I attended a virtual book event last month, and Laura Beth Vietor, the wonderful moderator, asked me about the way in which my novel, Beyond That, the Sea, was written. She was interested in the fact that “big” events are not always portrayed in the book. We see characters getting a house ready for a party; we never see the guests arrive. We hear that one character is going to tell another about a death in the family but we’re not privy to the conversation. Several characters attend another’s wedding—we see the anticipation and hear the aftermath, but aren’t allowed to attend.
“What is that called?” she asked. “And why do you do that?” I told her that I didn’t think there was a name for it, but that I’m always more interested in the before and the after. Big dramatic moments always feel loud and out of character and place to me; I prefer to pay attention to the smaller ones that make up most of our lives. The quotidian details. Then an attendee wrote in the chat that she was a therapist and that in therapy, they would call this a focus on process over content. I thought that was interesting, and I finally got around to learning more about it.
I had immediately assumed that this was somewhat of a judgment against me: that I was avoiding conflict by not dramatizing these larger events. That it was my failure as a writer—and by extension a person—not to dwell on the big moments. And since I am extremely non-confrontational, it feels pretty spot on. But instead, when I did read up on it, I discovered that was not really the case. In fact, one of the goals of therapy is to get patients to talk about process rather than content—to focus on the emotional reaction rather than the thing itself. And I discovered it’s actually quite a useful analogy for writing.
In therapy, the content is the “what” of the thing: what happened, with a focus on the facts. The process, on the other hand, is subjective and emotional, how someone felt about the events of the past and how they feel now. Driving directions are often used as an analogy here: if one is traveling from New York to Boston, then New York and Boston are the objective start and end points. The locations are the content. The directions represent the process, and there are many ways to get from here to there. If you use GPS, you will get several options. But we all have our particular preferences, too. Perhaps you like the rolling hills of the Merritt Parkway. Perhaps you hate the bumper-to-bumper of the Cross-Bronx. Do you want to get there as quickly as possible or are you more interested in views of the Long Island Sound? Those choices represent the “why” or the “how.” The old adage of the journey rather than the destination.
The connection to writing is clear, I think. It’s the classic relationship between story and plot. There are, of course, many different definitions of the two terms and the ways in which they are different, but I like this one by E. M. Forster:
Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, the but sense of causality overshadows it…If it is in a story we say, “and then?” If it is in a plot we ask “why?”
I have written before about my aversion to plot (to Forster, that would be defined as story), and this idea of process over content helps me to understand it a bit more clearly. The “what” is not as interesting to me—and to many of us, I think—as the “why” and the “how.” Because the “why” and the “how” are often what a story or a novel is about. The aboutness of fiction is usually its heart. That said, the “what” is the structure—what happened next, what did he say, what did she do. In therapy, of course, the content is the foundation. The event has to have occurred in order for one to process it. I’m not sure that is always the case with writing—process may in fact come first for many writers. So many writers I know often start with a question. But by the end, there is usually a connection between the “what” and the “why.”
Beyond That, the Sea started for me with one event: a child is sent to live with another family during the Blitz. What I was interested in was the aftermath—how did this choice affect both families over the ensuing years? There’s not much of a plot; it simply unfolds over time, considering the long-term effects of the decision made at the start of the book. My interest in the before and after—the process, if you will—shows up in the larger scope of the book as well as in individual scenes and moments.
“Wednesday’s Child,” by Yiyun Li, is a great example of a short story which privileges process over content. The story opens with the protagonist waiting in Amsterdam for a train to Brussels. Train after train is canceled. Finally she boards a train. We learn that her final destination is Ypres; Brussels is simply a stop on her way to visit the battlefields. By the end of the story she has not yet reached her destination. In this story, then, the travel analogy clearly comes into play. If we were to describe the story objectively, we would say a woman is traveling from Amsterdam to Brussels. That is, of course, not what the story is about. The story is about loss; it is about processing a loved one’s death; it is about coming to terms with complicated familial relationships. It is about figuring out the past in order to move forward. The story, in this case, is the process, not the content. It doesn’t really matter if she gets to Brussels or Ypres at the end of the story; in fact, it’s better that she doesn’t. The important thing is that her train is still moving in the right direction.
See you in two weeks!
I love plot, and the writers I sturdied when I was learning to write create fabulous plots but as I learned from Edith Wharton, always skip the wedding! She focuses on the before and after of all the headline events, as does Tolstoy, and Fitzgerald...all my early heroes. The most interesting thing between sentences and scenes, too, is the author's decisions about what to skip. Of course there may be times when the important interpersonal events happen at a big event, but I totally agree about the larger principle of the lead up and the result and it's based on what's dramatic. Weddings aren't. All you have to do it to think about movies that show weddings and the crazy lengths they go to to make something happen during a stodgy and predictable event. Ditto most headline events.
Excellent analogy and I love the EM Forster quote. I recently spoke to a class on writing short story and urged them to contemplate what the story is about, not the plot line. Or, as Vivian Gornick put it so well, the situation is not the story.