The benefits of losing the plot
The Age
Saturday March 20, 2010
Writers often don't know where a story is going until they finish it, says Jane Sullivan.WHEN Sarah Dunant began to write her first Renaissance novel, she was terrified. After all her research into 16th-century Florence, she still thought she couldn't do it. But to start The Birth of Venus, she got down a sentence: "No one had seen her naked until her death."In the second line, she decided the woman was a nun. She wrote on, and discovered the nun had a tattoo of a snake writhing down her body."At the end I thought, 'Bloody hell, I've no idea what's happened to her.' But I knew that if I picked up a book that began that way, I'd carry on reading."So she carried on writing, to find out who the woman was and how she got her tattoo.When we read a well-structured, pacy novel that builds towards a wonderful and satisfying conclusion, it seems as if the whole work must have been meticulously planned out before the author even sat down to write. But as Dunant and other speakers at the recent Adelaide Writers' Week demonstrated, novels (and sometimes non-fiction books as well) rarely evolve that way.Whether planners or improvisers by nature, writers always seem to leave room for mysteries to pop up and develop in their books as they are created. Often they have no idea where a scene is going until they have written it.Sarah Waters is more of a planner than Dunant. She has a plot worked out from start to finish before she writes, and the interest for her is finding out how her characters react. But she abandoned that method when she wrote The Night Watch, trying and discarding many scenes.When she wrote The Little Stranger, she never planned the romance that is central to the book, and only realised it would happen when she had the characters dancing together. To her surprise, "it got quite flirty".Markus Zusak writes expecting to throw out most of what he's done. "The whole idea of writing is mysterious, because you don't know if you can pull it off," he says. "I'll write five pages and then read it. There might be one point, one image that I like. So out of five pages of rubbish I'll pull out that gem and then use it to start five pages the next day."To non-writers, it sounds like a nerve-racking and wasteful way to work. Why not spend more time planning, and relax in the security that you know exactly where you're going? Because that would be boring, say the writers."We spend months, years in our rooms and it's very hard graft," Dunant says. "If you can't find ways to interest yourself, you'll run out of energy. So for me the process is to throw up mysteries to make me interested."When the heroine in The Birth of Venus married a much older man, Dunant knew there was something wrong, but she didn't realise what, until she had the bridegroom leaning over the bride at the wedding to look at and talk to her brother."So then I know she's married off to a homosexual," she says. "And then of course I'm excited."Audrey Niffenegger set herself a fantastically intricate task of plotting parallel timelines when she wrote The Time Traveller's Wife, but she got through it by asking questions, "which is what detectives do. The questions can be very basic or quite particular, but the only way the book gets written is if you have a continuous stream of them. As long as the novel is alive under your hand, your essential state is curiosity."Janesullivan.sullivan9@gmail.com
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