A few months ago I made a vague, nonspecific promise to update on my story in progress, which is titled “The First Walk Home.” I had thought that by publishing some public-facing claim, I’d be committing (for real) to actually finishing it. And yes, over the last few months, I wrote hundreds of words, and not long ago wrangled the story to a more or less “complete” first draft: it had a beginning, middle, and end. There were no holes on the page that I needed to fill in later. There was a crime, and it had a victim, and my protagonist did indeed solve it on her walk home. The protagonist had some good one-liners. Everything checked out: it’s done. 

And it’s…fine? Actually, no, it’s not fine. It aspires to be fine, but it isn’t very good. Despite it being almost a year into my Crash Course In Writing Genre Fiction, I’m still not sure I have a complete sense of what a story is, and I wish I were kidding.  

It’s been months, the story is only 5,000 words, and I cannot finish the damn thing. It’s a thriller that doesn’t thrill, a crime story with a boring crime, and it isn’t a story so much as a digital box with words in it. Yes, I have technically written a complete story. Now I have to set to work on the slightly different task of writing a story worth reading. It might in the end be a 5,000 word story, but it can’t be made up of the current 5,000 words. 

Erle Stanley Gardner has a great essay in which he admits that his earliest writing was simply terrible. Given how successful he went on to become, it’s tempting to look at that as false humility, that his idea of terrible writing is really quite acceptable by a beginner’s standards. 

Although maybe it isn’t false humility. Maybe he really was in the same position, and had no clue what he was doing or how to do it better. He writes that “When I started in to write I didn’t know the first thing about writing.“ I feel that, and pretty acutely. Was his first story better than what I just finished? Worse? Worse but in different ways? 

I have an MFA (in poetry, but still), I have written non-fiction for years, I have been writing for a living for years, and I thought that gave me some kind of advantage and that I would not be starting from Zero when I decided to write fiction. Not so. 

I am taking the scenic route to a completed first story, and it’s not solely because I have too many things started. It’s that I don’t know what “done” looks like. I don’t know what I’m making. What is a story, anyway? My background is really in literary writing, not genre writing, so it doesn’t surprise me that I don’t know what story is. Given the number of hyper-aesthetic 22 year olds who want to subvert readers’ expectations of what a novel could be, this makes sense; I, too, was once more interested in subversion than learning. Who cares what the Old Guard is doing – tear it down!

Turns out that stuff is pretty important. Who knew, right? It’s been rough going back to the beginning. There are a number of things that you can read about in a technique book, and you can accept them as being intellectually true, and you can even regurgitate them in conversations about writing and do it confidently, but you kind of have to feel them out for yourself through trial and error if you want them to stick. Here are just a handful of those things: 

Even the best dialogue is stylized. Dialogue is difficult. It’s tempting to have characters speak “as people really talk,” with all the interruptions, false starts, and, um, all of the, like, little eccentricities that, like, make our speech sound like speaking and not writing? But most of the time, you cannot do that. I tried “realistic dialogue,” conveniently overlooking that there was probably a very good reason it wasn’t done often. I also had quite a few things in “The First Walk Home” that were 6 back-and-forths between characters, but deep down, it could have been done in three. Stylized dialogue is the way to go; what you sacrifice in realism, you more than make up for in pace and efficiency. 

Scenes are at their best when characters interact and want different things from the encounter. I was not doing this. I was writing scenes because I needed to transfer Important Plot Information to the reader. But when two or more characters interact in a scene and want different things, this is called conflict, and, uh, it’s pretty important. My scenes in my earliest draft were functioning because I needed action, not because anything exciting was happening. And motion is not the same thing as action. Not all conversations contain conflict, but my goodness do stories move along when they do. 

There’s a difference between a germinal idea and an idea that can yield a plot. My initial idea of “can I write a crime story that takes place fully while someone walks from Point A to Point B?” is what Patricia Highsmith called a “germinal idea.” It was not a complete idea, and wasn’t even close to a complete idea. And I discovered this the hard way, because yes, I wrote a story that takes place during a single walk. But so what? And I do mean that “so what?” literally, because my First Real Draft of the story had no real stakes. Because what would happen if she did not solve the crime? Well…nothing. She wasn’t the victim. She had no stake in the outcome other than someone asked her for help. The life of the victim and the protagonist’s life did not intersect; they were lines that got close to one another but never crossed. 

This has been one of the hardest things about writing – we only ever see the finished product when people publish a story. We do not see what got cut, what memorable dialogue began life as a clunky sentence, what new plot point started as a cliche. We just don’t see this stuff. For me, as a poet for whom a germinal idea was usually enough for me to write a whole poem, this has been the hardest lesson of all. How many ideas do you need for a short story? Kind of a lot. It has been very slow going for me to be able to recognize something that is a fuller idea that can drive a plot, or be a plot. 

Gardner set himself on a “five-year apprenticeship” after he decided to learn writing, likening it to the 5 years of specialized study that he needed in order to practice law. I hope to God it doesn’t take me five years to learn three more things about fiction writing, but so far this is pretty fun, even accounting for not having anything that is both “done” and “worth reading.”