The Marriage Between Story and Language

Can I say both? As I just did, I guess I can.

Depends on the draft:

First draft - Story
Second draft - Story and structure
Third draft - Language, story fine-tuning
Fourth draft - Polishing, language-focus down to the word level.

Actually, I pay attention to language all the way through, but I don't get truly finicky about it until the polish.

Story without at least competent prose lumbers along with hobbles on its feet. Language without story (a rare if not theoretical beast) would be like walking through a vault full of gold and precious gems; before long, it's all just glitter.

I have completed about four drafts and and several edits. My story has greatly improved, as s has my structure.

CAWriter said:

With which aspect do you struggle more--story or language?

Click to expand...

Oh, language for sure. I know what I want to say, how I want the story understood and felt by the reader but somehow between the story in my mind and the language on the page I almost always fall short. One day.

Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Story structure is the hard one for me. Language is easy...usually.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

I write RS, political Thrillers and SF, all driven by suspense and intrigue. I focus on getting the storyline, theme, and intrigue elements first, then next series of passes are on language/flow. I'm getting better though. After 18 stories, I've cut my rewrites and edits from about two dozen to less than 10. Had some great editors with my publisher and they shared their experience and skills well. Shows even an old man can learn (g).

Very interesting--for me, it's story. I can bang out delightful sentences--and paragraphs and scenes and chapters--until the cows come home, but making them into an actual story is a bit harder. I have an idea of what I want to do, but injecting enough conflict to make an actual plot . . . well, that's not always easy for me.

They're different things?

A story told in boring words isn't a story at all. It's just a plot.

kuwisdelu said:

It's just a plot.

Click to expand...

And very often, not one that's different from a hokey plot.

I do it a little backwards, I suppose. Or sideways. I just do it all at once, and then revise and polish everything...although the way my writing group works, stuff at the micro level usually gets fixed before stuff at the macro level.

Good question. I believe it's hard to be an objective judge of your own language. At least for me it is. I can get from one extreme to another, like a love/hate relationship.
I can definitely tell the holes in my story. I think I'm more objective in that regard.

Something I have discovered about my writing is that the story is always there, but the language has to be thought about a bit more deeply. I tweak both, on revisions, but perhaps I tweak language more than story.

In my early days of writing, it was more about the story. Today, its more about the language used to tell the story, and make the story that much more interesting.

Language should always be in a later draft. 'Cause if you change the plot, all that work on language is wasted.


I struggle the most with story. Language is easy; I can write you the damned prettiest pages of nothing in particular, no problem. But getting the story elements just right really makes trouble for me.

Plus, changing language is easy. Very rarely does a change in one spot, even a major one, affect you 40 pages down the line. But a plot point change? You might have to revise the whole book.

I used to think language was my problem, but it's probably plot. For a long time I was convinced that my ideas were great, I just couldn't translate them as well as I wanted onto the page.

Language. Anyone can use it, but using it so I has the right rhythm and flow, mood and tone, cadence, word choice, surprising but perfect left turns into truth, etc., is tough.

Liosse de Velishaf said:

Language should always be in a later draft. 'Cause if you change the plot, all that work on language is wasted.

Click to expand...

That has been my experience too. When I first started writing I spent days even weeks trying to get each paragraph perfect. Only to find out that when the work was done or nearly so that I had to perform major plot surgery and all that perfect language was wasted.

Though the EXPERIENCE of creating that "perfect" language was not wasted. It was practice, I now see. For now I can quickly and easily create language which is concise, expressive, and sometimes even beautiful and witty. While at the same time focusing on getting the story right.

Liosse de Velishaf said:

Language should always be in a later draft. 'Cause if you change the plot, all that work on language is wasted.

Click to expand...

My experience is if I change the language, the plot changes.

Laer Carroll said:

That has been my experience too. When I first started writing I spent days even weeks trying to get each paragraph perfect. Only to find out that when the work was done or nearly so that I had to perform major plot surgery and all that perfect language was wasted.

Though the EXPERIENCE of creating that "perfect" language was not wasted. It was practice, I now see. For now I can quickly and easily create language which is concise, expressive, and sometimes even beautiful and witty. While at the same time focusing on getting the story right.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I totally agree on the experience thing.

kuwisdelu said:

My experience is if I change the language, the plot changes.

Click to expand...

Well, that depends what part of the language we're talking about.

Oh, definitely plot, to the point where I don't even think much about language on a first draft. A by-product of that being every story sounds like a newspaper article until the third or fourth draft.

kuwisdelu said:

My experience is if I change the language, the plot changes.

Click to expand...

I can see how that would work. If your language is light and satirical that will suggest certain plots and parts of plots. If grim and realistic that would suggest different plots and parts of plots.

Language and the story it tells certainly affect each other - a fact that Marshall McLuhan explored in the late '60s. But just how much and in which direction is unclear.

For me (and maybe not at all for others) the story comes first. The people, places, and actions I imagine first, mostly visually and occasionally aurally. Then I choose language that I hope will convey that to some else's imaginations. I will change the language to do that, but never the story itself. The story is real to me, as real almost as my actual experiences. The language is only clothing over the body, the story.

I struggle with both of those. Still working on the first draft of a novel. I think I've got a strong story in my head, and a good bunch of elements, but working out the mechanics of the plot -- the sequence of scenes, how things are introduced, how to find an organic develop for all the turning points -- is sheer hard work, and sometimes it feels like I'm at a dead end.

The language -- I'm not there yet. But usually, once I get used to the characters and find the right pace, the language seems to come fairly naturally. (A bit trickier with this project, because of the historical setting.)

And I have seen novels where there was obviously great attention paid to language, but not much of a story. Except for the really well-turned phrases, they don't stay with me much.

Manuel Royal said:

... Still working on the first draft of a novel. I think I've got a strong story in my head, and a good bunch of elements, but working out the mechanics of the plot -- the sequence of scenes, how things are introduced, how to find an organic develop for all the turning points -- is sheer hard work, and sometimes it feels like I'm at a dead end.

Click to expand...

Maybe the problem is that you’re thinking of plotting as a mechanical process, one which has to hit “turning points” and hit them at the right time. Books and articles which give us ideas about structure are fine to learn a bit about plotting. But to take these suggested structures as some kind of rigid framework is giving them too much credit.

Instead, think of a story as about someone wanting something. Which might be concrete and specific such as Van Diemon’s hidden treasure. Or more subtle and vague as to get through the school year without getting picked on by the Mean Girls.

In life as in stories there are obstacles to every goal. Physical ones such as mountains and rivers, mental ones as in mystery stories such as the detective lacking knowledge, social ones as in lack of respect from others, and emotional ones such as self-doubt or fear of commitment.

So put yourself in the place of your main character(s) and imagine the obstacles they are likely to face. Have your MC make a vague plan and then try to follow it. Even the best-laid plans will fail big or little as they’re attempted. So what could or would your MC do at the first failures?

And keep it up till you have a rough plot for your story. Write the story. Change it as your ideas about your characters and their place in the world improves. That is one way to get over the problems a lot of people have plotting.

Laer Carroll said:

Maybe the problem is that you’re thinking of plotting as a mechanical process, one which has to hit “turning points” and hit them at the right time. Books and articles which give us ideas about structure are fine to learn a bit about plotting. But to take these suggested structures as some kind of rigid framework is giving them too much credit.

Click to expand...

No; it's just that there are a few turning points that I definitely want in there, because they were my first mental images of the work. I also know the protagonist, at the beginning of the story, has no intention of taking a path that might lead to such events. I don't happen to know the precise events that are going to alter her path, except for the first one. They'll come when they come (provided I get back to lengthy chunks of writing; my current day job seems to be draining the life from me).

ETA: Thanks, though! (Should have said that first.)

I understand the importance of both, and I definitely work on language late in the process. But the prettiest language in the world won't do you any good if your story sucks. When I'm reading, I'm much more concerned about the story than the language. I'm of the school that good prose is largely invisible, though I can definitely appreciate well-honed use of language.