As a voracious consumer of anything about the craft of writing, and a bit of a contrarian by nature, anything that begins to smell of received wisdom gets me sniffing around to pick apart its weaknesses. This week I have finally begun to question the following:
“You must know your why.”
(The ungovernable teenager in me wants to smirk and say, “Why?”)
Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody has, as its second beat “Theme Stated,” where “you are giving the reader a subconscious hint as to what the story is really going to be about.” The well-known book coach and coach of coaches, Jennie Nash, has as step one and two of her method “Blueprint for a Book,” “Why write this book?” and “What’s your point?” She recommends, before even starting to write the book, that one should “Dig deep and write one page on why you must write this book. What does it mean to you? Why does it matter? Why do you care?” And these are just the best-known examples of a truism that appears frequently in blog posts and interviews and other smaller bites of writing know-how.
Let me beg to differ. Actually, I’m not going to beg.
Why you are writing something—anything—may very well be the last thing you know. While it is fun to use why as a statement (the why as I’m using it here), for the purposes of understanding one’s own WIP, it’s a question. And the answer to the question why is analytical. It’s meta. It’s the mind observing itself. Which is often not at all where we are when we begin to create a story.
Everyone’s process is different. There’s nothing wrong with starting with the why. But I don’t. I start with a feeling, a wisp of an image, a vibe, a single scene. Stephen King talks about writing like archaeology—you’re carefully digging up something, but you don’t know if it will be a claw, or a femur, or a whole freaking T-Rex (or a boring rock, in my case). In the early, exploratory pages, I barely know if I have a story, let alone why that story needs to be written. It is where I have the greatest number of questions, and the least insight. But I know I have something.
As Stephen Koch says in the Modern Library Writers Workshop,
“The mix of knowing and not knowing is where all storytellers begin, and it lights up the process of finding the story in a curious paradox. What you find feels like what you always knew. And what you always knew comes as a revelation.”
For me, the why of a book—Why am I writing this book? Why this story? Why does it matter?— is far far far from the seed that starts the book. The why is the discovery at the end—around the completion of the second draft—where I go, Oh! That’s what it’s about. Then I can go back in revision and strengthen the thread that is already clearly and powerfully and structurally there enough that I was able to see it in the first place.
My first book is about a woman learning to take up space in a world that would be much more comfortable if she stayed small and did small things. I wrote it because I was returning to writing after a twenty-year pause, and I could feel the twenty-two year old me who was afraid and unsupported, and the forty-two year old me who would no longer be contained, and I needed to tell that story to free myself. I’m literally only seeing some of the connections right now as I am writing this newsletter.
My second book took a lot of exploration before it took its final shape. I don’t recommend writing as much as I did to produce one 80,000-word novel. But it took a long time to find the real beating heart of it. Now that it’s done, I can see that the beating heart is the crucial difference between conditional and unconditional love, and that I wrote it because of the grief and loss of self I felt from a childhood of being, at least to some degree, loved for what I did and not who I was. If I had decided on the why of that novel in the beginning and stuck to it, it would have been something else, and I might have missed the catharsis that it became.
Writing, for me, is self-discovery. Maybe it’s not that for everyone, and that’s fine. I’m not at all here to say which way is right. I don’t actually care about right and wrong much in writing, which is an incredible freedom after most of a lifetime trying to perform and win approval. If it works for you to ponder why you’re going to write a particular thing before you write it, then go forth and create, you marvelous being! I’m just here to push back when something gathers the gravity of a rule or a thing you should do, because, as I said above, I’m a contrarian like that. I don’t like being told what to do.
If it is not readily presenting itself, searching for a why too early in the process poses the danger of limiting your scope, or exerting pressure on the idea, the prose, the story, to conform to something pre-ordained. Honestly, too much writing advice functions to put shape and purpose and scaffolding around the early formation of a story. Even as a person who is fascinated by the workings of story structure, a little bit goes a long way.
What is really important to me in the beginning of the process is the amazing power of creative intuition—that ability to tolerate a state of uncertainty and formlessness from which the really good stuff emerges. And it’s hard to tolerate that formlessness sometimes, but it’s where the truth lives.
I agree wholeheartedly. I feel my way through the stories I am drawn to write, and yes the big 'why' tends to come out in the mix through the writing process.
So much wisdom here, thanks so much for sharing.