The Last Draft

by Sandra Scofield

  The premise should be stated in terms of the protagonist’s actions and fate. Think of it as what the protagonist learns.

  Examples

  Fixating on past grievances impedes a full and present life.

  Living one’s life as a pretender becomes intolerable and the revelation of the truth frees one to live more happily.

  Running to the safety of home from the difficulty of one’s adult life only complicates things, and one must grow up and face reality to solve problems.

  Seizing power ruthlessly leads to estrangement and loss.

  Compassion (caring for others) leads to forgiveness.

  Risky adventure leads to painful maturing.

  Even in the face of persecution, a person of strong character who struggles can prevail.

  Habits of timidity and self-doubt paralyze progress; courage builds potential.

  Eccentricity—a gift, not a fault—leads to unexpected success.

  If we run from that which we fear, we will fall to its power.

  Following one’s powerful and rightful ambition fuels achievement.

  In each case, you can see that the premise presents: (a) an action (in comprehensive terms) that (b) leads to (c) a state of being or outcome. In a single sentence you can see possible story development. I’ve had fun with workshop groups, giving them a premise, and having trios conceive of a plot, then comparing the various interpretations. In your own writing, you can do this, too, as a way of making yourself ask: What if? It is a way to come up with some fresh ideas, while questioning your own beliefs about people’s responsibilities in a world that is full of consequences.

  A novelist creates a world of the story, and that world has its own governing rules. This is most evident in genre novels such as fantasy, science fiction, romance, historical novels, Christian novels, and mysteries, but I believe that any novel needs a conceived and constructed environment for its story. (This has surprised many of my students, who hadn’t thought of making up a setting.) Of course there is terrific variance, especially culturally. For example, Scandinavian crime novels almost always have a villain who is psychologically disturbed, as if the culture doesn’t want to accept that evil can come from greed, envy, lust, and pride, but must instead always be the work of the insane. Mysteries set in major American cities inevitably involve corruption at high levels. Romance ends in marriage, but the route—and the defining of relationships—has changed enormously in the last twenty years. Absurdity—situations where arbitrary rules make no sense—abounds in places where people are oppressed.

  At first it may be less obvious in the mainstream novel that there is a governing vision, but every story is a proof of what the writer believes about how life works—or should work, or could. In Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs novels, integrity, intellect, comradeship, intuition, and courage always solve the mystery and end the danger. In the novels of Kent Haruf (e.g., Plainsong, Benediction), life challenges the mundane routines of decent people, and they pull from their deep compassion and righteous instincts the courage to shake up their own lives. (Haruf’s last novel, Our Souls at Night, shocked me, because the characters—an elderly couple—couldn’t overcome the family forces against them.) In my own Walking Dunes, a poor young man doesn’t get what he wants, or perhaps better said, doesn’t want what he gets. In the world of that novel, 1959 West Texas, you are born a have or have-not, and it takes tremendous courage and luck to choose the direction of your life if you lack resources. The story “proves” this in David’s ambiguous situation at the end, but also in the different choices made by his gutsy friend Patsy, a girl who is determined to make an artistic life on her own terms. And the author’s philosophy is evident, too, in that David’s poor choices are governed by his dreams of wealth and success, while Patsy’s are governed by her desire to be an authentic person.

  In Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans are interned in camps during World War II. To survive, one had to be compliant; to endure, one had to maintain dignity without defying authority. One could say that the vision of the novel is cruel, but I think rather that “the world” isn’t the camps, but the family, where integrity and familial and ethnic solidarity sustain the characters. One’s goodness, in that world, isn’t defined by strangers and rulers but by selfhood. It exists within.

  In The Scarlet Letter, a sin (adultery) made public (by the pregnancy) in seventeenth-century Boston inevitably wreaks humiliation and ostracism for the sinning woman, but in Hawthorne’s vision, great strength of character, revealed over years in good works, compassion, and a humble but strong sense of self, lead the sinner to a decent life. The truly punished are men—the vengeful, scheming old husband and the guilty but secretive young minister who fathered the woman’s child. Hawthorne’s subject was the intolerance of Puritan reformers, but Hawthorne’s vision of their repressive practices in contrast to Hester Prynne’s intelligence and strong character allowed him to illuminate the role of psychology in the way one is affected by fate.

  In The Great Gatsby, ambition and success and lavish generosity aren’t enough for Gatsby to win back the love of Daisy, who is married to a wealthy and cruel man. Fitzgerald was much driven by his love for his own wife, Zelda, who was a mismatch, and by his ambition, which was often in tension with his sense that society had gone mad with greed. In the Gatsby world, good men don’t win, rich men do, but because the story is told by the thoughtful young Nick, Fitzgerald could also suggest the hope for men of integrity, compassion, and common sense.

  So one way to think of vision in the novel is to ask yourself:

  How should people treat one another?

  How should the earth’s goods be shared?

  What responsibilities do families (or strangers) have for one another?

  What happens when such “goodnesses” are violated?

  What do you think an individual is capable of under great stress?

  One way or another, you are inevitably making a case for how life works, so you might as well be conscious of what you are doing. Are you exploring how things shouldn’t be, or how they should be? Or perhaps how they would be if . . . ? When you think about these questions, you will surely find that you have beliefs about nature, governance, wealth, sex, religion, love, and more that affect the choices you make in your stories. For that matter, you have beliefs about the nature of fiction itself. I’m not saying a novel should be a sermon, nor that your belief in good things means goodness wins every battle, but I do believe that, whether on purpose or not, fiction (good or bad) is a representation of life, and it’s worth thinking about what you believe, and what kind of experience of life you are showing the reader. (If a novelist argues that this isn’t so in his case, I reply: Then your refusal to define your vision defines it for you, with no governing philosophy or psychology to create coherence.)

  Louise Erdrich recently revised her novel The Antelope Wife because, looking back across a decade since it was published, she saw that she could deepen its theme and make it more what she meant for it to be; she felt maturity had sharpened her understanding of her story. She is truly a writer driven by vision.

  Are you writing about how the world is? Or how it could be? Or how it should be? What effect on the reader are you striving for?

  Exercises

  Think of a novel that you feel has a powerful vision. Find events in the book that reflect that vision. Is the underlying vision part of why you like the book?

  Consider writing a credo (a statement of belief). What would you like to help readers understand about human nature?

  5. Describe the world of the novel.

  IDENTIFYING CONTEXT AND SCOPE

  Where does your novel take place? City? Suburbia? Academia? Distressed neighborhood? Utopia under siege? The back alleys of Ancient Rome? You very likely didn’t so much choose the setting as have the setting choose you
because of the story that came to mind. But setting is a powerful element of narrative. You want yours to be highly specific, logical, and in some way unique to your story. You want to think of what takes place inside and outside; in groups and not; in day or night. Consider the climate and landscape.

  The world of the novel is the ground for the story. A story happens someplace. It happens because circumstances come together to put events in motion. So start by conceiving of the right place for your story to happen.

  Start by thinking of writers whose work is remarkable for how it uses setting: the rough country and the rough society of All the Pretty Horses; the stifling mediocrity and leaden boredom of small-town life in Madame Bovary; the greed and amorality of The Great Gatsby’s Long Island society illustrated in the estates, and the filth of its “Valley of Ashes”; the suffocating heat, barren landscape, and threatening “otherness” of Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky. In Fools Crow, James Welch not only presents the world of the Lone Eaters in the Two Medicine Territory of Montana, he portrays the loss of that way of life. And in Winter in the Blood, he shows what modern life is like on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. The emptiness of the landscape and the grittiness of the small towns evoke the tragedy of what was lost. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose certainly has plot (heresy and murder), but what made the novel fabulously successful was its setting—a medieval abbey—and the cunning brilliance of its protagonist, a monk. In each of these books, the story could take place only in such a setting; the setting could produce only such a story. This is the feeling of inexorability that a great novel creates, that you want to create.

  Consider the world of your novel. What is going on where your characters live? How does personal story resonate with public story? How is an individual constrained or supported by society? What political, economic, social, or natural forces are crossing one another? What is the nature of social reward and punishment? How do you show these things and how do they influence the events and the characters? Start with family; every family has a construct of rules and rewards and punishments. What happens when a family member defies those rules? What happens when a person “overreaches”? What happens when love crosses “boundaries” of sex, ethnicity, class? If you take the time to answer these questions about your story, you may discover new possibilities for character and plot.

  Context

  Context has tremendous power in the novel; readers love to be immersed in places and circumstances that are exaggerated, pushed beyond ordinary limits. In All the Pretty Horses, it is 1948 but once the two Texas boys cross the border into Mexico, they are in a world out of time, as surely as Alice in Wonderland. The boys have no history to help them understand the pride and mores of an aristocratic Mexican family, the cruelty and contempt of the people for the boys, or the extent of suffering they must endure.

  Long Island (fashionable East Egg and unfashionable new-rich West Egg) isn’t just the setting in The Great Gatsby: It is Fitzgerald’s vision of a swath of American life at the time he was writing Gatsby. Tremendous changes have taken place in the nation’s life: women coming out from the kitchen; business and industry creating great new wealth; a swelling resistance to immigration (sound familiar?). Strivers are reaching for wealth and status, insulting and threatening the people of old wealth. Fitzgerald’s genius is to encapsulate so much of the culture in a very particular place, with characters who can be seen to represent excesses of the time, but who are fully developed as themselves, people you will never forget once you have read this book. At its heart is bighearted Gatsby, the ultimate self-made man, and Nick (the narrator), the ultimate contemplator, searching for meaning.

  Adam Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize for The Orphan Master’s Son, an amazing novel set in the horrific world of North Korea. His settings are so various and convincing you shiver and recoil, though the story is also about love and sacrifice and dignity in a place where none is publicly recognized.

  To stretch yourself, think of how you can intensify setting: an ice storm, a rash of crimes, a broken electrical grid, an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, soaring land prices. Small pressures matter, too: a leaking faucet, a fender bender, too many gray days, a sick pet. In House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III’s astonishing novel of divergent fates colliding, everything starts rolling because a young woman with a hangover doesn’t open her mail. An ordinary California house becomes a place of tragedy because getting it, or losing it, means so much.

  As an exercise, consider what would happen if you set your story in an entirely different place or time. Consider something outlandish, like a frozen outpost or a foreign city. Then come closer to the home of the novel, but change the neighborhood, the season, the year. How would that change what happens? If it wouldn’t matter much, you aren’t using setting.

  Study a novel you like and analyze how setting influences the story. Seating Arrangements, by Maggie Shipstead, a WASP novel if there ever was one, could take place only in its setting or one just like it. A family convenes on an island off New England for the marriage of a daughter. It’s a small world, and the exclusivity of the country club golf course is a major factor in the protagonist’s unhappiness and anxiety. (He doesn’t come from “old money,” and no matter how much he earns, he doesn’t belong to the wealthy aristocracy.) The nooks and crannies of the old family house provide places for rendezvous and unhappy discovery. The rehearsal dinner is the perfect place for revelations and stumbles. A men’s club has all the claustrophobia and mustiness of the milieu that doesn’t accept the protagonist.

  Another WASP novel is Nancy Clark’s comedy The Hills at Home. The Hills are a family; the place is their ancestral home in New England, where one relative after another shows up over a month’s time. And stays. And stays. The house is dilapidated and overcrowded and everything takes place in it.

  In The Great Gatsby, of course, Fitzgerald used his knowledge of Great Neck to create the contrasting worlds of the old rich, the new rich, the poor, and New York City. But what I especially love about the novel is how he uses weather to create emotional tone, such as Gatsby and Daisy’s reunion in pouring rain. The setting of the Midwest even figures in, because Nick remembers it as a healthy contrast to the life he is observing on Long Island.

  If you just start thinking about novels you love, you’ll recognize how specific and memorable the settings are in good stories.

  The most obvious problem I see in apprentice novels is a failure of imagination: too many things take place in too few settings. I once had a workshop group itemize settings in their manuscripts, and among twelve people, there were fifty-five scenes in kitchens or bedrooms! I challenged the group to move every kitchen scene to a setting that in some way aggravated or emphasized or contrasted with the conflict between characters, all of them to take place outside the characters’ homes. The results were exciting—and riotous. A breakup that had involved broken dishes in a couple’s kitchen got moved to supper in a church basement. A confrontation over an accusation of theft took place in traffic gridlock instead of at a dinner party. A teenage girl revealed her pregnancy at a piano recital. And Grandma had her heart attack while trying on scarves at a school bazaar.

  Many aspects of setting change over the course of time, too, and therefore can change over the course of your story. You should exploit this characteristic. What was clean can be dirty; what was dry can be wet; what was beautiful can be marred; what was full can be empty.

  For example, there have been novels about the encroachment of gentrification or industry on neighborhoods or agricultural land. If you can identify something that is “moving in” on your story background, it can (a) create plot opportunities and (b) stand for thematic elements about change. The Grapes of Wrath of course came from Steinbeck’s experience with the dispossession of tenant farmers in the Dust Bowl, and their migration to California. Jane Smiley’s books are always replete with history, landscape, and climate; each is a panorama
of a place and time, from Greenland to American farmland to horse farms to late-nineteenth-century California.

  Setting works on a microlevel, too. Something as simple as a garden of flowers or vegetables can create a motif for the story, accenting the passage of time, the inevitability of ripeness and decay, etc. A character fraught with problems might also be battling blackberry vines against his back fence.

  Scope

  Scope is about span, extent, duration. Within the setting, a story can be claustrophobic or spacious. Similarly, time can feel generous or constricted. What you don’t want is to let decisions about scope be happenstance. Ask yourself: How much time is being covered? Can you justify the time frame or was the decision the result of “that’s just how long it takes”? What is the effect of time on the story? What feeling for time are you striving for?

  Remember that whether the story takes place over a weekend (think of Ian McEwan’s Saturday) or over years (War and Peace), it always has to give the reader the feeling of time moving forward across events. Try to imagine telling your story in a shorter time frame, or a longer one, and consider what would change. (Especially consider the effect of compression.) What would now be impossible? Would that matter? You may find that compression will heighten drama; or that longer development may yield a deeper story. As always, in revision the choice is a considered one.

  I should point out that some writers treat setting very differently from what I am suggesting. Haruki Murakami is an obvious example, with his spare but evocative stories. If you aspire to that kind of lean prose, you’ll learn to make deft strokes, too, not because you don’t care about setting, but because you have a poet’s instinct for image and suggestion.