Good Bones

I don’t know how it is for other people, but my own progress as a writer is full of “Well, duh” epiphanies.  You know... those moments when you realize something in this big flash of brilliance that should have been painfully obvious all along.

It’s comforting to me that no matter how far I feel I’ve come over the years, I still have a lot to learn.  Even really basic things that everyone else probably already knows.

Well... maybe comforting isn’t quite the right word.

A lot of my “Well, duh” realizations in recent years have been about structure.  I’m starting to believe that darn near everything comes down to structure, one way or another.  Plot... character... dialogue... if it doesn’t have good bones, you can dress it up all you want in pretty words, but it’s still going to be lame.

Lookin' sharp!

Part of the reason it took me so long to figure this out is that not too long ago, I couldn’t really see structure.  Heck, I only vaguely knew it was a thing.  My writing professors weren’t really into structure in college and grad school.

My first clue came from reading Story by Robert McKee (which is about screenplay writing, but as the name implies, works for fiction, too).  That book is jam-packed with “Well, duh” revelations, like how something should actually change in every scene, which was a big one for me.  (I was embarrassingly into “show the reader the status quo” scenes before that.)

After enough times asking myself “Does this scene contribute anything to the story?” and “What changes in this scene?” and “Is this character progressing along her arc?” and stuff like that, I finally began to actually see the structure.  This makes everything so much easier.

I’m sure lots of people could do that all along, and it’s no big deal to them. But for me, it was like raising one eyebrow.  When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be able to raise one eyebrow (so I could look at people sardonically, I guess?), and I struggled for about a year and just couldn’t do it.  Then, finally, I found the secret one-eyebrow-raise muscle, and wow, there it was!  I still had to train that muscle up, and there are still many people who raise one eyebrow better than I do, but I can do it.

This is a large part of what’s made revision more fun in recent years (see earlier post).  Trying to fix things is way more satisfying (and, I hope, effective) when you feel like you can actually see what you’re doing.

Otherwise, you can wind up doing this.

It’s taken a lot of the frustration and mystery out of revision for me.  Now, whether it lets me do something awesome, like raising one eyebrow, remains to be seen.

And what have we learned today?

Fluid dynamics are hard.