Building a story is like building a house

Fiction is a house you are invited to live in for a while. If it’s a novel, the place might be a mansion where you stay for weeks, with a hundred rooms and a garden to explore. If it’s a short story, maybe we’re talking about a two-room cabin, where you show up late at night and leave early in the morning.

Yes, a relaxing night in a cabin might be just the ticket.

Either way though, many of the principles of construction are the same. Each room must have a purpose. Every hallway has to lead somewhere. If there’s a locked door — well, fellow reader, aren’t we going to wonder why it’s locked? That room we’re not allowed to look in. . . that’s what the story is about, isn’t it? And in the last scene, if it’s a short story, finally the lock clicks open, and we see, and we catch our breath. . .

Ideally in a house, there is no wasted space. When you’re in one where space is wasted — for example, if there’s an odd built-in shelf, entirely out of reach and useless; or a grand foyer that’s a little too grand — on some level, you notice. The house feels off — or the story does. It feels partly unintentional, or outright wrong, and therefore is a little harder to respect than a house or a story where every joint or word has good reason to be exactly where it is.

That feeling of necessity is a key consideration in building a house or a story, it seems to me.

And yet, in today’s story, I had to do quite a little editing after I thought I was done with it. Not to make it better (more intentional) — but just to make it fit better in the pdf that we send out to our Patreon supporters. Because this story’s changing voices and use of subheads kept causing awkward breaks at the ends of the pdf pages.

See what I mean? You can’t end a page with “Sincerely,” and start the next page with the signature. That’s demented. So the story went back under construction to fix the layout — as you can see from the red, where I kill a few words to help bring “Jennet” up. I enjoy the nuts & bolts of editing like this.

And I quickly discovered that while it seemed all the joints fit well enough in the writing, their fit was in truth arbitrary. I could delete a word here, a phrase there, to see if that would rearrange the page layout satisfactorily, and the deletions had no impact whatsoever on the story itself. It’s always startling to discover, when you need to get rid of some words, how many present themselves as unnecessary or poor.

For example:

Miss Taggart replied, “All she was, was not home. She might have gone out to pick up Chinese food.”

A-ha, I realized, it can be shorter:

Miss Taggart replied, “All she was, was not home. Maybe she went out to pick up Chinese food.”

(When you’re looking to bring a line up to the previous page, you might not need to make big changes.)

Anyway herein is revealed a dirty secret about writing — and I imagine it was as true for Faulkner and Toni Morrison as it is for little old me: While the story is still in your hands, not one syllable of it is chiseled in marble. You can mess with it right up to the last second, and the new joints will be just as tight or tighter, and no one but you will know they were almost some other way.

The world will be better for it.

Hmm. . .

The world will be better off.

Of course, wording can get more elaborate than is strictly necessary to convey information. Seemingly unneeded words might nevertheless be load-bearing when they establish a tone — which is, let’s be clear, the most or even only important aspect of a story. There is nothing terribly compelling in a sentence as just-the-facts-ma’am as this:

I heard thunder as I drove up Tempest Mountain to the deserted house.

But this first line, by H.P. Lovecraft, utterly blew me away the first time I read it at age 14, and I will never forget the thrill of that moment, of discovering that through its own extravaganza a sentence could rumble with the very thunder that it mentions:

There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear.

That house really goes for it! I do think, however, that “Laughing River” ended up improved because the pdf needed some shorter lines.