Alice Buell Lawrence

A good friend of mine teaches creative writing; we used to be in the same academic department before I went and explored administration. He also writes for theatre. I write novels and short stories. We rarely talk shop and we never read each other’s work. I don’t think either of us wants our friendship to go down such a critical path.

He was talking about grading work from his summer intro to creative writing course, commenting how many of the students went deep on creating heroic characters that just happened to reflect their respective authors, but that they don’t have their protagonists face any conflict. They just kind of exist. And how that does not a story make.

This got me thinking (and looking at all of my open documents in Pages). I’ve admitted already that I don’t write strong plots. I write something that moves with a plot, a story, but is really more of a character-driven meditation. I’ll put you in a scene and hope you have a pleasant time there. Each short story is its own little world.

This also got me looking at my novel, the one I keep not editing because I don’t wanna right now. Really reflecting on it, each character does face some form of conflict, something to overcome, though it can tend towards the minor. So I’m torn on this idea of how much conflict is enough conflict to generate an actual story.

I doubt I’ll change my general approach: I paint with words. That’s how I approach writing and how I generally approach my life. Murakami’s notion that one sentence simply follows the previous one is about right, though I do much of this on the word level. It’s different writing, certainly than this quasi-explanation, and it’s where I fit.

But it’s something to think about. Another thing to watch while I’m editing and editing and editing. Kill your darlings, sure, but it’s more like pruning a pathos. When your writing gets leggy, cut it back and start again. And maybe there’s something in the bits you cut that can live as something else.

Right. Turning on the writing/editing playlist and getting to work. It’s time.