Corban Wilkin: Illustrator

Sometimes your favourite bits of writing aren’t a good fit for the story…

When I’m writing a graphic novel and I find something that works, there’s this tendency to ‘over-write’. One small element of a story will suggest a side story or something in a character’s past, and when I sense that there’s something there, I’m almost obligated to follow it.

Writing fiction is a weird process.

Doing it at all seems to require entering a sustained state of lateral thinking. Finding something that really works, that takes on a life of its own and gets up and starts walking around, feels so miraculous when it occurs that you sort of have to let it do its thing and see what happens. What can happen is you end up with stuff in a story that does something effective in its own right, but doesn’t actually benefit the story as a whole.

A result of these tangents is that you can end up with a large project that appears complete but still doesn’t feel fit for sharing. At least three times now, I’ve experienced the immense relief of cutting a big chunk of material out of a larger work, and realising that it never really belonged there, that it was getting in the way of the real story.

The stories I love the most are very simple, but suggest deeper things going on just before, just after, just off-camera, just under the surface. Explicitly expanding a story too much robs it of mystery or space for the reader’s mind to work in. You have to cut the part to save the whole.

Cutting something out of a story can be agonising.

When you’ve found something good, you’re desperate to hang on to it, even when doing so doesn’t make sense. You can’t discard something that you like this much, you think, and you rationalise keeping it in by convincing yourself that it makes the larger work ‘eclectic’ in some vaguely-defined way. Some writers can do ‘eclectic’ and make it work to brilliant effect, but don’t you just hate it when you’re enjoying a book, and a new chapter starts, and the viewpoint changes, and suddenly it’s about something else? ‘Hey,’ you think, ‘I was enjoying that.’

So to convince myself to remove these parts that I like but which weigh down the larger work, I have to ‘save’ them in some way, to gain some kind of closure and move on from a story that’s still living in my head. They have to expand into their own full story, or stand alone as a short story, to in some way find a final form. Maybe by itself it doesn’t necessarily have a firm ending. Maybe, in the same way you’re trying to acheive for the main work, an excised sub-story like this can sit as a fragment, suggestive of something bigger.