When the story works somewhat, I look for holes where something extra is needed, like a beat of time or a smoother transition. An on-the-body moment or a telling gesture. Or where further research might help. Once the holes are filled, I’ve got a story that will eventually become a plot point in the future book.
In this way I create a few key scenes. Maybe depicting the character’s job. How the romance begins, the “meet cute.” Or the inauthentic way in which the character gets his emotional needs met, i.e., how he fools people into loving him. Each of these must stand alone as a short story. First so I can read them in workshop and test their effect, then garner feedback for revisions. Second so I can read them publicly and test where the energy lags or where hidden laughs occur. True story: When I read the story “Romance” on tour people always laughed at the line, “And we pitched my tent…” The characters were camping at a music festival, why was that funny? On tour someone explained that “pitching a tent” is the new euphemism for getting an erection. Go figure.
Self-contained, the story can also be sold to a magazine, for extra money and to assure some future book publisher that the topic has already been embraced by other editors.
These short stories accumulate. Each helps establish the verbal gimmicks of the narrator, and subsequent stories riff on those same devices. By now I’m printing all of the stories, binding them and carrying the collected work everywhere. By shuffling their order I can test the pacing, looking for places where an aside or flashback will help sustain tension or distract the reader before the surprise of a resolution.
This arduous process of creating a complete first draft, Tom calls it “shitting out the lump of coal.” As in, “Relax, you’re still shitting out your lump of coal.”
Over time I’m carrying a full draft of the book. The most important plot points, the original stories, are done. The main structure of the fictional house is built and more or less watertight. What’s left to do is to tweak the pace and try different endings.
The benefit to this method is that, initially, each story gives me a sense of satisfaction. I’m not carrying around the mess of an incomplete novel. As each story is finished and sold, I’m free to begin a fresh story. I know each subassembly works because it’s being published or it’s been applauded by an audience.
If I were your teacher I’d admit this sounds pretty artless. But if you hold a full-time job, have a family, and have to juggle every other duty in life, this scene-by-scene experimentation will keep you sane. Process: Crowd Seeding
Another Freightliner story. In cold weather feral cats would come to live in the truck assembly plant, despite the constant roar of pneumatic tools and the mist of oil and paint that hung in the air. People would feed them from lunch boxes, and we’d glimpse them running between the shelter of one crate and the next. On occasion we’d open a carton to find a nest of newborn kittens, pink and mewing, and management policy required that any kittens be immediately dumped into the shredder. There they’d be instantly pulverized like so much cardboard or packing material. Policy or not, no one was that heartless. Even at the risk of our jobs we’d keep the kittens a secret, hiding them and feeding them until spring arrived and they could venture outside.
Every job is its own world. On my first day in that same plant my foreman sent me to another work station to retrieve some tool called a Squeegee Sharpener. The foreman at the next station sent me to another foreman who sent me to a fourth station in the line, but not before each foreman cursed me. By shift’s end I’d been to every station in the plant, from rough cab buildup to offline, and met every foreman, and they’d all cursed me and spat on me. There was no such tool as a Squeegee Sharpener, but that’s not the point. What’s important is that I’d learned the layout of the place and had introduced myself to every boss I might ever be assigned to work for.
And the point of me telling you this story is that years later I told it at a party and everyone present almost leapt forward for the chance to tell almost the exact same story from his or her life. Someone who’d worked at Red Robin said on her first day she was sent around to find the Banana Peeler. Someone said that at Target he’d been sent to find the Shelf Stretchers.
You see, a good story might leave everyone in awed silence. But a great story evokes similar stories and unites people. It creates community by reminding us that our lives are more similar than they are different.
In fact a friendly competition begins. A man who’d worked in a brick factory in Toronto said he’d been told to fetch a bucket of hot steam. His co-workers had taught him how to cup a bucket over a steam tap, then run with the metal bucket upside down. He’d never questioned the task, but had spent his first day dashing around with blistered hands, trying to deliver steam where it was needed.
Another man said that television stations used to make the new hire wash the lighting gels. These are thin sheets of colored plastic used to tint the lights on set. They’re called gels because the originals were thin sheets of incredibly fragile gelatin. On your first day in television a station manager will give you a few sheets and tell you to wash them. If you scratch or tear them, you’re told you’ll be fired. You’re sent into a janitor’s closet with a sink and told to use the
