WE CANNOT CREATE A FICTION FROM A FICTION
We can make up story, we can make up plot, but we cannot make up truth.
We are attracted to the subject of our stories because their underlying emotional power calls to us. At first we may not be aware of this. We may think the plot, a series of incidents, is what interests us most as storytellers. But, more often than not, the real appeal is the mystery beneath the incidents in the plot. What concerns us intuitively, what we sense as writers, is the hidden significance inhabiting every story. What I refer to as the reality of the fiction.
When we are inside the writing experience, living and breathing writing reflexively, intuitively, subconsciously, and honestly, we are doing our best writing. How to discipline this kind of writing within logical storytelling is the challenge. We cannot allow the entire screenplay or book to write itself without parameters. Our stream of consciousness, or unconsciousness, might be a healthy way for us to dump our miseries and mistakes, but chances of it making any sense are slim.
Our first job is to create a compelling narrative structure that will support the series of revelations at its emotional core. We must constantly be aware that the plot is being quietly directed by an emotional stream of consciousness. This is different than an intellectual stream of consciousness. The intellectual stream is an organization of facts that build a story’s logic. The emotional stream is a current of suppressed psychological experiences that reveal a story’s meaning.
Like most streams, it gains in power and strength as it flows from its source deep in the forest toward the open sea. Passing each bend in the river, in this case each bend in your plot, the emotional stream constantly adds to its silt, its set of truths, forming the artistic basis of the drama from which the plot is generated.
Whether we are writing a mystery, romance, drama or comedy, every plot incident has an historically critical emotional incident attached to it at our creative disposal. Our character’s personal history, though deep in the past, is never passive. Emotional histories are always active, powerfully so, and often unnoticed, directing our lives and our characters’ lives. This imperceptible energy is at the core of your character’s authenticity.
As the plot moves along, these emerging revelations take the form of an elegant and intricate emotional ballet of expectation, fear, anxiety, joy, doubt, acquiescence, tolerance, intolerance, frustration, jealousy, anger, admiration, and incalculable love. They become, in short, what the entire narrative is really about: a soul’s portrait. And they become the reason you write it, and not someone else, because your character’s soul and your soul are soul mates. This is the inseparability of the writer and the writing: the marriage of the narrative’s emotional landscape to the author’s own spiritual geography.