Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

In Praise of Concrete and Rebar

by Brian Hodge

Spend enough time online and you’re guaranteed to encounter certain things:

Foreign-language speakers apologizing for poor English when their written communication skills are far more coherent than those of a distressingly large number of the English speakers to whom they’re apologizing.

Displays of courage dot com whose bluster puts professional wrestlers to shame.

And, if it’s a site where the number of writers hanging out has hit critical mass, neophytes seeking advice. Anxiety-ridden, whiff-of-panic pleas on how to continue wrangling some project that started out with promise and, after a few dozen pages, morphed into an overgrown briar patch devoid of exits.

I saw another one not long ago. The Stricken Writer’s dilemma: Should he keep grinding onward … or back off long enough to make more sense of where he was and what he had, reworking it as necessary, before continuing to add to it?

Nobody ever lacks for answers asking something like this. Either/or — it’s easy. And the answers had come in one after another after another: Grind that sucker out. Don’t look back now. You have all this momentum built up, so you don’t want to waste it. Finish while you’re in the grip of inspiration.

You could almost hear the voice of George Kennedy from Cool Hand Luke: “Git mad at them damned eggs! Eat it there, boy! Gnaw on it!”

Uniformly, the rationale behind the counsel Stricken Writer was getting was that the sensible thing to do was pound the novel out while the creative fever was hot, and then, only then, start trying to make sense of it.

After several of these theme and variations, Stricken Writer acquiesced. Everybody was probably right. Yes, he should get over his misgivings, cowboy up, and soldier on.

I had a couple of simultaneous reactions.

First, to myself: Wow … am I some kind of towering, overly cautious imbecile because I think this ranks among the worst consensus advice I’ve heard since a few of us talked our pal Keith into peeing on an electric fence?

Second, to Stricken Writer: Why are you lending this much credence to people who may be well-meaning, but, as near as I can tell, don’t have substantially more experience or credits to their bylines than YOU do?

Not that I posted this. There’s no way to say a thing like that without insulting everyone involved, and I really try to steer clear of bulletin board pie fights, and especially try not to start them, because it’s awfully hard to come out of them looking good under all that meringue.

Fortunately the cavalry arrived a little farther down the thread, a prolific writer whose work I was definitely familiar with, whom I respect professionally and like personally … and who’d already found a more diplomatic way to convey the rebuttal that was formulating in my mind:

That Stricken Writer might instead find it more beneficial to invest whatever time he needed to get a handle on what he’d written, and clarify where he saw it going and how best to get there, before trying to advance any further.

In other words, shoring up the foundation and feeling secure in its integrity before continuing to build. Grunt work — drudgery, even? Yeah, maybe so … but the next time you look at an ornate cathedral or gleaming office tower, consider all the drab, unheralded parts that it’s standing on.

If memory serves, Stricken Writer acquiesced here, too.

Now, let there be no mistake: I wholly believe there’s a time for blindly whipping a troublesome beast across the finish line before you actually know what you’re riding, or if it bears any resemblance to what you thought it would.

But I also believe that doing this successfully is a product, more often that not, of a certain degree of confidence, and earned confidence at that … and in this instance, Stricken Writer clearly didn’t have it. Even if he was predisposed toward barging ahead and was looking for validation of what he’d already decided. Because when you’re truly confident, you don’t need anybody else’s validation.

If every project of any significant size is, at its heart, a journey, consider the two strategic polarities in how to undertake it:

(1) The Jungle Explorer. Hacks away and forges ahead no matter what. Continually fueled by the thrill of discovery. Doesn’t matter if he can’t see three feet in front of his face — trusts that a viable path always lies before him. (Or her. Doesn’t usually let pronoun genders get in the way.)

(2) The Travel Agent. Meticulously arranges all stops and routes in advance. Minimal room in itinerary for surprises or detours. Insurance and inoculations taken care of before departure. Currency rates checked daily, phrase book always handy.

Two polarities, but in practice, an infinite number of hybrid positions along the continuum between. There’s no objective right or wrong about any of them, only what subjectively works best for a particular project. Most of us gravitate to wherever we need to be based on habits, comfort zones, and instincts rooted in prior experience, which has supplied a base of practical knowledge to draw from.

Still, if there’s one instinct that operates independent of experience, it’s the sense that tells you when you’re in trouble. It obviously served Stricken Writer well — he knew he was in the thick of it. He only needed someone to tell him that it was OK. That it happens. That if he wasn’t yet ready for a freefall into the Amazon Basin, there was nothing wrong with taking extra time to study the land and chart a better course.

Why, then, such a dogged insistence on telling someone to press ahead even when he’s just admitted to losing sight of what he’s doing and where he’s going? I have to wonder if it isn’t because, being human, we naturally crave quick gratification … and we live in a culture that teaches us to define progress in readily quantifiable terms. Numbers. Thus it’s a lot easier to count the pages you racked up today and exclaim, “Look how productive I was!” than to evaluate whether or not those pages work, or even belong there in the first place.

Does this mean they have to emerge ready for typesetting? Absolutely not. But they should leave you with a sense that they serve the project as a whole, and don’t comprise some unrelated or incoherent tangent you’re on because you don’t know what else to do.

We all need to explore sometimes, and follow where a path seems to lead. Wondrous things can be waiting on the other side of a leap of faith. But there can come a time when racking up pages just for the sake of racking them up becomes a distraction, a refusal to stop and think about what you’re really trying to accomplish … and if you’re anywhere in sight of that goal.

It’s frustrating enough to contend with this when you’re a seasoned veteran. But if you’re a novice with 60 or 80 pages that have turned into an ill-defined, unfocused, poorly constructed mess … well, I can’t think of many things more dispiriting than amassing 300 or 400 pages, and being forced to admit that your problems have only increased exponentially.

So. A few observations:

(A) It’s a lot less daunting to fix 60 or 80 pages than it is to fix 300 or 400.

(B) Maintaining momentum is invaluable … but not if you’re heading for a brick wall.

(C) If your idea is really worth pursuing, don’t worry about your inspiration deserting you. It’ll survive your efforts to serve it better. And you may even find it invigorated once you’ve found your footing.

(D) If your inspiration doesn’t survive, then consider that the idea wasn’t that strong in the first place.

(E) The only gut instincts really worth trusting are your own.

(F) If you encounter an electric fence and your friends look at you and start to grin, feign deafness.

Related posts:

1. In Praise of the Deplorable

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