Wednesday Blog Post: Exploit what you invent

The best and yet the hardest piece of writing advice I've ever been given came from Tim Parrish, in my Advanced Fiction Writing class my senior year of college. I was working on my thesis at the time and, with my brain already frazzled from working with real events and memories, I decided to "take a break" and submit just fiction stories for this class.

My workshop story focused on a set of twins, Nathan and Angie. Nathan left home to pursue a music career and Angie, who hardly speaks, stayed home with their music teacher father. When Dad has a heart attack, Nathan comes back to town to help Angie, only to find how much worse her situation had become. I loved the dynamic of the artistic twins, how Nathan would speak for Angie, and the situation I was creating. It was an incomplete draft when I submitted it, but I liked where it was going.

The workshop was, in a word, brutal. Tim said my characters were too weak, timid, not reacting in ways that they should. That they were, essentially, caricatures without actually responding to the situation. Another girl complained about the face that his name was Nathan and she'd just broken up with a musician named Nathan. I went back to my dorm room with a handful of reviews, including a page-long one from Tim (the longest I had received to that point) and cried.

"Exploit what you invent," Tim said over and over in the workshop. His review repeats it: "You've got to let go of playing it so safe and to see the story from the outside," he wrote. "...You're a writer with a natural sense of how to tell a story, but you're not a writer who yet takes many emotional risks."

It took me a while to realize it, but Tim was right. I hadn't plotted out the story nearly as much as I needed to, even if I didn't know how I wanted it to end yet. I didn't know who Nathan was, his personality, what his quirks were - and if I didn't know Nathan, I didn't even start to scratch the surface with Angie. For my next workshop, I plotted. I thought about where I wanted the story to go and how these characters would interact with each other. The draft for my next workshop wasn't great, but it was better - and Tim noticed that I'd taken his advice to heart.

That is the best piece of advice I can offer to other writers: Exploit what you invent. Create the situation and then run with it, let your imagination go wild. The first draft may show you what the plot may be, but it's further exploration that gives you the characters you're working with, what the story actually means.