The Art of Integrating Process into Story

sometimes How-To tells a story better than What-Happens-Next

In Paul Harding’s Tinkers, a clockmaker lies dying, recalling his world, life, his work, his childhood, his father. The scope of this novel is large and its emotional impact powerful, but the storytelling is lean and efficient. It’s a multigenerational saga in 180 elegant pages. One of the surprising ways Harding achieves this is by integrating vivid, minutely specific descriptions of quotidian activities of his characters. They wake and work, fix and build, and we get to see exactly how it’s done, step by step. This attention to process enfranchises readers by letting them in on the tricks of the characters’ trades and their secret personal habits. There’s a poetry to the dailiness that makes each incident feel universal.

George bought a broken clock at a tag sale. The owner gave him a reprint of an eighteenth-century repair manual for free. He began to poke around the guts of old clocks. As a machinist, he knew gear ratios, pistons and pinions, physics, the strength of materials. As a Yankee in North Shore horse country, he knew where the old money lay, dozing, dreaming of wool mills and slate quarries, ticker tape and foxhunts. He found that bankers paid well to keep their balky heirlooms telling time. He could replace the worn tooth on a strike wheel by hand. Lay the clock facedown. Unscrew the screws; maybe just pull them from the cedar or walnut case, the threads long since turned to wood dust dusted from mantels. Lift off the back of the clock like the lid of a treasure chest. Bring the long-armed jeweler's lamp closer, to just over your shoulder. Examine the dark brass. See the pinions gummed up with dirt and oil. Look at the blue and green and purple ripples of metal hammered, bent, torched. Poke your finger into the clock; fiddle the escape wheel (every part perfectly named—escape: the end of the machine, the place where the energy leaks out, breaks free, beats time). Stick your nose closer; the metal smells tannic. Read the names etched onto the works: Ezra Bloxham–1794; Geo. E. Tiggs–1832; Thos. Flatchbart–1912. Lift the darkened works from the case. Lower them into ammonia. Lift them out, nose burning, eyes watering, and see them shine and star through your tears. File the teeth. Punch the bushings. Load the springs. Fix the clock. Add your name.

The calm, methodical, intensely physical sticking of a finger into the maw of a clock echoes an incident from George’s childhood in which he was badly bitten by his own father while trying to assist him during a seizure. By the time George is grown up and repairing clocks, the old catastrophe has been digested, it’s adrenaline metabolized and emotion processed, transmuted alchemically into something different, better, even profound.

Processes are fascinating, and they turn up all over the place in literature, once you start looking. From the sardonic how-to of Elizabeth Bishop's “One Art” to the "Cutting-In" chapter of Moby-Dick, to the fishing tips and recipes of John Hersey’s Blues, detailed descriptions of process can tell stories slantwise, getting the reader to focus on instructions and minutia. As Harding does in Tinkers, above, the writer of a process passage often has a chance to introduce a specialized vocabulary and load it with metaphor and meaning without sounding heavy handed. Meanwhile, as the reader mentally carries out the steps in the process, narrative events unfold — or explode — on the sidelines.

PROMPT:

Choose a scene that seems flat or that you're not inspired to write. Could you enliven it by setting your character to work at some task, anything, important or pedestrian, from brushing teeth to burying the dead. Use a description of process, perhaps also a list of objects required, even step-by-step instructions required to complete the task, to reveal obliquely your character’s mindset, mood, priorities, challenges, limits, fears, dreams.

Further Reading:

Cutting In, Ch 67 of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.