As we all know, every birth is different. One might be straightforward and fast, while another is complicated, slow and difficult. In the end, hopefully, both produce a healthy baby. But the mother’s experience of labour is very different in each case.
As with babies, so with stories. Occasionally, wonderfully, a story will arrive fully formed, written fast, the first draft already close to its final version. More often, I find, there’s hard labour: weeks, months, even years of rethinking and revision before that story is ready to take its place in the world.
This is the story of ‘Hope’, the lead story in my latest collection Fire-Ready. Looking back over the 19 drafts on my laptop (and not counting the original handwritten drafts, which landed in the bin), I can see that it changed so much that almost nothing of the original remains. But in my head I was always writing the same story, moving towards a distant glimpse of the thing I was trying to capture.
Please don’t imagine I’m recommending this method. If you can write a story straight off, hurrah! Turn the page and move on.
But if it’s a struggle, maybe this chronicle of wilful mistakes and hapless revisions by a writer who has been at it for more than half a century might encourage you to continue, or at the very least reassure you that you’re not alone. I know from experience that each time I start a new story, I re-invent the wheel.
Reverting to my child-birth metaphor, I have divided my Labour into 4 stages, each identified by a new title for the story:
‘Before, after’ (2 drafts)
In the beginning I had an idea I wanted to explore, and a technique I wanted to use. Thinking about humanity’s ravages of our planet, I was struck by the aptness of the biblical story of Adam and Eve, who lose a beautiful place by gaining and using knowledge. I wanted to highlight the enduring relevance of that story, perhaps by using it as a kind of template.
Technically, I wanted to write in poetic third person, allowing myself the rare luxury of not being constrained by an individual’s first-person voice. It was February 2024 and I was heavily influenced by having just read Orbital by Samantha Harvey.
I wrote three ‘Before, afters’, each describing a place I loved, and its destruction by flood, fire, or the modern world. The first was a river pool in France where I used to swim, the second an old railway track I cycle along, the third a field on my aunt’s farm, where I used to collect hens’ eggs as a child. All my attention was centred on writing as evocatively as possible. Obviously I needed a thread on which to hang my gems of deathless prose, so I invented a Collector of Memories, at work on a spaceship which had recently fled uninhabitable Earth. The result was closer to an essay than a story – not surprisingly, because as soon as I read it critically, I could see there was no suspense.
‘Where man is not’ (8 drafts)
Events gave my story a nudge. The construction of HS2 has caused the closure of almost every footpath in my area, and the sight of ripped up earth and giant bulldozers fills me with rage. Taking refuge on my favourite old railway track/cycle path, I realised that had I been born 200 years ago, I would have been in a similar rage at the building of the railways, ploughing through the countryside and destroying wildlife. Now, in rural areas, their abandoned tracks provide a haven for walkers, cyclists, and nature. Maybe I needed to take a longer view of HS2, and think about renewal after destruction. Maybe the Collector of Memories could learn that nature was recovering on Earth, once humanity had fled? How might she feel about that?
Into my story went a drone that had captured photos of green shoots in a dead forest, and seaweed in the ocean. The line from Blake came into my head, ‘Where man is not nature is barren’. The new nature on earth would be barren, in the sense that there were no people there to see it, which is what Blake meant. But in actual fact, where ‘man’ was not, nature would flourish. I was twisting Blake’s meaning, but it seemed a good title.
‘Mutant kelp’ (3 drafts)
So the nameless Collector became a character, ironically named Hope, who was grieving for lost Earth through three treasured memories. She became the narrator. Heartbroken about the suicide of her son, she revealed that deaths outnumbered births, on the spaceship, and compared herself and her fellow passengers to despairing First Nations people driven off their lands by 19th Century colonisers.
When she heard the good news about the resurrection of nature on Earth, she wanted it kept secret because she feared people would return to Earth and trash it all over again. Poor Hope was entirely hopeless.
At that point I showed the draft to one of my sisters, the scientist. She pointed out that green shoots in a forest would happen a long way down the evolutionary line, and probably the first sign of new life would appear in the sea, and might be some kind of mutant kelp. This amused me so I retitled the story. She also opined (rightly) that the loving descriptions of Earth were a bit boring.
Also, the timeline was a mess. The time-lag between humanity fleeing Earth, and the appearance of mutant kelp, would have to be at least 200 years to be even remotely plausible. So Hope could not possibly have memories of Earth – she had never even set foot there. Whose were these memories, and why were they hand-written? Who uses paper and pencil on a spaceship?
I made savage cuts to my beautiful descriptions. They remained static. Belatedly I remembered advice I routinely give to short story writers on courses I teach: ONE Setting is not wallpaper. Make it active. TWO Every character should have a story of their own, even if you choose not to tell it.
Well, that was the end of the deathless prose. I imagined another narrator, Luna, an ancestor of Hope’s husband. She was first generation on the spaceship, back in the 21st Century. A single parent, she had kept a secret diary of her first year on the ship, to work through her worries about her son bullying her daughter. In her diary, she revisits memories of herself and her brother as children on Earth, for comparison. The memories take place at a pond, on an old railway path, and in a field of hens. But the only elements of my original description that I retained were those that revealed character and/or advanced the story. At the same time I added a few very sparing details about the spacecraft, to encourage the reader to visualise Hope’s man-made world.
Luna’s diary is found by the bedside of Hope’s dead son, which gives Hope every reason to read it.
‘Hope’ (6 drafts)
In my experience, there is often a gift, when you wrestle for months with a piece of writing. There is one missing piece of the jigsaw that appears, out of nowhere, to connect things and make the story better than your conscious mind was able to do. It is common knowledge that the brain goes on working all the time, even when you’re not aware of what it’s up to.
Here’s the gift. Initially, Hope thought that renewed life on Earth should be kept a secret so that people couldn’t trash it all over again. But now I realise (and in my final draft, allow Hope to realise) that what has caused her son’s suicide and all the other suicides on the ship, is lack of hope. They are going nowhere; they are simply fleeing a dead planet. Renewed life on Earth does not make the planet habitable yet; it may not be habitable for several generations. But where there’s life there’s hope. And if you have hope, you can live.
Suddenly Hope’s name is not ironic but, well, hopeful. I can even use it as the story’s title. And looking at my subplot, Luna’s diary, I can think about introducing hope there too. In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina longs for humanity to leave the ruins of earth and move out to the new world of space. I flesh out Luna’s bullied daughter, and she starts to gaze out at the stars. Luna joins her, then mother and daughter together start visiting the viewing platform and finding the same escape and joy in galaxies and constellations, as the young Luna did in ponds and hedges.
Conclusion
The main learning points are blindingly obvious: a story needs a hook, suspense, and conflict. None of these were in my early drafts. Description for its own sake does not work, the setting must actively serve the story.
All writers have heard this advice ad nauseam. BUT – if I had followed this advice from the start, I would never have written this story. I would never have started to stumble towards the story I wanted to write. It was only by forgetting all the advice I have ever been given, that I could begin to blunder towards what I was looking for.
This may just be a long-winded way of saying, ‘turn off your internal critic before you begin to write’, but I think it is worth repeating. The internet is full of helpful advice on how to write a short story, but I think the best advice is, ‘Start putting words on the page’. Follow your instincts. They will lead you down byways and dead ends, but they can also lead you to the place you really set off to find. And no one else can give you directions for how to get there, because they have no idea where it is.
TRY THIS
The writer who has made me think hardest about the short story form is George Saunders. His ‘The tenth of December’ is one of my all-time favourites. Check out his book about Russian short story greats, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. It is full of insights; plus the exercises at the end are excellent. Two other short story writers who are must-reads are Alice Jolly (From Far Around They Saw Us Burn) and Clare Keegan (Small Things Like These)
Writing exercises:
1. Changing the title changes the focus of a story and helps the writer to find different things within it. Ideally, the title should do some work, not merely be descriptive. (You can see why I was so pleased with being able to call my story ‘Hope’! A reader friend told me she would never in a million years read a story called ‘Mutant Kelp’). Take a story you have written and think up an alternative title. Might this lead you to make some revisions? Try this with several different titles, in case one throws up something worth pursuing.
2. Look at the setting in a story you have written, and ask yourself two questions. Is it active? And how far can you strip it back? In a late draft of ‘Hope’ I found that I could flag up the futuristic setting with a single word, ‘pod’, in the first sentence: ‘When Victor returns to our pod I hide the old diary and refresh my screen’.
JANE ROGERS has published ten novels, two collection of stories, TV and radio drama. Her novels range from historical (Mr Wroe’s Virgins, which she adapted into an award-winning BBC2 serial) to science fiction (The Testament of Jessie Lamb, winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award). She is Professor Emerita of Writing at Sheffield Hallam. Her new collection of stories Fire-Ready is out now. She will lead a workshop in the Mslexia Salon on 4 March and is a core tutor on Mslexia’s online Women’s Writing Weeks.
www.janerogers.info
