This is the last installment in a series of posts I’m calling “manuscript recipe,” where I try to distill advice from my favorite pieces of writing on writing into a set of guidelines for how to actually get a manuscript over the finish line. This one is about not straying too far from the main argument or main storyline of the work. The previous installments are here and here.
What to keep and what to ditch
In any serious project, you have thought about and researched far more things than can actually fit into the final product. So how do you choose what stays and what gets left on the cutting room floor?
A useful device for thinking about this problem is the idea of the path and the forest, from an essay in Philip Pullman’s 2018 Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling (one of my all-time favorite books, perhaps because when I first discovered it, I felt like I got to sort of simulate being and English major—in college, I always had a bit of major envy toward the English majors).
The essay I’m thinking of here is called “The Path Through the Wood: How Stories Work.” In the essay, Pullman argues that while every novel consists of the forest and the path through it, the novelist must never ever ever leave the path. If that happens, the reader stops reading.
The path, of course, is the storyline, the road that our protagonist(s) travel from the beginning to the (exciting) conclusion. The forest, meanwhile, is the world of the story: all the things that might happen to the protagonists or have happened to them before, plus everything that is going on off-stage. What is required to describe that world varies by genre—there might be unfamiliar laws of physics and fantastical creatures to be explain, actual historical events to elucidate, or just the characters’ backstories to develop.
It can be tempting to keep building the world in which the characters live. But such world-building, says Pullman, is only allowed insofar as it helps the story move along the path. All else is essentially self-indulgence and of little interest to the reader.
The path and the forest in academic work
Pullman is writing about fiction, but more or less the same rule applies in academic writing. You have an argument to make or a story to tell. If something does not relate to that argument or advance that story, ditch it.
Yes, many Important People have written about many important things that are tangentially connected to what you are writing about. You, however, should only explain what they have said if it is absolutely essential to understanding your specific contribution to scholarly knowledge, not just because they are Important People with important things to say.
And yes, you uncovered oodles of fascinating stories and tidbits as you did your research. But alas, you can only include them if they illustrate your argument or move your narrative along. (If they are truly fascinating, put them away where you can look them up later—perhaps they’re good for an example in some other work, a teaching tool, or a blog post?)
The bonus is that when you define what your path is and commit to staying on it, your work will flow more smoothly. Since you know you can’t stray into the forest, you have a ready-made constraint that helps you determine whether a particular piece of information should be included (is it on the path?) and how it should be presented (how does it relate to the path?). And constraints, as we know from poetry, can be enormously helpful in channeling one’s creativity.
Photo by Mario Dobelmann on Unsplash