Summaries and Scenarios adapted from Stephen Koch’s “Working & Reworking” Chapter 7 of THE MODERN LIBRARY WRITER’S WORKSHOP
“No story is really a story until it can be retold. Paraphrase is one of the most potent instruments of understanding. What cannot be paraphrased has probably not been understood at all.” Stephen Koch
(1) Summarize your first draft (or wherever your first draft is now) in 350 words or less. (This is about one pretty long paragraph.)
Don’t talk to yourself about the story. Don’t indulge in fancy meditations about theme and do not theorize. In other words, don’t write,
“This is a story about a son whose mother leaves a mental hospital to come live with him and his new wife. It investigates the affect of mental illness on a family.
Instead, stick to the story. Write:
“In the summer of 2005, Greg and Christine drive out to visit Greg’s mother, Dolores, at the asylum. Christine and Dolores have never met before. At the asylum…”
Tell your story to yourself in concentrated form. You’re telling the story to yourself, so stick to the essentials. Remember, this is just for you. Your summary should include the basic ground situation, the major moments of rising action, and the turning point. The summary is a clear account of what happens in the draft.
(2) It’s important to understand your first draft, but it’s also important to keep your options open to something very different happening, later, in revision. Write a what if scenario based on some of the possibilities inherent in your draft. Like the summary, this should be 350 words or less. Change the beginning. Change the ending. Shift the time frame—focusing on a much shorter, or longer, period of time. Change the tone. Change the major events. Change the protagonist. What if this was more a daughter—mother story than a bride-to-be—groom-to-be story? This exercise is about testing possibilities. Follow the same rules as above about sticking to major events on the plot line.
If the most typical problems in early drafts are sketchiness, shallow characterization, undepicted action, and vague description—the summary and scenario should orient you to those places in your draft which you need to pay particular attention. Are the moments you’ve described in your summary/scenario the moments you’ve dedicated the most attention to in your draft? A simple summary / scenario is your map for the next draft.
A Record of Choices: The writer Elizabeth Bowen says this: "Action is the simplification of complexity. For each one act, there are x number of rejected alternatives. It is the palpable presence of alternatives that gives the action interest. For each of the characters, the play of alternatives must be felt."
Characterization #1: The film director and playwright David Mamet says, "Good stories have problems that are rooted in character. Our hero, Dumbo, has big ears. That’s his situation. His real problem is not his ears, it’s how he feels about his ears. He wants to not have big ears, and what he wants isn’t necessarily what he needs."
Scene building--Dialogue: Write (or revise) two full pages of dialogue between two or more characters. Dialogue should (1) advance the conflict (2) characterize the speaker, and (3) imply more than is actually said.
· In your dialogue, what is more implied than is actually said? Are there places where characters say the opposite of what they actually mean? Can you add gestures, actions, silences that could make unspoken tensions even more apparent to readers?
· Look carefully at the dialogue in one of the stories you admire. Deliberately imitate how that dialogue is rendered. What story? What do you like about the dialogue?
Notes: Dialogue is not transcribed speech, but distilled speech—the filler and inert small talk of real conversation is edited away even as the weight of implication is increased.
Good dialogue is never static. It never merely conveys information. It is always multi-functional / multi-directional. It characterizes the speaker. It advances the action. It relates to the story’s deeper concerns. Often, it has tension in it.
(1) Direct dialogue: "Hey," Oliver said. "That's my stomp rocket!"
(2) Indirect dialogue carries, without quotation, the feel of the exchange: He went over to her and said he wasn't all that interested. She ignored him at first but then said fine, but wasn't there any other way?
(3) Summarized dialogue: We talked for hours about monkeys and llamas and even, if you can believe it, the coatamundi. It's nearest North American relative: the raccoon.
Dialogue often both characterizes the speaker and advances the conflict of the story at once:
"Hi, honey. I'm home. What's for dinner?"
"Make it yourself."
Tension and drama are heightened in dialogue when characters are, in one way or another, saying no to each other. They aren't answering each other's questions: "Why, your favorite, dear. Hamburger upside down pie." They're pursuing their own agendas. In this way, each speaker in a dialogue can be seen as a protagonist, with their own desires and obstacles to their desires.
The Barthian Analysis: Based on Barth’s essay “Incremental Perturbation”
“Most young writers have this experience: They create characters who are imaginative projections of themselves, minus the flaws. They put this character into a fictional world, wanting that character to be successful and—to use that word from high school—popular. They don’t want these imaginative projections of themselves to make any mistakes, wittingly or, even better, unwittingly, or to demonstrate what Aristotle thought was the core of stories, flaws of character that produce intelligent misjudgments for which someone must take the responsibility. (Young writers want to write stories which these imaginative projections of themselves are “victims of circumstances,” like the people on Oprah. Other’s are at fault for their problems and they are doing the best they can to overcome these obstacles others are responsible for.)
What’s an unwitting action? It’s what we do when we have to act so quickly, or under so much pressure that we can’t stop to think. It’s not the same as an urge, which may well have a brooding and inscrutable quality.
It’s difficult for fictional characters to acknowledge their mistakes, because then they become definitive. They are that person who did that thing. The only people who like to see characters performing such actions are readers. They love to see characters getting into interesting trouble and defining themselves.”
There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say “Mistakes were made,” you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel. When you say, “I fucked up,” the action retains its meaning, its sordid origin, its obscenity and its poetry. Poetry is quite compatible with obscenity.
Sometimes, if we are writers, we have to try and persuade our characters to do what they’ve only imagined doing. We have to nudge but not force them toward situations where they will get into interesting trouble, where they will make interesting mistakes that they may (or may not) take responsibility for. When we allow our characters to make mistakes, we release them from the grip of our own authorial narcissism. That’s wonderful for them, it’s wonderful for us, but it’s best of all for the story.”
You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won’t have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time.
Anne Lamott
Questions for your story revision:
Improbability: Flannery O’Connor says that “her fiction takes its character from a reasonable use of the unreasonable” and she also says that she wants her stories to contain an “some action, some gesture” which contains where the real story lies, an action or gesture that is both “totally right” and “totally unexpected.” So, above her interest in telling particular stories about particular people and events, O’Connor has developed some abstract ideas about how she wants her stories to work. These are ideas that she applies to all, or most, of her work. These ideas are a part of her aesthetic.
· Is there "some action, some gesture" in your story which contains where the real story lies, an action or gesture that is both "totally right" and "totally unexpected"? In a sentence or two, describe how this is or is not so? If so, underline it in your story and write in the margins ACTION/GESTURE.
· In what ways (details, events, scene and dialogue, characterization) has the story prepared the reader for this action? List them. Mark them in your story.
· In what ways might you develop even further the preparation for this action?
Characterization: Tim O'Brien in The Magic Show says that "too often characterization fails precisely because it attempts to characterize. It narrows; it pins down; it explicates; it solves. The nasty miser is actually quite sweet ands generous... A "solved" character ceases to be mysterious... I believe that a successful characterization requires an enhancement of mystery: not shrinkage, but expansion.
· Which of your characters are too narrow?
· How are they narrow? In what way?
· Revise your characters to make them more complex, more mysterious. Revise them--in small ways (at the sentence level and description level) and large ways (in the things they say and do--especially in the things they do, their important actions and choices) so that your story leaves the reader wondering.
· What do you want them to wonder about your character, and by extension, the story as a whole?
Or, to say it another way: Richard Ford says, "Our imagination loves to be filled with an object or to grasp at anything that is too large for its capacity."
Mixed Motives & Heightening Inconsistencies: Have you ever been asked: Why did you do that? And you couldn't honestly, or clearly, anyway, answer the question. You just did it. You might be able to come up with several possible explanations, but none of them are clearly more "true" than the other. Give your characters the same freedom, latitude, inexplicability. Burroway says that characters are “consistently inconsistent.” But not all inconsistency is good: your reader needs to understand those possible explanations. Too often, your readers don't understand what those possibile explanations are. Come up with five possible explanations for the way they acted. Build these possibilities into the story, implicitly and explicitly. (Maybe use the word "maybe.") Allow the story's outcome (it's climax and resolution) to be influenced by these possibilities. Ask yourself the questions:
Echoing Details: Make a list of important details/objects in the first half of the story. Which of these details/objects has unexplored potential for the second half of the story? For taking the plot in another direction? Use some aspect of this detail, but in a new and different way, at least twice later in the story.
Relevance or So What? One of the reasons we care about stories is because we find them relevant. For some reason, they matter to our lives. When we talk about theme in stories, we're talking about relevance. We're not only talking about what the story is about, we're saying, well, what about what it's about? We're asking, "So what?" If the story matters to you, or to any reader, they ought to be able to say why. In saying why, they're talking about theme and relevance. They're talking about why they care about the story.
In Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," there are explicit lines, especially near the end which state the theme. "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their specific mass and gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run of freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all..."
Not all stories state their themes in such explicit terms. Most stories, in fact, imply their themes through action, characterization, description, image, symbol, etc.