Building your Writing Toolkit: Part 5.4 – Pounding it Together: Making Narrative Work

This is the final blog in my several-weeks-long series on narrative. I hope that, if you’re reading this, you’ve read the other blogs and have taken some time to digest them because for the first time I’m going to offer some suggestions for real practice. It’s all well and good to tell people to “avoid this” or “focus on that” or “think about that” but until you actually sit down and DO something, you’re still just masturbating; you’re thinking about writing, but you’re not actually writing. Narrative is the first subject that I’m giving “homework” for because knowing how you start, how you write best, and going out into the world to experience it all have more to do with knowing yourself than they do with knowing your craft.

Narrative is different – narrative is tangible. If you don’t have a decent understanding of narrative as it functions in a short story or a novel or a poem you’re not going to have an audience for very long because your audience will know that you don’t know what you’re doing, and worse, they’ll get bored.

The written word should not be dull. It should enflame and excite. It should stand out from the page and strike its readers with its wisdom, wit, and wonder. The written word was invented in order to facilitate the sharing of information so vital that men were willing to construct a new manner of communicating to prevent that information from being lost – and one of the earliest things humans started doing with that new medium was marking down stories and poems so that the soul of a race would not die with its elders; we write what we do to give a tongue to history, to give a voice to the past, and to grant immortality to those who understand the magic of the words “once upon a time.” The written word should be anything but dull.

If you understand this concept – that writing should give life to what is being said – then you understand the basis of narrative: tell the story but tell it RIGHT – so that everyone who hears it will remember it and want to share it with others. Good writing is a virus, one that changes everyone it touches, and one that spreads with frightening rapidity and permanence.

I’m going to step off of my soapbox and stop ranting about why the written word affects us, and I’m going to hand out a couple of exercises that will help you to write affectingly.

Tell an old story but tell it new.

Everyone has heard that there are only about ten real stories in the world and they break down into laughably simple terms: love, loss, revenge, greed, pride, rebellion and a couple more of the Big Ideas we’ve been masticating for the last handful of millennia.

I’m not going to try to tell you to write something wholly original – very few things in literature are completely original (though that’s not for lack of trying on the part of many authors) and when you’re starting out (or even when you’ve been doing this for a while) butting your head against the idea of pure, original work is just going to frustrate you. I’m certainly not going to tell you to plagiarize, though. I’m going to tell you to re-forge.

We’ve all had an assignment in some class or another where we had to rewrite something creatively. Usually this happens in elementary school classes when the teachers give kids a chance to flex their creative muscles before binding them into five-paragraph essays for the rest of their K-12 education. Usually the children are asked to rewrite something simple – a fairytale, a joke, or a simple poem. When is the last time you did this?

If it was more than six months ago, it’s been too long.

So here’s the first exercise – it’s more complicated than putting your own spin on Little Red Riding Hood or telling a lightbulb joke with stereotype “x” instead of stereotype “y” or writing a Paul Revere rap: write the story of the moon and the sun. Why are they in the sky? Why are they running away from each other? Write the story and leave out the Greeks and the Romans and the Norse and Ethiopian origin stories. Write something new about something old – write as if you were first asking the question of yourself as a child, and sharing the answer you came up with to all of your friends and detractors on the playground.

Tell a story with an imaginary friend.

This exercise works best if you’re a little crazy and have some kind of recording device handy.

Remember your imaginary friend. If you didn’t have one, imagine one – make her a good one too, if she’s your first, with purple hair and retractable eyelashes or with the best tophat you’ve ever seen, or with all of the things that you hold close and quiet to your heart and are too scared to share with real friends because these things are too wonderful and hideous to expose to an outsider’s eyes. Do you have him in your head – tall or small and frightening or lovely and there to pat your back when you almost break down, but the weight of him in your mind keeps you upright? Good. Hold your imaginary friend there, bright and clear, and trade lines in a story.

Here’s an example:
Me: Once upon a time
Chaplin: There was a basketball
Me: The basketball rolled into the middle of the street, even though there was no one to push it
Chaplin: And no wind to blow it.
Me: The basketball rolled past houses and trailers
Chaplin: It rolled through streets empty of traffic
Me: And finally came to rest in front of an ugly, squat brick building
Chaplin: The town’s junior high school
Me: It rocked before pausing, and only Jack Mason saw it.
Chaplin: Jack had stayed behind that day
Me: After the parade passed by
Chaplin: Because he didn’t like the noise – it scared him
Me: But the basketball, with its beastly show of inertia, scared him more.
Chaplin: Jack was a quiet boy, with glasses and a thin chest
Me: But he was strong in a funny way – the way that stood out to other kids
Chaplin: The way that stood up to teachers
Me: The way that made him a target whenever he made a show of that strength.
Chaplin: Jack had a secret, and the day he saw the basketball roll to a stop in the center of the silent street, he knew his secret wouldn’t stay his for much longer.

One of the best things about this exercise is that, if you get really into it (because maybe you’re really a little crazy) you don’t know where your story is going next. You just know that it’s going, and you want to keep it going. You want to keep playing your game and you want to keep it interesting for you and for your imaginary friend. And if you’re really doing it properly, extemporaneously, with no thought or plan, you’ll get pulled into your own story – you’ll probably never make it to novel length using this tool, but you’ll find an idea for a novel at some point and be able to work yourself out of the sticky places in a longer work if writer’s block starts to settle in.

Thirteen ways of looking at a trash compacter repairman.

I really wish that I could take credit for this one, but I can’t. It’s based on Roger Zelazny’s introduction to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Zelazny came up with an odd sort of phrase as a wry way of examining the versatility of Dick’s fiction. I’ve appropriated the clever beginning of his introduction as an interesting way to approach storytelling. Here’s what Zelazny has to say:

“(1) Once there was a man who repaired trash compactors because that was what he loved doing more than anything else in the world –

(2) Once there was a man who repaired trash compactors in a society short o n building materials, where properly compacted trash could be used as an architectural base –

(3) Once there was a man who hated trash compactors but repaired them for a living to keep his manic wife in tranquilisers so that he did not have to spend so much time with his mistress, who was less fun now that she had converted to the new religion –

(4) Once there was a man who in purposely misassembling the trash compactors he haded, produced a machine which –

It is no good. I can’t do it. I can play the Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Trash Compactor Repairman Game, but I canot turn it into a story at once puzzling, poignant, grotesque, philosophical, satirical, and fun. There is a very special way of doing this and the first step in its mastery involves being Philip K. Dick.” (4)

Okay, well, none of us can claim to be Philip K. Dick (unless you’re reading this and you’re the missing android version of Dick that someone made in the early eighties – which would be awesome, but if so, please go home: you’ve been scaring people for three decades now.) Putting aside the fact that you’re (likely) not Philip K. Dick, try to play the Trash Compactor Repairman Game. Play it for seven rounds the first time, instead of thirteen. Play it for three rounds. But try to play.

It’s very unlikely that you’ll write a Hugo Award winning story by playing this game (that’s okay too, Dick relied on methamphetamines and a fair dose of batshit insanity to write his stories, not whimsical storytelling exercises) but you’ll write something, and then you’ll write it differently, with more depth, and again but with better characters, and again with more feeling, and again.

This exercise isn’t an attempt to start a novel from scratch (even though that’s eventually what it can turn into) – it’s an attempt to get you to use your imagination. And it’s an attempt to get you to tell a story: not a brave story, not a hero’s story, but just the story of a Trash Compactor Repairman, and maybe one who becomes his own hero.

These exercises may sound silly, you may think they’re stupid, but they’re all getting back to one essential core goal: tell me a fucking story, and while you’re at it, make it a good one. That’s all that narrative is, that all that it should be – individuals passing through the dark places in the world before coming together into the light, with stories to tell about their adventures.

This finishes up my blogs on narrative, but I’ll be back on Saturday the 31st with an extra blog – it’s going to be based on this one. I’m going to do these exercises for homework, for practice, and to see what I can write (though I’m only going to play 5 rounds of the Trash Compactor Repairman Game because it seems that writing fewer than 500 words in a single sitting is a bit of a stretch for me) and to share it with you. I invite you to do the same, to practice, write, and share: choose one or all of these exercises and post them in the comments of my Saturday blog, and let’s use that space to workshop a little.

Thanks for reading, See you Saturday, and have fun. Write something. Play. Make up imaginary friends and visit imaginary worlds. Have adventures. And keep telling stories.

Cheers,
- Alli