How Does Your Garden Grow? Tips for Avoiding the “Forced” Story

By Kathy Leonard Czepiel, @KLCzepiel

JH: Please help me welcome Kathy Leonard Czepiel to the blog today, to chat with us about growing our stories. She offers us a few tips on how to avoid writing stories that feel forced, and she learned them all from some tulips (okay, not really, but it's cute story).

Kathy is the author of A Violet Season (Simon & Schuster), named one of the best books of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews. She is the recipient of a 2012 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her short fiction has appeared in Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, CALYX, Confrontation, Brain Child, and elsewhere. Kathy teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.

On a fun note, Kathy has a project underway called 45 Treasures that will result in readers’ antiques and vintage items being included in the pages of her next novel! Here’s how it works: readers e-mail a photo of a household item from the period 1900-1945, along with a brief description, and Kathy posts it in her gallery on Pinterest and on her website. This is crowd-sourced research, one way for Kathy to immerse herself in the period of her as-yet untitled second novel. Eventually, she’ll choose 45 items from the gallery to mention within the story itself. Your treasure could be one of them! The galleries are already filling up with everything from the mundane (a toaster, an iron) to the downright quirky (“cigarette silks,” a 1920s dentist chair, a “Mr. Ree” board game). E-mail your own contribution to KLCzepiel (at) att (dot) net.

Take it away Kathy...

Last fall, I did a stupid thing. I planted some tulip bulbs under a tall, shady bush. They were tulips that had already been struggling to grow in another shady spot in my garden, so I dug them up and stuck them under this shrub, calculating that its leaves wouldn’t come out in time to shade them much. In the spring I watched them valiantly trying to do their tulip thing. They were slow to emerge and stunted, half the size of the other tulips in my garden. In the end, they were tall and leggy, desperate to find some sunlight. Eventually they bloomed, but they looked like clowns on stilts. As I puttered around my garden this season, looking for other stupidly-planted things to move (I am a slow learner), I couldn’t help thinking about all the times I’ve planted something in my writing where it wasn’t happy growing.

You know the stuff. You go into a short story or a novel or some other writing project with a predetermined idea of what it’s about, what will happen, who the characters are. And then they refuse to blossom. The plot vines in an unexpected direction, the theme goes underground. And maybe, if you’re stubborn like me, you try to force it. You try to make the tulips grow in the shade, or the ferns in the broiling sun, because that’s where you want them to be.

My first novel, set on one of the Hudson Valley’s bygone violet farms, came to me organically (that is, slowly). As I started work on my second novel, I thought I could save myself some time and pages by writing an outline. To some extent, it worked. I thought through a lot of the novel’s big-picture points before I sat down to write. I had an idea of where I was going. Still, the things that I thought this new novel would hinge on were the things that felt most forced in the first draft. I realized that the story and its characters were developing as I wrote, and it was more important to pay attention to those developments than it was to stick to my preconceived outline. In the second draft, entire scenes, even chapters, disappeared. They were based on ideas I had tried to force to grow in the soil of a novel where they didn’t really belong. Once I got the novel started, I had to “watch” it just as I watch my plants to figure out what they need. I had to dig stuff up and haul it off to the compost pile. I had to move some items around. I even had to plant a few unexpected things.

To dispense with the metaphor and get real, here are a few tips for what to do when your writing starts to feel forced:

Follow your instincts.

You’ll know when you’ve taken a false step. You’ll feel just a little bit uneasy every time you read a certain passage. You’ll catch yourself justifying it: “But this has to happen so that So-and-So can do this!” When a beta reader points it out, you’ll feel resignation: “Yes, I knew that all along.”

Try out an alternative.

Tell yourself it’s just for kicks, to see what will happen. I keep a folder called “Outtakes” for each of my projects. When I cut something, I paste it in there, knowing that I can always go back and resurrect it. I never, ever do. But having that folder gives me the security of knowing that I’m not doing something irrevocable. I’m just trying it out.

“Kill your darlings.”

You’ve heard this before, but it bears repeating. You must never be so enamored of your own work that you can’t slash it. I recently cut about fifty pages of subplot from my novel-in-progress.

Choose your beta readers carefully. Then listen to them.

Your beta readers should not be your biggest fans. I have one reader who is an old friend. She is also the kind of person who tells it like it is. She might worry that her criticism will sound harsh, but that won’t stop her from giving it. That’s the reader you need! Listen to her, don’t argue. If your own instincts aren’t up to par, she’ll be the one to tell you when you’ve done something contrary or false.

Now, as I put my garden to bed for the long New England winter, I have a list of plants I need to move in the spring. I also have a solid draft of my novel to work on through the cold days, a draft that is feeling more and more like the story it is meant to be: a story that I hope, in its own good time, will bloom.

About A Violet Season

A MOTHER’S CHOICES IN A TIME OF CRISIS THREATEN THE ONE PERSON SHE MEANS TO PROTECT—HER ONLY DAUGHTER— AND FORCE HER TO MAKE THE BOLDEST MOVE OF HER LIFE.

The violet industry is booming in 1898, and a Hudson Valley farm owned by the Fletcher family is turning a generous profit for its two oldest brothers. But Ida Fletcher, married to the black sheep youngest brother, has taken up wet nursing to help pay the bills, and her daughter, Alice, has left school to work. As they risk losing their share of the farm, the two women make increasingly great sacrifices for their family’s survival, sacrifices that will set them against each other in a lifelong struggle for honesty and forgiveness. A Violet Season is the story of an unforgettable mother-daughter journey in a time when women were just waking to their own power and independence.