Developing a story-germ

[breathedout]

tartan asked:

Your post about writing process is excellent. Here's something I've been wondering about lately: in the beginning research and freewriting stages, how do you decide what story will best make use of the images/ideas/themes/anecdotes you're starting from? What series of events and webs of character relationships will best do the things you want to do with this story? Because I start with ideas the storyline never feels inalienable to me--I feel like it could change, and can't tell if it should.

Well firstly, yay! I’m so glad you liked that post. And secondly, wow, what a great and hard-to-answer question! I’ve been giving it some thought and… this stuff is all so intuitive that I think the only way I can answer is to actually go through the process of starting from a spark and brainstorming a story from it, and try to observe myself in the wild, so to speak.

So: for the sake of the exercise, let’s suppose that I’m planning to write a story inspired by this passage, from Colette’s The pure and the impure. I’m choosing it because I had that “I WANT A NOVEL ABOUT THIS ANECDOTE” response to it, but since then I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought. I’m just going to read it again right now, and then stream-of-consciousness work through the very initial process I’d use to start to formulate a story with it as a starting-point. If you’re reading along I’d suggest you also give the link a read, since the rest of this won’t make much sense otherwise.

Okay, let’s go!

So. Upon revisiting this passage, I ask myself: what it is it that draws me to it? On the highest level, I think it’s the subversion of a stereotypical female/female dynamic (rivals for a single man’s affection) into not one but two compelling alternatives: first, erotically charged malevolent sporting rivals, and, later, comrades-in-arms discoursing on shared battlefield experiences. I am also very intrigued by the fact that these two alternate dynamics are then in tension with one another in ways that the women themselves attempt, but fail, to control.

So now I’ve isolated that kind of… locus of interest. I’ll go back and look at the passage and try to tease out more specific things in it that excite my narrative sense. In this case:

• I like the notion that these two women, having shared this experience of rivalry over a man, have more in common with one another than either ever did with the man in question; that in fact their connection with each other is more substantive than either’s connection with him. That even at the height of their respective attachments to the man, they spend more time thinking about the other woman than they do thinking about him. Even when one of them is with the man, she is distracted from his charms by thinking malevolent thoughts at the other woman. It’s as if the two women are soldier-peers in a war of which the man is unaware.



• Colette seems actually to hold a kind of superstitious belief that thinking bad thoughts at other people can have tangible negative effects on their well-being. Since that’s not part of my perception of the realistic world, I’m starting to think about how best to handle it in fiction: whether to make this a kind of Gothic-tinged story where hints of magic hover around the edges of an otherwise-realistic world? Or whether to make this conviction that one can do harm by thinking harm, a sort of psychological delusion on the part of the POV character? Both have interesting potential, but for this particular story my instinct is to go for the noncommittal possibility of actual magic, a claim that never needs to resolve itself one way or the other. All these misfortunes that befall the narrator COULD just be coincidence; she doesn’t believe they are, but there’s nothing in the story to contradict that reading if someone is determined to make it. So my angle on this story would be “low-key Gothic”: there may, I hint, actually be supernatural elements in play whereby one party can adversely affect another’s life by thinking bad thoughts in their direction; the narrator believes these supernatural elements are in play; but the text itself never comes down definitively either way. As a reader this is generally my favorite way to encounter fictional magic (it takes a lot more to keep me engaged if the author goes all-out on a world that explicitly involves real magic), so I’m now excited that I might get a chance to use this approach in a story myself.



• I note, now, that I’ve designated the Colette character as the narrator. I stop and think about this for a moment: it’s not inevitable; I could always take the rival woman as my narrator, the one who tried to murder the Colette character in Rambouillet. If I took her as my POV character, I could narrate the entire anecdote that she hints at here. But that feels wrong. For the story I’m starting to formulate, part of what intrigues me is the manner of Colette’s narration, the way she simultaneously hints strongly at, and fails to explicitly acknowledge, both her physical attraction to this other woman and what this former rivalry-dynamic brought to her life. That’s sort of the psychological territory I’m interested in exploring, I think, and for that it makes sense to stick with the Colette avatar (or some character extrapolated from her) as my POV character.



• That thought leads me to catalog the manifestations of physical attraction in the passage. When I go back to do so I note, first of all, that the structure of the anecdote goes: narrator fails to devote sufficient attention to her rival, with disastrous consequences –> she corrects her mistake and they regain an equilibrium of mutual malevolence –> they both lose momentum on hating each other and become good (albeit occasionally spiky) friends –> they actually try to restore the intensity of mutual animosity, but fail –> visceral memory of erotically-charged mutual animosity. The narrator, I realize afresh, feels nostalgic about the period when she and the other woman were “united” in passionate hatred. When (and only when) she thinks of that period, her prose becomes thick with signifiers of the other woman’s beauty: “the former resentment in the periwinkle eyes that questioned mine”; “With that beautiful blue-eyed woman, whose light chestnut hair was exactly the shade of mine…” The place they reach after their passion fades is comradely, and more relaxed and pleasant, and requires less energy; but is lacking some thrill that the narrator found (or believes in retrospect she found) in their sisterhood of malevolence, earlier on.
• 
  
  
• There are often individual words that pique my interest. Here, the narrator says “I was in spirit close to some woman, my invisible presence was upsetting her” (bolding mine): as this refers to the more intense, erotic portion of the relationship between the two women, I entertain the idea that “upsetting” is how the narrator conceptualizes a whole cluster of descriptors: distracting, arousing, maddening, threatening, appealing, alarming, as they occur in tandem. This kind of thing might trigger a vision of a particular scene: the narrator walking down a public street, say, possibly with her male lover, the disputed man; and suddenly feeling, piercingly clear and visceral, the sensation on her skin and in her guts of the other woman’s malevolent remote attention. This, in the complex valence of Colette’s prose, “upsets” the narrator. She is possibly panting in public, very “upset.” She is, as she says a moment earlier in the text, wholly occupied in “thinking of” the other woman. The man is inquiring what could be wrong: perhaps it is the sun? Yes, she says, and squirms in her voluminous skirts on the park bench onto which he’s lowered her. All she can think of is the prism-focused beam of the other woman’s regard. She can almost feel her touch. It’s very. Upsetting.
  
  [This is the kind of scenario that I tend to flag as a signpost, later on: definitely want to hit this scene, in some form; starts to get at the heart of why I find the original passage so interesting. I’ll call it Street Scene.]



• But as much as I find compelling the memory of the intense erotic-at-one-remove bond between the two women, I also find very compelling their latter-day companionship. The story about the botched murder attempt in Rambouillet is hilarious, but that’s not quite what I’m after here; what I want to capture is more hidden between the lines, in the almost-easy repartee between the two former rivals, now friends. I love the idea that they reach a point where they just don’t care anymore and relax into liking each other and actually knowing each other (because let’s face it, a remote rivalry, however erotically charged, does not an in-depth knowledge of another soul make). But I also love the idea that there lingers a certain… piquancy, to the memory of a time when they felt more passionately about each other. I’m very conscious of wanting, in my story, to capture both the urgency and obsessiveness of their past attraction, and the only-occasionally-uneasy companionship of their present relationship. RELATEDLY, I become conscious of a possible bridge between those two states: the moment when the narrator says:
  
  “This limit revived, for some unknown reason, a little of the former resentment in the periwinkle eyes that questioned mine. But it was only a fleeting gleam. In vain we tried—in vain we still try—to upset each other by violent arguments, a tone of defiance quite out of keeping with our calm remarks: we soon recover our cordial relations. The powerful bond that was our youthful and mutual hatred can no longer unite us.”
  
  There’s a LOT that’s fascinating here, but most crucial to my planning purposes, I think, is the detail that in this latter phase of their relationship they actively TRY to “upset” (there’s that eroticized word again) each other, in order to recapture the feeling of being passionately “united” that their mutual hatred once brought them.

I’m now very much thinking about the dichotomy between these two dynamics: the earlier, “passionately united in hatred and possibly intentionally harming each other through the intensity of our thoughts” dynamic, and the later “we’re buddies who get along mostly swimmingly but we also both feel nostalgia for and occasionally try to recapture the time when our relationship was more urgent and passionate if also more antagonistic” dynamic.

The two states are separated by a span of years; I can think of a number of ways to explore the dichotomy between them. I could, for example, zoom in on the moment in time when the dynamic is shifting from one thing to another; in that case my narrative would firmly establish Malevolent Dynamic, and gradually shift over its course to Comradely Dynamic. Because I’m me, the approach that’s more appealing is starting with a firm exposition of Comradely Dynamic, and then gradually introducing the yearning for something, some previous state not yet understood by the reader, then progressing to flashbacks to Malevolent Dynamic. If I took this route (lbr this is almost certainly the route I would take, because the thing that I possibly find most compelling about this whole scenario is the retrospective yearning for Malevolent Dynamic even in the legitimately appreciative midst of Comradely Dynamic), then I can imagine the culmination of the story either of two ways:

1. After establishing the Comradely Dynamic and then gradually via flashbacks introducing the Malevolent Dynamic [including Street Scene], end with an interaction like the one the narrator mentions, where the two women attempt to egg each other back into Malevolent Dynamic, almost succeed, and then… collapse back into Comradely Dynamic.



2. After establishing the Comradely Dynamic, introduce an interaction like the one described (an attempt to egg each other back into Malevolent Dynamic, near success, followed by collapse), which the reader won’t totally understand as it’s happening; then gradually, via flashbacks, work back into an understanding of Malevolent Dynamic, and end with Street Scene.

Either, I think, could produce an interesting story. #2 is definitely going to be more technically challenging, because it involves more teasing of the reader’s incomplete knowledge, and I’d have to put some thought into how to get the bridge back into Malevolent Dynamic working. That could be a plus or a minus, depending on whether I’m feeling like a technical challenge. The two options are also going to end on slightly different notes. I’d say #2 is overall more sharply nostalgic, even regretful: ending with a memory, especially a very vividly-held memory, is almost always a palpably nostalgic move. With #1, that nostalgic feeling will still be present, but I’ll be ending on a more forward-looking note, and one that reaffirms the tangible value of the more comradely current relationship between the two women. Overall, although #2 has a definite dark appeal, I’m leaning toward #1 because I’d like that opportunity to portray and reaffirm this kind of complicated but valuable female friendship. [Note from 2019: Just kidding, I would now definitely go with #2.]

So now I’ve got a very basic structure:

• Establish characters and their current comradely dynamic, comfortable and seemingly untroubled [”present-day” narration is in this era]
• Gradually introduce, partially via flashbacks, their former malevolent dynamic (incorporate Street Scene into one of these flashbacks)
• Build on the theme of their mutual conflicted yearning for the united intensity of the malevolent dynamic, despite their genuine appreciation of the comradely dynamic. (This in practice will be much less… spelled-out… than it sounds here.)
• Culminate in a mutual attempt to egg each other back into the malevolent dynamic (sex scene or near sex scene), which almost succeeds but ultimately collapses. We end the story with both characters in rueful laughter, as occasionally-regretful friends.

That’s about as barebones a story outline as I could possibly imagine: there are a few extremely broad goals to hit, and two slightly more specific semi-sex-scene concepts (and I kind of love that both these sex scene concepts are nontraditional in some way, either because the two people involved are not physically together, or because the whole thing collapses partway through), but it’s all still extremely loose.

From here I need to decide a bunch of things, like: how long is this story going to be? How gradual the development? (Answer: inevitably longer and more gradual than I think it’s going to be at first.) At this point it has several different—but great!—potential manifestations, and I’m kind of choosing what’s most appealing to me. I could really, if I wanted to cut brutally, pare my prose way down, and leave the reader in some suspense for much of the action about what’s actually going on and when, make this just a single-scene story: a conversation, with an unspoken memory in the middle (Street Scene) and an abortive sex scene at the end. On the other extreme, if I wanted to really savor the development of both of the dynamics (and have leeway to extend the sex scenes), I could expand it out to novel length, which would require a lot more thought about the natures of secondary characters, sub-arcs, the nature of both women’s relationships with their shared male lover, whether either of them had other lovers at the time or during the intervening years, how many years have in fact gone by, whether any of those other people were women, what both women’s relationships are with a whole variety of things including: Paris, Catholicism, the supernatural, their extended families, their professions, clothes, music, fidelity, literature, and so on and so forth—basically if it’s going to be a novel there’s a WHOLE lot more free association and research that I need to do, because I’m spreading out that 4.5-point outline over 100,000 words rather than 10,000 or even 5,000 words. There’s going to be much more to the story if the former than the latter.

If I do decide to go the novel route, though, just that list I free-associated gives me some places to start with research. These women, if I’m working from the text, are both French Catholics, so I’d need to research how this kind of a belief in the harmful power of malevolent thoughts might fit into a framework of fin de siecle French Catholicism. To craft the character of the man I could look into biographies of Colette, or biographies of her various lovers, or period biographies more generally. (This story needn’t be “RPF” unless I want it to be; my characters could be based on this anecdote and then take off in completely new directions if I chose; but grounding myself in history is usually super helpful for me, creatively.) And so on. I start to get a sense of a few types of books I should seek out; and probably, once I do, whole new novelistic sub-arcs will suggest themselves.

If I go the short story route, which requires less planning, I can start sketching out sections with word count goals at this point. Say I’m going to try to do this story via the single-conversation-with-an-unspoken-memory-in-the-middle route, and I’m aiming for 5,000 words. (LOL in my dreams.) I’ll probably want 2,000 of those words to be dedicated to the final scene, where they attempt to egg each other back into their old, malevolent dynamic—especially since it is something of a sex scene, and porn sucks up words. I might need 800 words at the beginning to establish the current, easy dynamic. Which then leaves me 2,200 words in the middle to both build tension, and incorporate the POV character’s vivid memory of the Street Scene. That gives me some structural parameters to work with, and decide how to massage.

From here on out I feel like my more specific narrative decisions are guided by the very large-scale “outline,” my consciousness of the even larger-scale concerns that are motivating me to write the story in the first place (first step), and the character dynamic arcs I’ve mapped out. The specifics of the storyline, to use your phrase, still don’t seem inalienable, exactly, but when I run into a quandary about which direction to go then I can use this very loose framework as a directing principle, if that makes sense? I’ll ask myself, “what story decision would help me hit this specific character feeling or dynamic?” and make decisions accordingly.

Does that help?? Man this got insanely long, but it was fun for me & hopefully it answers your question at least marginally. Feel free to ask me to expand or clarify particular points, if you want! :-D

Comments

[anarfea]

This is fascinating. I love looking into other writers' processes.

[breathedout]

Thanks! It was a fun exercise to do. (And I still want to write the story.)