Unity

A good story includes many things, such as an engaging plot, complex developed characters, well written prose, etc. I have studied many techniques of writing for years (starting with writing workshops when I attended middle school) and for some reason, almost all of the people who helped me with writing never mentioned a need for unity. Certainly, they mentioned that scenes in a story needed to make sense for the plot, but here I refer to unity as something deeper than that. I never really noticed it until I analyzed Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. At that time, I had read it several times trying to discern why it felt so perfect. Then it hit me: every scene, every moment, linked back to the central theme of the story. It felt very tightly-knit and interconnected. Dick did not waste any time doing anything other than furthering the plot and providing insight into the characters. Absolutely nothing felt out-of-place or unnecessary. Every tiny detail seemed integral, to the point where if one removed a segment of it the entire story would cease to exist.

A lot of the books I have read in the past do not hold up well to this. A fourth of the content of those stories seemed unnecessary. Some scenes could easily have disappeared and the core of the story would remain mostly the same. Often, when reading such scenes, I lost interest in the story because it seemed as though such scenes served as filler. Sometimes a scene, usually fight scenes, only remained in the final draft because they sounded cool. Yet deep down they did not advance anything or aid the rest of the story anyway.

Working on my current novel-in-progress has revealed to me similar errors in my own writing. Not so much that some scenes had no true purpose, but that I had scenes that did provide insight into the characters. Yet they did not link back up with the core theme of the story. I had to seriously rethink everything and write down what I really wanted to accomplish with the story. For my current story, the central element of the story consists of a conflict that remains largely behind the scenes until it reveals itself at the end. The seemingly unrelated activities of the characters absolutely had to connect back to this element for the whole thing to seem like a single story. The actions of the characters needed to work to make this element inevitably appear at the conclusion. The characters never show an awareness of this element, because it truly does remain behind the scenes not only to the reader but to the people in the story as well. For example, this resembles the awareness an average person, living in a suburb in the midwest of America, has about the genocides in Africa. They acknowledge that genocides have occurred there (probably from hearing it on the news), but do not think about it much in their daily lives. Same case with my characters in my current story.

To create a connection there, I arranged the story so that the characters unknowingly have an involvement in this hidden element. Emphasis on involvement, because it simply would not make any sense if the characters had nothing to do with the theme of a story. It works best when everything weaves in and out of each other, creating a mesh of sorts. Remember: tight-knit. Inseparable. Similar to the details and elements of reality, it would not remain the same without each other.

I apologize if this does not seem entirely coherent. I did not want to give away any spoilers of my story, which made even discussing this difficult. Not to mention the difficulty of writing in E-Prime, which feels very contrary to the sentence structure I instinctually think with (which I hope to eventually dismantle and allow for more flexibility in thought syntax). I also feel very tired since I have midterms this week and the next. I just wanted to convey something interesting that I have thought about recently.