow wood. As I work on revisions for a second novel, this lesson has stayed with me: when beginning a journey, a destination is important, but as a writer, I should be willing to embrace and explore the diversions along the way. I should listen to where the characters want to take me. I should pay attention when I am forcing the story to be something that it is not, and listen, instead, to what it is asking to become.

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THINGS YOU WOULD KNOW IF YOU GREW UP AROUND HERE

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