Revision: the forward motion of conflicting needs

Dear Victoria: Thank you for answering my first question about Art & Craft of Writing Stories.

2) My other question is about P. 270, (I have your book open in front of me). About midway down, “What do you suppose happened here?” Then we’ll ask “And how could these needs have led somewhere else?” “How could my char have responded to their problems differently, given their fundamental driving forces?” “…a possibility, some way for them to wriggle out of their nightmare right before it happens. We’ll avoid thinking about the original solution to their dilemma. If we can’t avoid it, we’ll think about its opposite. Pose the question as if for the first time ever. . .And what if something else happened instead?” What I’m not clear on is, the story’s been outlined and plotted, we know our protag inside out and what’s driving her. So why add a something else? Wouldn’t that be another story altogether? I thought they acted according to who they are and that drives the plot. Why would she respond differently, after we’ve fleshed her out and know how she’s been driving the plot? If something else happened instead, that’s another plot, another story. Or is what you’re saying is to make that something else an even bigger complication?—Diana Rubino

This is a very good question, Diana.

Writers often bring me manuscripts for which they’ve developed plots according to advice and then been dismayed to discover that the Climax did not turn out to be as powerful as they’d hoped. This is mistakenly attributed to the act of plotting rather than pantsing. I have heard it even from presenters at writers conferences: “Don’t plot. It sucks the juice out of your story.”

This is wrong. Plotting does not suck the juice out of your story. Plotting is the juice of your story.

However, because novels are enormously long and the writing of them enormously complicated, it is almost guaranteed that the writer will, at some point, lose the thread and wind up writing a Climax that is not the most powerful Climax for this protagonist in this particular story.

That’s why the gods invented revision.

So when we’ve finished our first draft, we go back into the design phase and ask ourselves, “How close did I get to the story I intended to tell?”

We don’t really know our protagonist inside and out until we’ve walked alongside them scene-by-scene, word-for-word, through their entire novel. Characters are so complex. Their needs are so huge. Their dilemmas are so overwhelming! And 70,000 words are a whole lot of words to get down on paper.

So it is only at the very end that we know our protagonist well enough to ask, “Did I capture you truthfully?”

This is why we must both know our plot beforehand and still leave room for our imaginations to evolve over the course of the writing—because it takes both halves of the brain to create a great novel.