Notes from “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain”
Think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy
Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy.
Idea is a story as a process for the transfer of energy.
The preferred, most-efficient, highest order form of energy transfer (the premier way for a scene to advance the story in a non-trivial way) is for a beat to cause the next beat. Especially if that next beat is felt as essential — i.e. escalation.
“A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were.”
The Cornfeld Principle
Every structural unit needs to do two things:
Be entertaining in its own right
Advance the story in a non-trivial way
Each chapter/section needs to allow the character(s) to go into the scene in one state and leave in another. This allows the story to become a more particular version of itself; it refines the question it’s been asking all along
Don’t make things happen for no reason
Having made something happen, make it matter
“Artists take responsibility for every single element.”
We need characters so that they can fulfill the purpose required by the story.
“The writer can choose what he writes about, but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”
The Goal is to be “Undeniable”
Soon a block will start working — I can get all the way through it without a needle drop. The word that sometimes comes to mind is “undeniable,” as in “All right, this bit is pretty much undeniable,” which means that I feel that any reasonable reader would like it and would still be with me at the end of it.
A block, revised, starts telling me what it’s for; sometimes it asks a question (“Who is this Craig of whom they are speaking?”) or seems to want to cause something to happen (“Fern has offended Bryce and he’s about to blow”0. Once I have a few “undeniable” blocks of text, they start telling me what order they’d like to be in, and sometimes one will say that I really out to cut it out entirely. ("If you get rid of me, Block B, then Blocks A and C will abut, and look at that— that's good, right?") I start asking questions like "Does E cause F or does F cause E? Which feels more natural? Which makes more sense? Which produces a more satisfying click?" Then certain blocks start to adhere (E must precede F) and I know they won't come unstuck.
When something has achieved "undeniability," it feels like something that has actually happened and can't be undone, instead of just words on a page.
As the blocks start to fall into order, the resulting feeling of causation starts to mean something if a man puts his fist through a wall, then joins a street protest, that's one story; if he comes home from a street protest and puts his fist through the wall, that's another) and starts to suggest what the story might want to be "about" (although part of this process is to shake off that feeling as much as possible and keep returning to that P/N meter, trusting that those big thematic decisions are going to be made, naturally, by way of the thousands of accreting micro-decisions at the line level).
But all of this, at every step, is more felt than decided.
“The first draft doesn’t need to be good. It just needs to be so you can revise it. ”
Revising = Intuition + Iteration
Be Able to Answer: Why is it meaningful?
And if it isn’t then it shouldn’t be there.
Avoid daily, calendar-tending meanderings.
If you find the story is mere accounting, it is not meaningful.
So skip.
Always Be Escalating!
That’s all a story is: a continual system of escalation.
One way to do this is to refuse to repeat beats.
Once a story has moved forward, we don’t get to enact that change again.
A Pattern Creates Propulsion
Be pre-pattern. But refuse to repeat.
If an element recurs, the second appearance is an opportunity for variation and potentially, escalation.
2 things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t:
Willingness to Revise
The Extent to which the writer has learned to make causality
“All a story is...is a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.””
Why is this important? Because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.
Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.
A well-written bit of prose is like a beautifully hand-painted kite, lying there on the grass. It’s nice. We admire it.
Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up. The kite is then a beautiful thing made even more beautiful by the fact that it’s doing what it was made to do.
“Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyone has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (i.e. is narrated subjectively).”
There is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind’s predisposition determines the type of world we see.
Language can make worlds that don’t and could never exists.
Gogol…is showing us that we ourselves make a ridiculous world in every instant by our thinking.
“How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference?”