On Writing and Storytelling: When a Modest Little Story Develops Ambitions

When a Modest Little Story Develops Ambitions

Writers make plans.

Stories, apparently, find this adorable.

When I started And the Horse You Rode in On…, I had what I thought was a perfectly reasonable idea of what it would become. It would be a modest story, roughly comparable in length to Comings and Goings: The Art of Being Seen. Not tiny, certainly, but contained. Manageable.

You may pause here to laugh.

Because And the Horse You Rode in On… has apparently developed ambitions that were never discussed with its author.

At some point, without asking permission, the story stopped being quite so modest.

Part of the problem is that I discovered there was more story here than I originally thought. This wasn’t simply a matter of getting Jim Garraty and Mark Prieto from Point A to Point B. Once I began spending real time with them at this age, their world started filling in around them.

School became more than a backdrop. Home became more than the place they went after school. Parents became characters rather than names. Patrick Blanchard became more complicated. The neighborhood acquired its own rhythms, rules, alliances, smells, sounds, and peculiar gravitational forces.

And once those things started becoming real, I didn’t particularly want to rush through them.

That’s the trap.

Or perhaps that’s the gift.

I originally thought I was writing about something that happened to Jim and Mark when they were kids. Instead, I seem to be writing about a particular moment when childhood starts quietly changing shape.

The boys aren’t necessarily aware of it yet. That’s important. Nobody announces, “Attention, everyone. Your childhood is now entering a transitional phase.”

You go to school.

You trade things at lunch.

You watch television.

You hang around somebody else’s house.

Somebody’s mother has already called your mother before you’ve even thought to ask whether you can stay for dinner.

And somewhere in all of that, friendships begin changing. New friendships become important. Old ones become complicated. Adults become slightly more three-dimensional. The world gets a little bigger.

So does the manuscript.

That last part was not in the outline.

I’ve occasionally wondered whether I should rein it in. Surely there are things I could cut. Surely I could make the entertainment references shorter, compress some of the school material, hurry everybody through dinner and get on with it.

But every time I consider doing that, I run into the same problem:

Those things aren’t detours anymore.

They’re the story.

The Wacky Packages, the television shows, the cafeteria, the teachers, the houses, the mothers calling one another, the complicated friendship with Patrick, all those seemingly small details are doing something I hadn’t completely anticipated when I began.

They’re creating the world that Jim and Mark will eventually spend the rest of their lives remembering.

And perhaps that’s why And the Horse You Rode in On… keeps getting larger.

I’m not merely trying to explain how two characters became friends. I’m discovering the world in which that friendship became possible.

There’s considerably more of that world than I expected.

So my modest little story is no longer quite as modest as advertised.

I suppose I could complain.

But honestly?

I’m having too much fun.

And at this point, I have learned better than to tell the story how long it’s supposed to be.