Fork in the Road

This may be one of those cases where the coin flip trick works: assign one story direction to heads, the other to tales, toss the coin and catch it, and if before you have a look to see the outcome you find yourself suddenly with a rooting interest (i.e., "Heads, please be heads"), then toss the coin away, you've found your answer. If you don't find yourself with a rooting interest, well, flipping a coin is as good a way as any to settle this tie. You'll be back to writing.

WOW. I'm surprised you find any time at all to write. Even finding the time to flip a coin would be miraculous.

Maybe you could outline it from each fork in the road. Where does the story lead, what do the characters become? Pick the one that you want to write.

I agree with MythMonger - outlining might be the way to go. Also, consider leaning towards whichever direction is more difficult and torturous for your MC.

As Yogi Berra said, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."

This is humor, but it's also how I write. In writing, my experience is that forks do not exist. One direction is usually straight ahead, and the other direction usually goes off at an angle. If at all possible, I take this direction. I take the "fork".

For me, going off at an angle is what makes a story different. Going straight ahead is what makes a story like every other story. To paraphrase Robert Frost, I try to go with the fork less eaten with..

In my own writing, I usually tell pretty quickly if I'm going down the wrong path. It just doesn't work, I struggle WAY too much, I keep trying to plug through...and then I inevitably realize the reason for the pain. So I cut and paste the false start into a "Snippets" doc (recycling is your friend!) and begin again.

I'm a firm believer that the story already exists 100% in the mind, and we are simply "discovering" it as we go. As such, the thicker the brush, the more I look for the real path.

Jamesaritchie said:

As Yogi Berra said, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."

This is humor, but it's also how I write. In writing, my experience is that forks do not exist. One direction is usually straight ahead, and the other direction usually goes off at an angle. If at all possible, I take this direction. I take the "fork".

For me, going off at an angle is what makes a story different. Going straight ahead is what makes a story like every other story. To paraphrase Robert Frost, I try to go with the fork less eaten with..

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The fork less eaten with... I love it. Some thought-provoking advice, too.

If it isn't exciting for you, chances are it won't be exciting for the reader. I was at that point once, so I sat down and thought hard about what could go wrong here, what could come careening in out of left field and blow everybody's plans out of the water. Took a while, but I found it and it made the book much stronger. We all had to scramble to deal with it, LOL

DreamDestroyer said:

Problem is, I don't know which way to go.

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"I -- I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Jeff

Judg said:

If it isn't exciting for you, chances are it won't be exciting for the reader.

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I never have believed this. If it were true, most ghostwritten books would never sell. Nor would most work for hire of any kind. Nor would at least half the stories I've sold.

I read all sorts of things like this, whether they mention exciting, or humor, or sadness, or half a dozen other things.

I just don't believe it. I don't feel anything when writing a story. For me, it's an intellectual activity. I get in a zone, and I construct a story. I don't have to find it exciting, or be sad when a character is sad, or laugh at the humor, or anything else. What matters is how readers feel when reading a story, and that has nothing to do with how I feel. I'd be an emotional wreck if I had to feel something characters feel, and I'd never write anything if it had to excite me.

Make a deal with yourself. Pick a direction and commit to it, with the caveat that when you get to a point -- you set the milestone -- you can go back to the fork and take the other road. Give yourself a chance to love the direction you pick without second-guessing. It always helps me when I tell myself I can do it another way after I get this way finished. For some reason, it helps me avoid feeling like I'm missing out on something.

MythMonger said:

Maybe you could outline it from each fork in the road. Where does the story lead, what do the characters become? Pick the one that you want to write.

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This is what I do when I reach these forks (and believe me, this happens to me a LOT). This way you don't spend a ton of time perfecting the actual writing on a storyline that might not go anywhere. Another thing I've found true for me is that often times when I reach these forks and sit there, stuck, it's because neither direction is the right one. Sometimes it's good to sit with it for a few days and see if there's another possibility you haven't thought of yet.

There is a huge myth here about right and wrong decisions.

When we come to a fork in the road, sometimes it is one of those old computer adventure game choices. One route leads to fortune, fame, glory and an annoying dwarf, the other route leads to instant death.

You are in a dimly lit cavern. There are exits to the East and West. There is the dead body of an annoying dwarf on the ground.

Go East.

You go east. Suddenly an enormous fire-breathing dragon appears and burns you to a crisp. Your adventure has ended. Do you want to reload?

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Some forks in the road are certainly like that. One way is good, one way is bad. It is important to make the right choice because life doesn't allow us a chance to reload and go west, kill annoying dwarf and get all.

But real life is rarely as simplistic as a computer game. In many instances we come to a fork in the road and it does not matter which direction we take. It's the philosophical idea of Buridan's donkey. A donkey is placed exactly in the middle of two buckets or water or stacks of hay. He can't decide which is closer so he dies of thirst/ hunger/ a logical paradox.

My wife asks me what I want to eat for supper - chicken or fish?

I reply that it does not matter. She has been to the shops and bought chicken and fish. Therefore I am going to eat chicken and fish in the near future. Whichever one I choose for supper tonight, I will have the other one tomorrow night. She is asking me to be Buridan's donkey.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she says. "We've had this discussion before, smart-ass. What should I cook tonight?"

Sometimes when we get stuck at a fork in the road, we don't know which direction to take because it doesn't matter or because the decision is so finely balanced.

So when we come to a fork in the road, the first thing we should ask is "how critical is this decision?" If the decision is not critical, then flip a coin like InspectorFarquar suggested. It really doesn't matter what you choose. Chicken or fish? The left hand pile of hay or the one on the right? Who cares? Just pick one.

If the decision is critical and you still can't make it then perhaps you don't have enough information to make the decision. If you have time, go get some more information.

If you have got as much information as you can and you still can't decide, then pick one at random again. If they are that close they are probably as good as each other.

In this instance, I suspect that you are in a Buridan's ass situation. You can probably make either choice work. There is no right or wrong. So stop staring at the choice and just pick one. Doing nothing is almost certainly worse than making a wrong decision. Then having made your decision, forget about it and focus on making your decision work. No looking back.

Once! said:

There is a huge myth here about right and wrong decisions.

When we come to a fork in the road, sometimes it is one of those old computer adventure game choices. One route leads to fortune, fame, glory and an annoying dwarf, the other route leads to instant death.



Some forks in the road are certainly like that. One way is good, one way is bad. It is important to make the right choice because life doesn't allow us a chance to reload and go west, kill annoying dwarf and get all.

But real life is rarely as simplistic as a computer game. In many instances we come to a fork in the road and it does not matter which direction we take. It's the philosophical idea of Buridan's donkey. A donkey is placed exactly in the middle of two buckets or water or stacks of hay. He can't decide which is closer so he dies of thirst/ hunger/ a logical paradox.

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I think it always matters which direction we take. The problem, of course, is that we'll probably never see what would have happened if we had taken the other direction. You choose chicken, and you never learn that how hungry you were, how fast or slow you chewed your food on that one particular evening would have meant choking to death on a fish bone, had you chosen fish.

You choose fish, and you never learn that on that one night your wife left the chicken sitting just a minute too long after cooking it, and you would have ingested an unhealthy amount of salmonella.

Most often, we make a decision of some kind, and we don't see the wisdom or the foolishness, the right or the wrong, for ten or twenty years, but every action has a consequence, and forms an unbreakable chain taking us to where we are now.

It isn't that this or that decision doesn't matter, it's knowing when there's nothing you can do about, no way to determine which decision is best, so you just pick chicken of fish, or leave it up to your wife.

But most of real life comes with decisions where we can reasonably predict the most probably outcome. Not the certainty, but the most probable. Novels are the same way. A good writer can probably make any direction work, but even the best writer is going to turn out a better story, if he chooses the right direction, based on his experience, his wisdom, and his intelligence.

Buridan's ass is funny, and makes a point, but in real life, decisions matter. You can't let this freeze you, and you have to know when you can and can't prediction the best probable outcome, but a novel will probably be radically different depending on the choice.

Go one way and you get Harry Potter. Go the other and you get those who wrote boy goes to wizard school well before Rowling, but who didn't get it written in a way that many readers cared about.

Don't choose. Not yet anyway. Write both. Set a limit as suggested above - maybe five pages of each. When you're done, you'll have a sense of which is working better. Continue with that one. Save the other one just in case.

If neither seems better, start asking yourself questions. Why are they equal? What does the character want? Is getting it too easy? Is there a third choice I could make at that fork? How does this fit my themes, overall plan? What is my book about? Does this belong with the answers to that question? I'm betting the answers to the questions will point you in the right direction. In fact, some of them might be good pointers to start with.

Jamesaritchie said:

I think it always matters which direction we take.

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There is a wonderful joke about Hillary Clinton. One day, she and Bill decide to leave the limo behind and take a ride in a taxi. Don't ask me why. Just trust me on this one.

And they are both surprised that the taxi driver is an ex boyfriend of Hillary's. Again, I know it's unlikely, you'll just have to trust me on this one.

Afterwards, Bill says to Hillary: "You know, it's funny. If you had made a different decision earlier in your life you might have been the wife of a taxi driver."

She says: "Actually, no. If I had made that decision earlier in my life, I would still have become the wife of the President."

The point is that we rarely know what would have happened if we had taken a different decision. Once we take one fork in the road, we usually don't know where that other fork would have taken us.

We might feel the need to justify our decision by thinking that the other fork would have been totally wrong. But we rarely really know.

JK Rowling made many decisions when she was writing Harry Potter. Each character's name, gender, personality, appearance. Each plot point. Some of those decisions were critical for the success of Harry Potter. Most of those decisions were hardly relevant at all. It would have been just as much of a success if Harry had been called Peter or George or something like that.

So sure, she might have made a long string of bad decisions and ended up writing something which failed. She could equally have made a number of good decisions and produced a different but equally successful story.

That's why Buridan's ass is far more relevant than just a philosophical argument. In life there are a small number of very good decisions, a small number of very bad decisions and a huge number of relatively neutral decisions. And with those relatively neutral decisions, it is usually more important to make the decision quickly and implement it well.

Fairy tales would have us believe that there is only right and wrong - good decisions and bad decisions. The reality is that life is about shades of grey. Fifty or otherwise.

This thread started because the OP didn't know which fork in the road to take. We can't make that decision for them. We don't know enough about the choices. There is also no point in telling them that will be obvious because one fork will be clearly right and one will be clearly wrong. If it was that obvious they wouldn't have a difficulty in choosing.

Which is why several of us responding have asked this question - if the two choices are so finely balanced does it really matter which you choose?

Now that I think of it, I remember hitting a fork in my first book. I was stuck for weeks. Then I realized that I wasn't considering the MC's personality. He would only take Option B, he'd never choose Option A.

Once! said:

This thread started because the OP didn't know which fork in the road to take. We can't make that decision for them. We don't know enough about the choices. There is also no point in telling them that will be obvious because one fork will be clearly right and one will be clearly wrong. If it was that obvious they wouldn't have a difficulty in choosing.

Which is why several of us responding have asked this question - if the two choices are so finely balanced does it really matter which you choose?

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While I generally agree with what you're saying, and that there's wisdom in what you said, I don't think the OP presented us with enough information to determine IF the choices are finely balanced.

Merely being at a crossroads of any sorts and being unable to determine the best course doesn't necessarily mean the choices are equal. I, for instance, usually feel if that's the case I have no trouble just picking one. Neither you nor I know what at all the OP is stuck AT. For instance, to kill a major character or not to. Both choices lead to a completely different story, and both may be good stories. But that doesn't mean they're equal. Good and bad don't really exist that way. They're judgments we make based on what we can see and what values we hold. So what's obviously the "right" choice for one book is a completely wrong choice for another, and if undecided at the ultimate ending of the book, you really won't know. Furthermore, different people have different experiences and what counts as common knowledge for one person is completely unknown to another. I don't think there's any use in assuming we know where another person stands.

The thing with writing, is you can always edit. And if you can edit, than if you decide the turn you took at one point went completely off course, you can always go back. So you can investigate both paths as much as you need to, if it's a critical junction. My approach would be to write a future scene that would be impacted by that choice both ways, and see what I get. I don't mind skipping around in my writing. Outlining is also all right.

So long as you don't get caught up in making one decision that you stop progressing at all. Worst case you end up with a book with two endings, or a choose your own adventure.