Redheaded Quilter

Another part of developing a novel structure is planning the locations. Just like with a movie, the “set” makes a difference. Where do your characters live? What kind of place is it (urban, suburb, rural?) If it’s a city, is it a rich one or a poor one? Most cities are a mixture, so what part of town do they live in and do they visit or know people in other parts of town? Where do they hang out? Do they have a favorite restaurant? Do they go to school? Do they go to church? To the mall? What do they see every day that might influence their thoughts, feelings, or actions?

To develop this part of my novel, I turned again to my long list of scenes (which I know is still partial, but which will form the backbone of my story). Next to each scene I wrote about the setting.

Here is a sample of my location notes from my first five scenes. The notes not only include the actual place (that is, “airport” or “church”, but they also include notes about why I want to set something in a particular place and give me some options for other places I could set the scene if I feel like that is necessary once I start writing.

You’ll notice that I’ve included some additional information that wasn’t in earlier notes, like the fact that the family is Catholic. I decided this on the fly, but for several reasons:

• I grew up in a Catholic household, so I am most used to their rituals and can write about it much more easily than I could about any other religion.
• I don’t want to have to research an entirely different tradition just for one scene.
• It ties into something I discovered about the mother yesterday while writing about her emotions – she’s sort of a born again Catholic. When her husband dies she is suddenly overcome with a religious fervor that doesn’t seem to really help her and in fact harms her by pushing away her daughter who thinks it’s all a crock of BS.

Writing this has also revealed to me something else about the daughter. I have been struggling to decide what her college major was, what her interests are. The fact that she grew up as a tomboy, spending more time with her dad than with her mother, and the fact that there is some pre-existing tension between she and her mother tell me that she didn’t take on a study or career path the mother approves of. And the thought I had just now that her mother’s religiosity pushes her away reveals to me that she’s an atheist. I think she’s going to be a science major of some kind, either in the medical field, or perhaps in some boring, obscure science at which she thought she could get a job easily, but which evaporated with the recent destruction of the economy. All kinds of manufacturing plants need scientifically minded people, but when the jobs are shipped overseas, those jobs go away and there is often no other place to apply such specialized skills. I believe this is what is happening to my MC.

I love how something as unrelated as “location” has revealed to me not only my MC’s college major and religious beliefs, but the probable path of her early career. I find it fascinating how each layer builds upon the previous and sometimes enhances it or uncovers something I’ll need to know later on.

Now that I have a rough plot nailed down, I need to think about my characters. Sometimes they come first for me, before any story, but this time they are still vague. Last week I jotted a few notes about my MC, but they are not a full character sketch.

There are many character sketch templates available on the web. Usually they are a list of possible traits – everything from philosophical opinions right down to eye color. I’ve never really liked those templates. They seem to me to be an artificial way of creating a character. How can I know who each person is before I’ve lived with them for awhile? I would rather start with the character’s actions and allow those actions to tell me what kind of person I’m writing about.

There are other character-related questions I have to answer though. For example, before the story starts, my MC’s father dies. I already know that she had a good relationship with him. She was a tomboy – the son he never had – and they did everything together. She loved him. All her memories of him are happy ones and she is deeply saddened by his death. What I need to work out is how she will feel throughout the story because everything that happens to her for the next several months (the entire length of the story) will be colored by her sadness at his death, by her memories of him, and by what she finds out about him as the story goes on.

So I’m going back to my trusty spreadsheet. I find I’m enjoying this method of structuring my story and it seems to work for me. This time, I’m going to add a column for my MC (and one for her mother). This column will give me a place to explain what kind of emotions she has in a given scene – unrelated to the action in the scene itself.

Anyone who has ever lost a loved one knows that what’s happening in the external world sometimes has no bearing on the feelings you’re having inside. You can be at a hilarious movie and burst into tears for what seems like “no reason” to those observing you. All the reasons are internal and in this character development phase, I want to plan out what her internal emotions will be in each scene and whether they’ll match or go against what is happening. Will she act on her feelings, or not? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on what I need the story to do at a given time.

Her feelings will be linked to her father’s death, certainly, and I’ll have her go through at least some of the standard phases of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). But they’ll also be linked to her feelings about her hometown and how it has changed and to her mother and how things are suddenly different with her now that they’ve both lost the most important man in their lives. Her grief will color how she reacts when she finds out the truth about her father (hint: he’s not the hero everyone thinks he is), and that will make for some interesting scenes. She still loves him, but he’s disappointed her greatly and her sadness will be all mixed up with her feelings of betrayal.

Here is my first cut at trying to describe what I think she’ll be feeling in the scenes in part one.

This exercise helped me uncover details about my characters that I didn’t know even yesterday. For example, I didn’t know until I filled out this table that the mother was religious. I didn’t know that my MC had doubts about her parents’ relationship. You can see how this step can be an important part of getting to know your characters.

What is your favorite way to flesh out your characters?

After the basic plotting steps I talked about part 1 and part 2, it’s time to start elaborating on the bare bones scene descriptions.

To do this, I took each scene listed in part 2 and jotted a sentence or two about what I want the scene to do, how I want it to contribute to the overall story. If I want the scene to have a particular feel, I’ve added that information too; although for some of them, I don’t yet know what kind of feel I’m aiming for. In some cases, I’m not even sure exactly what will happen in that scene. I may write something like, “MC reacts” but I don’t yet know how she’ll react. Will she be furious? Saddened? Hysterical? Who knows? I won’t know an authentic reaction for her until I get to know her better and the only way to do that it by writing her.

These notes will come in handy when I actually start writing in November. They will keep me on track and guide me when I’m at a loss for what should come next or how to treat a current scene. Here are my elaborations for the first few scenes.

This kind of exercise is a great way to flesh out the scenes and to see where you may want to add some foreshadowing, reveal thoughts and emotions in a subtle way, or introduce minor characters or flashbacks to fill out the story.

I started out with 28 scenes and after doing this exercise, I ended up with 2 additional scenes and at least one new character. I’m sure I will add in more scenes as I’m writing, but these are the major ones, the ones that will do most of the work. The others may just be filler. Then again, if they won’t contribute, why bother to write them? Thirty scenes in 17 chapters may be enough all on their own to tell this story. I won’t really know until I get to the next stage.

Last weekend I asked how you dream up a plot. I’m still waiting for a response from anyone… Despite your lack of comments, I thought I’d post part two of my plotting series.

NaNo starts in – ack – 13 days! I’ve had a rough outline of a plot in my head for a couple of weeks now, but I haven’t put anything on paper until today. Everyone plots in different ways. Even I plot differently depending on what I’m writing or how the story hits me in those first heady days of creation. Here is how I did it this time. It may be helpful, it may not, but if nothing else, it will show you a way you may not have thought of.

I’m usually very systematic in how I approach things. I love charts, diagrams, and lists. I’m trying to keep all that to a minimum with this novel because sometimes the planning smothers the creativity. (I’d far rather research than write!) So I’m planning (ha!) to wing it this time and see what happens. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need a structure. Something as long and complicated as a novel needs some kind of foundation to build on. As Strunk & White say, the structure is the bones to which the writer applies the flesh and blood.

I started plotting by jotting down in Excel all the scene ideas I had. To me, the scenes usually come as visual images in my mind. For example, one of the first images I had for this novel was of my MC jogging in the dark on a rainy night, looking into a window and seeing something awful being done. What she sees is the catalyst for the entire story and is tightly woven in with other events (although she won’t realize that until much later).

After I had about 10 scenes written down, I assigned them to ‘acts’. I know a novel is not a play or a movie, but every good story follows the same basic structure (there’s that word again) and a beginning, middle, and end is easy for people to understand and relate to. After sorting my scenes into acts, I further divided them into ‘chapters’.

This kind of organizing is very simple to do and you can do it on paper if you prefer, (or in Word or whatever word processor you’re using.) I like Excel because it makes it very easy to re-sort my scenes and chapters if I change my mind about the order I want them in.

As I added scenes, I re-read them in order to see if I liked the flow. If something seemed to be missing, I would add a scene. Sometimes I wouldn’t be sure what would happen, but I knew that something else was needed, so I’d write something like, “something bad happens here”. If the plot looked like I’d had too many similar scenes in a row, I would re-order them or add one in the middle to break up the similarity. Happy books have their place, but they’re generally boring. The reader needs some tension in order to stay interested, so if it looked like I had too many happy, easy, good scenes in a row, I’d throw in (you guessed it) “something bad happens here”.

After sorting all my scenes, I assigned them to chapters. I tried to end each chapter with some kind of cliff hanger to make the reader want to turn the page. As you can see below, chapter 1 is lacking that, unless I can somehow make the funeral into a cliffhanger. That’s a bit unlikely (although you never know what’s going to happen at a funeral when emotions are high). I may have to insert another scene at the end of chapter 1 to give people a reason to go on to chapter 2 or come up with something interesting for the end of that funeral.

Thirteen days before NaNo, the first part of my plot looks like this.

I want act 1 to be short and snappy, thus, it’s only two chapters and only 5 (maybe 6) scenes long. Some of the scenes will be lengthy, such as the funeral and seeing the event that kicks off a whole series of awful things (on top of the funeral of her father which was the first awful thing).

Act 2, which I haven’t shown here, currently has 5 chapters and 13 scenes. Since that’s the guts of the book, it may grow longer. Act 3 starts with another horrible event in my character’s life (can you tell I love to torture them?) and contains 8 chapters and 10 scenes. It also might grow, but I don’t want it to be too long. Once you get on that downward slope to the ending you want to resolve things quickly. My last scene note to myself is “happy ending of some sort” because I haven’t figured out how they’ll resolve the problem. I’m hoping it comes to me by the last week of November.

So this is how I’m plotting this NaNo. What do you think? Do you do it the same way? Differently? Do you have advice? Think I’m on the wrong track? Leave a comment!

In 2009 I participated in National Novel Writing Month and I actually finished – I achieved the 50,000 words I had to write! (I haven’t done a damn thing with the resulting draft, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Last year I didn’t do it but this year, now I’m more settled in my new state and I have a new job, I’m going to do NaNo again!

I spent weeks in September racking my brain for a plot, but nothing came to me. I’m not one of those writers who is always overflowing with stories. It’s hard work (sometimes) to make them show themselves. But now, I have what I think is a great idea for a novel. I’m not sure I can do it justice, but I want to give it a try.

It started a few weeks ago when I got a song stuck in my head. The song is “The Girl All the Bad Guys Want” by Bowling for Soup. It’s a little pop ditty about a guy who has a crush on a girl who likes tough guys but, [spoiler!] in the end he wins her [of course]. It’s really cute and annoyingly catchy and it wouldn’t go away for two weeks. Listen!

I have always been in awe of how song writers can put an entire story (even a silly one like this) into a 3 or 4 minute song. I kept wishing I could write something that complete and compact, or alternatively that I could start with something that complete and compact and unfold it into a full-length novel. But I didn’t want to just copy the story of the song because that would be cheating. So I mulled it over while the song went through my head about a million times.

Finally one night I thought, “Why do all the bad guys want her?” I knew that in my story they didn’t want her the same way they do in the song, and suddenly it all fell into place. I started concocting a story about a young woman who sees the “bad guys” doing something “bad” and they find out that she saw them and are after her. That’s how it started, but then it stalled. I didn’t know anything about her or the “bad guys” and didn’t get any farther.

A trip to the library the following weekend was unproductive – they didn’t have any of the 5 books I wanted in stock. (Although they did have two copies of my composting book and one had been borrowed!)

I browsed through the non-fiction section looking for something interesting. I don’t like to read fiction when I’m trying to plot my own. It’s too distracting and then I second guess myself. I saw a book called Methland about a small town in Iowa that was basically… I was going to write “destroyed by meth” but that’s not quite right. The town was destroyed by government policies and giant agricultural monopolies and then meth moved in (as it does in lots of small towns that have gone through this same process.) It looked interesting, so I borrowed it. After a few chapters, I knew the setting for my story and I knew what the “bad guys” were involved in. Over the next week or so as I read, my plot took shape.

I’m not going to reveal it here. For one thing NaNo hasn’t started yet. For another, it may change into something wildly different as I write it. But I thought some of you might be interested in how one writer gathers little bits and pieces from seemingly disparate places to eventually concoct a plot.

I hope I can blog a bit more this month as I plan and before the writing starts, but I won’t make any promises. My time is tight lately and if research or planning is to happen at all, it will eat up my online time.

But if you are doing NaNo, let me know below! And good luck!

Oh, and sorry for the earworm!