Escaping the Triggering Town
~my process~
There are three interlinked questions that I want to answer with this newsletter:
How do I know an idea is a novel-length idea, a novel-length idea I want to write, a novel-length idea I can’t help but write?
What is the relationship between the starting inspiration for a novel and what the novel finally ends up becoming, sometimes years later?
What is my emotional headspace that allows me to be excited about a novel idea throughout the long slog of execution?
But I’m not going to answer them directly, since the answers are all tangled up in the process. So I’ll just take you through my process, with examples where it worked, and when it failed.
An eye for scale
It goes like this:
I’m doing literally anything except sitting at a desk thinking about story ideas and an idea will come, with various degrees of specificity.
University ship to mars. Portrait against Olympus Mons. Artist and scientist get close over a five year journey to Mars
or
Robot WebMD
and I ask myself, how long would it take me to get to the bottom of that story? I picture, purely impressionistically, in fast-forward, what the motion of going through that story would feel like, how big the world could be, how many angles could I explore. This is pre-worldbuilding, pre-character development. This is an exercise similar to putting on a skit in my mind with stock characters and stock music and stock set design, to answer what type of impression that story might leave on me. I try a couple of different genres and moods, see what clicks, what gives me that itch to keep going. And I estimate with this exercise if a story’s got two thousand words in it or a hundred thousand.
At this point, it doesn’t matter if the estimate is right or not. The story’ll tell me itself, eventually.
An ear for voice
This is how my last novel started:
documentary format. galactic sport. giant robots. filmmaker, undercover, trying to turn one of the hotshot pilots. There’s interplanet rivalry, intra-team rivalry between teammate pilots, sabotage, some speeches.
lights under the water and then the camera zooms in to see the streak of metal and momentary focus on a flag underwater.
One of the subconscious tells that alerts me to an idea with legs is that I’m already spinning up visuals and writing words that could immediately go into the story as-is, like streak of metal.
Then I wrote a four-thousand word short story based on that idea in a night and sent it to my friends, who read it and said this is way bigger than a short story, which I had already begun suspecting, when I opened a new OneNote notebook to start collecting all the other worldbuilding and possible scene ideas I had started having, and next thing I know it I’m making 5x12 tables with lots of different names and yeah, this is becoming a novel.
Problem was, I was nine months and twenty thousand painful words into a novel that had a really promising hook, an expansive world, easily enough story for a hundred thousand words and then some, and I had just written a pitch for it that had finally excited me to keep pushing after my confidence in it was flagging.
That one had a really compelling pitch too, that came from strands of ideas pulled together from reading Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and watching Dark.
If you feel the exact same way as someone in the past, you can haunt into their skin and relive that moment where you both felt the same way, and you can see the future. This is the field of neurohistory. Two rival neurohistorians, who were once friends who designed the device that lets someone haunt on command are on opposing sides. one wants to use emotional time travel to study history, and one wants to weaponize the haunting. They race to find one woman who disappears into the future, and one who can actually change the past, before the long, interdimensional war between the emotions of fear and curiosity engulfs them all. The Emotional History of War.
But I abandoned it immediately.
The novel I completed before either the sports or the time travel one, started from:
global democratic system generated and maintained by hundreds of world programmers, scientists, historians, philosophers, and lawyers to gauge political candidates. Every performance review is then scrutinized for fairness by a cottage industry of media pundits and experts. Set it in Delhi. James Bond/Michael Clayton type spy/reputation fixer but in a more sophisticated story.
Carbon scrubbers hum a rattling gray note.
In both cases that worked, the story came with a voice, which to me, helps set the aesthetic stance of the story. It helps me set out the worldview, the angle, the filter, with which the events of the story were unfolding from. The novel idea that petered out had a lot of really good plot and vibe ideas, but I couldn’t, in twenty thousand words, pin down an aesthetic stance. An image that stayed with me, a line that ignited a fuse.
Those ideas for novels that I became obsessed with had two elements each that I think helped:
undercover filmmaker and hotshot pilot.
lights under the water and then the camera zooms in to see the streak of metal and momentary focus on a flag underwater.
and
James Bond-style investigator in a more sophisticated story.
Carbon scrubbers hum a rattling gray note.
A voice, an image, and someone with that voice, in that image.
So, so far:
I know when an idea is novel-length by trialing it in my brain by giving it stock scenes, impressionistic, with different genre angles, to see how much juice there is.
I know when an idea is one I want to write when the world seems really cool, when the plot engine seems exciting and able to generate tons of juicy conflict.
But an idea that I can’t help but write, comes, from the beginning, with three elements: a triggering image, the first hint of a voice that gives me the aesthetic stance to tell this story from, and an archetype of a character who fits into that aesthetic stance, and speaks with that voice.
Learning to leave the triggering town
In the excellent poetry craft book Triggering Town, Richard Hugo says that a poem (to me, also a novel) is not like a news story. In a news story, the words serve to clarify the subject, not illuminate the writer. In a poem (and novel), the words may start to serve the subject, the triggering town, but over the course of writing the story, the words must ultimately start to serve the writer.
Somehow you must switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the words. For our purposes I’ll use towns as examples. The poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another. The reason for that, I believe, is that the stable set of knowns that the poem needs to anchor on is less stable at home than in the town you’ve just seen for the first time. At home, not only do you know that the movie house wasn’t always there, or that the grocer is a newcomer who took over after the former grocer committed suicide, you have complicated emotional responses that defy sorting out. With the strange town, you can assume all knowns are stable, and you owe the details nothing emotionally. However, not just any town will do. Though you’ve never seen it before, it must be a town you’ve lived in all your life. You must take emotional possession of the town and so the town must be one that, for personal reasons I can’t understand, you feel is your town. In some mysterious way that you need not and probably won’t understand, the relationship is based on fragments of information that are fixed—and if you need knowns that the town does not provide, no trivial concerns such as loyalty to truth, a nagging consideration had you stayed home, stand in the way of your introducing them as needed by the poem. It is easy to turn the gas station attendant into a drunk. Back home it would have been difficult because he had a drinking problem.
How does this work for me?
Those keep notes on my phone above, the books or media that inspired them, are my triggering town. I take emotional possession of these ideas, and I start to view the world through these ideas.
But soon after I get into the groove of the story, as early as the first chapter, I have to abandon whatever was in the original pitch or inspiring media that did not survive contact with the words as written. If the story started taking a darker turn than I had originally sketched out, if there are new themes that emerged that weren’t in the media that I was inspired by, I need to switch to paying attention to the storyworld itself, and let loose the anchor of the starting image, if it’s no longer serving me in the direction the story is taking me.
So you are after those words you can own and ways of putting them in phrases and lines that are yours by right of obsessive musical deed. You are trying to find and develop a way of writing that will be yours and will, as Stafford puts it, generate things to say. Your triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words. When you are honest to your feelings, that triggering town chooses you. Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates, your inner life. The relation of you to your language gains power. The relation of you to the triggering subject weakens.
I really believe ideas are hyperdimensional waves in the air that choose you, as Gilbert says in Big Magic, and if we have our antennae tuned the right way, we can catch them. If an idea pings us at the right time, when we’re ready to bring it into the 3D world, we’ll be able to pull the essence of the idea into this world by, as Hugo says, obsessive musical deed. Getting the voice of the idea, and then the face speaking that voice, brings that idea to flesh, sustains it through the next stage of getting it onto the paper.
When I let the voice lead the story, I reach places I didn’t think the story could go, because inhabiting the story’s voice itself has changed my inner life: it’s taught me something about myself.
So for the novel that I never found the voice for, I could never escape the triggering town. I kept staying within the same confines that came to me originally, and I couldn’t find an aesthetic angle in the twenty thousand words I’d written to guide me to the next eighty thousand.
But the novels that I did write, I escaped the triggering town. Over the course of the first draft, I discarded many elements of the original pitch that weren’t working mid-draft, and over the next two-three drafts I added in many more details, characters, themes, plot ideas that I accumulated over the years, and the original triggering images, the lights under the water, streaks of metal completely disappeared from the story. The voice of the story itself evolved, over years and drafts, until almost none of the words from the original four thousand word short story were still left.
The aesthetic stance this novel adopted was muscular, elegiac, and twisty like a garrote, squeezing as much fluff out of the story as possible until all that was left was thick, slab-like sequences that bodily guided the reader through its world. The story arranged itself into crushing sequence after another, claustrophobic. Truby calls this the designing principle. It’s your aesthetic culling tool.
In the other novel, with the James Bond-type character, that character was sent through the ringer so much over the course of the drafts that almost none of that original flamboyance was left, and what was left was someone more thoughtful, depressed, with a hint of swagger. The carbon scrubbers line itself stayed, but was no longer the first line, once I realized where the story really started, and what was the seed of the story, got buried somewhere in middle of chapter six. The aesthetic stance here evolved into a gothic, sludgy, noirish whole with pinpoints of sharpness like a hidden shiv. The novel began to coil like a snake, dark and shiny, becoming taut.
Escaping the triggering town is sometimes immediate, but finding the heart of the story could still take years.
the years, the heart
Each novel comes with it a fresh set of obsessions. There’s new music that helps give me the sonic architecture of the world. There’s visual media that I rely on as stock fodder for new art ideas or set design, and there’s the shelves of new fiction and non-fiction books that arrive to be pulped through to get the mulch that fertilizes the next few years of writing the novel. And so once a novel idea that I’m obsessed with is found, a triggering town is imagined, a starting voice, a character, and an aesthetic stance is discovered, the next phase is the journey to the heart of the novel, and for me, I don’t know it until maybe, if I’m lucky, the end of the first draft, but usually, the end of the second draft, almost two years after the first idea.
But the journey is the fun part. This is what I do:
I am always, ever only seconds away from entering my story in my mind. The ambient feeling of being within that aesthetic stance of the novel is available with a switch. And whenever I’m watching, reading, or talking to someone, and I hear something, or see something that belongs in that story, I write it down. I am always collecting. This collecting is what builds on the aesthetic stance of the novel. I am applying a filter to reality — does this fit in my world? And through the repeated applications of that filter, what I am creating, is simply, my inner life.
Life and media/research consumption feeds into my mind to create the library of ideas, thoughts, feelings, images, sounds, situations, and lines that I think belong in the story. But what’s the output? What happens when this buzzing hive of idea-particles collide on the page?
The output is me solving a problem that I’m wrestling with, that I didn’t even know I was. This is the heart of the novel — and it comes into focus for me only after I reach at least one The End, sometimes two, because only after stepping back and seeing the entire shape of it, do I see what question I had been circling, what literary experiment I had conjured and populated with test subjects to study and enact their roles, to tell me what I was trying to learn about myself that I needed some puppets to tell me.
My style of writing novels is taking a cool starting image, feeding it years of research and inspiration, and watching the words come out that tell me what my brain has been trying to figure out for the past couple of years. What the novels end up being for me, is a tool to become the person to answer these questions by the act of absorbing, synthesizing, and vocalizing, to get the insight required to discover the answers.
If this sounds serious — it is. But it’s also a lot of fun. Because a lot of the time, the actual process of the years to find the heart is a series of inventing more and more delightfully preposterous situations to put my characters through until they come, exhausted, to the answer. I am making a machine that presents situations that I find enjoyable, to trick my mind into discovering some truth about my inner life.
The carbon scrubbers/James Bond story eventually turned out to be a question of: how do you become your optimal self in a dying world, by building up the system or tearing it down?
And the filmmaker/giant robots story, after many drafts, revealed itself as helping me answer: what is the line between storytelling becoming a weapon or therapy?
It’s this combination of years of living within an aesthetic stance and thought experiment execution and designing my personalized funhouse that gets me through the long slog of writing and rewriting novels. Some days it’s the fun scene I’m writing that keeps me engaged, some days it’s the soaring depths that the novel has just revealed in my psyche that I need to fill, like a dope fiend with the next hit, and some days I sit at my desk like a scientist, evaluating the research output on the page, mulling my next experimental conditions. The ideas that die in the process usually are missing one or more of those elements, or have just come to me at the wrong time, before I was ready to design the right world for them.