Thomas Sullivan: KISS
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Keep-It-Simple-Stupid is complex. It beggars its own advice. The slightly bitter tone of that reference to “Stupid” implies worlds of bad experience underlying the pure wisdom. You can’t appreciate K.I.S.S. until you’ve tried to do everything with elaborations, convolutions and overkill.
Each time I go at a new novel, I swear that this time I will organize things better. I will research, take notes, write summaries, draw timelines, sketch characters – I will PLAN! And I do. I create a new monster of resource material with every new project. Maybe you know the drill: you accumulate a wealth of material, troves of ingenious ideas, alternate endings, subtleties, nuance. You anticipate every objection. Ever-deepening twists open chasms of possibilities. The characters come to life like evening rainbows in the wake of an all-day rain. The promise of the book is staggering. It’s all down on paper – reams of paper. And, of course, very soon the problem stops being one for muses and starts becoming logistical. At that point, I can no longer keep track of the densely packed details and sort through the multiple plot and scene variations. I have kept so many options open and procrastinated so many choices that everything has potential contradictions. I have reached a point of moratorium.
The amateur usually begins with one sheet of paper and lets it flow sequentially: “And then and then and then…” Some writers are good enough to make that work, and it’s still refreshing some times to read a work that isn’t too slick, that bears the authenticity of a raw storyteller letting it all out with little proportion, pace or premeditation. But the pro, writing across galaxies of time and space out of his/her own substance, may be hard-pressed to invent a “natural” story with desirable flaws akin to cosmetic moles and passion equal to that first unschooled effort. More often, I see writers intoxicated with the lessons they’ve learned, performing a few tricks to excess. Mea culpa. And yet I wouldn’t give up those stages of learning the craft. I like to step out of sequence, let go of time and space, and use association and memory to let a character free-fall through a narrative. I like delicious ambiguities that burst into truth long after the reader has made a false assumption. I like to under-tell a story, leaving the possibilities as open as life itself. Learning to use contrast and subtlety and shadows and echoes and a million hues and tints can be terrifically effective, but the capstone trick inevitably comes back to doing it all simply. Get your universe down to a grain of sand without losing anything, and you’ve done just that, written a winner, maybe a classic.
But there is the built-in contradiction in terms. You started out simple, and then you learned all those skills that go against simplicity. Life is always gray, isn’t it? That’s the folly of everything. It’s never just . . . well, simple. I guess the answer is always going to be a compromise of degrees. And it won’t be a one size fits all solution. You have to mercilessly identify your own indulgences and accept the cure. Maybe slaughter a few sacred cows. For me, it was a huge help to think through the stages of what I had learned and to come back to the bedrock fundamentals of communication. And here, at risk of being – ahem – simplistic, is one of them:
All communication has three parts.
That’s it. No clarion trumpet blast. But give me a moment here, and I’ll try to connect it to a working method for a novel. The three parts can be expressed as bluntly as “beginning, middle and end,” or slightly formalized, as in “introduction, body, conclusion” or “topic, development, summary.” It’s all the same thing, naked or dressed up. The important thing is to understand the logic of that. Whether it’s two people passing on the street or a grand treatise read at a symposium, the mechanics are the same. You have to claim someone’s attention, deliver the goods, disengage. It may be as rudimentary as eye contact made by those people passing on the street, followed by a nod, and then the breaking of eye contact. That says, I see you and I know that you see me, followed by a nod of recognition, followed by a conclusive looking away. Hello, how are you, goodbye. Take the visual out of it. Pick up the phone, and you get hello-goodbye sandwiched around a message. Unless you’re my father, who used to just pick up the phone and wait. Sometimes you got the hang-up without the good-bye too. Very disorienting for the person on the other end, because it violated the common sense of communication.
In a novel there is simply no excuse for violating the logic of communication. More than that, you had better not slight any of the parts either. In fact, because you have the advantage of endless premeditation, you are under obligation to deliver nothing short of the most clear, compelling and conclusive narrative possible. You have walked onto a stage for the avowed purpose of communicating. The problem is you have a great deal to say and you need to say it in an entertaining way. And we aren’t talking about exposition alone here, but rather the paced meting out of information so that the reader’s emotions stay engaged, so that there is discovery and surprise and fulfillment. Rhetoric serves another mistress, but the fundamentals still trump. I try to break it down this way:
The BEGINNING needs to give the reader a place to stand, a seat in the theater, a POV. Then you’ve got the reader’s attention, if not full engagement. This probably answers, at least in part, the traditional questions of Where, Who and When. If you’re James Michener, you’ll want to take Where and When downtown for a chapter or two, but others writers will work Who to a point of believability, particularly if there are mainstream aspects to their book. Genre fiction is more likely to cut you a pass with Who, Where and When briefly while you work strongly on What and Why. Which is to say, you need to define a problem, a line of tension, a conflict – something that needs resolving. Few books can get far without doing that. None should. Episodic, anecdotal or stylistic raptures that approach pure poetry may be the exceptions. I liken beginnings to rolling the dice on the green felt table and allowing the reader to read the numbers. Therein you’ve introduced your characters and their conflict(s) in a time and setting. You can argue lots of exceptions to this. Faceless pulse-pounding openers will certainly command attention. But for my purposes in organizing a work, that’s just semantics. The BEGINNING doesn’t really end until I have a POV character on record.
The MIDDLE next, the most important part, right? The body, the message, the goods. Well, yes and no. Remember, while you may be telling a story, the real purpose is to entertain. In terms of content, yes, the MIDDLE must stay the course and conduct the journey every step of the way between start and destination. It answers the How. But that’s almost a given to a competent writer. If you make your living reflecting the things and events of life, you know you can pull that part off. You reach into yourself – whatever insight you have into the human condition and the mortal soul – and you pull out the philosopher and the psychologist and the inventor of things and events. You just roll along with whatever steps are necessary to get between the statement of the problem and the solution. It’s expandable. It’s contractible. It’s an accordion or a bellows that you can vary in length and complexity. You set up the hurdles and baffles. You do the sideshows, the subplots. Bring characters in, take them out. In short, the MIDDLE is a stalling action between the problem around which the novel revolves and the fix. Like a scaffold or Lego structure, it can go almost anywhere and look like almost anything. Or like jazz, it may flow all over the place, so long as it comes back to the central theme. To be sure, there are plenty of caveats that apply here. Give the reader the sense that you are wasting their time, pointing at things for their own sake, or worst of all haven’t figured out where you are going yet, and you’re dead. But the MIDDLE is a point of free play in the writing of a book, very much open-ended and limited only by your imagination.
Not so the ENDING. Traffic merges and everything has to come together now in a tidy confluence that will allow the reader to disengage with a sense of closure. The essential conflict has to be resolved, or, at the very least, its insolubility must become the point of the book. Fudge on the tacit promise you made to the reader in the BEGINNING that all would be answered and you’ve got a problem. Often the resolution has been complicated by the MIDDLE, where other characters, subplots and conflicts have been introduced. This can protract the ENDING and make disengagement less impactful. Or not. For me the guarantor against problems with endings is – back to my theme here – to simplify the fundamental parts of communication. I do this by changing the order in which I address them.
After I write a BEGINNING, I write an ENDING before I write a MIDDLE.
Now, I know that this ENDING is just going to be a draft. I’ll almost certainly have to change it, if only because there will be those new things in the MIDDLE that have to be concluded. But the point is that if I can think of a dilemma worthy of solving in a novel (BEGINNING), and I can imagine a satisfying way to solve it (ENDING), then my only reason for revising the draft ENDING will be because I’ve come up with something even better to use, more comprehensive, richer in meaning and entertainment. By writing the ENDING immediately after the BEGINNING, I also create clearer guidelines for what can be in the MIDDLE. New elements introduced in the MIDDLE must fit the detailed scenario I’ve already laid out for a conclusion. Overall, a much simpler method than winding up trying to straighten out a plate of spaghetti.
All this said, it’s just a plan. In practice I make big-time changes to an ENDING as often as not. But again, if you have something totally workable in place to start with, something that excites and motivates you, the only time you will change it is if you come up with something even better. Seems to work for me. At least it dents the problem of logistics with all those notes and research sources. The BEGINNING and the ENDING are usually the most concrete elements. Even with variations, they tend to be clear-cut. The MIDDLE is where complexities reign. Surround it with packaging and it can help you control its shape as it develops.
“Thanks for reading.” Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/
http://twitter.com/thomassullivan
11 Comments:
Mari said…
Thanks for this. Lots of food for thought there.
Janet Berliner said…
A wonderful essay, Sully-Suh, on this St. Paddy’s Day. I have to confess that I find it a constant source of amazement and a permanent reason for gratitude that you are my friend and colleague. Careful out there in that cold White House. We want you around for a very long time. J.
Sully said…
Thank YOU, Mari and Janet! Happy St. Green’s Day back atcha.
Sully
Nicole said…
I’m still among the beginners, writing “and then and then and then…” Thanks for being one of those providing a map for the path I want to find.
David Niall Wilson said…
Great (lol) Now I’ll sit and ponder the ending of my next book and wonder WHY CAN’T I WRITE THE ENDING NOW?
Great essay Sully…lots of good insight, both into your own methods, and into my own interpretation of the process…
DNW
Sully said…
Nicole, writing is one of the few professions where being a beginner has some advantages. Freshness and passion are probably never going to be better for you than they are now. The other things will come with time on task. Work at it!
Sully
Sully said…
Hey, Davey, you create at the speed of light. Not sure the order of beginnings, middles and ends means much in that rarefied ether. Spontaneous creation, alpha and omega.
Jeani said…
Hi Sully,
I was reading along thinking “I knew it — I could never write a novel.” Then you said “After I write a BEGINNING, I write an ENDING before I write a MIDDLE.” That is not how I have imagined the process, but it makes sense. Even though I am, by nature (at least in part), one who plans things down to the finest details, I always rather thought any novel I might ever produce would flow out of my other nature (which I shall leave unnamed), really writing itself as I went along not knowing the ending until it “happened.” Hmmm . . .
Jeani
Sully said…
Jeani — You’ve got the novel-writing problem surrounded already. By your self-description you are an organizationopath, but you have another nature (implication: opposite). That’s what it takes, someone who can contain structures of logic and cause and effect, but at the same time can let go and follow the quantum leaps of imagination. Go for it!
– Sully
Jenni said…
Why is it, a parent and a lecturer can say things, again and again and again… not sinking in at all – and then somebody you’ve never met, says something and wham! it makes sense?
I mean, I knew the whole formula before… from writing fanfiction etc, but still, for all my assignments it seemed to go out of the window.
After reading this, I realised that the assignment I got the highest grade for, I actually wrote the end before even starting! I just knew the characters, and the last line and it was the easiest thing I’ve ever written. But before reading this, it didn’t quite sink in, as to why.
Thank you.
Sully said…
Jenni – You’re most welcome. Thank you for confirmation. Writing — creating anything, for that matter — is a lonely biz. Has to be. These blogs and postings are like cries in the wilderness and it’s great to get an answer.
–Sully
