Creative process as the Garden of Forking Paths
I wanted to make a post that explains to anyone who might want it an analogy that explicates an important approach to composing a large narrative work, be that a musical, a play, a novel, or some other long form. I find that many writers take a long time to develop the ‘feel’ of how to do this, as the number of variables involved in making decisions about what to write, what to edit, what to remove can result in the task feeling insurmountably complex.
The complexity of composing a big work shouldn’t be understated, but that complexity becomes more manageable the more experience one has of overcoming it, as you develop approaches to problem-solving that give rise to fewer problems in the future. Those who have made several large works will understand what I mean. Sondheim calls it ‘not painting yourself into a corner’.
We’ve all been there. You make a decision about your work, even a very tiny one, and it naturally has implications for the other aspects of the work. If I choose to end a line of lyric that I want to rhyme with another end of a line and I choose the word ‘stump’, the possible meanings the rhyming line can express have been severely limited. This often means the rhyming line falls short of the perfection of the first line, and I am sure we are all familiar (from our work and the work of others) with the feeling that while we have ticked the ‘make a rhyme box’ we haven’t fully ticked box of the ‘and that line is also meaningful, beautiful, concise, poignant’ or whatever we want it to be.
Just as the butterfly flaps its wings and sets in motion the chain of events that will ultimately lead to a tornado, so too does each choice in the work dictate the availability of future choices. We have made not only the work, but our own ability to write, deterministic. That is to say we create something of inevitability through the exclusive act of choice: when we choose something we are not only actively choosing we are actively discounting the things we haven’t chosen.
This process is much like walking down a road. Each step I take in one direction makes it take longer and involve more effort if I decide I actually want to go somewhere in the opposite direction. Have you ever not known entirely where you’re going only to check a map to find you’ve been going quite the wrong way and you now need to go all round the houses to get back on track? It’s a frustrating feeling. Any writer who has shouted into the dead of of night ‘I just can’t get it to WORK!’ is experiencing this kind of frustration, only they’ve usually taken so many twists and turns along the way that they no longer know which route is the right one.
Embarking upon a new work, we see this road stretching out in front of us like a labyrinth and we feel excited but also scared of getting lost. We know it will be difficult to get to the centre of the maze.
And that’s where the experienced writer and the inexperienced writer differ. The inexperienced writer sees his or her journey through the maze as linear. Having only one body this is how we have come to understand movement from one point to another. And it’s absolutely the worst way to approach writing. And I wish I could go back in time and tell myself this analogy that follows, because it would have saved me so much time and so many low ebbs in which I felt I’d never be able to make a big cohesive work.
I will call this labyrinth the Garden of Forking Paths because it is not a maze with a finite number of possible routes, it is an infinite maze (see Jorge Louis Borges). When you are looking at the blank page you can do anything and that infinity is impossible to conceptualise let alone face. This is why making decisions is so important. But how do we prevent those decisions from leading to dead-ends that we cannot possibly predict?
The answer lies in plurality of thought. The mental journey through the maze cannot be a single journey. We must go on multiple simultaneous journeys. I can choose the word ‘stump’, but if I really want to craft a good lyric I will have alternatives in mind for if I cannot get ‘stump’ to work. If I want to talk about a steatopygic amputee I might easily use ‘stump’ and ‘rump’. But I might decide that ‘rump’ is an unlikely word for my character to sing, after all how many people use the word ‘rump’ seriously in conversation to refer to a human backside? So I try to go back and change the word ‘stump’, but there are no synonyms for it that sound at all natural. So now I’m painted into a corner.
Rather than approaching it like that, why not approach it like this: I want to express the meaning: since losing my leg I have gotten fatter because I cannot exercise. I ask: what words can I use in this? We think first: what about ‘stump’? And then before we start writing we think ‘what if I cannot make that work? How many alternatives do I have?’ The answer to that particular example (and hence why I chose it) is: not fucking many. So I think about other words that have more synonyms. ‘Leg’ is a possible word to use at the end of the line as it has a few rhymes. I look through a rhyming dictionary and see if there are any other words relating to the meaning I want to express. ‘Egg’ relates to food and so could relate to putting on weight, but it’s quite tenuous. ‘Peg’ may refer to a wooden leg which could work but it’s an uninventive rhyme. So I discount leg and consider something else.
I’m now making choices that have flexibility built into them, and think about some (though by no means all) of the consequences that result from my choice. The more one writes lyrics the more familiar one becomes with which words are versatile and which aren’t so much. I would be very unlikely even to consider using the word ‘leg’. But I might consider the word ‘fat’ as it has LOADS of rhymes. The only way to get better at this is to do it, but I promise you it does become easier as time goes on.
But that’s for lyric writing which is something someone writing a musical will get a shitload of experience of very quickly. Making decisions about form and structure, characterisation, narrative arc, and all of those massive things is something not only more complex, but being able to get that experience at all depends on having material to manipulate in the first place. It is said that musicals are not written, they are re-written, and I believe the same is true for all longform work: Just as building a house requires you to have bricks, so building a musical requires you to have at least some understanding of the voices of the characters, sketches of who the characters are, some musical material in the form of themes or motifs.
And how many times do you get halfway through building and you realise that it’s all gone wonky because you’ve chosen a pattern of coloured bricks for one pillar and don’t have the right colour bricks to make the second pillar symmetrical? Or, as an example in musical theatre writing, you use a melodic theme for one character and find that it is completely unsuited to the emotions that character experiences in the narrative that emerges. And so you’ve got a theme you can’t use as much as you want to, so you have to go back and change that theme. If you’ve used that theme as the basis for several vamp figures in some places where that theme is appropriate then all that material has to be changed. And that’s a PAIN IN THE ASS.
We call the process of composing a dramatic piece ‘dramaturgy’. Dramaturgy is how we analyse the material critically to try to arrange the various elements in the way most conducive to what we want the work to achieve. And hardly anyone talks about it, and so many people I meet don’t know what it is, even writers of dramatic works. Why? Because it’s something that you don’t become aware of until you’ve been a writer for long enough to have been through the process of structuring a whole piece.
This is one reason it is better to start writing smaller, more manageable works. It means you can go through the process of writing a musical from start to finish more times: you could write two, three, four short shows in the time it would take to write one big two-act musical. You would more quickly develop an instinct for what constitutes a ‘good’ choice (in the sense that it doesn’t prohibit other choices you are likely to want to make) and what constitutes a ‘bad’ choice (in the sense that it’s going to come back and punch you in the face) because you will have more experience to look back on. You will have made more mistakes which means you will make fewer in the future. And you will have seen more of your choices pay off so you’ll get a feeling for what kind of choices will work in future, too.
But the best starting point is not to see writing as a linear journey where each choice precludes others, but as a multiplicity of simultaneous journeys in which you think ‘a few moves ahead’, just as an experienced chess player keeps multiple strategies in their head to allow for the variables inherent in playing with an opponent making choices that you cannot predict but you can rank in order of likelihood. Chess is a great game for writers to learn to be good at because it is very much like that Garden of Forking Paths, with its high level of complexity, its large number of variables, and the fact that certain effects are more likely to result from certain causes based on the context of the journey thus far.
The novice thinks a few moves ahead, the master thinks many moves ahead. But start getting used to doing this now and before long it will become second nature, you will find that you can deal with far greater complexity than you thought possible, and you will spend far less time assaulting your poor, put-upon cephalic follicles.
So before you decide on that motif, figure out your narrative arc. Think ‘what affects/moods is this going to have to express?’ and then use that to inform what notes and rhythms you use for the motif.
Before you decide on whether that character is going to be nice or nasty, decide what you want to say to the audience and then think through what relationships you might depict on stage to communicate what you want to say. Use that to inform how you formulate your characters’ personalities.
There’s no right and wrong in the choices you make, there are just useful and not-so-useful choices and we’re all discovering which are which, even those people who have had a long and successful writing career. More often than not we make not-so-useful choices and have to go back and change them. It’s always worth asking: if I need to change this what will I be able to change it to? If that’s ‘sweet fuck all’ then change it NOW before something else depends on it being there.
And don’t be scared of showing your work to others. It’s only inexperienced writers who think ‘that doesn’t work so x will think I’m an idiot’. The first draft of much of what I write is total shit. There is no such thing as a good first draft, but there are first drafts that are easier to shape into something amazing and first drafts that are a series of dead ends. Stop worrying about ‘this lyric is shit’ and start thinking about ‘how can I approach writing to make it easier for myself to juggle all these elements?’ because it’s when you start doing that that you see your work improve.
There are so many prescriptive books about the craft of writing but there is not enough said about the process of writing. What emerging writers need to realise is that you don’t ‘improve your writing’ you improve your approach to writing and it is that that makes the writing better.
It sometimes feels like what I do as a musical theatre writer is a dark art and abandon all hope ye who enter here. But it isn’t. I learned (and am still learning!) how to do it without any teacher and with quite little reliance on books, except Sondheim’s annotated lyrics which I think is an extraordinarily helpful and wise book and one worth revisiting often. Most people in this industry have learned by doing. For once it would be nice if people stopped waffling about craft and just started sharing lessons about the writing process itself. If you agree, please share this, and if you don’t then why not write your own meditation upon approaches to writing and share that with the world? Let’s not be scared of other people learning we’re not all mammoth geniuses, we’re just people who have used skill and experience to build upon a nugget of talent, because I think deep down that’s why people don’t share their knowledge. It’s very ego-affirming not to puncture the myth that what we do is magic.
