Brick by Brick: the Architecture of Storytelling

Writing with Precision, Purpose and Restraint

In discussing writing, it's of necessity that we investigate the process of writing at a level beneath grand, sweeping gestures. I have alluded to words as "bricks," which must be laid out and mortared carefully, on a scale so fine that it can be difficult to see where this or that sentence properly lays a foundation that enables the building to stand well. So let's get our hands dirty and attend to this process.

I'll propose a story about a woman and her son, and the horse ranch they have. He goes off to college and leaves her alone, with her approval, as she wants a good life for him. For a year, let's say a chapter, she struggles with the ranch, getting by but not doing well. Whereupon her son returns, licking his wounds from a bad relationship and having quit school in mid-semester. She comes home and finds him in her living room, hurt, distraught; she listens as he explains himself.

I'll put this into first person from the mother's perspective:

Five minutes after explaining how his girlfriend had smothered him, Dennis was already apologising for sounding like a fool, defending Joan's actions and chastising himself for not being more grateful, or patient, or loving. She had cared for him so hard that he'd begun to question, just after a few months, if it was realistic for them to even be together. And then the new university term had started and he... he just couldn't "pretend" any more, as he put it. He didn't want to be an engineer. In fact, he wanted no part of anything. His life had been wasted, he said. He'd worked so hard in school and it was all for nothing. Every minute of his life, he kept saying, had been wasted. There was no point to anything. He rambled like this and I just let him, seeing that at least for now, it was best for him to work things out without his mother's advice.

There is much potential dialogue here. A writer might choose, for example, to veer into an emotional framing, describing Dennis's tears, his body language, the cracking of his voice, his gripping the mother's hand... all the physical signs, none of which appear in the above. Instead of the narrator's distance, we could have her interpret the scene, analysing his words, weighing in on what she thinks is rational or not, inserting her own reflections about his future or his youth.

We could frame this same scene in dialogue, selecting each word of his misery, while the mother offers reassuring words... or strides in to correct him with her mother's wisdom, attempting to give him context or outline the comparative unimportance of one short relationship in a lifetime. From there, the dialogue could easily descend into conflict, the mother and son having a go at each other, perhaps revealing old wounds that have been left unsaid since Dennis's late puberty. An invented father — for of course there was a father — makes an easy fuel to add to this fire, leading to a deeply emotional rift between the two characters, perhaps one the book never quite resolves.

All of these are brick walls we could start laying out. Much of the dialogue writes itself, largely because we've had those fights ourselves or because scriptwriting leans hard into this approach. An aphorism preaches that conflict is always good... but we should consider this carefully. Setting the mother and son at each other makes a strong, intensive scene... but where is this story going? Is this a book about a mother and a son arguing with each other on a horse farm? If so, we could have set the story anywhere. The very fact that this is a horse farm suggests, from the start, that we had another agenda all along.

If we impose an argument, that becomes the focal point... but then we lose the tension of the two characters struggling together in their daily effort to keep the farm alive. If we reach for the easiest conflict at hand, a low-hanging fruit that anyone might write into the story, what are we missing that might offer a greater, more purposeful conflict? Is this really mother vs. son? Or is it mother and son against the world?

Moreover, if we write the book so that the son has gone away only to come back so we can rush to the argument, does that not seem contrived? Alternatively, if the son returns and then applies himself to the farm, his character can be affected positively by his time away from home; the mother sees that he's more mature, that he's learned other things about himself in the outside world. This helps mitigate the cost of the education that's been lost. It helps her feel proud about her son; and we can write just as deep a scene as a fight when he comes to his mother and expresses how grateful he's become of her. We can introduce a reason for our choosing a horse ranch; a foal, who grows to be a magnificent horse, perhaps a racer, perhaps a horse whose qualities can be passed on... I know almost nothing about horse-raising, but there are many possibilities here. And then, inevitably, Joan comes to find him on the farm, to reconcile, to join him, to create a meaningful and aspirational ending for the three of them.

So let's look at the structure of that paragraph: it looks like a mere description of a boy returned from school in misery, but it's all bricks laid to build a foundation. The self-recrimination Dennis launches into, after saying that Joan was smothering him, inserts a doubt about that first telling. It allows the possibility that she never did, that his recrimination is legitimate... and this allows space for us to exploit when Joan returns, and they suss out what really happened, that it wasn't smothering after all, but misunderstandings and personal failings. The recrimination isn't a convenience. It's a brick laid just so, to set the stage for a later scene.

When Dennis says he ought to be more grateful, or patient, or loving, these are things he can say to his mother in that scene where he confesses that without her, he'd be adrift in a sea. The latter half of this sentence is therefore doing other work, it's setting the structure for Dennis to decide what is more important to him — his recognition of the worth of other people, or the self-demands he once had about needing to become an engineer, which he never really wanted.

When he tells his mother, "she had cared for me so hard," this sets up Joan's personality long before we see her. She's capable of loving hard, she has reason to do so. Take away the smothering and we have a foundation for her explaining later why she came at him so hard and why she had to follow him half way across the country, giving up her own school. Yes, true, we haven't invented that reason yet, but we see what needs to be invented and we'll solve that problem when we get there.

His "pretending" to go to school is a crucial state-of-mind. It sorts the boy from the man, the delusion from the real world, the willingness to "grow up", when quitting school is usually framed as immature. In his case, we turn this on its head, painting the picture of a boy whose right course was literally in his back yard, not in some distant esoteric career move. The farm, the life he thought he needed to escape, was never the lesser path.

Then, that opening paragraph delves into his despair. The lack of his future. The waste of his life. Himself without purpose. All this sets us up perfectly for his commitment to the foal. His growth and that of the horse are intertwined. The conflict progresses steadily, as nature, the bills, the outward dismissal of what mother and son claim about the horse, the need to find a reliable voice to confirm that what they believe about the horse is in fact true... the climax that comes when the horse proves its worth... all of this obliterates the ennui that Dennis feels at his lowest moment.

We don't want his mother interrupting this structure we've carefully laid out with an arbitrary moment of conflict. We want to get past this part, get past Dennis's troubles, get past this necessary sinkhole, so that we can get on with the story, for it's the richer, deeper story that we're interested in telling. We need to explain Dennis's return... but with restraint, with the bare minimum of force we need to get the point across. We feel how hard it is for him. We know where he's coming from. We intuitively understand. Good. Bricks laid. Job done. We can move on.

Think how clumsily a moral lecture at this point would scatter the bricks we're laying down. Think of how her misreading of what her son is going through, how a lot of assumptions on her part, would derail everything for four or five chapters... after which, we'd have all that "drama" in our minds as we tried to make progress. Instead, let's just have the mother listen. This establishes her as a completely different sort of character; a supportive, capable, strong woman, who doesn't need to criticise, who has faith in her son's ability to sort himself out, who is patient as a woman farmer must be. Who isn't herself a bundle of tears.

And because she trusts her son, so do we. Because she's ready to accept his choice to abandon school without recrimination, our minds are opened too, because there's a lot of book left. Clearly, something larger happens. Something where the resiliency of this mother and the doubts of this son are going to be investigated. The very fact that we didn't rush to the lowest hanging fruit in the barnyard is evidence that something is different here. The reader will sense that.

If we had gone for the easy conflict, the predictable argument, the scene would have screamed, "This is the kind of book where people fight about obvious things."

Every sentence matters.

We can think of this as a version of Chekhov's gun. Not in the sense that the gun must go off before the end of the story, but that the gun is there, on the wall, where it can be seen and wondered about, making the audience aware of its implication. Writing is more than one object having a purpose in a story: it is about every object, every phrase, every character's decision, working its magic to create a story that wants to be read more than once.