An award winning editor I know told me that they ended up buying the stories that they couldn’t stop thinking about. This process takes time. Longer times for longer stories, often. Were they still thinking about the story, days later? Weeks later?
Those were the keepers.
Memory is a Darwinian space. There is a lot that we love that fades as fast as the flavor from a stick of chewing gum. Procedurals that can be binge watched leaving only a handful of images behind. Big Fat Novels that instantly erode into summaries shorter than the blurbs on the back cover.
And so part of my process includes thinking of things and not writing them down. Thinking of things and then seeing if they survive the passage of time. If they don’t drown in the torrent of images that my writer brain coughs up constantly.
What I call the kaleidoscope.
I’ve wondered sometimes if I might be described as ADHD, after having kids with that diagnosis. Our strategies for managing boredom and difficulty with routine are similar.
The kaleidoscope inside my head, bright moments of stories, climaxes and turning points of various sorts, have to be tamed, harnessed… without being broken. Becoming milestones between the dotted lines on a map.
Theres no shortcut, between the milestones. Well I mean there are. Tapping together the Ruby slippers; the deux ex machina, narrative summary, the prose version of the montage. The title card reading Ten Years Later.
But that doesn’t change the fact that you need story in your story, steps between the leaps, rising and falling action. Nobody buys tubes of Oreo frosting middle and eats them. You need the cookie. Single stuff, double, stuff, triple stuff, but still, stuff. Cake and Frosting.
Maybe your final milestone is pure epiphany. Maybe it’s character change we can believe in. Or preservation of character under duress. It could be a plot as intricate as a victorian pocket watch, the case popped open to reveal the perfect gleaning works.
In any case, your plot is a kind of map, and you’re going somewhere. Physically or mentally or emotionally. Maybe all three.
And in life and in story you’ll remember the high points and not the mundane details that link the high points together. That’s the work of life, the job of prose, and the chaff of memory, all the bits that abrade away and drift off, unwanted and unloved and absolutely vital.
Mostly… but sometimes it’s the little details that stick. Odd moments. Nothing plot beats stuck deep in narrative valley that are the parts of the story that remains.
I remember one of those editorial truism, that the beginning of a story hooks the reader, the middle holds the attention and the end sells the thing. Your brain will erase a ton of middle, the middle is thing that got you to the end, that made the beginning and the end make sense; but the middle is more than the means to the end. It has to be.
Otherwise the reader catches a glimpse of a miserable person on deadline filling out a form in a cubicle.
In the end, you do have to give readers something. Something the story has earned, for them. Something of the proper scale. Sometimes it’s mostly the journey. Sometimes it’s the view from the summit of Everest.
Or a rooftop in Brooklyn.
Something that sticks with us.
