You might have your story in mind and you might even have defined a theme. But what is your story about? In a post on Lit Hub, Stephanie Duncan Smith offers advice for digging into the truth of your story. “Ultimately, not knowing your book’s aboutness as you begin to write is not a problem, but a prompt,” she writes. “Your angle is not your starting point, but rather a finding at which you arrive only through a diligent discovery process.”
This discovery process can take many routes, and is rarely a straight line. Duncan Smith shares a few guidelines that helped her navigate the process:
- Free yourself to create from questions rather than settled clarity. “In the end, writing from certainty makes for rather dull reading,” Duncan Smith writes. Instead, follow your questions and look for surprises. “The call of the creator is not total achievement but the ongoing work of excavation — there are always deeper layers for those who go looking.”
- When you get stuck, get analog and orient your ideas spatially. If you’re stuck, trying writing longhand instead of typing, or print out your work and make edits by hand. Map your work with index cards or draw pictures. For Duncan Smith, the solution came via sticky notes, which she used to track three distinct timelines she wanted to depict in her book. Once she mapped it out, she spotted temporal connections she’d missed on-screen. “Before them, I had simply been journaling, writing to process, unsure of where the words were taking me or what I was trying to say,” Duncan Smith writes. “But seeing those three narratives and how they might be braided together unlocked new connections.”
- Do the work of delineating between a work’s aboutness, and its illustrative elements. Don’t confuse your plot with what your story is about. “My book draws upon the experiences of pregnancy, pregnancy loss, and new parenthood as illustrations, but it’s not about any of these things,” Duncan Smith writes. “It’s about the risks signature to love: how we discern when to go bold and when to play it safe, the contours and consequence of each choice, and how to ground oneself amid the unknowing of how any story will go.”
- Take care to give your “it” and “this” a proper name. If you’re writing about love or forgiveness or the banality of evil, name it. Find many words to convey your message, without relying on vague language or pronouns. “On a sentence-level, bringing precision to your subject nouns make your sentences volumes more powerful, memorable, and quotable,” Duncan Smith notes. “On a structural level, naming your subject nouns can help you land the aboutness of the work.”
