In a comedy writing class at The Second City -- a standby in the world of Chicago improv whose classes I would absolutely urge the comedically-interested to check out -- a teacher looked at my scene sketch and made a face. She often made that face.
I strain to recall it all, but I think we were reading my piece about a pair of startup entrepreneurs who get into a steadily escalating blowout debate about their business concept -- and at the same time, they were throwing a party to launch the business concept, and there were some jokes about the food that these guys were serving, and there was some kind of feminist commentary in there somewhere with the entrepreneurs’ wives, and they were regaling their glory days as brothers of a fraternity, and they started outcompeting each other in some fart jokes, I believe -- and then, my teacher made that face. “Here’s something I like to tell people. Imagine you enter a room full of things. You could take all of the things and put them in your story, or you could take just one of them, and really see just that one thing. Which story would you rather read?”
That little parable might have gifted me with the single most important takeaway of my earliest and often embarrassing ploughings-away at writing fiction.
I think the metaphor of ploughing is actually a useful one. When we plough, we turn over familiar ground. A week later, totally unexpected plants might be growing. Ancient seeds, long dormant in that soil, are sprouting. We discover things we could have never anticipated -- and that’s a very exciting process of writing.
One of the toughest disciplines I had to learn, especially in the beginning, is the art of settling on just one main story idea that comes up in the process of drafting discovery -- the art of finding the heart of your story. For instance, looking back at the entrepreneur scene, I can take a glance at that messy draft and think -- ah-ha! How absolutely hilarious and satisfying it would be to explore just that one core emotional element, of these entrepreneurs who can never settle on an idea, and therefore never get their business off the ground. We could explore the blockages that most people can relate to, like perfectionism; the vulnerability going on in these two self-doubting former frat guys. In this case, knowing what I know now, I would not choose to explore all the semi-related items I found in the room. I would zero-in on just that one core aspect of their emotional dysfunction -- inability to launch -- and explore that one thing for all it’s worth.
Within these entrepreneurs, I know that that particular core emotional element is the
most interesting, fruitful aspect of the relationship between them because that element was the initial inspiration for the story; it was an observation that came from life. I once worked at an Internet company and would join lots of conversations that featured deep pining to start the next big app, online food truck, sustainable grocery delivery service, etc. I relished in hearing this group of my coworkers daydreaming about Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg, imagining their own startup careers founding multi-billion dollar efficiencies that solved the world’s inconveniences, but never committing to moving forward with any of these business ideas, big or small. It touched me. I was interested in this moment where Silicon Valley and young entrepreneurship was burning people up with FOMO, yet where dreams seemed so hard to turn into reality.
Do you struggle with focusing in on the core emotional place of your story? I
now readily embrace the beauty of the second draft in coaxing this element to life, reshaping the work around its heart. Of all the material you’ve generated in your first draft, of all the ground you’ve churned up and of all those discovered seeds that are growing, what do you have to trim away so that those one or two different story elements, the most vital, alive, important focus areas, can thrive?
Cherri is a first year fiction MFA student who is completing her first collection of short stories.
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