Embrace Limitation

When this “Wheel of Process” is finished, and live for a month, I’m going to run the analytics on how frequently certain articles are accessed. I’m willing to bet that this one—from the title alone—will be in the lowest 10% of those that are read, if not dead last.

Nobody likes to be limited. And yet when working through a revision with a client, my first step is finding things to limit. Life might be about war and art and love and coming-of-age and friendships and betrayal and spirituality and exercise and family and career, but life gets 168 hours a week. Readers will give your book ten hours of their time, on average. You are going to need to limit your narrative discourse if you want to make an impact.

What can we limit?

• Characters. Every character needs to serve the plot, whether they are “flat” (i.e. do not evolve) or “round” (we will follow their growth/deterioration). When characters appear, they must represent an aspect of the theme. Nine times out of nine-and-a-half, a work of fiction or narrative non-fiction has too many characters for the reader to comfortably follow. Unless you are hampered by the curse of the converted memoir, why not combine a bunch of people?
• Ideas. Your book can only be about one thing. It can be about the different ramifications of one thing, like “emotional patterns.” It can be about two things, “music” and “love,” say, provided that your book is about the wonderful connection between music and love. It can’t also be about war and friendships and exercise and family and career.
• Time Frame. The reading present gives your reader a sense of how long the narrative will take to unfold, and what intervals will be marked along the way. Flashbacks or flashforwards can provide a pleasant mental challenge for the reader and help reveal your theme, but only if they can’t be contained in the reading present. Chances are they can be, and if they can be… they should be.
• Plot Points. Exposition that can’t be contained in scene? Get rid of it. A narrative arc that goes up and down and up and down and up and down? Truncate it so we can have some idea of where we’re going and that we’ve arrived. Think you need to write another ending on top of the ending you already have? Why?
• Points-of-view. This is a relatively easy one. Limiting points-of-view means don’t go inside one character’s head just for a paragraph. In fact, one narrator is usually enough to satisfy us. Why? Because that is like life: I know what I’m thinking (regardless of whether I’m proud of it). I don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s head except by deduction from what they say (not always what they mean) and what they do.

Unity cannot be achieved by comprehensiveness, only by consistency among the narrative elements you do choose to present. If I’m starting to sound like a broken record, well, at least I’m limiting myself!