“But I contain multitudes! How can it truly be about my life when so much is left out?”
What we’re doing is crafting a story with a thread running through it that captivates the reader, keeps them turning the page, and delivers an emotional climax. To do that properly we need to find that core.
The film about Johnny Cash was built on the thread following the death of his brother. Cash, as it was portrayed in this film, was striving to come to terms with that loss while filling the role of the older brother that he idolized. The theme of a brother’s death was also at the core of the film about Ray Charles. Man On The Moon about Andy Kaufmann left out huge parts of his life – that he was a father was completely cut from his story – in order to focus on the key thread about Kaufmann’s artistry.
If you were to discuss Johnny Cash you would not point to his brother’s death as the defining point of his life. But when developing a tight film script it serves as a powerful core for the personal journey of the Cash character.
The first months of working on a ghostwriting project are spent discovering what the story is, and outlining these points in the arc. What is the core theme and value? How does this build to a powerful conclusion? How do we structure your story to bring out the emotion in this for the reader?
With that in place we start to pool the parts of the story and journey that support this. Part of this is deciding what doesn’t make it. What parts of the journey distract from the story.
For one client, I structured his story in a non-linear approach to emphasis the way he’d overcome set backs at each part of his journey from Brooklyn to Silicon Valley. For another client, I structured her story as a journey, an adventure, into the wider unknown world as she discovered a larger industry from her small town.
Helping writers come define and refine this core is a key part of my coaching and developmental editing work. We work on identifying those essential elements of the foundation. What is the core theme? What in the story supports that? And what can we cut off to sharpen the story?
When that’s in place, the page is set for a powerful story.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s shorter insights to story craft are now available on her website.
They come from what her site calls an “informal workshop” answering questions posed by readers in 2015.
The first one addresses an article she read about breaking rules in writing – Show, don’t tell. Write about what you know. Sympathetic characters.
A friend sent this to me a few weeks ago with the note – “I think you do this well.”
It’s a manifesto of getting things done. There are some points there that align with my process. And some that I don’t adhere to.
Through my own creative work – novels, poetry, music – I’ve learnt how to put out work, how to create, how to revise, and how to finish. Much of this I adapt to my process of ghostwriting.
Point 10 – Failure counts as done. So do mistakes. – is powerful.
My approach is to work on the idea, the experiment, and finish it to see if it works. Honour the idea for what it is. If it works, then we can release it. We can ship it. If it doesn’t, then we learn why, and move on to the next idea. This doesn’t dismiss adjusting approaches, revising, adding different experiments.
It is simply a way of staying true to what the idea was and seeing it through until it is done.
This is not to say that there isn’t or shouldn’t be attention to detail. The point is that finishing the draft, and moving on to add that detail, is integral. Finishing something gives you more insight into how the whole piece works. There are structural understandings to the writing you find only when you have a draft finished. And picking at details on the way will keep you from these observations.
Failure counts as done. It’s not a judgement on you as an artist, a writer, a musician. In fact, you don’t have to show it to the world.
If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, then move on.
We’ve seen the old zoetropes that put pictures in motion. Perhaps we’ve even made flipbooks when we were at school. The picture changes a little and the motion unfolds. Even as we watch the leaf fall, the dancer move, the horse gallop… we know that it is just small individual images moving fast to make it look like movement.
Trusting the writing the process and following it where it goes takes strength and dedication. Finishing the song, putting it down to the record, then turning to the next tune is a cycle that meant they learnt so much in their process, and were open to new ideas to weave into the songs the next time around.
John Swartzwelder is a reclusive writer best known for writing a huge amount of the strongest early Simpsons episodes. He also wrote for Saturday Night Live. Now he writes novels. His writing process involves getting the idea out quick. Finish the first draft as fast as possible. Then work deeper in the rewrite.
