Without Charts, Maps, or Compass

You are facing a blank page.

There's no hint of a path, no ripple suggesting a direction, no shadow suddenly appearing as a road on which to walk.

The page is as empty and clean as a sandy beach after a storm.

There are no footprints, no indentations where gulls may have landed, or shallow lines where sea turtles may have crawled.

How do you know where to go?

Must you know your destination before setting off? Or can you simply put one foot in front of another until you discover where you are?

Starting a story... and determining its plot... is a bit like finding yourself on a strange beach, not knowing which way to go to reach civilization. (Hmm... what if you're on a deserted island and walking the beach will only take you in circles?)

So how do you start?

Well, the first question to ask is this: who is walking?

And why is she on the beach in the first place?

And does she know where she wants to go... or what might prevent her from getting there?

To create a plot, you might try begining with a character... and that character's desire for something.

"Something has to happen," writes John DuFresne in The Lie That Tells A Truth, "and characters must make that which happens happen."

DuFresne goes on to share what Henry James wrote about plot: "...it's the character's act of doing that becomes your plot."

Plot then becomes not so much an exploration of that external world of beach and sand, but an exploration of that character's internal world... of what's driving her, motivating her to act (or not act), to decide one thing and not another, to choose to live a certain kind of life.

The action must be motivated, DuFresne writes. It must be causally sequential, credible, and compelling.

"The only thing that keeps us reading," DuFresne suggests, "... is the suspense, the wanting to know what lies ahead, the tension inherent in that mystery. No tension, no plot. No action is interesting for its own sake. Don't confuse motion with movement. Movement is motivated motion."

In other words, every action in a story must evolve out of a character's motivating impulses.

"Random incidents neither move nor illuminate," writes Janet Burroway in Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (5th ed.). "We want to know why one thing leads to another and to feel the inevitability of cause and effect."

"Reasonless action undermines plot," DuFresne agrees. "Plot is all about motive."

Plot is then a record of not only a character's choices but why she made those choices... after she has made them.

It's a map of obstacles that stand in her way, too, a chart showing readers how and why she moved across the beach this way, rather than that way, and reveals the courage (or lack of courage) it took for her to step into the unknown, to pursue whatever she wanted despite the obstacles in her way.

"When 'nothing happens' in a story, it is because we fail to sense the causal relationship between what happens first and what happens next," suggests Burroway. "When something does 'happen,' it is because the resolution of a short story or a novel describes a change in the character's life, an effect of the events that have gone before."

Whenever the character's intentions are foiled, notes DuFresne, we get tension.

As the stakes increase, the journey becomes ever more difficult and challenging.

Plot displays this struggle... so the reader can experience the same struggle (as well as the feelings of success that come from overcoming the odds)... and learn from it something more about the human heart, what makes us human, what compels us to act in certain ways.

You won't find your character's journey on any map or chart.

A compass won't help you either.

What will help is a deep and abiding love for your character... and a desire to fully understand that character's life and dilemma... to know your character from the inside... in order to discover who she is and why the character wants what she wants.

Then... it's a matter of letting her go... and watching her struggle past obstacle after obstacle to reach her heart's desire.

Resources for further study:

Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (5th ed.).
John DuFresne's The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction.

Diving Off The Edge

Staring down at a blank page on some mornings can feel like standing on the edge of a high-diving board afraid to leap into the unknown.

From such a height the surface of the water can look more like a sheet of steel than a shimmering liquid. Rather than dive, you want to inch backward and tell yourself it's much more prudent to climb down.

But... you can't back away from fear.

Why not?

Because taking such risks--free-falling, diving--is the essence of writing. That's the goal: to plunge into uncharted territory and explore new, forbidding landscapes.

Diving into the water... cracking through that illusion of fear...is exactly what you must do if you expect to find what's hidden beneath the surface.

But how do you step off that high-diving board into ignorance and uncertainty?

John DuFresne suggests in The Lie That Tells A Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction that failure and uncertainty are simply part of the territory that come with writing. People who invent things, says DuFresne, are always failing.

"Only a fool does not make mistakes," writes DuFresne. "You need to take chances when you write stories, and if you're afraid to fail, if you're afraid to take the wrong road in the story, then you won't ever write anything worthwhile. "

But your ability to take risks, explains DuFresne, depends on how you perceive mistakes. "James Joyce said that there are no mistakes, that an error is a doorway to discovery."

To find that doorway, it may prove helpful to begin diving from a lower height... to establish your faith in the process of diving.

To learn that the air will support you in your free-fall, and that the water will be there to welcome you when you reach the bottom.

Each time you dive, taking greater risks, you learn what it feels like to leap off the edge... and recognize the fear that accompanies risk-taking... and ultimately overcome it. The more risks in your writing that you take, the more likely you'll learn how to dive into riskier and riskier terrain.

It's important to remember that diving isn't about success or failure. It's about learning to find that doorway past fear... to let go of your fear and then let go again... and again. Each dive helps you see through the illusion of fear.

It was Chris Lynch, one of my teachers, who taught me about not shying away from fear. He came over to me one night as I was standing with a group of friends, waiting for the program of readings to begin, and said, "You're reading your story, right?"

Lynch (author of Shadow Boxer, Gold Dust, Freewill, Iceman and the 2005 National Book Award finalist, Inexcusable) looked at me with his blue-green eyes, and in that look was this message: If you back away from fear, it will devour you, and there will be nothing left of your guts or your soul with which to write the next day or the next week or the next year.

Give into fear, he was warning me, and you're done as a writer.

Not giving into fear, in other words, is one of the requirements of the job.

Another one of Lynch's students, J. Irvin Kuns, alludes to this fear in the acknowledgements section of her book, While You Were Out (Dutton, 2004), summing up the process of learning to dive in a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire:

"Come to the edge," He said.
They said, "We are afraid."
"Come to the edge," He said.
They came.
He pushed them... and they flew.

Learning to dive past the risks--to fly past our fear--is part of the writing process.

It never gets easier.

But, once you've done it... once you embrace uncertainty and trust the process of diving and plunge past your fear... you'll be surprised at the worlds that you'll discover hidden beneath the surface of the blank page.

(For more information about John DuFresne and his thoughts on writing, check out his blog at http://www.johndufresne.com/Dufresne%20Blog.htm. )