No Plot, Just Vibes
How to Assemble a Manuscript from an Idea Hodgepodge
Welcome to Shelf Life, where we have filled up our Google storage.
When I got my Gmail account circa 2006, I was shocked to learn it came with 10 gigabytes of free cloud storage. Ten gigabytes? No one would ever fill that with cloud storage. Remember when Bill Gates famously said no one could ever need more than 640k of RAM? That’s me in 2006. Joke’s on me, I filled up that drive with phone backups, Google Slide presentations, and this thing you’re reading. Well, time makes fools of us all eventually.
Today in Shelf Life, reporting on someone else’s thought piece. Which might be a nice change for you, I think, since Shelf Life is usually 1,800 words of stream-of-consciousness drivel poured directly out of my brain. There are just so many thoughts and they have to go somewhere. Possibly this could all be avoided if I took medication for my ADHD.
Earlier this month I read an excellent Medium article by Laini Taylor, “Conventional Writing Advice Isn’t for Everyone,” and I enjoyed it a lot. I linked it so you can read it too. In fact if you only have eight minutes this morning, go read that and forget about reading this. It was nice to see you, have a great day.
If you have twice eight minutes and can read both, great. I’m glad you’re still here.
I have never been able to choose a favorite book out of all the books I’ve read, different books appeal more or less to me at different times. There are a handful of books and series I read again and again, if I were to group those all together they would make an amalgam of “my favorite” books and series. That said, Laini Taylor is definitely my favorite author. There are few other series I reread as much as I do Daughter of Smoke and Bone (three titles) and Strange the Dreamer (two titles) and both are by her.
She once said or wrote—I can’t remember where I saw it—that she woke up one day and decided to get her writing act together because mortality was weighing on her and she didn’t want to die with important stories untold. When I read that I felt it in my bones and I was like—yes, this, exactly: I also don’t want Laini Taylor to die with stories untold. That would be such a tragedy. For me, personally.
Anyway this is not the Laini Taylor fan club blog but she is my fave. Recently, she shared on Instagram that she had written an article in Medium on her writing process and it was an excellent read, which you already know because I linked it above and you read it already.
The important part of the article is the message that conventional writing advice doesn’t have to—and, in fact, just doesn’t—work for everyone. Specifically, she calls out the advice to write a fast and bad first draft and then fix everything in revision. This is great advice—for some writers. Some people don’t write a clean first draft—they take a vomit pass. You know, make a sloppy copy. Importantly, some writers don’t. Some writers write more slowly, more mindfully, and lay in their text just the way they want it to be in the final draft.
I went to art school so I know there are painters who do a rough-in first and there are painters who go right to the image they want to create. I am neither kind of painter. I failed out of art school.
Taylor points out that if she had listened to the advice that everyone must write a sloppy, bad first draft first, she would not have completed her first manuscript. She would have likely become frustrated and concerned that she wasn’t moving “fast enough,” or writing efficiently enough, and given up on herself as a writer.
I’m the opposite in that I have to constantly remind myself that it’s really okay for my first draft to be bad because otherwise, as I am writing, I’m like “oh no this is terrible I should probably stop working on this and probably print it out and put it in a fire.”
I can say that about half the time, my first draft is a disaster that successfully maps out the plot and pacing but otherwise is completely unreadable. The other half of the time, my first draft requires a little polish but is otherwise totally usable. That said, 100 percent of the time I am convinced, while writing, that my draft is very very bad and no good and the only way I keep momentum is to remember that it doesn’t matter, because there is always editing, and while I may not be a particularly skilled writer, I am an unimpeachably skilled editor.
Okay none of any of that is what this was supposed to be about.
What really struck me about Taylor’s Medium article was the part about how she assembles a story from a collection of vibes and then builds a plot to underlay it all.
Taylor writes: “My stories don’t start with a plot and progress toward a conclusion. They start with a ragtag band of ideas scattered across treacherous countryside and staggering toward each other singing different songs.”
I love this description of the process because it’s so relatable. Who among us moves forward into a story with only one idea? I think of the 1970s– and 1980s–era Stephen King novels as sort-of “one idea” stories.
A Saint Bernard, but evil (Cujo).
An antique store, but evil (Needful Things).
The place in the woods where kids bury their pets, but evil (Pet Sematary).
A resort hotel in the Rockies, but evil (The Shining).
A misfit teenage girl, but evil (several).
But even those stories, which I think are fairly one-dimensional especially compared with later books by King, have a lot of layered concepts. Carrie has telekinetic powers that go haywire when she’s humiliated at prom, but she’s also brought up in an abusive household by her zealously religious mother, and separate overlapping subplots follow both Carrie’s worst school bully and another girl who is remorseful about failing to stop the bullies.
But anyway, it’s a whole collection of creepy vibes and the blood-drenched, raging prom queen is only the main and most memorable.
I’m not sure a story can make it on just one idea—perhaps if it is very short. But most of the time a story is a collection of intersecting ideas and concepts and it’s in those intersections between ideas that the story emerges and the plot takes shape. “Telekinetic teenage girl” doesn’t get you Carrie. Telekinetic teenage girl plus abusive upbringing plus relentless bullying gets you Carrie.
When I have a vague idea for a story or part of a story, I leave it in the idea bucket (which you can read about in an earlier Shelf Life) to mix and mingle with its fellow vague ideas. When I am looking for a new story to develop and actually write, I go browsing through the idea bucket and take out not one but several to use together.
Remember: You can never run out of ideas. Ideas are everywhere, freely available, and infinite. Don’t be afraid to steal from yourself for your own benefit. If your story is missing something, raid your idea bucket for another piece you can slot into the puzzle. Don’t try to “save” every idea to be its own, standalone, lonely story. Ideas are social. They want to be with their friends. And they’re like a puzzle: Without all the pieces, the end result will never be perfect.
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