Article: Hold On to Your Plot Part 1

When we begin writing, we have this core idea, this main plot that keeps the story together. But as we get deeper into subplots and secondary/tertiary characters, sometimes we lose our main idea. We obsess over the little things. We forget the forest for the trees. We see the colors but not the rainbow. I could go on, but I won’t, for your sake. The following series of three entries will focus on Mike Phillips’s essay showing how he keeps his plot in line, with his hints on how to help you stay focused.

Article found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/getwriting/module27p

Losing the Plot?
by Mike Phillips

New Ideas from Old
Plots are always based on a story of some kind, and there are only a limited number of basic stories in any culture. Boy meets girl, for instance, or the eternal love triangle. Look hard enough at any story and you will always find the fingerprints of an earlier one.

My own first novel, Blood Rights, was based on a reworking of the story of Oedipus – boy meets dad, kills him and marries mum. This is a fairly unusual family crisis but, in principle, most plots draw on stories which have universal and familiar themes, both within history and for our own times. Exploring and developing stories of this kind is a reliable and interesting way of starting to construct a plot.

Exactly how you go about doing this is a matter of individual temperament. I have sometimes found that it requires nothing more than the impulse to get something down on paper, rather than having planned it out meticulously before I pick up a pen.

Tension Tips

Fear Factor
Get inspiration from your own fears and phobias – if it scares you, the chances are it will scare a good proportion of your readership. Primal fears go to the very route of who we are and can be particularly effective if they’re magnified or exaggerated for the purposes of your story.

Short and Sweet
Use short sentences to keep your prose tight and efficient. This will help create tension, whereas longer, description-heavy passages will slow down the pace. And if you’re writing a novel, keep your chapters short. Not only will this crank up the stress, readers will be encouraged to read more of your book!

Shock Treatment
Keep readers guessing by leaving each chapter or scene on a cliffhanger of some sort. It doesn’t have to be one of your characters in a life-threatening situation each time, but you should aim to have your readers wanting to know what happens next.

Found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/getwriting/module21p

The Importance of Theme for Organization

I often read that the biggest things a writer should worry about are theme and organization. Theme, because that is the heart of your work; organization because that’s the skeleton to help you write about the theme.

For the longest time I wondered, How does one find a theme in the first place? Maybe something happened in your life that you want to write about. Let’s face it, wanting to write about that topic isn’t enough. You need a focus, something that connects you to the topic and distances you from it at the same time, so that you can communicate clearly with your reader.

I began with “I want to write a romance, but I don’t want the heroine to be the typical spunky girl. I want her flawed, and with heavy concerns.” So, I worked from there, writing character descriptions and first drafts; I wrote an entire 94k first draft just throwing whatever came to me onto the page. I celebrated, because we all should celebrate the completion of a draft, especially when it takes three years to do it (full-time student, remember). Then, I stuffed it under my bed (or maybe in the back of my closet, I’m always re-organizing so I never completely know where some things are) and started over.

Step One: Write a shitty first draft and be done with it.

After that, I walked away from the work for a month. Namely, NaNoWriMo month. The crazy speed of that writing month invigorated me, and in December I said hello to the original work with a new focus. I started over with this new focus, with a new understanding of the characters, and with a pretty solid understanding of their initial back stories.

Side Note: a back story, if you don’t recognize the term, is a short story and/or history about a character, location, or object that happened before your current time line.

Step Two: Use the extraneous parts of your shitty first draft as a collection of back stories to your characters.

Now I’m halfway through First Draft B, as I like to call it (props to Redshoeson for the naming idea). I know where I would like the story to go. But my initial back stories aren’t full enough. I have to go back. Give each main, secondary, and even tertiary character additional back stories about their history with the other characters. These back stories lead to motivation, motivation to decision, and decision to action. But my back stories all need a theme. There must be something connecting these characters. But… how to write the theme?

The theme is a single sentence that succinctly describes what your work is about. Also known as a thesis, blurb or hook: the main idea that keeps you writing, and grabs the reader’s interest. Still, it’s hard to know how to write this magical sentence. So, look at examples. The first sentence on the back cover of a paperback is usually the hook, which the copywriter expands into paragraphs about the main characters and why we should read about them. I also found reading the New York Times bestseller list really helpful, because the top ten have one-sentence summaries.

Step Three: Read the New York Times bestseller list.

Try to keep your theme/hook/blurb/thesis at fifteen words or less. You want this to be focused but universal, so don’t use the main character’s name unless it is a sequel or part of a series. Don’t use passive voice! Choose your words carefully; every word in your theme should be there because there is no better word for it.

Here are some examples from the bestseller list in July:

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen: A young man — and an elephant — save a Depression-era circus.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards: A doctor’s decision to secretly send his newborn daughter to an institution haunts everyone involved.

Peony in Love by Lisa See: Love, death and ghosts in 17th-century China.

The Quickie by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge: A police officer’s attempt to get back at her husband, whom she suspects of cheating on her, goes dangerously awry.

After you have the main theme, things will fall into place, slowly at first. Your theme is your thesis, so tie everything back to it and you’ll have a tight, organized work.

Eight Writing Tips by Vonnegut

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut

Book: Stardust

Title: Stardust
Author: Neil Gaiman
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 235 pgs

Summary: In the town of Wall there is a young man named Tristran Thorn, and he is in love with a young woman named Victoria Forester. Victoria, young, beautiful, and completely aware of the fact, sends Tristran on a fool’s errand: to fetch the fallen star on the horizon. And so, Tristran steps across the border from the everyday to the mystical.

Excerpts:
pg 23 – He entertained these thoughts awkwardly, as a man entertains unexpected guests. Then, as he reached his objective, he pushed these thoughts away, as a man apologizes to his guests, and leaves them, muttering something abuot a prior engagement.

pg 36 – “Anyway,” said Cecilia Hempstock, Louisa’s cousin, “he has already been married. I would not wish to marry someone who has already been married. It would be,” she opined, “like having someone else break in one’s own pony.”
“Personally, I would imagine that to be the sole advantage of marrying a widdower,” said Amelia Robinson. “That someone else would have removed the rough edges; broken him in, if you will. Also, I would imagine that by that age his lusts would long since have been sated, and abated, which would free one from a number of indignities.”

pg 131 – “A nymph. I was a wood-nymph. But I got pursued by a prince, not a nice prince, the other kind, and, well, you’d think a prince, even the wrong kind, would understand about boundaries, wouldn’t you?”
“You would?”
“Exactly what I think. But he didn’t, so I did a bit of invoking while I was running, and–ba-boom!–tree. What do you think?”
“Well,” said Tristran. “I do not know what you were like as a wood-nymph, madam, but you are a magnificent tree.
“I was pretty cute as a nymph, too.”

pg 224 – He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize how much he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he decalred that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.

Why should you read this book?
Because it’s Neil Gaiman, and everyone should read one Gaiman book at some point. This book begged to be read aloud, and I almost wish (now this is a shocker) that I had the audio version. The narration is simple yet intriguing and complex; I want to read it again just to figure out how he was able to convey so much with so little. Which is exactly why you should read this book. Long sentences and over-the-top vocabulary are gimicks easily pointed out…they hide bad plots and expose worse execution. Gaiman’s simple narration is a quick read, yet, there are important themes discussed.

Plus, the movie comes out on my birthday. So, read the book before you watch the movie, as the movie is almost never as good as the original.

Horror Fiction

Think you’re just a simple fiction writer? That your romance doesn’t have anything to do with horror? I find that the best fiction has elements of multiple genres, or at least tricks from multiple genres. You want to add tension, or make your antagonist creepy and scary? Try applying some of these horror fiction hints to bring out that creep factor. Even if in the end you decide it’s not for you, it will make for a great writing exercise!

Horror Fiction Unearthed
by Shaun Hutson

Getting a Reaction
Can you hear scratching at your door while you’re reading this? Nothing too insistent. It might just be a sound you haven’t heard before, a banging in the radiator pipes possibly. A creaky floorboard? That’s the way a lot of horror stories start. Something small and apparently insignificant grows gradually until all Hell is let loose, sometimes quite literally.

Writing horror for me started with a similarly small and apparently insignificant event. Quite simply, I read a horror book that was so badly written that I thought I must be able to do better myself. The only problem is that when people say they’ve read something of mine and felt inspired to start writing I now wonder if it’s for the same reason I started…

Let’s hope your desire to start writing horror comes from what I now see as a vocation in life. That is to say, scaring the living daylights out of people. But also the realization that you can work in a genre like no other from a writer’s point of view. You can do everything within a piece of horror fiction that you can do in any other genre, and much more. The only thing that limits you is the extent of your imagination.

I’m in the business of scaring people. The by-products of my work might be nightmares (which are the ultimate accolade in this genre), they might be vomiting (I would say I’m only kidding but someone wrote to tell me a scene one of my books inspired this rather more than usually visceral reaction), or they might be outrage at some supposedly taboo subject that I’ve dared to write about but, whatever the case, the main thing is to get a reaction. Make them love you or make them hate you but don’t allow them to be undecided. To my mind, the worst thing a writer can be confronted with is indifference.

So, how the hell, if you’ll excuse the pun, do we go about getting that reaction?

Playing with Structure

Here is a great article on the structure of your work, stressing the importance of making the structure as important as the plot.

What is Structure?
by David Mitchell

To begin with, structure need not just be a frame on which you hang narrative, but a kind of plot in its own right, running parallel to the narrative-plot. Twists in this ‘structure-plot’ occur as and when its nature and workings are revealed to the reader.

What follows are observations and suggestions about constructing, handling and using a complex structure. Structure can be to fiction what the work done in an editing suite is to a film, which is why I’ve chosen examples from films as well as books. Structure dictates how your reader will experience your writing, and the importance of that ‘how’ cannot be overstated.

A traditional narrative-plot is a sort of question-engine (“Who killed Professor Plum?”) whose leading answers give the text momentum (“Colonel Mustard, in the library, with a candlestick… but why?”). Characterization also has a propulsive quality (“Why was Old Plum such a swine anyway?”, “Ah, that’s because of the War – sit down and let me fill you in…”). Less obviously, structure, too, can be made to ask questions: often a variation on “What’s happening here, in what order, perceived by whom?” A complex structure has the potential to surprise, connect with and intrigue the reader in innovative ways.

But how complex is complex? “Complex enough to generate unusual effects, unusual problems with unusual solutions” is an answer only slightly less arbitrary than the question, but it’s the one I’d like to run with. Thus a narrative-alternating structure (A1, B1, A2, B2, A3, B3…) where narratives A and B share a world and are ‘aware’ of each other (as in, say, the second book of The Lord of the Rings) won’t be counted as complex because it’s old as the hills, but a structure such as that of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (A1-20, A1, B1, A2, B2…) will.

The Heart of the Story

Though this is more about feature writing in a newsmagazine or some such publication, I thought this article was helpful for us fiction writers as well. Just um…whenever he writes “journalist,” substitute “fiction writer.” In general, it works out.

The Heart of the Story
by Jon Ronson, feature writer for The Guardian

Finding a Story to Tell
How do you begin your story? All journalists are, to a greater or lesser degree, paranoid conspiracy theorists. This is because stories do not have natural boundaries, every lead can take you to another lead, every thought to another thought, and eventually – if you allow yourself to become crazy – every story you write can incorporate the past, present, and future of all human civilisation. You don’t believe me? Okay, I’m going to pick a topic at random. The Paris fashion shows.

Every journalist is – at some point in their career – asked to cover the Paris fashion shows. The brief is this: we are slobs with no fashion sense. Wouldn’t it be funny to send us to this strange world, where we can be wide-eyed, sardonic innocents, making fun of the pomposity, the circus, and the expensive clothes?

So you start with that very brief, but the conspicuous, garish wealth on display starts to grind you down. Where are the clothes produced? Are they stitched together in some sweatshop where the workers are beaten up for complaining about their conditions? So it becomes a story about that. And you feel so superior in your slobbishness, and you think it’s all a con, but what if you’re wrong? I don’t like looking like a slob. Are they happier than me? What is happiness? How old is that girl? Oh my God, am I a dirty old man for finding her attractive? Why does the age of consent differ from country to country? Is the Law as fragile as a shifting sandbank? Should the Law respond to the moral climate or dictate it? Is she too thin? She looks ill, yet attractive. Why is that? Why did Ali McGraw become better looking the sicker she got in Love Story?

Book: The Thirteenth Tale

Title: The Thirteenth Tale
Author: Diane Setterfield
Genre: Fiction
Length: 406 pgs

Summary: Margaret Lea has a secret about her birth; a secret that haunts her to this day, and affects every decision she makes. She is the daughter of an antique book dealer, and so is his helpmate in running the bookshop that maintains their lifestyle. One day, a letter arrives for Margaret, written in an awful hand, requesting that she journey to the home of the infamous writer, Vida Winter. Miss Winter is infamous because of her past, or lack of it, for with every interview there is a new rendition, and none of them are true. There is no record of Miss Winter’s birth, her childhood…nothing to say who she was before she appeared in the literary world. Miss Winter, it seems, wants to tell the truth of her past for the first time, ever, and she has chosen Margaret for the job. After thirty (or forty, perhaps?) years of public speculation about the past of Miss Vida Winter, and the plot of the missing thirteenth tale from her book Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation (only twelve were released), Vida Winter is ready to speak the truth.

Excerpts:
pg 4 – (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)

pg 5 – Some writers don’t like interviews of course. They get cross about it. “Same old questions,” they complain. Well, what do they expect? Reporters are hacks. We writers are the real thing. Just because they always ask the same questions, it doesn’t mean we have to give them the same answers, does it? I mean, making things up, it’s what we do for a living.

pg 32 – I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a yearning for the lost pleasure of books. [...] Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.

pg 45 – People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he’d hurt someone’s feelings. But then he was a genius.

pg 46 – “Readers,” continued Miss Winter, “are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer’s life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. [...] To write my books I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work.”

pg 100 – You could hear the power of his brain in his voice, which was quiet but quick, with a facility for finding the right words for the right person at the right time. You could see it in his eyes: dark brown and very shiny, like a bird’s eyes, observant, intent, with strong, neat eyebrows above.

pg 177 – As he listened, he had been been rather struck by her queer little voice. Despite its distinctively feminine pitch it had more than a little masculine authority about it. She was articulate. She had an amusing habit of expressing views of her own with the same measured command as when she was explaining a theory by some authority she had read. And when she paused for breath at the end of a sentence, she would give him a quick look–he had found it disconcerting the first time, though he now found it rather droll–to let him know whether he was allowed to speak or whether she intended to go on speaking herself.

pg 220 – His voice had the unmistakable lightness of someone telling something extremely important. A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

pg 289 – Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

Why should you read this book?
Because it is a love story to readers and writers. This just might be my favorite book if 2007, just as Elantris was my favorite of 2006. I will be hard-pressed, I think, to find another book that immediately enfolded me in its mystery and charm, leaving me dazed in my everyday activities as I contemplated the characters and plot. Every character is tangible and sympathetic, the setting is distinct, and the plot is original (to me, at least). The style is romantic in the classic sense of the word, yet entirely believable given the narrator’s (Margaret) deep appreciation of books. We’re never given a time period, yet I’m left with the impression that Margaret lives in the 1930s, 40s, or perhaps even 1950s.

Reading this book left me with sensations of DuMarier’s Rebecca, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, LeFanu’s The Wyvern Mystery, and other such romantic, gothic, books. Read it for the intense characterizations. Read it to know the language of a bibliophile speaking with another bibliophile, describing favorite works. I feel as though The Thirteenth Tale has changed me and so my writing: it’s let me believe that there are readers willing to entertain a more romantic and classic style from a modern author, and that is good news indeed.

Playing with Structure

Using Foreshadowing
Heighten the themes of your story or increase the tension by using small incidents which echo later, more significant events, known as foreshadowing. Keep it subtle though, and the reader will be quietly thrilled to have spotted your literary trickery!

Multiple Viewpoints
Don’t be afraid to tell your story from multiple viewpoints if you feel it’s right, but be careful not to confuse the reader – make it clear which character is in pole position at any one time.

Question Your Decisions
Once you’ve decided on a structure (or as one develops while you write), ask yourself what your chosen structure adds to the story. If your answer is that it seemed like a good idea at the time, it might be worth reconsidering!

Article found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/getwriting/module15p