Get a fresh view of your novel with zoom-out questions
I feel lucky that my life is brimming over with good things this month: interesting editing work, postseason baseball games (go Giants!), an escape room adventure for one of my kids and her friends, concerts, camping trips, dates with friends. And also, I’m tired! What would have felt busy but not overwhelming two years ago is feeling harder to manage this year. I need longer to-do lists, more advance planning, and designated rest periods to feel like I can accomplish and—most importantly—enjoy it all.
Is this a permanent change or a temporary one that will wear off as I get re-acclimated to a pre-pandemic level of activity? I won’t know for a while, or perhaps I’ll never know. The past year and a half has changed me in myriad subtle ways that I can’t always see.
The one thing I do know is that I am in control of the way I think about these busy weeks ahead. If I imagine my to-do list as a long, gray slog, then that’s how I will experience it. But if I can think of it as a hero’s journey, well, then it becomes significantly more interesting. I also gain agency—this is a quest I have chosen!—rather than accept powerlessness.
I love moves like this one, both for life questions and for creative work. It’s the move that metaphors make. Here’s a beauty I encountered last week in Shruti Swamy’s new novel The Archer. The narrator has been caring for her much younger brother through her own childhood and has now found a new measure of freedom at college:
“In those days I felt more like a child than I had during my childhood, when there were always meals to prepare, and a boy to care for, laundry to wash, and all the small pinpricks of household chores that I did daily, each little chore a tiny needle at the surface of my thoughts, which, so pricked through, could never fully grow.”
The Archer is about how a woman can have an artist’s life, and Swamy engages now-familiar metaphors, like Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own, in fresh new ways.
I have a set of what I think of as ‘zoom-out questions’ that I often play around with to help me unlock the same creative energy and new insights that metaphor offers. I sometimes send them to clients who need to radically rethink a creative project or have gotten lost in the details, and I turn to them frequently myself. This week I applied them to the revision course I am planning to help myself see beyond the path I expect to follow and search out new approaches.
Here are my two favorite zoom-out questions:
Time: What would this project look like if I compressed or stretched the work on it to various lengths? What finished product would I create in an hour? A week? A year? A decade?
Genre: What would this project look like if it were a play, a music video, a painting, a board game? If it is nonfiction, what is the fictional version, and vice versa? What if this project were something non-literary: a trip, a walk, a meal, a garden?
You can build your own zoom-out question, from whatever components are familiar or important to you. Start with a what if, then add a big concept or category, and add the levers that will help you change the scale, reverse the picture, see a new pattern. If you come up with one of your own, I’d love to hear about it!
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