<<insert photo of Morrill Hall here>>
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        The literal plotline:
      Father picks up his daughter at the bus station and starts to drive her home. But he decides to stop by the river. There, he kills her.
      The figurative plotline:
      What it all means—the daughter’s simultaneous regret but denial; the father struggling with what he believes he must do; the horror of the daughter’s murder, at her own father’s hands. Oates forces all this to bleed to the surface.
      The literal plotline:
      Family of East Indian ancestry visits India. Their tour guide has a crush on the wife/mother. She confesses to him the sordid details of her son’s paternity. That son gets attacked by wild monkeys. The tour guide saves him.
      The figurative plotline:
      What it all means—how the tour guide has deceived himself about the wife/mother and his attraction to her, his idealized fantasy about her. The sadness of these disconnected lives. Neglected, unloved children.
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      Plot is a result of character.
      The who leads to the what.
      When you know who your characters are, you know what options exist for the plot of your story.
      1) Write out the literal plotline of your story.
      2) List your disparate elements, the images, metaphors, similes, place names, character names that are evocative.
      3) If you don’t have any of these, then that should tell you something.
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      Revision is difficult for some beginning writers because they believe they generated a polished final draft in that initial spark of inspiration. To alter it now would negate or invalidate the inspiration. The first draft, basically, becomes sacrosanct. This is misguided. Some beginners don’t want to revise, because revision would make the story something different.
      They don’t seem to understand: the point of revision is to clarify the story and make it be what it needs to be. If this makes it different, then that’s what has to happen.
      Revision is messy. It’s like gutting a building, leaving only the structural shell standing—and sometimes not even that. (See Morrill Hall.) First drafts are pretty messy. Tight stories with neat endings and too manicured plots have a prefab feel—like modular housing. Sure, everything fits…. But there’s nothing beautiful. Too neat, you know? Bloodless, soulless. When I see someone going for a finished product, something polished and, dare I say, neatened up in that first draft, I shake my head. It’s as if they’re writing toward an idea. This is problematic, because an idea is not a story. I get the impression the person doesn’t want to learn about the process of writing. They just want to create something unassailable, something perfect. They steer clear of any Unknowns in their writing process, if you can call what they’re doing a “process.” In fact, they’re circumventing the process altogether. They’ve torn open the box of Fiction Helper and poured out all the freeze dried elements. Now, to stir it together…
      Neatness isn’t part of the real world, though, is it? Contemporary short story writers want to recreate life with a convincing degree of authenticity. As Rick DeMaranis says in The Art & Craft of Short Story Writing: “Fiction needs to resonate with the world as we know it.” Look: neatness is not part of that. Stories themselves move from chaos to clarity, draft by draft. Clarity comes in the rewrites. It's not about making something bullet proof or unbreakable. It’s not about surgically removing the untidy dangling ends but searching those odd dangling ends for solutions to what I call your story “problem”—and even developing them into the trajectory of your story.
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      I was familiar with a situation just NW of Ames of an animal research professor here at the university who was in the midst of a bitter divorce. He and his soon-to-be- ex-wife had moved off their acreage, and he had abandoned his research herd of llamas. The neighbors were growing uncomfortable. Who would look after the llamas?
      This became my story premise.
      Blood and meat imagery kept popping up in my draft. They were echoed items.
      How the animal researcher had poached deer on his own property.
      The POV character’s job--distributing organic meats.
      His wife is batiking fabric for their son’s First Communion (blood), and I wrote: The wax bled through the fabric.
      The narrator calls the llamas in the field “dead meat.”
      At some point I realized an act of violence needed to occur, a literal blood sacrifice. Once I settled on the particular event, I had my ending.
      As I wrote the story through several drafts, my sense of what it was about took form. I sculpted some of the images and scenes to fit what I began to realize was the story’s system. Without being heavy-handed, I started emphasizing the blood and meat moments. Ultimately, all these concrete and specific details pointed me in the direction of my theme: mercy.
      When I started writing the story, I had no intention of dealing with this subject. I began by describing llamas grazing along a hillside at sunset, and I tried to make this image as vivid as possible, because I wanted A) to immerse the reader in my soon-to-develop world and B) to immerse myself in the reality of this world so that I could keep inventing it, believing in it. When I saw where the story was headed, of course I followed it.
      What you set out to do doesn't really matter, as Rick DeMarnis says. What develops along the way matters. Too tidy and neat? Nothing develops. The tidiness actually works against anything developing.
      Fiction writing is risky, because of the discoveries you might make. Sometimes you’ll sit down to write a happy story and end up with something seamy. Think of Joyce Carol. Would she even have had a career if she had shrunk from her subject matter, disturbing as it was? Be less focused on your idea or original intent and more curious about where a story can lead you.