How I Write
The Work of Drawing Out
Thomas Ogden
In the past, I have been asked how I go about writing fiction and have not been able to offer a response that has satisfied me. The mythic idea of the Muses has never rung true, because neither my ideas nor my style of writing feel as if they come from a source that visits me, that is external to me. The people I have known and the life I have lived are the sources I draw upon and that draw upon me as I write.
Looking back as I complete a collection of short stories, Aunt Birdie and Other Stories (Sphinx Press), I find I am better able to put into words my experience of writing fiction.
I begin with a rough idea about the sort of situation I would like to create in the piece I am writing, a situation I find intriguing or disturbing or interestingly complex. For example, a situation in which a woman returns a child she has adopted; in which a man accidentally kills his wife; in which a man marries his halfsister; or in which a man secretly has two families. These situations may be derived from events in my own life, from a friend’s life, or from events I have read or heard about—or just situations that come to mind.
I then turn to the work of inhabiting the situation I’m imagining with characters who feel real to me. Of course, the person I know best is myself. I have changed in the course of my life, so I have been many people upon whom I can draw. There are also many other people to draw upon: people I’ve known or heard about, characters in books, and people in newspaper articles. I use one person or combine people as I begin to define the character. I have in my mind a history for each character, which I may or may not elaborate in the text. I then “introduce” the characters to one another as I experiment (as I write) with ways they might relate to one another. For example, they may draw out, complement, inspire, antagonize, dominate, or submit to another character. The situation I begin with changes, acquires depth as the characters interact with one another as I write. I do most of this work in the act of writing, not by working things out in my mind and then writing them down.
Unless I am surprised by what I’m writing, the writing is lifeless. When I am writing well, I have the feeling that I couldn’t have predicted what is happening. This applies as much to the writing itself—the writing style—as to the development of the characters and the storyline.
As I write, the experience must feel spontaneous, without design. Only in that way am I able to bring to the page more than I know. And only through writing spontaneously do the lines become layered and convey multiple meanings. If the lines can only be read in one way, the story feels uninteresting to me. In my own life, I do not know anything for certain. Everything exists in an atmosphere of “could be,” “may be,” “probably,” and “unlikely.” This must also be true in the stories I write. The characters must live in the realm of mystery and uncertainty.
“Unless I am surprised by what I’m writing, the writing is lifeless. When I am writing well, I have the feeling that I couldn’t have predicted what is happening.”
I write fiction by creating scenes. The scenes are comprised largely of events organized around conversations between characters, although a character occasionally thinks about his life and the situation in which he finds himself. The characters acquire voices as they speak to one another or to themselves. In writing, there are no actors. The voice created in the writing defines the character. If the voices of two characters are undifferentiable, I have not created two distinct characters.
As a scene acquires a measure of solidity, I experiment with adding a prior or subsequent scene. This stage, in which I am extending the sequence of scenes forward and backward, requires a good deal of time. What I am doing at this point is pushing the limits of what I feel a character is capable of being and capable of doing. As I press a character toward his limits, the character must remain real to me (i.e., he must not become larger than life). People behave in ways that are remarkable, unusual, and improbable; in fiction, the remarkable, the unusual, and the improbable must also be plausible. Characters are interesting to the extent they surprise me (and themselves), but the characters must remain human.
As the sequence of scenes congeals into a storyline, I begin to attend to the craft of writing: word choice; sentence structure; use of first-, second-, or third-person narration; use of metaphor; narration in present or past tense; structure of dialogue; use of dialect, and so on. The trick is not to let the craft (the “carpentry”) kill the art.
At this stage, I find that the most effective way to improve the writing is to sculpt: to create not by adding, but by paring away. I remove everything that does not contribute to the action of the piece. Extra words make reading the text feel tiring to me. Each time I read the story, I delete more, until I reach a point where I am no longer sure whether a deletion makes the text stronger or weaker. Then, I stop.