Writing In Circles

                                                  

This is a little trick I discovered when writing short stories. I haven’t read about it anywhere else, though it wouldn’t surprise me if someone has already described it somewhere because there’s something fairly intuitive about it. In any case, since it seems to help me write successful short stories—such as the cover story “My really big excuse”, about an elephant,pictured above—I thought it was worth sharing with the blogosphere.

The “trick” is this. When you have read right through your newly-drafted story to the last sentence, go back immediatelyand read the beginning of the story. You will probably notice an interesting thing, as I often do. Either the beginning will be totally consistent with the ending—in terms of the “world” you have set out to create—or it won’t. If it is consistent, then it’s a very good sign that you have written a well-controlled and hopefully successful tale. If it isn’t consistent, then it’s a sign that you have drifted as you have written the story. Just how you have drifted will then be a matter for exploration. But the first thing is to feel the jolt, to realise (usually with a considerable sense of disappointment) that the story you’ve just finished doesn’t really fit your starting point. There has been a fracture in the space-time continuum of your created world (so to speak) that betrays its legitimacy and its ultimate believability.

Interestingly, using this little technique seems to help discover the problem much better than simply reading, in a linear fashion, through the story from beginning to end. Reading in a linear fashion may of course give you a certain sense of unease or dissatisfaction, but because the problem is a gradual one as the story progresses, you may not understand why the story is dissatisfying. You need to feel the jolt that comes from suddenly plunging back to the beginning of the story. Then it’s much more obvious that your world has actually shifted, and you can then take steps to track down where you have gone wrong. It could be many things: changes, rather than progression, in mood, character, voice, tone, setting, even genre.

Actually, this “trick” has now become so entrenched in my writing life that I no longer leave it till I’ve finished a whole story. Rather, instead of simply “plunging on” from whatever point I’ve got up to in the writing, I often go back and read the story from the beginning again. In this way, I’m constantly doubling back to my starting point. It means that with each new section of my story I’m more confident that it fits the progression of the whole. I’m “writing in circles”, but it seems to work. And it’s always such a nice feeling when I do finally reach the very end and then read the beginning again, and find that the whole journey of the story has a consistent music to it. It gives me confidence that the new story (like that cover story I showed you right at the beginning) might even get published!