Laying the tracks

At the climax of the second Wallace & Gromit film, ‘The Wrong Trousers’, there’s a sublime scene in which the dog Gromit is riding the toy train and laying down the tracks in front of it just fast enough to keep it speeding along, in pursuit of sinister penguin Feathers McGraw. Boo, hiss. It’s not the first time this visual gag has been used – I think there’s a Buster Keaton film in which he does the same thing, only with real railway sleepers and steam train. In fact, the image of laying down the tracks as the train bears down on you is quite well-used. Usually it’s meant to mean staying just one step ahead of disaster. But in a slightly adapted form, it serves as another of my tips for myself to aid with the writing process.

The most daunting thing about writing is the blank white space below the last line of text. It can swallow you up like a snow hole. Writing does sometimes feel as hard as trudging through deep snow. Your mind is trying to do two things: work out what happens next, and write it down in a way that’s not awful.

Now, I’m a planner. I write out my whole plot in advance before I even start. It may change a lot along the way, but I need to know that I have a version that works, to fall back on if necessary. A lot of people don’t do this, can’t stand the thought of it, and I respect that (more than that, I envy them). But I think everyone, planner or not, can benefit from ‘laying down the tracks’.

This is planning, but on the small scale. On the scale of a single scene as opposed to a whole story. What I do if I get stuck is write down, in the roughest way, the basic events that are happening here. Just describe the scene, using scraps and half-sentences if I wish. I may even spell ‘their’ as ‘there’. Shudder. And I play tricks on myself. I tend to use a different font from the main text font, perhaps in a tiny size (8pt!) so that my brain can never mistake it, even for a moment, as actual writing. I am cheating myself; telling the stuck-up perfectionist that it is okay to write absolute rubbish, so long as the facts are here.

These facts now lie in front of the proper story text like sleepers and rails before the slowly advancing train. They bridge the way over the howling white ravine. A lot of them simply get pushed aside by the train, proving useless or irrelevant, but that doesn’t matter. Properly supported, the story rolls on, until I get to a bit of firmer ground and can write without so much bridging work in front of me.

If you don’t know which way to go, lay the tracks.