My Stupid Theory of Writing

Trust me, I don’t want to write this. I actually can’t stand it when people try making writing into a science, with graphs and rules and taxonomies, and I know that’s exactly what I’m getting into here. But, even as I specifically tried not thinking about it, this idea kept on occurring to me, growing a little whenever I let my mind drift off in that direction, until it became something coherent and maybe even true. I really hope it isn’t true, because these sorts of literary theories always make the world of storytelling feel narrower, as if you could learn everything you need to know about it in one short essay. But I might as well write it out and see how it works.

The first part of this theory came to me when I was reading submissions for Inklette’s fifth issue*. I’d read more than five hundred stories and essays by the point, and voted to reject about ninety five percent of them, which struck me as oddly harsh, given that I had something good to say about most of the rejects, and a lot of misgivings about the ones I voted for. So I scrolled back through the comments the other editors and I had made, looking for some common thread between what we accepted and rejected. What I found was oddly precise: practically every comment was about the piece’s writing, plot, characters, or meaning. I began to imagine these four elements in a diamond formation, with writing on the bottom, plot and character in the middle, and meaning topping it off. Writing fit on the bottom because it was the most grounded, the closest to something concrete: word choice, comma placement, sentence construction, that sort of thing. And meaning is on top because it’s the furthest of the four from the text: reducing thousands of words into a pithy sentence telling what it’s all about. Character and plot are in the middle: not as anchored to the text as writing but not as far from it as meaning. The four also work as a nice process for understanding writing: you discover the character and plot from the writing, and you discover the meaning from the character and plot.

Moreover, I discovered that we forgave a lot of stories with flaws in the writing or meaning, but character and plot were essential. Often I started a comment that would end rejecting a piece with “The writing is beautiful, but…” or “I really agree with what the author is saying here, but…” There’s more to it than that, of course. It’s hard to take any other element seriously when the writing is bad, and we’ve accepted our share of nearly plotless stories (not so many without well-defined characters, though). But, for a time, that was that, a nice little diagram that I didn’t trust and hoped to never use.

But the theory came back last night when I went to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with my dad, and when the movie still felt like it was beginning well past the two-hour mark, I realized that I’d never seen another movie like this. Oddly, though, it’s a pretty common structure in books: hundreds of pages exploring characters that leads to little catharsis, if any, in the last couple pages. At first I thought it was just because books tend to have more creative freedom or more space to sprawl, but even most low-budget art movies I’ve seen are better paced than your average meditative novel. After contemplating this for a while, I found the sentence that I would call my thesis, if I believed it: each genre is crafted to fit one of the elements of writing. Poetry is writing, drama is plot, fiction prose is character, and non-fiction is meaning.

This part takes a little more explaining, so I’ll go over them one at a time. Poetry’s defining feature is technically its line breaks, but looking at what is and isn’t considered a poem, I’d argue that it’s really that poetry doesn’t need to have a narrative. When prose goes without narrative (in dervish essays, for example), it’s usually either called poetry or a genre-hybrid. This lack of narrative lets poetry focus on the words and their sounds more than any other sort of writing, which is why techniques that play with sound like meter and rhyme are the hallmarks of this genre.

Non-fiction being tied to meaning is a little harder to defend, since it’s such a broad category, encompassing everything from autobiographies to instruction manuals. But, despite that diversity, non-fiction writers almost always state their point much more clearly than poets, novelists, or playwrights. It’s considered good form to have a thesis statement in most types of non-fiction, it’s often forgiven in creative non-fiction, but any creative writing workshop will chew you out for saying exactly what you mean. 

The middle two are even more difficult to pull apart, but I think my conundrum over Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s slow pace shows the essential difference between fiction prose and drama. Novels can go on for thousands of pages without anything happening because prose has the agility to notice a frayed thread on a jacket, zip back twenty years to remember how your favorite goldfish died, and return to present within a sentence. Only our minds are so fluid, and what better way is there to get to know a character than to follow the path of their brain for a little bit? This particular skill is why it’s rare to see a totally objective omniscient narrator in fiction prose.

When I say drama, I mean anything with a script meant to be read out loud. It used to be only theater, but now the designation has stretched to radio shows, movies, TV, podcasts, and so on. As far as I can tell, it just gets plot because there’s really nothing left. It can’t convincingly bring you into a character’s head like fiction prose, craft an argument like non-fiction, or draw your attention to the sound of language like poetry. So it goes for plot, the dumb, cheap thrill of stuff happening to humans, the middle child of writing that most workshops ignore and most critics condescend. 

Okay, I’ve kept it together for about a thousand words now, I think it’s time to stop holding this limp argument upright and let it collapse on its own. Poems don’t need narratives, but a lot of them have one anyway. Plenty of non-fiction meanders without getting at any real meaning. Why do I want to write fiction while my brother Micah wants to write screenplays, even though he’s better at characters and I’m better at plot? Can all of these elements really be equal if it’s a compliment to call an artsy book or film “plotless”**? How can you judge meaning when, in the best works, it’s impossible to come to a definitive answer? Worst of all, none of this analysis says anything about the power of writing or the reasons why we read, and nothing at all about emotion. It’s so universal that it hardly holds true for any particular work and so general that it’s hard to mine one useful bit of information out of it.

But even if this theory doesn’t explain everything, at least it does something. It gives plot a place at the table with all his overhyped siblings, which I appreciate. It might be a starting place for analyzing a work, not a perfect one but still better than my common strategy of saying, “Yeah, I liked it…” and then staring blankly as I try to find the words to articulate why. And it’s instructive for writers in how it reveals each genre’s temptations. It’s natural for prose writers to gravitate towards long and tedious stories about people who just sit around and think, or for poets to experiment with making sounds and evoking sensations without striving for anything else. But I think, to be a truly good writer in any genre, you need a deep understanding of the four elements I laid out here. Not that that’s all you need to be a good writer, since I’m just pulling this all out of my ass anyway.

__________________________________

• On that note, submissions for our ninth issue are open now!

** I actually have an answer to that one: whenever someone calls something plotless, it either just has an unconventional plot or it’s a boring, stagnant, probably pretentious piece of garbage.