In a way, my stories (novels) grow like a tree, but not like a topiary. My stories grow according to their nature, but they are not wild. They are more like a bonsai, trimmed and wired so that it looks like a natural tree, but far more picturesque and dramatic than if it were left to grow without careful shaping. All fiction is more picturesque and dramatic than the same events in the real world.
Something written without an objective, without plot or resolution, is like the news — just the facts. It comes out of nowhere, it happens somewhere, and it may not have an ending until more has been written, and may have no closure at all, if it is no longer newsworthy. That is the way much journalistic reporting is supposed to be. But it won’t work for fiction. Check your newspaper for examples. The accident happened and tied up traffic. And…? News stories have been carefully written and edited to be what they are, news, but there is no plot.
A storyteller, as I really am, may take the same material, add conflicts, characterization, new settings, some kind of change at the end, and turn it into a story. Good stories may, in fact, start from something in a newspaper that triggered the writer’s imagination. In a similar way, all bonsai starts from a natural sapling, or even just a seedling, frequently found in the wild, and put in a pot, where it is allowed to just grow for a while, sometimes for years.
When I start a story, my notes, sketches, and roughs tend to go all over the place, even though I try to rein them in a little. It’s a jumble, but I believe that it is better to include all my ideas while I’m writing that first sketch or rough. It can always be trimmed, added to, changed, moved, or deleted later. If I don’t record my spontaneous thoughts in the heat of creation, they will be lost. If there are no words on a page, digital or paper, there’s nothing to work with.
On the other hand, if an idea comes and I don’t make a note of it, but it keeps coming back to me, then I know I have something good, and I had better put it down, even if I won’t be able to work on it until another time. The idea may well have evolved into something else when I finally get to it.
I don’t try to do everything all at once. I focus on just one aspect of storytelling in each read-through. I start by developing my raw material, that is, a note may become more of a sketch, or a bit of dialogue, or a simple description, or it may be cut. A sketch may become a rough draft of real dialogue, character development, settings I can almost see, action as things happen. Parts of that first writing may present new ideas, or a new direction. I may have to change the order of events, or change who says what in a dialogue, according to the nature of the characters. I may insert new events or movement or people so that the story can actually go from here to there. Frequently I have to improve a phrase or sentence or paragraph by tightening it, by using fewer words. Even in later drafts I find passages which need to be clarified, expanded, tightened, or rearranged.
But always there is an idea, a seed, a beginning, no matter how poorly expressed at first. I may discover toward the end of the story, that there is a better beginning. Always there is an objective to guide me, an idea of what the ending is about. It may turn out to be what I thought of when I started, or become an entirely new ending for what the story has grown to be, and that surprises me.
The draft on which I am working is like the bonsai which has been allowed to grow for a while, and now needs to be trimmed, and wired, and has new growth which must be encouraged or cut away. But still, the bonsai has its roots, and though it will never be finished — it is a living thing after all — eventually the bonsai-maker can do no more, and it is good enough to show. And with a story, when I can no longer see what I can do to improve it, I stop. I have done all that I can. It’s ready to be published.
Sometimes, years later, when I have grown, and my skills have grown, I can see that the story could be worked into a second edition. I have done that twice. But better yet is to start working on a new idea, make new notes as revealed by my unconscious muse, let new characters come alive, and have a new idea of what I want to achieve.
It is time to pot a seedling, and grow a new bonsai.