Mixing It Up

On March 11, 2015, Tracey Dyck wrote, Does anyone have advice on varying sentence structure? I’ve discovered that I overuse a certain structure in my novel. (I forget what that type of sentence is called–bad me–but it looks like this: “Bob drove to the market, whistling along the way.” It’s the “ing” phrase that keeps cropping up.) It sounds like a basic problem, easily solved, but I’ve started highlighting every use of that structure in my manuscript…Chapters one and two have almost 50 uses each. Sometimes there are half a dozen in the space of a few paragraphs, and other times I go a whole page without one. Anyway, tips/thoughts would be helpful! 🙂

Kenzi Anne sympathized: I have this exact same problem–and it’s driving me crazy!!! I’ve been trying to switch up my sentence structure, but my brain always defaults back. I have no idea how to stop it, either 🙁

Elisa suggested: Well, this may sound cliche, but read an author whose writing structure is very different from your own. I would probably suggest reading Austen, because she has a very unique, very distinct writing structure. I find myself talking and thinking in Austenese (as I call it) after I read anything by her. Maybe try reading PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Then start writing. This always helps me. Her writing is so vastly different from my own that when it takes over my mind it warps my writing structures and my writing comes out very different from what it normally is. Later I come back and edit through it to make it my own again, but the structure is different, and it helps me unstick from my repetitive tendencies.

I reread Pride and Prejudice (for the jillionth time) in the middle of writing Ella Enchanted, and, without realizing, fell into Austenese. My writing group was sure I’d gone nuts. I stopped and revised, but I still think Ella has the right sensibility for Austen! Elisa’s strategy worked for me.

We writers are often permeable, by which I mean that writing styles infiltrate us and come out through our fingers, so I love Elisa’s idea. Here’s a prompt: Read a chapter of a book you love. And another. Read something by Dickens, by Emily Bronte, by her sister Charlotte. Then write, and don’t analyze your sentences until your writing session is over. Then look back and see what happened.

We can also imitate directly. Here’s another prompt: Look at a paragraph in a book you admire and analyze it. In poetry school, I had to do this with a poem last semester and then write a new poem following the exact pattern of the old one, which took me way out of my usual writing style. If you’re writing narration, choose a long narrative paragraph. If you’re writing dialogue, a speech paragraph, or several, in the case of dialogue. Use the pattern you’ve discovered when you write the next paragraph in your WIP.

Below is the beginning of Peter Pan by James M. Barrie:

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

Let’s analyze. I’m not a grammarian, and I will probably mess up the technicalities in my description. Please forgive me.

Short first sentence, six words, two commas. Except restricts the word all that starts the sentence. Second sentence: two independent clauses joined by and. We can count the words if we want to. (If I were writing that sentence, I’d end with a colon, so that the second and third sentences would be joined.) Third sentence, same as the second. (Barrie seems not to have worried about variety!) Fourth sentence: independent clause followed by dependent clause that incorporates an exclamatory sentence of dialogue. (In my opinion, Barrie was a very supple writer.) Fifth sentence: two independent clauses joined by but. Sixth and seventh sentences: short and declarative without clauses. Notice that the sixth sentence ends with the same word that the seventh begins with, two. That repetition of two gives the paragraph ending punch. We can adopt the same strategy, not always, but occasionally.

Now look at a narrative paragraph of your own and recast it, following Barrie’s example. You may not succeed entirely, but I suspect you’ll substantially change up what you’ve been doing.

For expert help, we can do an online search on sentence structure to see what we have to work with. But we don’t want to get too academic. Sentence fragments, for example, are okay in fiction if they work. Exclamations are fine. The comma splice (independent clauses connected by only a comma) are a device that writers sometimes use, especially if each clause is short and meaning is clear. Almost anything goes in dialogue if the character speaking really would talk the way we’ve written–and if the meaning is clear.

Let’s take Michelle Dyck’s sample sentence and fool around with it. I understand that it’s meant just as an example and not deathless prose. Here it is:

Bob drove to the market, whistling along the way.

What are the possibilities?

Bob whistled as he drove to the market.
As he drove to the market, Bob whistled.
Bob drove to the market. He whistled the entire distance.
Bob drove to the market and whistled the entire distance.
Whistling “Clementine,” Bob drove to the market.

There may be more, and I’m not claiming that any of these are better than the original. The two-sentence solution is definitely worse. But they are alternatives.

We can incorporate the previous or the following sentence into our revision, the one that comes before or after the whistling. Suppose that, just before he drives off, Bob receives a kiss. We might then write: Molly planted a kiss on Bob’s astonished lips and sent him off in his car, where he whistled “All You Need Is Love” from her house to the market, where he bought a bouquet of long-stemmed roses.

Or we can use what’s going on in the scene, like this: Bob whistled the old repertory–“Home On the Range,” “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”–while his daughter stared stonily out the window. When they pulled into the market parking lot, he grinned. “You used to love those songs, sweetie.”

This strategy uses liveliness to introduce variety into our prose. Again recognizing that our sample sentence is just an example for discussion purposes, when we really write in our story, it’s usually (not always) better to name the song being whistled, which will tell us a little data point about our character. If Bob is whistling tunelessly, it’s good to know that, too. And in most cases, it’s good to name the store. In my part of the country, Whole Foods has a different ring from the A&P. Or it may be a purely local store, and then the name, whatever it is, will add local color. We can make up the name if we like, to give an indication of setting.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Use this in a story: Bob whistled as he drove, his favorite tune, of course, the anthem of his cult: “Rising Star Shining.” And the bug under his seat picked up every note.

∙ Pick a paragraph in a book you love that isn’t from this era, could be one of the authors mentioned above. Modernize the sentences.

∙ Pick a section of dialogue by one of these authors and transform it into modern speech. You may have to break up long paragraphs to do this.

∙ Try my Barrie example above. Use his paragraph as a template for a revision of one of yours.

Have fun, and save what you write!

P. U. S.

On February 15, 2015, Melissa Mead (formerly carpelibris on the old blog) wrote, I’m having trouble figuring out who the story I’m telling is really about. (Gail, it’s the version of “Sleeping Beauty” that I told you about at the book festival.) It’s not the title character. I thought it was the Eldest Fairy’s story, but then the Youngest Fairy started to come to the forefront. The usual “Who has the most to lose?” trick isn’t working, because there are different ways to “lose.”

Any suggestions for figuring out whose story this is?

Michelle Dyck responded with this: Whose story is the most interesting/exciting? (I guess that’s pretty similar to the “Who has the most to lose?” question.) Whose personality or voice grabs you the most?

Just a random thought: could you compromise and pick a few POV characters? Or do something like the movie HOODWINKED, in which the same story was told multiple times from multiple points of view, and each one fleshed out the tale a little more. That might be cumbersome in book form (or might be better suited to a series rather than a single book). But maybe that idea could be modified.

Melissa came back with: That’s the problem. It’s a tie!

This is just a short story, so I don’t think there’s room for the Hoodwinked treatment. (I did have fun trying to pick that movie apart, though!)

I had trouble choosing the POV in Fairest, and I tried out three–zhamM, Ijori, and an omniscient narrator–and wrote hundreds of pages I couldn’t use. Finally I figured out how I could write from the first-person POV of Aza, my Snow White character, even while she was out cold from the poisoned apple. The problem with zhamM and Ijori as narrators was that they weren’t present for a lot the story. The trouble I had with the omniscient voice was that I couldn’t resist dipping into the minds and hearts of everybody, and the story slowed to a slug’s pace.

But for those of us suffering from POV Uncertainty Syndrome (PUS!), an omniscient narrator may be the way to go. If we do, we can delve into the thoughts and feelings of those characters who particularly fascinate us, in Melissa’s case, the youngest and oldest fairies. Of course, we have to avoid my failing of getting too interested in everybody and losing control of our story.

Another advantage of trying an omniscient narrator is that it can be diagnostic; we may naturally find ourselves dwelling more on one character than the others, and, voila!, without tearing out a single strand of hair, we’ve discovered our POV character. We can switch then and there to that POV and clean up the omniscient voice when we revise. In Fairest, the omniscient narrator came right before I figured out that Aza should be my POV character, so it worked for me.

Similar to an omniscient POV is the POV of a character who is not our MC. We could choose the median fairy, for example, the one halfway between youngest and oldest, to tell the story. She wouldn’t be as impartial as an out-of-the-tale narrator or as partial as the oldest or youngest, because she’d be on the periphery of the action. A magnificent example of this kind of narrator is Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (high school and up). And if you want to read prose that’s marvelous enough to cause heart palpitations, this is the book for you.

My idea with zhamM as narrator was to have him be in love with Aza and have it be a doomed love, because he’s a gnome and she’s human. But I didn’t know how to work him into all the scenes I needed. If I had decided to keep him as my POV character, I would have had to make the story belong to him, with many of the “Snow White” events happening in the background.

Mostly, I’ve gone with the obvious choice of MC: Cinderella; Snow White; in my Princess Tales with Sleeping Beauty, the “Princess on the Pea” princess, the “Golden Goose” lad, and so on. But I didn’t in A Tale of Two Castles, which is sort of a retelling of “Puss In Boots.” The miller’s son is a character, and there are many cats, but Elodie, my MC, and the dragon detective Meenore don’t exist in the original fairy tale. Since Aza, Meenore, and the ogre are at the center of my plot, I had to invent a new story arc and many scenes.

As I think about “Sleeping Beauty,” I notice how full of feeling the story is. Sleeping Beauty is an infant, but her parents experience horror when they first hear she’s going to die young. After the terrible gift is ameliorated, they still have to wrap their minds around the hundred-year sleep.

The oldest fairy is mired in rage. She may have other emotions as well, like loneliness, jealousy, and hurt for being left out. The youngest fairy may be frightened, because she’s going against an elder. She may be worried, too, that she’s going to mess up the spell. She could be ambitious, a meddler, a very kind soul.

When we choose our POV character, we can decide which feelings we want to explore from the inside out. This is like Michelle Dyck’s wondering about which character is the most interesting, in this case most interesting from an emotional standpoint.

We can ask which character is most like us and which is most different. Then we can decide if we want the security of the familiar or the risk of the unknown. (Both choices are fine.)

Here’s another metric we can use: Which character is most likely to be talky inside her head? A character who isn’t introspective may be more challenging than one who is. Do we want that challenge?

Also, one of them, may lie to herself about herself. If we’re in her mind, we have to see past her self-deception. Do we want to always be on our guard?

We can try one way and then another. As I’ve said many times, writing isn’t efficient. Wasted pages are a small price to pay for the right POV.

I’ve never written from the POV of a non-human. Regardless of which POV is chosen, it’s fun to consider how a fairy might think. She has to think in words or we can’t write her, but can we introduce an element or two into her thought process that will reflect her alien-ness?

When Melissa Mead first posted her question, I wrote a note to myself that I still think is worth thinking about, and it was that maybe this should be a novel as Michelle Dyck suggested and not a short story. It’s possible that the idea is too complex for short story treatment. Or not.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Write a scene from “Sleeping Beauty” in the voice of an omniscient narrator. Delve into the thoughts and feelings of everybody, even the baby.

∙ Write the story of “Aladdin” from the POV of the genie of the lamp.

∙ Using “Aladdin” as backdrop, tell the story of the genie and his imprisonment in the lamp. This means moving away from the original fairy tale and creating something new.

∙ Write the thoughts of any one of the “Sleeping Beauty” fairies when she first sees the baby princess. Give the thoughts an inhuman quality. Do this one way, then another, and another.

∙ Try “Sleeping Beauty” from the POV of a minor fairy, who has opinions but is more observer than actor in the story. You can make her a busybody, so she insinuates herself into all the major moments.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Like falling in love… and out… and in…

Before I start, I posted this in comments within the last blog: I asked my tech support, AKA my husband David, about photos or images appearing with names as they often did in Blogspot. This is completely optional, but if you want to, you just have to follow his instructions below:

The blog uses gravatars. Very easy to set up.

Go to http://en.gravatar.com/.
Establish a free account using the same email address as is used on the blog.
Gravatar will send a confirmation email.
Click on their confirmation email.
Log in to Gravatar.
Upload a photo or other image that will be the avatar.
After a brief delay, the Gravatar will appear next to the comments on the blog.

Now for the post. On February 14, 2015, iowareadsandwrites wrote, Does anyone have the same problem where you start a story (with a good plot and characters that are ready to go) and you write one or two chapters, but then the story doesn’t sound that fun or interesting, so you don’t want to finish it.

Am I the only one with that problem? How can I stop that?

Several of you sympathized and chimed in.

From Erica Eliza: Writing a story is like falling in love. It’s fun in the beginning, but then the honeymoon’s over, and you just have to push through until things get fun again. When I’m bogged down, it’s usually because I have it outlined too well and there’s no wiggle room. So I change something up. Make a new character walk in the room, have a fight scene end with a compromise instead of an easy victory, let some fun, far-off event happen earlier than I planned.

From journaladay: I’ve found the easiest way to stay on track with writing a story is to get a friend who is willing to read it as you write it. If you feel like you have an audience it tends to bring out the motivation for writing SOMETHING because you have people waiting on you.

From Elisa: Hah, I have the very same problem a good deal of the time. When that happens I usually either 1. Start working on one of my three “Main” stories, or 2. Work on the geography of the story (I LOVE geography, I also LOVE drawing maps, I would like to become a cartographer someday). Drawing out my maps helps. I get to decide where the mountains are, what the boundaries are, deciding where the towns are, drawing mountains (I totally recommend drawing mountain ranges. It is calming), drawing rivers and deltas, etc. Once I do that, I frame the map (if it’s the right size) or I roll it up and tie it with hemp string (because I think it looks more interesting and story-ish than yarn, although some maps I use color coded yarn ties, to keep track of which are for where.) Then, once that is done, I pull the map out again and use any of my various fun paperweights and place armies strategically with chess pieces, or I decide where my characters go, or stay. I make lots of possibilities and when I find an interesting placement of armies/characters, I form the story around it. I know it’s kinda odd, but it helps me, so I decided to throw out the idea, in case someone else might find it helpful.

P.S. I also listen to music without words and then come up with lyrics and weave them into the story. That’s also kinda weird I guess.

From Melissa Mead (formerly carpelibris): I have that problem with books AND short stories. My hard drive is full of opening scenes. Sometimes I can combine a couple to make something new. Sometimes I leave them for a while and come back to find the spark reignited. Sometimes they just sit and get dusty. 🙂

These are great ideas as well as lots of company for iowareadsandwrites’ misery.

journaladay’s suggestion has been useful to me sometimes, but my reader has to be encouraging. I don’t do well if I imagine my editor, for example, disliking everything I’ve come up with. But if I know he’s a fan, lights start popping in my brain. I think, He’s going to love this! And this!

We can stack the deck in our favor by letting our reader know that we are just a tad fragile about our WIP and we’re looking for encouragement, not the reverse. If a reader can’t do that, he’s not the one for the job. Later, when we’ve soldiered all the way through and have a complete draft, we can ask him to take a more critical approach–critical, not destructive. We never need a bulldozer of a reader.

Before I was published, I lucked into an adult-ed writing class taught by a woman who had once been a children’s book editor. Every week I submitted my new pages, and she responded with a few paragraphs on blue paper and line edits right on my pages. I slaved to have something to hand in every week. If I felt like I was getting lost in my story, I could let her know and she’d respond. Once or twice a semester she’d choose one of my chapters to read aloud for the entire class to comment on.

The class was heaven, and I wrote Ella Enchanted while I was in it, but we can get similar help from a writers’ group. Before that class, I joined several writers’ groups. Most of us were beginners, but we were all good readers, and we did our best to help each other. We can all set something similar up. If our fellow writers are eager to find out what’s going to happen next in our story, we’ll be helped to keep going.

I agree with Elisa that switching tracks can work. Most of you know that I struggled through writing Stolen Magic, and I took two big breaks in the middle. One was just a pure vacation. I gave myself a month of no writing to see if my head would clear. This works for some writers, and you can try it, but it didn’t work for me. My story mist failed to lift. I also took time off to write Writer to Writer, which I think did help. For one thing, I felt productive because I was still writing, and some of what I was writing was about plot, which was my problem with my novel. My advice to readers helped me figure out what to do.

Notes work that way for me, too. I write about what I can’t figure out, and often figure it out in the process. We can all do that.

The point is that, despite Erica Eliza’s charming analogy (which I agree with), our long marriage is more to writing than to a particular story. If we switch to a different tale, we’re still writers. And I agree with Melissa that letting a story lie fallow while we dive into other projects can give our subconscious room to bring up fresh ideas.

I love the idea of crossing over to another art form for inspiration. I haven’t yet tried drawing my way out of a plot impasse, but I will keep the idea in mind. Drawing is more completely right-brained than writing, I think, and the shift may open our inner eye.

Music distracts me, but it does work for lots of writers, so that’s another strategy to try. We can invent lyrics, as Elisa does, or we can just let the music relax us or fire us up. You can experiment with what sort of music is most useful for you.

I’m generally up and down all the way through a novel, and with some novels, alas, it’s more down than up. It may help to remind ourselves, when things go south, of our story’s delightful dimple, our characters’ lovable quirks, the transporting qualities of our setting.

I love the idea of moving a plot point up. Sometimes I delay making a bad thing happen out of a misplaced unwillingness to harm a beloved character. The result usually is that the pace turns to molasses, and I get bored. Of course, if we’re going to jump ahead, we need to make sure that we’re not omitting something essential.

It’s possible that when we have characters who are “ready to go,” they may be too formed, and their rigid shape may restrict our exploration. Say we’ve imagined our character to be courageous, selfish, enthusiastic, and blunt. When a plot point arrives, she may not be able to develop organically, because she has to hold onto the qualities we’ve imagined for her. I don’t do a lot of character description in advance. Mostly I toss ‘em into situations, dream up how they might respond, and they evolve. That approach may keep a story interesting and allow us to move forward.

Finally, there is the little matter of self-criticism. It’s not useful to wonder if our story is fun or interesting. We need to ban those questions. It will never be either one if we don’t write it, and that kind of thinking just slows our fingers. The time to worry about that is really never. We write the story; we edit our first draft and however many drafts follow. Then we put it out into the world, for publication or for friends and family. We let our readers decide about fun and interestingness. If we’re sensible, in my opinion, we don’t ask anyone except the members of our critique group or our special readers to weigh in. Other people will tell us if and when they feel like it.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Expand the story of the three little pigs. Develop their characters. Take the one who builds with straw, for example. What’s his attitude toward the future? How does he spend his time? What’s his take on interior decorating? What are family gatherings like among the three of them? If they argue, how does each one express himself? How do their voices sound? In what ways are they all pigs? In what ways are they different?

∙ Turn the pigs into people, the three daughters of a king who has impoverished his kingdom. The three are homeless, but they still have subjects who depend on them. How do they resurrect their economically depressed land? The daughter who ultimately builds in brick may not necessarily be the heroine, or she may be. Write the story!

∙ Move your pig princesses into the universe of Jane Austen’s novels. The girls are now the daughters of an impoverished parson. They have to go forward, too, and at the end each one has to be paired up with someone. Turn “The Three Little Pigs” into a period romance!

Have fun, and save what you write!

Rainy Day Misery

Thanks for weighing in on the changed blog! If you have more thoughts, please post them. By the way, what used to be called labels are now categories.

Now a little pre-post before the main event:

Without being specific, a writer recently asked on my website about advancing controversial opinions in stories that might offend some readers. This has come up before, and I’ve written a couple of posts on the subject. Basically, I’ve said that we shouldn’t stifle ourselves, and we don’t know whom we’re going to offend or not offend, anyway. The most seemingly bland scenario may trouble someone.

A fresh idea has occurred to me, however. I still don’t think we should worry about our readers. There is literature in the world putting forth every take on every topic in the universe. But we may want to protect ourselves.

Something like this was addressed not long ago in my poetry school in a master class about writing about actual people in one’s life (which I’ve also written about here). One of the poets teaching the class had published a collection that revealed troubling family history. The response from his relatives was less than positive. I think he had every right to publish, but he also had the right to not publish and shield himself if he felt that he wouldn’t be able to deal with the hurt.

This doesn’t apply just to life experiences. If we put forward an unpopular position, whether our readership is broad or narrow, we need to be prepared to accept the response. I’m not saying not to do it–maybe we should do it–but we should brace ourselves. If we’re not ready for criticism or even anger, we can hold off and wait for a better moment.

Now for the regular post. On January 15, 2015, KLC wrote, I had been writing short books that had good ideas, but were not suspenseful at all and leaving me with absolutely no reason to turn the page. Then I started planning for other books and as I started to write them, I realized that the only way I knew to make my books suspenseful was to add in lots of drama and people dying. The problem is that that’s not how I want my books to be like, so how do I make a good, suspenseful book without making it a blood-and-gore horror story. (Perhaps I have been taking your advice “make your characters suffer” a bit far…)

At the time I wrote, I’m adding your question to my list, but it will be a while before I get to it. In the meanwhile, readers will be in suspense if they care about your main character and if he or she needs something or wants something or is in trouble. No one has to die.

And this is what I’m writing now: I love to walk but not in the rain. On most Tuesdays I commute to New York City and while I’m there I like to get in a long walk of about three miles, because I especially enjoy striding through the bustle and along the interesting architecture. The endorphins kick in after a while, and I feel like the healthiest old lady on the planet. Starting on the previous Wednesday, I anxiously watch the weather predictions. It’s silly. My health won’t be damaged if I miss a walk or two, and it’s not my only form of exercise. Usually I’m lucky and get sun, but I worry that I’m wasting my wishes on weather, and when something really important comes along, they’ll all be used up. Still, I care a lot. If I were a character, and the reader sympathized with me, he would want the sun to shine whenever I wanted it to.

Could this desire for a sunny day be a suspenseful part of an interesting story? I think so. Let’s make me a lot younger than I am and let’s call our MC Abigail, since no modern young person is named Gail, alas. Abigail is an outdoorsy person, and things haven’t been going well for her lately. Let’s say her Geology teacher seems to have it in for her and she’s failing, even though she loves the subject. Her best friend has texted her with accusations that make her feel awful, even make her feel that their friendship since they were toddlers may have been a sham. Oh, and let’s top it off: The friend’s accusations are true, because the most misery comes when we are guilty (and, I think, the most reader sympathy).

Abigail needs a break, so she plans one for the next day, because today is shot. It’s spring. The dogwoods are in bloom and she hasn’t seen them yet in her city neighborhood. She packs a picnic lunch the night before and decides to leave early for the big park a mile from her house. If the day is clear, she’ll be able to outstrip her unhappiness or walk into it and figure out some strategies. She goes to sleep visualizing sunshine.

If our story has been very tense up to now we may give her a break and blue skies. If not, we make it pour. She’s cooped up at home because it’s the weekend. What does she do? She obsesses about her friend. She composes an answer, then thinks it won’t do, tries again, gives up. Next, she picks up her geology textbook, reads a paragraph without comprehension, shuts the book with a thud. Desperate to do something positive, she decides to cook dinner for her parents and make her favorite recipe, which they also like, but it turns out that a crucial ingredient is missing, and the deluge is still going on. We’ve set it up that she doesn’t deal well with frustration. So far she’s been cautious and positive, but we know that isn’t going to last. She starts curling her hair around her finger, always a bad sign. The reader wonders in what way she’d going to go off the rails–and keeps reading.

So what have we done? We’ve taken a trivial wish and surrounded it with unhappiness, because we do need to make our characters suffer, even if the suffering is unlikely to kill or maim them or anyone they love. I don’t think I’ve made Abigail sympathetic enough in just this summary, but we need to do that, too, to persuade the reader to turn the page. One possibility for that would be to put her in the presence of her friend, who’s ignoring her. We reveal her thoughts, as she wonders about the right approach, as her friend smiles and talks with other people, maybe even glancing in Abigail’s direction and looking away.

A great example of all of this is Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery. Nothing more violent happens than Anne cracking Gilbert Blythe over the head with her school slate. There’s death, but it’s not the focus of the story, and a baby gets the croup, but Anne saves her. What draws us in is how unloved Anne feels herself to be, with some reason, her ardent desire for whatever she wants at any point in the story, her wry self-awareness, and maybe five other things I can’t think of. Certainly the voice of the narrator is engaging. If you haven’t read it, I hope you will. You don’t have to be eight years old; it’s worth studying.

Although no lives are at stake, the themes can and should still be big. In my example of Abigail and the sunny day it may be friendship, self-worth, self-understanding, empathy, personal growth, honesty. That we touch these grand motifs will also keep readers reading.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Make the reader care about your character’s wish for one of these: a melted cheese sandwich, eyeglasses, quiet, a single good idea, a set of watercolors. Write a scene or the whole story.

∙ Show Abigail at home after receiving the hurtful text. Make her sympathetic through her thoughts and her preparations for the longed-for sunny day.

∙ Write the argument between Abigail and her friend when it finally comes. Make the emotional wounds deep, as if this were a battlefield and the words were swords. If you like, then bring about a reconciliation. If you don’t like, use the argument and the injuries sustained to launch your plot, in which the pain is never physical. You can end finally with renewed friendship or separation and growth, or, tragically, just separation.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Announcement!

A short interim announcement: We’re snatching the blog away from Blogspot and moving it entirely into my website, so that people who don’t have gmail accounts can comment, too. This is an experiment for now. My worry is that unwelcome comments may come in. I’ll delete them, of course, but they’ll be there until I check. If that happens even once, I may moderate comments before they get posted, as I do on the Guest Book, or I may go back to Blogspot.

You’ll find differences, and I want to know what you think. Please say if you’re happy or unhappy, because that will make a difference in how we go forward. My feelings won’t be hurt if you say something negative.

If you signed up as a follower of the blog, your follower-status will move over, so you won’t have to do it again.

I’m eager to hear from you as you give the new blog site a spin. And, as always, I look forward to your writing ideas and questions.

Ready, set, beginnings

On August 5, 2014, nevvawinter wrote, I have a question about beginning a story. I often come up with elements for a story, such as a setting and a character or some dialogue and a conflict, but I have trouble putting these elements together and adding elements to make a complete story out of my initial slightly-fuzzy vision. Any advice would be appreciated.

I have all those problems, too!

End of post.

Just fooling–about it being the end of the post.

I started The Two Princesses of Bamarre prequel that I’m working on right now by telling the reader something my main character doesn’t find out until much later. It’s a dramatic revelation, and it provides instant interest. I’ve been sending my editor fifty-page chunks of the manuscript to keep me from getting seriously off track, and she disagrees with my choice. She thinks the reader shouldn’t learn this truth until my MC does. Maybe she’s right. I won’t be sure–if I ever am sure–until I finish the book and go back and probably try it the other way.

In Two Princesses itself I didn’t get the beginning right until after the advance reading copy had gone out to reviewers–for which the book suffered in the reviews. Then I finally figured it out, and the published beginning is fine, or so I believe.

Before I was a writer I used to paint, and I loved using watercolor. But in watercolor you cannot correct mistakes–or you can, but to a very small degree. Oil is more forgiving; still, in all of painting that isn’t done digitally, earlier versions are covered over. It’s hard to go back.

Writing is infinitely forgiving, especially writing on a computer or laptop, but even pen-and-paper writing is, too, as long as we don’t destroy what went before or cross out so mercilessly that the earlier version becomes indecipherable.

I love that. It takes all the worry out of beginnings. I often start in one place then realize that important scenes precede my beginning, so I add them to the front, sometimes more than once.

Or, going the other way, I may discover that my beginning presents information that the reader doesn’t need. It’s back story that helps me develop my character or my plot, but it doesn’t come into the present adventure. When that happens, I move the unnecessary part into a document called Extra, in case I discover a use for it later.

When I’m fooling around with an idea for a book or a story, I write a lot of notes. Many writers think without writing. They may stare out their window, daydreaming productively.. I can do a little of that, but usually my mind really shifts into gear when I’m typing. I write about where my idea might take me, what characters I need to put it in motion. I may think about the setting, the world it will be in. Often I wonder if there’s a fairy tale I can use to help me with my plot. During this process a beginning usually comes to me. The way that it generally comes has to do with the conflict at the heart of my idea. When that happens, I write my tentative first scene and then go back to my notes.

One way to begin is to start with the central conflict at its height and take it from there. For example, suppose we have a village under some sort of threat, and the village is divided about how to address the threat. Let’s imagine that the danger is seasonal flooding, which seems to get worse every year. The villagers, some unwillingly, have raised their houses and public buildings on stilts. We start with a flood. Alas, the stilts aren’t strong enough, and several houses are swept away, including the home of Skye, our MC. In the disaster her father, Quinn, is killed.

That’s a fine way when it works. We tear into the problem and then we present the difficulties with solving it, revealing character and setting as we go. In my historical novel, Dave at Night, I begin with the death of Dave’s father and plunge the story into the central problem right away.

I tried this with Two Princesses, too, less successfully. In one of my attempts to get the beginning right, I introduced Meryl’s illness immediately. As soon as the book opens, she gets sick. It was a powerful start–too powerful, because the reader couldn’t focus on all the other things I needed to set up: Addie’s timidity, monsters, and the epic poem that features Drualt.

In Dave at Night and my example of Skye and her dear departed dad, the beginning may succeed because these beloved characters are dead and done with, and the story can move on. But suppose Skye’s father doesn’t die. Suppose he’s last seen clinging to a ceiling beam in a rushing river. The reader may be unable to pay attention to anything else because she’s so worried about him, and yet we need to set up the rest of the story.

So instead we start with something not quite so intense but that introduces elements of the conflict to come. In Skye’s story, we might start with a town meeting where Quinn argues loudly against raising the houses and in favor of a system of dams to control the water. Meanwhile, Skye wishes her father weren’t so confrontational. Then we move into the work to raise the house, which Quinn does with all the skill at his command. He disagrees with the town’s decision, but he’s going to do his best. We show the relationship between him and Skye and anyone else we decide to put in the family. Maybe we show that Skye is her dad’s opposite. She’d rather not get what she wants than argue. Since, in my mind, the village is kind of a character in the story, we introduce a few of the residents: the mayor, Skye’s best friend, the horse doctor, the owner of the inn. We produce weather reports. We don’t send in the flood until at least a few scenes take place and establish this world and its inhabitants.

Specifically, our beginning can be presented just about any way: through dialogue, action, thoughts, emotion, more than one. Setting is harder, but that can work too. In this story, which has to do with the natural world, setting may be just the thing. We may want to start with rising water. Or with how beautifully the village has recovered, finally, from the last flood twenty years ago.

And, of course, we can change our mind. We can start with a few lines of dialogue and then decide that the dialogue should come later or isn’t needed at all.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Write Skye’s story beginning with Quinn’s death in the flood.

∙ Write Skye’s story beginning with Quinn being borne away by the rushing water. See if you can make it work.

∙ Write Skye’s story beginning, as I suggested, with the village meeting.

∙ Start the story several ways and just write a few paragraphs. Start with dialogue, then with setting, then with action, then with thoughts, then with emotion. Keep writing from the beginning that interests you the most.

Have fun, and save what you write!

The Twisting, Turning Way

I have two events coming up post-tour! Next Saturday, May 9th, I’ll be at Byrd’s Books, 126 Greenwood Avenue, Bethel, Connecticut, at 11:00 am. And the following Sunday, May 17th, I’ll be participating in the South Carolina Book Festival at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center located
at 1101 Lincoln Street. I’ll be speaking there from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm and then signing books. Hope to see some of you at one of these events!

If you don’t already know, Stolen Magic came out on April 21st, and I just finished my tour. I met a few of you, and I’m so glad I did!

On December 27, 2014, Elisa wrote, How does one make intricate little side-plots? To add interest and mystery to a story what must one do? I have one story that I’ve written quite a bit in and I know just about everything that is gonna happen, etc., but it is kinda boring me because there is one and only one plot that plods on and on, no interesting little side-plots to add color and depth, just a very simple, straight forward story that goes neither to the left nor the right. How do I fix this? I’ve tried to add more action to the Main Plot (which is, essentially the ONLY plot) but it just adds weight and burden, not necessarily interest. I’m bored at the one-wayness of the story. Any ideas for fixing this?

I tend to have the opposite problem: I over-complicate. So maybe we can find a place in the middle.

Sometimes when stories are hurtling along a single track, the track is single because we haven’t slowed down enough for side tracks to appear. Let’s take the fairy tale “Snow White.” Not much complexity there. The plot mostly revolves around the evil queen, and Snow White herself is just a pretty doll of a character who’s acted upon by others, again mostly the queen.

If we don’t slow down, nothing is very interesting. The queen is motivated by jealousy, the hunter by pity. The dwarfs take her in because she can clean and cook. The prince is love-struck by Snow White’s seemingly lifeless beauty.

Let’s pretend I never wrote Fairest and look at the story fresh.

We can pick any of the characters for the slowing down, so let’s start with the prince and make him our MC. Why is he traveling through those woods? Is he looking for the dwarfs? For something else? Is he on the run? Does he have a sweetheart at home?

More slowing down. We go back to the moment of his departure from his parents’ castle. What sort of family does he leave? Who says goodbye to him? With what feelings does he depart?

What happens on his way to the dwarfs? Does he encounter anyone? Does he run into trouble? Is he bringing trouble with him, or behind him? Are the dwarfs and Snow White in danger because of him?

I’ve never bought it that he falls in love with a dead body, or what he thinks is a dead body. So what is it about the apparent corpse that appeals to him? There’s lots of room for complexity here.

Then, when she wakes up, what happens? Are they really instantly in love?

In the fairy tale, they invite the evil queen to their wedding. We can explore the gaps there. She has to be dealt with, because what’s to stop her from attacking Snow White again? In the fairy tale she goes to the wedding. Why? She could decline the invitation. The mirror has told her that the new queen is more beautiful than she is. Won’t she be dangerous if she shows up? If she doesn’t come, she’s out there being evil. If we slow her part down, we can introduce all these considerations and make complicated things happen based on them.

Let’s move on to another character, the hunter, who risks his life for Snow White. That’s extreme kindness. When I’m kind to someone, if it’s more than a quick thing, I become involved. I want to know what happened. Is the hunter going to just let Snow White go, or is he going to interest himself in her future? If we want to complicate our story, we may decide to answer yes and give him a bigger, slower role.

Snow White’s father doesn’t come into the fairy tale in any significant way, but we can bring him in. Does he know what his wife is up to? What’s his relationship with his daughter? Does he know she’s left the castle? What does he want? What’s going on with his kingdom and affairs of state? How’s his health? We keep asking ourselves questions and consider possible answers, looking for threads we can weave into our story.

This is fun!

And the dwarfs can add more complexity. Are they all glad Snow White is living with them? Do they all like her cooking, for example? Do they all like her? Have any of the dwarfs fallen in love with her? Do they get along with each other? What do they think of the queen? Might one of them be in league with her? What do they think of the prince when he comes along? Do they all think she should marry him?

What about Snow White herself? What does she want? What are her hopes for herself? What was her relationship with the evil queen before the mirror declared her more beautiful? What’s her relationship with her father? With the hunter? Did she know him before he took her into the forest? What does she think of the dwarfs? Does she like them all? Does she like living with them? Is she trying to figure out where else she could go? Or does she want to spend her life in their cottage? I’ve never understood why she lets the evil queen in, even the first time. So why does she do it?

We can keep in mind that our story doesn’t have to end where the fairy tale does. It can go into the future, or we can tell just a fragment of the story that we’ve expanded into a multi-faceted epic.

We can develop plenty of intricacy with just one POV, but if we want still more, we can try multiples or omniscient third person. The hunter and a dwarf, for example, can have their own POVs.

The key to subplots is our characters and their conflicting desires and circumstances. We discover these when we slow our action down, enter our characters’ hearts and minds, and get into the details.

Here are a bunch of prompts:

• Pick out five to ten–or all!–of my questions about the characters in Snow White and write a paragraph or two about what you might do with them.

• Write two more questions about each character. Explore them in a few paragraphs of notes.

• Write an argument between two dwarfs over Snow White. If you like, she can overhear it.

• Write a scene that causes the prince to leave home. Could be an argument, a quest he takes on, whatever.

• From the hunter’s POV, write the scene that follows the moment he lets Snow White go in the forest.

• Write a scene between Snow White and her father.

• Write the whole story!

Have fun, and save what your write!

Onward! Or Backward?

First off, I’ve come across a magazine that seeks story and poetry submissions from high school students, and, since the submissions must come from students themselves, not from schools, I assume you can be home schooled if you’d like to submit. And the publication actually pays a fee if a work is accepted, rare in the poetry world. Here’s the link: http://www.hangingloosepress.com/submissions.html. Be sure to tell us here if you get an acceptance. Good luck!

Second off, I’ve announced on my website that there’s a sale on the e-book version of A Tale of Two Castles going on until April 20th, which isn’t very far off. Here’s the link if you’d like to take advantage of it: http://www.gailcarsonlevine.com/news.html.

And third off, a reminder of my tour for Stolen Magic, which starts in a few days. The farthest west I’m being sent (tour arranged by my publisher) is Ohio, but for you easterners, I would love to meet you! Here’s the link to the details on my website: http://www.gailcarsonlevine.com/appears.html.

Finally for the post! On December 1, 2014, Bug wrote, I’ve never actually… uh, finished a story. This NaNoWriMo I got 30k, which is twice as much as I have ever gotten. So, it’s exciting, but I’ve realized that I need to change something, and it’s so major that it’ll change EVERYTHING. Should I just continue and pretend that I already wrote it that way, or start over?

Erica Eliza responded with, First, congratulations for getting that far. Some changes aren’t as big as you think. If it’s something drastic, like switching the POV, I’d say restart. If you can get away with rewriting certain scenes and tweaking lines in others, keep moving forward. (This is still the same Eliza, BTW. I just tacked my first name onto my screen name.)

And Rapunzelwriter chimed in along the same vein. I’m not quite done with mine, but I reached 30K as well and am currently feeling like I have to rewrite most, if not all of my story. I’ve also been having a problem with not being able to recognize anything good in my work. Sometimes I’ll finally finish a short story, and after re-reading it, groan because I see so much that needs to be fixed, and rarely anything good. Any advice?

carpelibris offered, Sounds normal to me! Rough drafts (at least to me) are just a pile of “stuff” you make in order to have a complete thing to work on. Raw material that you can turn into something wonderful.

At the time I replied, Everybody works differently. I’d recommend that you keep going and, yes, pretend you’ve already made the changes. By the time you get to the end, you’ll have a better idea about how to revise.

Now, reflecting at my leisure, I still mostly agree with myself, although I don’t always follow my own advice and I’m not even sure if it applies to every story.

In my experience, just moving forward is a happier way to write. In my novels Ever and A Tale of Two Castles, I did just that. I was confused, I often felt that I didn’t know what I was doing, but I kept going. I finished both books in under a year and a half, pretty quick for a turtle of a writer like me. And I look back on those books as comparatively painless. I’m trying to do the same with the manuscript I’m tentatively calling Bamarre, the prequel to The Two Princesses of Bamarre, which I’m working on right now, even though the process has been interrupted by poetry school.

On the other hand, I did start over–and over and over–in both Fairest and Stolen Magic, and both books were miserable to write. Fairest took four years and Stolen Magic four and a half, although I did write Writer to Writer in the middle.

In the case of Fairest, I couldn’t get the POV right. The underlying problem, however, was that I was at a loss about how to handle the part of the story after the Snow White character eats the poisoned apple. Once I realized what to do there, I was able to write in first person from her POV and everything fell into place. Was it necessary to go through all those iterations to figure it out? I don’t know.

I was even more mixed up with Stolen Magic, and my problem was plotting, specifically plotting a mystery, which has to have suspects (I forgot them in the first 260 pages) and has to be solvable (which I forgot in the second 140 pages). Unlike Fairest, if I had managed to write either of the first two versions, they would have been very different stories from the one that I ultimately developed, inch by inch. I regret that I never figured those stories out; they were interesting, and my curiosity about them didn’t get satisfied.

So I suppose my recommendation is to keep writing new pages if you can. If you can pretend that you’ve made the revisions, if it’s clear enough to you what you will have to do later, then just keep writing. Go back only if you absolutely can’t go forward.

About finishing, I always finish. Sheer stubbornness is one reason. A story that is a figment of my own imagination is not going to defeat me.

Another is curiosity. Since I don’t outline, I don’t know exactly how my story is going to turn out unless I write it. The ending may be clear in my mind, as it is in the book I’m working on now, since it has to prepare this world for the events in Two Princesses, and I know the feeling I want the ending to have, but I’m not yet sure how I’m going to get there, even though (I hope) I’ve written two-thirds of the book.

The last reason, and probably the most important one, goes to the heart of Rapunzelwriter’s final question. I can keep going because I don’t look for what’s good or bad in my WIP (work in progress). In fact, I studiously avoid this question, which will just lead me down the rabbit hole of self-doubt. I recommend that everybody avoid it. If that self-doubting voice in our mind starts piping up, we have to stamp it down with both feet. Yes, we have to decide if our characters are acting according to character. Yes, we need to vary our sentences and remember to include sensory information other than the visual, and so on. We have to be critical in a nitty-gritty, detail-oriented way, but we don’t have to be nasty to ourselves! We have to give our stories, ideas, words, plots, characters–all of it!–a chance to shine. I believe we can squelch our negativity if we pay attention to our self-critical impulses and don’t let them take over.

Even when I finish a novel, the big question I ask myself is, Is this working? Not, Is this good? We can let the critics weigh in on that. We can just congratulate ourselves and do a victory dance and have a party and set off fireworks for having made our way all the way to “The End.”

Having said all this, I also think it’s okay for you (not me) not to finish. If you’ve learned all you can from a particular story, or if you’re bored, there’s nothing wrong with moving on. If you’re a young person, you’re changing at a crazy pace. What appealed to you a month ago may no longer be the slightest bit interesting. So try something else, and don’t worry if that fades, too. The only important thing is to keep writing, because if you do, eventually you’ll finish something.

Here are three prompts:

• We never hear about Snow White’s younger sister, who won’t ever cause the mirror to arouse the evil queen’s jealousy. But this sister has extraordinary qualities of her own, which the dwarfs put to good use. And it’s possible that Snow White’s prince has a cousin. Make their lives intersect and write their story, which may or may not interfere with Snow White’s troubles.

• Go back to your Snow White story and switch narrator in the middle. If you were writing in first person from the sister’s POV, switch to omniscient third or to first person from a different character’s POV. Do not go back. Just keep writing. If the story now takes you in a different direction, that’s okay. When you finish, revise.

• Experience finishing. Take a simple story structure. Could be this: Your MC desperately wants to win a contest. Say there’s a kingdom, and every year the young people compete to find a large ruby, which the king hides. Your MC tries three times and finally succeeds. That’s it, the whole story. Write it in three to five pages. Include two to three other characters, no more. Give your MC a personality. Include dialogue, a hint of setting, and get it done!

Have fun, and save what you write!

Alone in a Character Desert

Just in! You can hear a few minutes of the audio version of STOLEN MAGIC here: https://soundcloud.com/harperaudio_us/stolenmagic_levine!

Here’s a preview of my upcoming tour for Stolen Magic. You’ll see that the farthest west I’ll be coming is Ohio and also that the time isn’t set yet for my first appearance in Washington, DC, but you can contact the bookstore for details.

Sunday, April 19th – Rhinebeck, NY
Oblong Books @4:00 PM (with Jeanne Birdsall)

Tuesday, April 21st – Concord, NH
Gibson’s Bookstore @6:30 PM

Thursday, April 23rd – Fairless Hills, PA
B&N Fairless Hills @7:00 PM

Saturday, April 25th – Hudson, OH
The Hudson Library & Historical Society from 2 – 4 PM

Sunday, April 26th – Washington, DC
Barston’s Childs Play @ 3:30 PM

Monday, April 27th – Takoma Park, MD
Takoma Park Public Library @7:30 PM

On October 30, 2014, Rock On wrote, I was kind of having trouble with the idea for one of my characters. She’s a loner, and I’ve never written an MC who was a loner before. I like to give my characters a good, quirky supporting cast with a really close best friend and a geeky friend and lots of other unique characters. But if my character is a loner then that means basically no friends. She’s an only child too, so no siblings. About the only people she has are her parents and then she has a dog. Any suggestions for a book with about three good characters and a dog, and then the villain?

In response, Bibliophile wrote, I assume by loner you mean introverted, not good with most people, etc. If that is the case, then that just means that your MC won’t have a lot of friends, not none at all. She can still have a supporting cast of three or so friends who are probably misfits as well. Frankly, most of the characters I write ARE loners or misfits, mostly because I have never had an exorbitant amount of friends myself or I forget to write in interactions with other people besides like, one other person who is normally some sort of love interest. I think that any plot can be used with that cast of characters, though you may find that that size cast is just hard to work with. I do assume though that each of these characters are involved enough that it would be possible to tell the story or the majority of it from any of their POVs. That said, there is still room to place in tertiary characters to liven things up.

Bibliophile’s idea is certainly a possibility. Rock On’s MC–let’s call her Regina–may have a few friends who aren’t close to her, maybe because she pushes them away. Part of the arc of the story could be her growth in the friend department, and at the end she may have a best buddy. Could be that in the book’s crisis she’ll fail unless she relies on someone. For a happy ending, she does, and the friend comes through. For a tragedy, she doesn’t, or she does and the friend fails her.

We can add more characters if we like, the quirky supporting cast, although maybe not the best friend, while maintaining Regina’s loner personality. One of the supporting characters can be super-friendly, which may be annoying or not, and we can write all the ways Regina pushes him away. We can make a teacher reach out to her, and even though she likes this teacher, she can still keep herself at a long arm’s length.

Or we can make Regina a loner not by choice. She’s always reaching out, but her attempts are so awkward that people are put off. Or she’s hyper-critical and no one can stand to be around her. In this case we can also have a big cast, although no one likes her.

There are other alternatives as well. A long time ago I read a thriller called Slayground by Richard Stark (high school and up), which I’ve mentioned before on the blog. Most of the book, as I remember it, is a chase through an amusement part, and it was so tense that I inhaled before I read the first sentence and exhaled when I closed the book. Parker, the hero, isn’t a saint, but the people who are after him are worse. If I remember right, there were flashbacks to scenes with them and also to scenes with Parker’s girlfriend, but mostly the reader is in his head as he plans how to escape and how to defeat them. As I recall, we get to know only Parker in the course of the story, but it’s enough, because the action is so intense.

We can try something similar. Regina is alone somewhere; let’s imagine the setting is a kingdom where she doesn’t speak more than a few words of the language; she’s on a mission to capture the king’s daughter and get out. We write her thoughts, her plans, her emotions; we describe the castle and provide her observations of the king and his courtiers, the daughter, her nursemaids. We take her on a midnight exploration, where she fears discovery at every moment. If we want to suggest other characters in her life, we can have her write communiques that report her progress and failures to her commander at home, to her brother, to her teacher who prepared her for the mission. There’s probably going to be little dialogue in such a story, but lots of thoughts, setting, and, most of all, action.

Regina, her dog, and her parents can live in a remote place. She’s home-schooled, and she helps her parents with their work studying the behavior of a certain species of beetle. Maybe one of the parents is having trouble of some sort, and the beetles have been infested with a parasite, and Regina is carrying on a running argument with her parents about her future. Meanwhile, the dog develops a limp and the villain shows up. There’s a lot of complexity here. I don’t know if we need more characters.

The dog can be a full-fledged character, too, which will expand the cast a little. Even books for adults include animals who think in language. Some of them speak. A few examples include: Nop’s Trials by Donald McCaig (middle school and up, I think), which I loved, about a border collie; Call of the Wild by Jack London; Watchers by Dean Koontz (I’m not sure; maybe middle school, maybe high school), in which the dog’s name is Einstein, and I don’t think there are many characters in this one, either; Charlotte’s Web; Bambi. I don’t think the animals communicate directly with the human characters in any of these except Watchers. The dog in Rock On’s book–and ours–can talk if she wants it to. Regina’s dog can talk, can be her friend while maintaining its doggy qualities.

Here are five prompts:

• Regina lands on the seventh planet of a giant star, where conditions are deemed suitable for people. The others in her seven-member crew died during the crossing. She discovers three-legged sentient beings on this planet who remind her of stools more than of anything else. She needs to establish camp, resume communication with earth, and win the cooperation of the aliens. Write the story.

• Regina, a talented actor, is in a theater group. Everyone but her is outgoing, and she plays the part of a lovable friendly person. Because she’s so good, her fellow performers keep expecting her to be like her character. Write the cast party after the final performance in which she makes everyone understand that she is NOT their friend.

• Regina and her intelligent dog are home alone when the villain rings the doorbell and manages to get in the house. Write the scene, and be sure to keep the dog doglike even if you decide it can talk.

• Write the story of Regina with her beetle-scientist parents. You can give her the problems that I suggested or make up your own.

• Write the story of Regina and her attempt to kidnap the young princess.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Plots and subplots

On October 5, 2014, unsocialized homeschooler wrote, I’m on the fifth draft of my novel (oh the joy of calling my work a novel!) and I think I’ve lost my way. Originally the story was simple–boy likes girl, boy writes anonymous letters to girl, girl gets in trouble because of boy, girl hates boy, boy saves girl. Okay, so maybe not that simple, but now it’s really complicated. There are multiple perspectives, half a dozen more important characters, and another subplot. With all this extra stuff, the stuff that made up my first draft now only takes up a quarter of the novel. Part of me thinks that all the extra characters, subplots, points-of-view, and stuff should all go, but the other part of me really really really likes all the characters I’ve added.

So do I cut out all the stuff in an attempt to recapture the original magic of my story? Or do I leave it all in and re-write the story from scratch for the third time and embrace the new magic of my story? Any suggestions?

Most stories follow one or two MCs, who have goals, who face problems, who overcome for a happy ending or fail for a tragic one. But exceptions abound. An example that leaps to mind is the novel (high school and above, I think) Exodus by Leon Uris, which I read decades ago, and which follows multiple characters. The problem of the story, the founding of Israel, doesn’t belong to just one or two MCs, but the struggle unites the narrative.

So that’s one way, a connecting thread. If we look over our story with its octopus tentacles of plot and POV, can we find or devise a problem that unifies everything? Suppose that overarching issue is the romance, and let’s call unsocialized homeschooler’s boy Rafe, and girl Stella. Our other POV characters are Stella’s sister, Pauline; Rafe’s best friend, Tom; Stella’s ex-boyfriend, Oscar; the principal of their high school, Ms. Quincy; and–oh, let’s mix it up–Mellie, Rafe’s cat, who, unbeknownst to everyone, has recently achieved human intelligence due to a freak accident with lightning one night when she got out of the house to go prowling.

Since our unifying problem is the romance, each character has to be invested in its success or failure. Let’s say Mellie, who used to have a happy social life with other cats, now finds her former friends dull. She’s miserable and wants to spread it around, so she’s trying to sabotage the romance. The reader is interested in how she goes about this, and also in whether or not she’s going to remain super-intelligent and whether Rafe is going to figure out her transformation.

Say Oscar, Stella’s ex, wants the relationship to succeed. He’s mad at Stella for their break-up and he thinks (rightly or wrongly) that she and Rafe will be wretched together. He’s moved on, but his new relationship is troubled. If he gets to a better place, he may be kinder to Stella, so the reader is caught up in his story, too.

You get the idea. The lives of these other characters work because of the bearing they have on the main event, and also because we’ve, naturally, made their personalities and their stories compelling.

Now I’m thinking of the novel, Hawaii by James Michener (again, high school and up), another book that I read as a young adult. It proceeds chronologically and tells the story of the islands, starting with the geological events that created them. The six sections are separated by time gaps. One is about the Chinese immigration, another about the influx from Japan, and I don’t remember what else. Each part, as I recall, is long enough to be a novella and to be satisfying, and each stands alone. I don’t think characters appear in more time period.

So that’s another approach, a chronological ordering. We can start our story in the past. Rafe and Stella can be the patriarch and matriarch, from whom everyone else descends. Their romance can be successful, but there’s a problem that succeeding generations have to work out.

A third way might be through theme. Now I’m thinking about Little Women. The MCs are sisters, which makes their coexistence in a story natural, but each has her own narrative arc. One chapter belongs to one, another to another. They come together in the theme, which is growing up.

Love can be our theme in this example. The cat Mellie may find a turtle who was similarly storm-struck and whose intelligence was also enhanced. The two bond, and the reader experiences inter-species affection. Ms. Quincy becomes increasingly engaged with her job. She embraces the challenge of running a successful school (falling in love with her work). Oscar could be the failure. His new relationship founders, and his subplot is of love gone awry.

Writing in third-person can provide unity of voice, too. All of the books I mentioned are in third-person, but I don’t think that’s a necessity. Variety is fun for the reader, in my opinion.

Going in a different direction, however, we can decide that some of our subplots, new characters, and POVs deserve their own stories. We can split them off and give them their day in the sun. If we do, we may be able to be more expansive with them and not have to cram their problems into a story that belongs primarily to others (Rafe and Stella).

I’m painfully aware that I sometimes over-complicate my plots, and the result is that the tension flags. Then I have to slash and burn to get things rocketing along again. Many of us may struggle with this.If this is happening in your story or in unsocialized homeschooler’s, simplifying may be the only answer.

To go back to unsocialized homeschooler’s question: I can’t say whether she should cut back, embark on draft number six, or find some middle. Here on this blog we don’t mind writing again and again to get it right. The point is to create a sense of continuity.

Here are four prompts:

• Little Women is old enough to be in the public domain, which means you can fool around with it and not worry about copyright infringement. It’s possible that there’s more to Jo’s story than Louisa May Alcott was able to cram in with all the demands of the other sisters. Write a story about Jo that isn’t in the book. You can even make her an only child if you like. Then go on and write separate stories about each sister. You can also write one about Laurie. If you’re inspired, each one can be a novel, and the result can be a series.

• Write a story about Rafe and Stella and the others with the overarching problem being their romance. Add or subtract characters at will. Try it in third person and then in first from more than one POV.

• Write a story about them using the chronological approach. Rafe and Stella are the founders of the family, and they set up a mystery that succeeding generations have to resolve. Each secondary character can be the MC of a generation, or two of them can exist at the same time. Don’t forget Mellie the cat!

• Treat these characters thematically. Their stories are united by a common theme, which can be love or anything else.

Have fun, and save what you write!