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Renovating Stories
Stories are not set in stone. They are not fixed in place or time. They are not restricted to one particular group of people, nor even necessarily to people. A good story has a truth about human nature. We see ourselves and those around us in a good story.
In some ways, there are only so many story structures, but they are clothed in infinitely different details, just as a limited company of actors might portray thousands of characters through costume changes and changed mannerisms. If we strip down the stories, they still have the same bones. Boy meets girl. Man overcomes nature. Man overcomes himself. I could list them all; there are not so many more.
Likewise, we see the same story transferred from place to place and time to time. Richard III driving a WWII-era tank in a 1940’s fascist atmosphere? Why not? The Merchant of Venice in 1930’s Italy? Again, why not? One of Shakespeare’s plays changed from being about nobles to being about modern celebrities? I have seen it done. The Tempest made into a science fiction movie with Leslie Nielsen as the heroic lead? Yes, yes, yes, and it is called Forbidden Planet.
I can also think of some very successful authors who have only ever told one story, but repeated it a hundred times in different books, maybe with different characters. Good stories can and should be recycled.
We can dress the good stories in new clothes, but they are still the same stories. About the only true innovation in story creation is in creating bad stories. Humans have been the same for about 300,000 years, and all the good stories have been discovered. This is, once again, because good stories speak of human nature. They reveal us to ourselves. They show to us who we should be, who we could be.
As a writer, I never throw anything away. I have plenty of stories in the wings where they did not work as they were or where or when they were. Sometimes they were set in a near future that passed them by too soon. But I find that the best stories can transcend those details. They can be reworked to slip into another place and time. I will go through my story cemetery, my boneyard of forgotten dreams, and look for one that might be resurrected to slide into an empty slot elsewhere.
The main thing that I have been writing under my own name these past few years is a science fiction series. It’s really a set of short stories grouped together in a shared universe. When I started writing it, I had a timeline in mind that would span about three hundred years very rapidly. What actually happened was something else altogether. But, since they were really short stories, I had some stories set way out ahead in the 1860’s or even early 1900’s. My timeline compressed, and I may not even get to 1800. Thus, I have gone back and looked at those stories. Could they be shifted back in time to accord to the new timeline? A story about a child who acquires the Midas touch? There’s no reason it could not be about a different child and family and set fifty years earlier. A story about someone who after reading a book of speculative fiction, opens a pathway to the stars and other planets? Given the way it is done, it was not dependent on technology to reach a certain point. Why not move it forward by seventy or eighty years and to a different country?
Like in the Book of Ezekiel, Chapter 37, I wander through a valley of dry bones, and with a bit of inspiration, they become living flesh once more.
As many times as I have managed to do this, my strong recommendation is to never throw any old stories away, no matter how bad. As one learns to write better, one also learns how to fix what didn’t work. The story that did not work in the first attempt to write it and understand it might be one’s masterpiece in the third or twentieth attempt.
What about you, my friends? Ever done a bit of renovating and recycling a tale you have told to make it better and make it serve new purposes?
Published in Group Writing
The fish keeps getting bigger.
Every time it’s told. Did I tell you about that time I landed a killer whale in a bass boat?
Seven, I’ve heard.
There are only three stories:
(I wish I could remember where I got this from.)
I’ve done this with songs multiple times.
Tell us more. Words and music? Just lyrics?
Same here. It’s not easy getting old lyrics out of one’s head after singing them for years. And the original lyrics frame how the singer’s melody/rhythm goes.
I have many songs that were written when I was a dumb kid imitating the atheist and libertine bands I grew up with. Others were written lazily. Or the lyrics are too self-referential, too formulaic, etc. But it takes discipline to start over when you have a finished song.
Editing the music is usually more a matter of adding hooks and variation around the estsblished structure. It’s rare that I think a verse or chorus needs to be dumped and replaced.
What is the novel equivalent to hooks in a song? For films, the first thing to come to mind is the Terminator saying, “Hasta la vista, baby.”
Good question. Opening lines? “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”
Definitely, the opening lines need to hook a prospective reader. The same might be said of the first and last lines in each chapter.
But anything plot-wise or regarding characters? Some peripheral characters might refresh the story by introducing an unexpected interval or complication.
But Godzilla vs. Mothra is just “A stranger comes to town”…
Only where Godzilla is a homie.
Isn’t he?
That is like a hook in a song? I wouldn’t say so. One can do a lot of things with characters in a novel or other lengthy work, such as a play, depending on genre and other factors. For instance, having some characters as comic relief can lighten an otherwise dark work. That seems to be the sort of thing you are speaking of. An example of this might be the sexton scene in Hamlet. One can also use them as red herrings in mysteries or suspense novels. Jo Rowling did that frequently in her books.
Thinking further on your question, it really does depend on genre. A romance novel is going to be a lot different in plot and characters from a mystery or suspense work.
When working a plot, an important decision can be where to break chapters. For instance, in some sorts of books, it’s important to break the chapter on a cliffhanger, so that people will want to read on. They’ll keep saying, “I’ll put this down and go to sleep as soon as I get to the end of the chapter…” But, darn it all, the bomb’s about to go off, and the hero doesn’t even know where it is yet, so they keep reading.
It is generally good to maintain copies of even incomplete written efforts,
AND
Sometimes I really need to first sit down with a black sheet of paper, pen or pencil, and outline. Else all those incomplete bits, or old complete products, get cut and pasted together in an unoriginal and suboptimal mess.
This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under January’s theme: Renovation. There are plenty of dates still available. Have a great home renovation story? Maybe with photos? Have a terrible home renovation story? How about furniture, or an instrument, a plane, a train or an automobile? Are you your renovation project, or someone else’s? Do you have criticism or praise for some public renovation, accomplished or desperately needed? Are you a big fan, or not so much, of home renovation shows? Unleash your inner fan or critic. We have some wonderful photo essays on Ricochet; perhaps you have a story with before and after photos, or reflections on the current state of a long project. The possibilities are endless! Why not start a conversation? Our schedule and sign-up sheet awaits.
The February 2019 Theme Writing: How Do You Make That? Is up. Thanks for the great suggestions. I’ll likely use some of the others in March and April.
Arahant, I’m curious about your published writings. Do you write for a living? Is it a living? Do you self-publish or does a traditional publisher put out your writings?
Depends. Under my own name, I self-publish various things. That includes various Websites and a few science fiction books. Under other names, I can’t say.
Literary theses always seem to require a great deal of assumption and suspension of perception, then go on to “reason” from that convenient position. That’s why 1) I never trust them at face value, and 2) they seldom tell us anything.
Shorter: What if they’re all new stories just told against common backdrops?
Yep, every Steven Seagal movie had an entirely unique story.
In one sense the stories are all new. But the themes are similar. If you’d like, the backdrop is human nature.
I wouldn’t know. But I assume you do take my obvious point: People who see stories as the OP describes them are taking the “narrative” as the thing that matters, which is to say they focus on the effect of the story in the reader’s mind and consider the physical words of the story secondary. That is careless, even arrogant, because it assumes the ability to see into readers’ minds. It indicates a habit of taking one’s own “narrative” and projecting it. It’s also the position of the leftist mind, hence my cautionary remark.
New unless plagiarized, I guess. Similar, sure. But abstracting all those “narratives” into one thing is so reductive as to make the thesis trivial – of course all the stories are about one thing, if it’s all just “human nature.”
Here’s another way to phrase it – the stories are mostly unique, but the readers are the same.
Every one of his movies has the exact same plot. I tend to agree more with the OP; the details change, but the song remains the same.
Judge, let me place a concept into our mutual near-attention sphere. The intellect is a model of reality. The intellect is made of concepts hung together by physical mechanisms that implement the logical operations of association and abstraction. (That the human intellect can model itself, being part of reality, is where most philosophy falters.) But remember the point: there is reality, which exists independently of any intellect. There is intellect, which models reality.
Now let that recede for a few minutes, then consider again: the story on the page, the narrative in your intellect that models it, and the projection in the author’s intellect of your narrative.
Not according to George Berkeley.
True. There are many proponents of the First Lie, but Berkeley’s namesake city is almost an archetype of the fantasy life. (That’s not the the word I wanted, archetype. What’s the word for a society-wide representation of a common if ill-defined idea?)
Can’t help you. I’m sure I’d understand it if I read it, but my memory isn’t what it once was.
Can’t find it, I give up. Avatar. Reification. Not working.
Ok, back to the point – George Berkeley was a liar, a faithful acolyte of the First Liar, who told the credulous they could create their own worlds just as real as God’s.
Interesting how many of the right-left roots discussions come back to Gen. 3. @arahant just wanted to talk about how he reuses his work products, now I’ve driven this into the weeds. Or was he talking about their effect?
@barfly, I think you have read my point very wrong. (Or inserted your own narrative into it.) This conversation was not started to be about “literary theses” or “narratives.” It’s about never throwing away an unpublished story.
When Jacob wrestled the man through the night, he said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” That is how the creative process should work. A story comes to us, perhaps it is not fully formed. Perhaps it is only a character and we have to determine, to tease out of that character, who he is and what stories he has to tell. If we can’t finish it or find the story right away, we need to put it aside. It may grow, and change, and mutate until it becomes something real at some point.
No, and yes. I know what you were saying, but I picked a loose thread instead of looking at the garment.
That is close to what caught my attention. The story will never, ever, become real.