Sometimes a story comes to us fully-formed. We have a general idea about our plot and characters and overarching theme before we start writing. Sometimes we start with character or theme and have to work a little harder to integrate them into a coherent narrative. But occasionally we start a project because we have a need. We might need to work out trauma or tackle a philosophical question. Sometimes a story starts with no more than a general feeling about what we want to get out. On these occasions, it can be hard to figure out exactly what your story is about.
In a post for Lit Hub, Bonnie Friedman discusses times like these. “It’s a common predicament: we write transfixed by certain episodes, darkly enchanted by them, not yet able to take responsibility for the effect the pages produce,” she writes. “We tell the stories we can’t believe. We write what we know but don’t. We hope to convince ourselves, to make the unbearable into something whose actuality we can accept.”
Friedman encountered this with a student in one of her classes, who wrote about an abusive marriage but could not seem to write the story of how she escaped it. Friedman herself wrote a memoir about a dependent relationship with her therapist and a novel about a divorce. In both cases, her early readers found different messages in the text than Friedman intended.
“I wrote about these things to gain perspective and because I wanted others—wanted, actually, the smartest people I knew—to tell me what they meant,” Friedman explains. “Yet when these readers did…I felt as if my observers were exaggerating. Being simplistic and overly dramatic. I regarded their comments with comforting skepticism.”
So, how do you move forward in your story when your creative brain is circling a single idea. Friedman says we must step away for a bit. “The writer must at some point—and not too late—find a way to believe her own testimony,” she says. “I was restless to believe a reality that I could not, concerning the characters in my book. I discovered that for this to happen—for me to believe with my heart what only my mind knew to be true—there were some basic assumptions I had to change. When they changed, I was able to complete my manuscript in a way that satisfied both the reader and myself.”
First, Friedman stepped back to see what her manuscript about a character’s divorce was trying to tell her. What she found were images of dissociation and estrangement. “They implicated the husband, who had hidden parts of himself from his wife. But they also, more significantly, implicated the wife, who told herself that her affair wasn’t important, that it was a non sequitur, something she was fantasizing while awake, and which possessed all the importance of an idle daydream,” Friedman explains. The manuscript said these things mattered, even though Friedman hadn’t inserted them consciously.
“The images told me that although I—like my protagonist—pretended it didn’t cost me to be deceptive, actually, everything is related,” Friedman writes. As a result, she altered her view of her protagonist and dramatized the change. The character became more honest with herself and her husband, and surprising events ensued.
When Friedman’s students are stuck, she has them inquire about the clues hidden in their manuscripts. “I ask my students who seem entranced, unable to gain perspective on their own testimony, what might you tell yourself ten years from now, if you could look back on the you of today alive on these pages?” she says. “What might a wise friend see in your narrative? Answering these questions allows people to access their own wisdom, which many of us slide out of our own reach.”
