Separation of Concerns

On Kitchen-Sink Disease and Fixing Messy Stories

Photo by Kelly

Have you ever been reading a story and you start realizing the author is attempting to do too much? It's difficult to tell why because you've read more complicated stories (with more characters, more complicated plots), but for some reason there is something about this story which is just not clicking with you and you're having a hard time keeping track of what's happening.

Part of the reason could be that there are too many stories enmeshed within the book, so many it becomes difficult to tell where the story is going. Another reason could be not having a clear understanding of why things happen, the logic that occurs from beat to beat within a story. Or it could be there are simply too many characters with similar or the same name.¹

Regardless, the main issue is probably a lack of separation of concerns by the author. While they were drafting, they attempted to put everything into every scene, rather than logically separating things out into discrete, clear arcs and then coming back to weave everything seamlessly together.

Separation of concerns is essentially the computer programming equivalent of "mise en place" in the culinary world or "everything in its place". In programming, for example, you want to separate out business logic (or the ifs and thens telling the program what to do) from the rendering logic (or the code that makes it pretty). By mixing everything in together, you get all sorts of problems and it becomes much harder to break things apart to figure out where and what you should be doing. The longer you leave these problems untreated, the more likely you are to get tech debt.

The First Step is Identifying a Problem

Tech debt is a software engineering term which means problems caused by poor design decisions made at the onset, which accumulate and increase in severity over time. But this isn’t quite tech debt yet. Right now, it is simple the problem of having too much in a story, a problem I lovingly refer to as Kitchen-Sink Disease.

Kitchen-Sink Disease is contracted after a writer has been too deep in the forest of their story to see the trees. The author writes scene after scene which (they believe) follow from point-to-point, but when they provide the story to an alpha-reader they don't get the response they're looking for. The reader is confused, not understanding why the story is happening, why the main character has motivation X when clearly they said Y, and why character Z exists at all.

One of my favorite descriptions of a writer riddled with Kitchen-Sink Disease is from Auntie Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. For context, Anne Lamott has been working on a book for a long time and has now had two separate drafts rejected by her editor. The following is what happened when she insisted on seeing her editor at his house:

I began to walk around his living room, like a trial lawyer making her case to the jury, explaining various aspects of the book, some of which, in my desire not to appear too obvious, I had forgotten to put down at all. I filled in lots of spaces, describing things that existed between the characters that I had assumed were clear. I was ranting -- twenty-eight years old, savagely hung-over, feeling like I was about to die -- but I told him who the people were and what the story was. I sketched in the underpinnings of their lives and thought out loud how I could simplify some things and deepen others. I was not thinking about what I was going to say. Words were just pouring out of me, and when I was done, he looked at me and said, "Thank you."²

If you have contracted Kitchen-Sink Disease, it can be difficult to tell. Most likely, you're only going to be able to tell by looking at your outline or having an author friend review your book or (in the case of Auntie Anne Lamott) having your editor tell you. If you're worried you've contracted it but can't tell, and you don't want to have someone else diagnose it for you, your best option is to put the piece down for a week or a month and come back to it with fresh eyes.

So, if you're recognizing yourself in the above symptomatic descriptions or you’ve put down the piece and come back to a complete and utter mess, you may ask yourself how to fix the problem? Unfortunately, the only real way to cure Kitchen-Sink Disease is to cut.

The Editing Spectrum

Photo by Adrien Olichon

I've mentioned before about the writing scale of pantser and plotter (i.e. a writer who discovers the story and characters and everything else while writing, and a person who plans everything out beforehand). Most writers exist somewhere on this spectrum, but there is another spectrum that I've noticed in my years of writing, mostly as it concerns editing: overwriting and underwriting.

Personally, I tend to underwrite. If you are anything like me, in your first draft, you assume the reader is in your head already and they know everything about your characters and your story. Because they already know all of this (or you assume they do), you tend to skip over the parts that you should write and only write what you consider to be absolutely necessary for getting the story done. After all, you don't want to be too obvious, you don't want to commit the cardinal sin of being boring.

Now, you shouldn't coddle your readers; you shouldn't baby them or spoon feed them. For whatever reason, this is my biggest fear. But you also shouldn't assume that they have more information than they do.

As a result of assuming readers are like me, it isn't an uncommon experience for me to hand a scene to my alpha readers and have them say that they have no idea what's going on. Usually, this ends up in a discussion where I explain what is happening. I make sure to take copious notes, so that I know what is missing. When it's time to write the second draft, I go back and write the missing chapter (or scene or paragraph) and we are all the better for it.

In my opinion, an overwriter is in a much easier scenario.³ For them, all you need to do is go through and do some vicious cuts, combining chapters and reweaving in cut information so that you can feed your kids their vegetables without them even being aware that they are eating it.

I've pointed out in a recent note that it's likely that you'll be in a situation where you write a chapter that you need (so that you can understand what the main character is going to do next, or so that you better understand what is happening in the world of the story) but that your readers don't. There are many lovely comments on that post about what you could possibly do to fix this problem.

If you have a solution to that problem that other people have not mentioned, please let me know in the comments!

Inoculation Against Kitchen-Sink Disease

The best way to protect yourself preemptively against Kitchen-Sink Disease is to be aware that it's a problem. When you're writing a story, you may identify that having multiple points-of-view end up causing you to have too many things that you're attempting to do in a single story. You can use the George RR Martin method of writing a full characters story all the way through and then splitting it up into individual chapters and shuffling them like a deck. Or you could do what Anne Lamott describes earlier in Bird by Bird where she printed out the whole manuscript and laid it all out on the floor so she could see which scenes were where and what she was missing.

Of course, the best way to completely avoid Kitchen-Sink Disease is not to write at all (much as the best way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases is to never have sex). But we all know that isn't really a solution.

A more effective answer would be to write down everything that must happen to each character, separate all of them into individual arcs, and then, in future drafts, combine and massage things together so that some scenes can do two complimentary things at the same time. One of the better ways of doing this is in understanding the organization of your story (whether you are writing a monostory or a polystory), which is what I will be talking about in two weeks.

At least being aware that this is something that can happen is useful so you don’t feel so alone. This is a disease that affects almost every writer and remember: it's always better to have something, even if it is a mess riddled with Kitchen-Sink Disease, than to have nothing. At the end of the day, you can't edit an empty page.

1. And if you have all three of those problems with the book you're reading, you're probably reading One Hundred Years of Solitude.

2. Author beware: if you do this to an alpha reader, do not expect them to thank you.

3. But, as I've described, I'm an underwriter and the grass is always greener.