The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [37]
It sounds absurd, doesn't it, to say a writer should follow the story? But stories are often screwed up because the writer forgot... or lost... this principle. The story is where the conflict is. The conflict grows out of the central viewpoint character's quest after a central goal. If you remember this, you won't get as confused about where your story should go next. You as the author will continually ask yourself: What is the goal? Where is the conflict? And write those segments .
Sometimes the temptation is to follow some minor character "because she's interesting." Watch out for such feelings on your part; more often than not, they signal that you've lost the thread of conflict... allowed your primary character or characters to get passive. You fix this by giving the main character some new thrust—a plot stimulus—to rekindle the flame of conflict and plunge him into the struggle anew.
Examine your own thinking as you plot and write a story. Are you following the line of conflict? Keeping the main viewpoint character stimulated, involved, moving ahead in his quest? I hope so! If not, look back at your basic statement of what the story was to be about. It contains the basic goal, and the basic conflict, which together define the story question. Get your story moving again, and on the right track, by following that line of struggle.
At some point, of course, you will have done most of the above work as well as you could during one or two drafts. At that time, you will try to lean back from the project a bit and consider ways you might improve it.
This is a necessary and vital part of revising any story of any length. Sometimes flaws are seen and corrected. More often, new angles are detected and worked into the story with a resulting enrichment. For all of that, you should always remember to be a bit leery of any major, far-out plot or character "inspirations" that seem to come out of nowhere at this late stage of the creative process.
That's because your imagination tends to be a fairly short-term tool, and it gets bored easily. Also, it's a lazy facility, and would rather work on some new "game" rather than concentrate long hours or months on the same matter. So what often happens is, the imagination sends up for you some new grand idea that sounds like great fun because it's fresh, but really has nothing whatsoever to do with the present project.
So in thinking about revision of your story set in Chicago, you get this brilliant idea for an episode set in Afghanistan; or it suddenly occurs to you in the dead of night that, wouldn't it be neat if your twenty-six-year-old protagonist were changed into a seventy-seven-year-old crone?
Such blinding flashes of "inspiration" may sometimes work. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they represent a rebellion by a rambunctious imagination, a bad impulse to be avoided like the plague. If you have planned your story and written through it, following the conflict, major deviations from your plan at the late stage of revision will at best represent enormous and dangerous rewrite, and at worst another disaster. When in any doubt at all, stick to your game plan!
Along this same general line, perhaps one additional way of losing yourself in a fog should be mentioned. That is the problem beginning writers sometimes have when they speak of how "My characters just took over the story and went their own way."
I hope you never heard yourself saying such a thing. Because did you ever stop to think how strange such a statement really is? How can your characters take over your story or anything else? They are not real. You made them up. They exist only in your head. And you are the author. You are the one in charge!
Part of your job as a creative writer is to control, discipline, and channel your imagination—not passively let it freewheel like a runaway truck. If it seems those characters in your head want to go away other than the way you planned, either there's something wrong with your