So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

In the Afterword to the 20th Anniversary edition of her first novel, Adult Education, Annette Williams Jaffee writes about the genesis of a book from an outline:In the spring of 1979, two women named Becca and Ulli came to live with me. I had recently started working with the poet and novelist Maxine Kumin, who was teaching in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton University for the semester. I had sent her two very short stories—I couldn’t write more than five or six pages at that time—and a letter saying: “I am a housewife trying to crawl out of her kitchen.” Although I had wanted to be a writer most of my life, it was only six months before that I had begun writing with a certain seriousness I had never brought to my work before, meaning I was actually writing, instead of just talking about it.

  We were living on the lake then, in a split level contemporary house and the bedroom which had previously housed a series of students who baby-sat in exchange for the room and an occasional meal—other people’s difficult adolescent children was how I thought of them—was empty because my children, now 11 and 10, could finally stay home alone. I resigned from all my volunteer activities and gave myself five years to produce one publishable work—a short story, perhaps, in an obscure literary magazine

  I had known Becca a long time, although I didn’t know her name. For several years I wanted to write about this woman and the times she lived in; sometimes I called her Susan, sometimes I called her Sandra, but I could never get beyond a few flat first-person narrated pages. One of the stories I had sent Maxine was about a dancer named Becca. All of a sudden I knew the name of this woman! I knew she had been a dancer; I knew she had red hair. I knew everything about her. More importantly, I heard her voice—she talked to me all the time. The kitchen, my car, my bedroom became cluttered with scraps of paper with what Becca had to say to me. In fact, suddenly, everything anyone told me seemed to be about Becca. Her friend Ulli arrived differently. I had spent the academic year 1973-4 in Sweden, and Ulli became the culmination of that strange, mysterious, beautiful place for me.

  I would meet with Maxine in her office every Monday for an hour. She would read what I brought her and I would watch her elegant face for signs of amusement, confusion, pleasure. She taught me that my stories were really outlines and needed to be filled out with details and dialog. Sometimes she said they were finished as they were, sometimes she didn’t have a clue of what to do to save them. After that hour, I would run indoors in the enormous skeletal university gymnasium—like Jonah in the belly of the whale, I thought—on a wonderful spongy track and pieces of fiction would float through my head. With my flushed face and all my pulses beating, it was like being in love.

  By May, I had written about forty pages about Becca and Ulli and their husbands Gerry and John and the children, Christopher and Alexandra and Victoria. “Well,” said Max at our last session together, “if you can write eighty more pages about these four characters, you will have a novella and maybe we can fix up some of these short stories and you will have a book.” (A book!) More importantly, Max handed me on to Joyce Carol Oates for a tutorial the next fall.

  “No,” said Joyce, when I brought her my 75 pages in the fall. It’s not a novella, it’s a short novel—about 180 pages—and here is how you begin.”

  Each Monday at three o’clock, I climbed the stairs at 185 Nassau Street to Joyce’s office, usually stopping to chat with Richard Ford across the hall. He had published only one critically acclaimed novel at that point, so I wasn’t too intimidated by him, and anyway, he had those lovely Southern manners. I assume he still has. Every week, I brought Joyce the next chapter I had written on the basis of her wise and gentle guidance. One week, I remember I was very distracted and didn’t get much done and when Joyce questioned me, I said I was thinking about Thanksgiving and making a turkey. “Well, think about Becca making a turkey,” she said.

  By April, I had written 180 pages. I remember how Joyce put the manuscript down on her desk and said very seriously, “You are now at a blessed point for any writer. You have a fine first draft of your novel. Treat it as if you will die and this is the only thing that you will leave behind.”

  In a spy story, the dramatic need of the main character may be to find the mole in the organization, or to bring an agent in from the cold, or to discover the secret formula. In a thriller, it might be to stop some catastrophe before it happens, such as stopping a madman before he sets off a bomb. Novelists sometimes use the device of the ticking clock to maximize suspense; that is, the problem must be solved in a certain amount of time or the catastrophe will occur. This is a common device on television and in films.

  Thrillers and detective fiction, books about spies and cops, mysteries are sometimes called plot-driven fiction, although, in the hands of a really good writer, all categories blur. In plot-driven fiction, the incidents that occur in the story mostly derive not from the personalities of the characters, but from external forces out of the character’s control, and from incidents of chance.

  In James Lee Burke’s novel, Burning Angel, a detective’s house is trashed and two men are brutally murdered. These incidents are obstacles to the main character’s dramatic need to solve a crime, but they do not derive from his personality. Contrast this with a novel that is character driven. In James Leo Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy, the main character, Joe Buck, a street hustler, encounters many obstacles to his yearning to be truly needed by someone in the world. He’s duped by a religious fanatic, fleeced by a con man and continually taken by the johns he’s supposed to be taking, but all of this results from his personality. He’s a country boy, totally out of his element in New York City; more, he’s kind and dense and gullible.

  In the chapter on creating character, we talk about the fact that the more you know about your characters, their histories, fears, their likes and their phobias, their habits, their weaknesses, the more there is to write about, the more trouble they’ll get into, the more places they are likely to retreat to, the more problems they’ll create for themselves. I’ve often heard people complain about thrillers they’d bought because the plot sounded fascinating, only to find that the book ultimately felt artificial. The characters seemed to be continuously facing obstacles that were created for them, like rides at an amusement park, rather than problems that they were likely to face in real life had the characters been given deeper personalities. The best plot-driven fiction, such as the novels of a writer like John Le Carre’, use all the elements of character-driven fiction. A character’s strengths and weaknesses, his or her history and longings, will determine not only the obstacles that he or she will face, but how he or she handles them as well. Single & Single is a globetrotting thriller about rogue London investment bankers entangled with the Russian mafia. There are as many explosions, shoot-outs and reversals as any Mission Impossible movie, but its protagonist, Oliver Single, is primarily driven by his complex and realistically drawn relationship with his con man father.

  We can think of stories as being driven by character when the desires and flaws of the protagonist create much of the action, or driven by events when the structure of the story is provided by a central sequence of external occurrences or crises: World War II, a flood or fire, an invention like the time machine. The characters in such a story have no less necessity to be well drawn, well motivated, convincing, but we are primarily interested in how they contribute to the main event and how they are affected by it.

  Similarly, if you are writing what is sometimes termed character driven fiction, stories based on the lives of people who are not in “high concept” professions—bookstore owners, housewives and academics rather than four-star generals, homicide detectives and astronauts—you still want your reader to continue turning pages, and you would do well to pay attention to some of the basic elements of storytelling.

  This is not to say that the protagonist is ever only about satisfying a need. Your main characters will meet many people and many things will happen to them. Time will pass and they’ll make discoveries about life and
maybe they’ll have more than one great desire or maybe they won’t even know what their primary need is, but you, the writer should have an idea about where they are headed and what they yearn for.

  For instance, in Myla Goldberg’s fine novel, Bee Season, Eliza wants to enjoy her father Saul’s love and attention, which has always been fixed on her brother; Saul wants a disciple, a progeny who will be brilliant in some way and share his passion for Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. This is one of the novels in which it is characters getting what they want that gives them trouble.

  However, the dramatic need is not always obvious, especially in character-driven fiction. The character thinks she wants one thing, such money, when what she really wants is what she thinks money can buy: respect or freedom. Sometimes a character might think she wants sex, when what she really wants is human connection, an end to loneliness. If this is the case with your character, your story is even more interesting because you’re operating on more than one level: on the material level, the quest for money or sex, as well as on the deeper spiritual or psychological level, the quest for love. Your character might even fail to get one thing she thinks she wants and get what she really needs. Or she may get what she thinks she wants and find it does not satisfy her real or deeper needs.

  People don’t generally read novels or memoirs to observe characters breezing through life. Nobody gets a free ride. Life is about meeting challenges, solving problems. Characters change when they encounter conflict successfully or unsuccessfully. Just as there are some people who undergo a tragedy and continue forward in their lives with a deeper perspective, others become bitter and wallow in self-pity.

  Some readers like to follow people like themselves, meeting or knuckling under to similar problems. Others like to read about people who couldn’t be less like themselves: professional athletes, gorilla researchers, double agents; the disabled, the dyslexic, the disinherited. It is true that a terrific writer, in command of her talent, can write an interesting novel about a woman who does little besides think and react to a day’s occurrences, but you will often note that the day is very well chosen indeed and manages to bring up important issues and conflicts in that woman’s life, as happens in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It’s well, however, to remember that a lot of people want to read about other people’s juicy problems in order to forget their own.

  So what kinds of problems can your characters find themselves faced with? Interior conflicts are those problems or issues that arise from the traits inside a character’s personality: guilt, greed, jealousy, envy, laziness, self-hatred, lack of confidence, the inability to make decisions, the habit of believing everything people tell you, the need to please authority. Your protagonist could harbor a terrible temper that always makes her blow up at the wrong people; your protagonist can suffer from the fear of being emotionally hurt which might make him run away from people who love him. On the other hand, a character can create serious complications if she has an obsessive need to be loved which makes her attempt to seduce people and thus invite trouble. Interior conflicts in characters as well as the people we know tend to repeat and snowball. In Midnight Cowboy, Joe Buck’s need to please people gets him suckered time after time until all the money he’s saved is gone and he finds himself homeless.

  Interpersonal conflicts are problems that arise between people and may or may not result from a character’s own personality: a character’s interaction with a sadistic boss, a really nasty neighbor, an abusive husband; a father-in-law who always tries to put her down. Rivals for a job or the love of the same person or divorced parents competing for a child’s love: these are all examples of interpersonal conflict.

  Interpersonal conflicts can happen as a result of pure chance: a band of Hell’s Angels who appear in your character’s rearview mirror; a lover with whom she had the most exciting sex of her life twenty years ago moves into her building; a lonely widow meets a charming con man in the supermarket line. But it is the convergence of personality and chance that sets up the conflict. In the first example above, an aggressive personality might decide to race the Hell’s Angels at a stoplight, while a meeker (more sensible?) person might pull over to the slow lane and let them pass. So many choices: every personality responds to chance in a different way.

  External conflicts: The natural world can create some impressive conflicts: A snowstorm made tough going for the Donner party. A stock market or plane crash may dampen a vacation. A large white whale plays havoc with the outcome of a whaling venture. All are disasters the characters had no part in creating, although usually the situation is set up to involve the personality of a leader or decision-maker: someone foolhardy or stubborn or driven who insists on going forward in spite of danger or obstacles.

  Things get even more interesting when external conflicts create inter-personal conflicts: An aging but very independent woman has a stroke and must then move into the home of the daughter whose life she never approved of; a bad snow storm causes a writer to drive off the road and be rescued by a sadistic, obsessed admirer. External conflicts can cause a person to act in a way that puts his/her personality to the test: A self-involved Jewish teenager must grow up quickly when the Germans enter Paris and send her family to a concentration camp. Perhaps you’re struggling with the issue of how to write about the lives of everyday working people. A prolonged labor strike can throw the citizens of any community into situations in which they meet conflicts on every level. This can happen in a mountain mining town, or rust belt Detroit, or downtown Los Angeles.

  Most novels have their characters go through all kinds of combinations of conflicts while short stories tend to deal with more limited conflict, if any. Many short stories are slice-of-life narratives that may, like James Joyce’s, offer an epiphany, a moment of insight. Or, like many New Yorker stories, they may simply give a quick view into someone’s life.

  Another way to look at plot is from the standpoint of what happens to the protagonist. The most elementary kind of plot consists of a change of fortune on the part of the protagonist, either a rise or fall. The personality, or deep inner character of the protagonist, does not undergo any particular change either for good or ill and no interesting issues, or moral or political or philosophical dimensions, are riding on what happens, although the story may be told to point out a simple moral: money is the root of all evil, Thou shalt not kill, whatever. The story depends on suspense and perhaps surprise or on a simple irony of fate for its effect on us.

  When such a work rises above the ordinary, it is generally either because the milieu is tremendously well realized, or because one or more of the characters is strong enough so that we simply want to watch him or her in action. We do not want the character to change, but only to please us by doing what we expect of it, with variations. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes’s stories are of this kind. However, I would point out that in the detective fiction of Dorothy Sayers, her protagonist, Lord Peter Whimsy, changes considerably.

  There are other kinds of plots in which the protagonist does not change: those in which the main action is the suffering of the main character, often the heroine. Sometimes the emphasis as in Zola or Dickens is on the societal forces that have produced the misery; for instance, war in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Another case in which the protagonist remains constant is the plot in which some particular strong character wreaks havoc and is punished. For all its richness of language and complexity of presentation and milieu, Moby Dick does not have a protagonist who changes. Ahab is as obsessed when we meet him as he is when he goes down lashed to the whale.

  We have expressed the strong opinion that plot must issue from character. The better you know and the more completely you can enter your major characters, the surer you will be about their longings, what they want to do and what they will then try to do. Certainly the interactions and intersections and collisions of characters partially determine plot. However, the better you know your societal setting and the pressures of the time and place,
social class and economic situation, the more you will know how these desires can or cannot be translated into successful action.

  Simply put, a doctor wants a fur coat. Her conflict would be largely internal. Is it right to own such a coat? Animals died for her to wear it. Is it appropriate to her life style, her social setting? But a coal miner in Wyoming wants a fur coat. That’s a different story.

  Successful action in this case is determined by scarcity, competition and consequence. What to eat for supper is not the stuff of high drama to a woman who sells commercial real estate in Manhattan, but to the displaced homemaker living as a bag lady on the street, what she can buy in the supermarket to eat in her doorway—say the doorway of an office building in midtown Manhattan—is a fraught choice. She may not have another meal for two days. And for a mother in the Sudan trying to keep her child alive another day, eating or not eating is the stuff of life and death.

  I can show you what I mean by what I know and don’t know about the plot when I am writing a first draft with an example from Gone to Soldiers. I know that about a third of the way into the book, Jacqueline, a French Jewish teenager, and her mother have a serious fight, so that Jacqueline leaves home, not meaning to run away permanently, but keeping her away from home at a critical time—the night of the Grand Raffle when roughly twenty thousand Jews were picked up by the French police under instructions from the Gestapo. They were taken to a rink used for bicycle races in the winter, where they were held for eight days without food or water, including five thousand children, who died like flies. Then they were shipped to camps.

  Now I have to remove Jacqueline from her mother’s flat in Paris that weekend, so that while her mother and younger sister are taken, she is not. I would like it, naturally, to be an absence not accidental or contrived—By the way, Mama, this Friday night I will sleep at my girlfriend’s. So I figure with Jacqueline being nineteen in the hot summer of 1942 and out of college because she has been forced out for being Jewish, I will give her a boyfriend and she will at this time begin sleeping with him. That, either discovered by her mother or in fact an honest answer on Jacqueline’s part to such a question, would get her into a fight where she would likely storm out of the flat. Such a fight could also make her feel quite guilty, which is useful to my plot. So Jacqueline has a boyfriend, who to keep her out of danger that night, should not be Jewish. Who would be most indifferent at that time to the laws forbidding such association? One of the zealous, the zoot suiters of Paris who defied the Nazis by wearing their hair long and greasy and listening to jazz and acting cool. Okay, now we have Jacqueline’s boyfriend, Henri, emerging, and the plot begins to fill in.