JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #13
August 13, 2020
I've been working on revising a story I wrote a couple of years ago, and I was making good progress making some changes when I revisited the commentary from the workshop. One piece of feedback stopped me short. It said, "The next level is to go deeper." I realized that everything I'd been doing with the story was superficial, merely cosmetic, and I wasn't addressing its biggest shortcoming, that it had only glanced at the underlying story. But I had no idea in that moment how to fix it.
I set the story aside for a few days, convinced I'd need to move on (again) and work on a different story (again--I'd already tried several times to revise this story in the past two years or so) because I had no idea how to "go deeper." I realized that this was always my dissatisfaction with the story, the thing that had kept it in my drawer for so long. I kept failing at figuring out how to address this flaw.
Then it hit me. The story is about a character confronting her own shortcomings, as all stories are, and though I knew every beat of her action, of the choices she made during the story, the underlying reasons for her actions were unclear. Part of this was due to point of view. I'd originally written the story as a stage play, and translating it into a short story left it in a relatively distant third person. In early drafts, there was little access to her inner thoughts, only what she chose to express in dialogue. Most of my revisions in the past couple years had been attempts to bring the POV a little bit closer, to give us more access to the character's thoughts so that we could see her inner conflicts, her thought processes, a bit more clearly. But that was not working.
Despite spending uncounted hours with her, I realized that I didn't really know this character. I didn't really understand her. I had a feeling for what she was thinking and the decisions she was making, but when I thought about it honestly, I really didn't know why. I didn't know how her personality had been shaped by her life, how she had come to be where she was, suddenly emerging onto the stage of my story. I knew the best thing I could do to fix the story was to dive into my character's life and find out who she was and where she came from. I needed to discover how her personality had interacted with the world, the chain of causative factors that has led her to the beginning of the story and this crucial confrontation with herself.
It's rather embarrassing when you give the same advice over and over again to other writers, and then, when trying to understand the shortcomings of your own work, you forget that advice. So I'm writing this out as a way to both remind myself of that central advice for any story: it must be about the character; and as an example to other writers when thinking about how to solve problems in your stories. Hopefully next time I'll heed my own advice.