Inductive Composition And Theme Stories

My Favorite Poet.. Wait, I still have the meaning of that word wrong, don't I?

In his book On Writing, Steven King says he’s a natural “putter-inner”, meaning that as revises his first draft, he tends to add more material. That’s a problem because his goal is usually to make the second draft shorter than the first. I have this same problem, compounded by the tendency to start writing the second draft before I’ve finished the first. The longer my piece, the more likely I will go back to the beginning and started fleshing out material with new ideas. Often, I’m fleshing out stuff that’s already a bit overfed. That usually happens because the characters, settings, themes and other story elements have had too much time to sit in my brain and generate new ideas.

There is more peril in this behavior than merely bulking up a story that may first requiring some tightening. Another consequence is that I spool out new threads of thought that meander away from the central throughline. Sometimes these diversions are okay. I’m comfortable with pinning random ideas to the board and seeing what becomes of them later. Sometimes, however, they take on a life of their own. I become fascinated with a new turn on a story element and want to follow it further, adding more and more and circling back until the sideroad becomes a part of the main product. It can through the balance off or paint me into a corner. I can wind up turning a story that started out with a clear concept into something that is a little confused about what it is. At that point I may be tempted to put the work down and ponder it for a bit before having the courage to sort out the mess. It happens to the best of us, I suppose.

However, lately I’ve been trying to work on shorter stories and poems that are a little more immune to this trend. In particular, I’ve developed a fascination with flash fiction and haiku. My flash fiction is 1000 words or less and my haiku use the tradition 17 syllable pattern. There are many advantages to these literary formats. For example, they are more likely to actually get finished. Also, I am less likely to start messing with the content before I’ve finished a first draft. What’s more is that I have to be parsimonious with my words. I’ve found that this limitation is more freeing than constraining. There is the obvious result that short pieces can be more focused. However, I’ve also found that it appeals to my habit of “breeding” : when things I write generate litters of more ideas that I am then compelled to write also. Short works do not force me to throw out ideas. Quite the contrary.  They encourage me to break those ideas off into separate pieces. Each thought can be developed on its own.

One could ask whether this results in more disjointed results, where one speaks in sound bites rather than complete meals. After all, when I try to write a novel and add more and more ideas, it’s because I think they’re all related in some way. By spinning off new stories (or for that matter poems), have I risked shredding something that had the potential of being a whole fabric? I’ve come to the conclusion that ideas can be multitude, all with inter-relations, without forfeiting individual coherence. I’m not the first to have experimented with the way of writing I’m about to describe, but for lack of better terms I’ve coined it inductive composition and theme stories. Let me explain.

Inductive composition is a little like regular old brainstorming, except that each idea gets self-contained development, and the end products may stand on their own or together. Suppose you have an idea for a basic story involving two characters and a single conflict, something that can be related in a flash fiction format. This may spawn ideas about a continuation of that conflict, or new conflicts, or new characters that may relate to one or more of the original characters. Can each of these become the basis of a new flash fiction piece? Write them, making sure that they can still function independent of the others. The idea is to create a chorus of pieces. Each has an individual voice and together they add volume and new shades to various aspects of the story. At this point, one might rearrange the pieces and put them together in a single cohesive long story. You could do that, breaking their isolated existences and weaving them together. Thus, this becomes one way of coming up with the rough draft of a traditional novel. Or, you could select a subset of these pieces that seem to have a narrative relationship and arrange them together.

The parts may not be as cohesive as that traditional novel. They may even be somewhat contradictory. Nonetheless, it is possible for a general narrative to emerge and become visible to the astute reader.

I call this inductive composition, by analogy to the inductive method of reasoning (not to be confused with inductive mathematical proofs, which are altogether different). The foundations of an inductive argument are facts or propositions that come from independent sources. They weren’t created for any particular purpose. However, noticing a pattern, one may pull them together to argue that in concert they imply a certain conclusion. While better and better inductive arguments can support greater and greater probability of their conclusions being true, they can almost never provide absolute certainty in the way a deductive argument can. Of course, deductive argumentation requires axioms and strict adherence to formal logic, which is not true of reality.

Fiction is sometimes meant to represent reality, which is experienced in a sequence of moments that don’t have an ultimate purpose and which often have lots of blind alleys or observations that are interesting but not lent to absolute conclusions in the absence of omniscience and the ability to integrate such total knowledge. Reality is contradictory and subject. Yet, we press on with hedge bets based on an inductive assemblies of a thousand individual experiences. This is the model of inductive composition.

Them stories take this a step further. A theme story is composed of shorter stories that may not even contain the same characters or settings. Each component represents an individual emotional beat that might be typical in a larger story. For example, consider a plot summary based on the monomyth structure. One could write a sequence of shorter stories in which each piece details the emotional core of a particular stage in the hero’s journey. Don’t worry about continuity with anything else, just write something that evokes that stage the deepest sentiment and clearest representation possible. Then arrange them in their normal narrative sequence. Thematically, it tells a story, even if this isn’t true on the surface.

The major drawback of the theme story is that it makes no sense as a whole with the decoder ring. This may be okay, depending on your purpose. I could use a theme story as a platform for honing particular skills or exploring ways of looking at the larger story problem without being encumbered by commitments and connections that I have established earlier. Perhaps I could use that to write something more traditional. Or perhaps I could let it stand as-is. After all, each of the component story is supposed to stand on their own and should draw their strength from within, so to speak. The thematic progression might actually be clearer than you think to some readers.

I like to think this approach has a loose connection to the concept of nen actions in Zen philosophy. Nen actions describe the chain of thoughts that progress from an initial sensory input. The first nen is the immediate impression that happens when we first receive a stimulus. It is the sensation of colors and sounds without identity as a part of a larger pattern. We simply see blue and hear a string of notes. The second nen, which often happens so quickly we don’t even notice the first nen, is pattern recognition. We now see an entire image in a painting and may even identify it if it’s familiar to us. We now hear a melody and know the words. The third nen turns from passive recognition to active response. This could be a simple internal response, such as a pleasant feeling that comes from the things around us - or even a decision to ignore the input and move on. Or it could be something more dramatic, as when a stimulus triggers our flight or fight reflexes. Though in some sense the first kind if response might be considered passive, down at the level of nen actions we would call it active because it is a response that distinguishes you from a device that merely records its inputs.  

This is of course just an analogy. Writing any sort of fiction requires going beyond the third Nen (come to think of it Beyond The Third Nen sounds like a great name for a story or a prog rock album). However, I like the idea of sometimes just following a stream of ideas without first trying to connect them in some over-arching infrastructure. Sometimes one can be created after the fact, and sometimes themes and narratives emerge organically all their own. You make take a step back and find it there, something you couldn’t have discovered if you went in with a plan.