Fiction is linear when read, and often written that way as well, though a writer don’t necessarily begin at the beginning. At every stage, however, whether that be chapter, scene, paragraph, sentence or even word, he must choose what to write next. The sum of all his choices is the finished work.
A schema of his project will look something like a fern frond. The finished work is the midrib, or rachis, to use the botanical term. From it, fractal-like, diverge smaller ribs, or rachillae, and these in turn can have further branches, and so on. Each of these ribs diverging from the rachis is an avenue he hasn’t followed.
When the story starts to have a life of its own the author develops a sense of the path he needs to follow. He is happy if this feels to him like a rachis; all the elements of the story are in harmony. If he branches off it he may not at first be aware of the fact. The further he gets along the rachilla the worse and more uncertain he feels. He might turn along another branch in the hope of regaining his original direction, and even another, but it’s hopeless: every route from here ends in vacant space. It’s akin to getting physically lost and coming to the end of a cul-de-sac. He realises at last that he has gone wrong but doesn’t understand how. The story grinds to a halt.
For writers who begin at the beginning, this fern analogy holds up in another way. The rachillae are larger at the start and look tempting. These are the unfinished stories in his desk drawer or, nowadays, lurking year after year on his hard disk. Along the rachis the rachillae become progressively smaller, so that by the time the end gets near there is less and less chance of going wrong.
This ‘going wrong’ is the cause of writer’s block. The symptoms build slowly. First there is a nagging feeling that something isn’t right. This is followed by a general depression about the piece as a whole. Next it all seems misconceived. Finally the writer questions the very idea of authorship. He examines the meagre returns on his labours and wishes he’d taken up another line of work. Depending on his vanity and the emotional investment he has made in presenting himself to the world as a Writer, this can even lead to permanent depression.
His solution, of course, besides learning plumbing, is to retrace his steps and find out where he left the rachis. It’s often difficult to do and involves throwing away everything on the wrongly taken rachilla. In the worst case, this can amount to many thousands of words, but there’s nothing else for it if he wants to finish what he set out to do. It may be that he cannot regain the rachis at all because he was never on it: everything he has written so far is a rachilla, in which case he should recognise the fact and consign it to his real or virtual desk drawer.
The feeling of going wrong has to be learned, which is what prentice pieces are for. So too the acceptance that a rachilla must be sacrificed, even though the odd phrase or paragraph from it might be put to use in the proper place.
A frequent cause of going wrong is a character being made to do something he wouldn’t do if he existed in real life. The writer errs for various reasons: inexperience, ineptitude, a desire to take a short-cut or force the story in a certain direction. The light-bulb moment on that particular sort of rachilla comes when the writer says to himself, ‘X wouldn’t do that!’
That is one of the reasons it’s easier to follow the rachis nearer its end – by then the writer knows his characters better.
One nostrum for overcoming writer’s block is to sit down and scribble whatever comes into your head. That is, you delegate the writing to your subconscious. Although I agree that the subconscious plays a central part in writing fiction, this is not the answer. It does not develop your craft, because you do not understand how you became blocked and you have missed an opportunity to analyse your mistake, and these are functions of the conscious mind.
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