Late blog today. I blame the promised storm not arriving yet plus the fact that I'm on Day 1 of ditching caffeine for a month. I spent all my energy credits for the day already.
Thursday: Thinking out loud about narrative units
Friday: Further heat-ravaged thinking about narrative units
I realised today that my budding division there -- between i) Dramatic Units, ii) Form-Specific Units, and iii) Atomic Units -- maps loosely to something else I've had in my head a long while. Writing as a craft is a gestalt of many different skills -- broadened further by the way it plays in the tidepools of different forms. Good writers are good at lots of different things, and have suitable levels of proficiency in the various elements -- but they're not equally good at all things. You need to be good at at least a few things and know how it all fits together, but you can suck at a bunch of craft-related stuff and still be a good writer. (Though it helps a lot if you know where your balance of strengths lie and choose projects that fit that. )
You can't really separate all those different seams out, but you can loosely group them in a useful way. I've tended to think of that craft into three major 'chunks':
- Devising stories. The nebulous craft of 'worldbuilding', having interesting ideas, coming up with interesting characters. Sharpening all of that until you've got something worth telling.
- Storytelling -- in the sense of knowing how to structure and present your story. Crafting good scenes, building out a plot, knowing what needs to happen on the page and what doesn't. Twists, turns, interesting emotional stakes.
- Getting good words down. What I tend to call 'nuts and bolts' writing. Word choice, clarity and grammar, filigree and ornamentation, imagery, and the like. The business of words and sentences, above all.
So, you need to be able to do all of that at least functionally to get anywhere. (Although -- perhaps not even that if you're just working to brief. That can shortcut at least some chunks of it.) But you don't need to do all of it equally well. For me, I think the third type, the craft of words, was the thing I was best at early. Which is deceptive, because it made me think I could write far better than I actually could in practice, in the sense of writing that encompasses all of these groups. But turning a good phrase can only get you so far. I haven't actually gone back and re-read any of my many draft stories from a decade ago, but this is the problem I remember being plagued with and lacking the tools to fix.
I've seen plenty of work that is very pedestrian in its nuts and bolts writing, but sings in the ideas and construction -- it's never felt like a deficiency. And the inverse -- I've read work that's beautiful but at the structural level unremarkable or 'badly functional'. Which isn't always a death kneel either, though I'll admit that it's less often to my tastes.
'Nuts and bolts' writing can seem to matter disproportionately, because it's often one of the easier things to evaluate -- you can get to grips with it quickly in someone else's work. Though, that said, I think it's often a reasonable proxy for the overall quality when evaluating someone's work, if it just doesn't land right for me at that level.
I consider nuts and bolts writing the easiest thing to get better at, but that may just be because I had a historically stronger grasp of it myself. (Though there's certainly some concrete elements to that, too -- you can learn digestible rules and styles, and you can iterate quicker than the other categories.)
I think people from outside the discipline overindex on the first and the last groups when thinking about what 'writing' is. There's a tendency to think of writing as 'just' the last bit. There's also this myth that it's just about coming up with loose, exciting ideas. This plays into weird-and-amusing-but-also-not-amusing anecdotes about people coming to writers with their awesome idea, and they'll magnanimously allow the writer to use their idea and split the proceeds. Ideas aren't actually worthless, and truly good ideas are rare enough to be worth treasuring, but they sure as heck ain't the bulk of the craft, either.
(Actually, I'll posit that the skillful part of 'ideas' part of the writing craft is more centred around forcing the generation of decent ideas. Having really good ideas come to you out of the blue is great, though the number of times I've found that powerfully useful in practice is small. Better still is the ability to come up with the ideas you need right now and make them work for you.)
In any case, given this mental division of the craft that's long existed in my head, my nascent taxonomy of narrative units probably isn't surprising.
A closing aside: this inclination over the past few posts to respond to my own previous post in some way has given me a notion. One thing I'll try in a forthcoming week is to write the same blog post over five days. More specifically: drafting something loose and exploratory, then aiming to cover the same ground in the post the next day. And so on for the rest of the week. It'Ss not about revising the previous post as much as rewriting it (and stealing chunks from it if needed) to try to sharpen it and see what falls out of my head when doing this. Sketching and resketching./