Sunday, August 23, 2009

Confessions of a Plotter



Whenever anyone asks if I plot my books in advance or simply fly off into the misty unknown and write by the seat of my pants, I always say, “Oh, I’m definitely a plotter.”

But that doesn’t mean I have every scene nailed down before I start writing. I do carefully work out the beginning and sketch in the end (the operative word there is sketch). But my ideas for the middle are usually just that—ideas for scenes that sort of float, well, in the mist. And there usually aren’t enough of them. I’ve learned over the years that my grasp of the story changes once I actually start writing and new ideas pop up, so it’s a waste of time to put too much effort up front into carefully laying down a path I won’t end up following.

But I can only go on like that for so long. Somewhere around page 75-100, I haul out my 3x5” cards and go to work on my plot again. Each card represents one scene. The note cards I use at the initial concept stage—when I’m just getting a rough idea of what will happen for the proposal—are all white. But once I’m well into writing the story, I get really obsessive about pacing and timing. And since I’m a visual kind of person, when I go back and attack my plot again I use colored index cards.

If you’re curious about what all those different colors mean, here’s the code for my thrillers (I take a different approach for my mysteries):
Light green: Tobie and Jax scenes
Light blue: Noah scenes (Noah is the protagonist of the interwoven subplot)
Purple: action scenes involving Tobie and Jax (i.e., chases, fights, shootouts, etc.)
Dark blue: action scenes involving Noah
Dark red: the head villains plotting the dastardly deed Jax and Tobie are racing to avert
Light red: the villains’ minions, maneuvering to get Jax and Tobie (or Noah)
Yellow: missing links—places I need something to get me into or out of a scene or sequence of scenes

The beauty of this system is that I can see everything—pacing, character flow, and missing links—at a glance. I can see I need a purple card (a fight or a chase) here, or that I go too long without a villain scene there, or that I need another blue sequence with my subplot character, Noah, in there.

The layout is significant, too. But for now, I’ll leave you snickering at my OCPD tendencies.

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Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Back on Track

Well, I finally finished the reworking of the first hundred and twenty pages of The Babylonian Codex. I sat down last night and read through it. The pacing is good and the action tight, so all systems are now go to chug forward again.

I had a brief moment of panic when I couldn’t find my outline for the rest of the book. That outline—much scribbled over after Steve and I spent several nights intensively replotting—still isn’t finished, but the thought of losing the progress we’d made had me sick to my stomach. I spent several frantic hours cleaning up my office and my bedroom (I do a lot of my writing perched on the porch swing of the upstairs gallery). On the off chance I'd somehow mixed it up with my research material, I even sorted through and filed a huge stack of notes and print outs on everything from sailboats to the Gospel of St. Thomas (at which point I realized I’ve done way too much research for this book). I even went through the trash. And still no luck.

Of course I found it sitting on my desk, stuffed in the back of a note pad but so well aligned that nary a hint of its presence showed. I swear I looked in that pad a dozen times.

Note to self: become more organized, or risk stroke.

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Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Hello, April!



I don’t know about you, but I am really glad to see the back of March. In the past month I have: finished my fifth Sebastian book, What Remains of Heaven; seriously injured my eye; slogged (one eyed) through my editor’s requested revisions on my second thriller, The Solomon Effect; lost one of my cats; caught a nasty case of bronchitis that provoked a porphyria attack; and slogged (bucket within reach) through massive editorial rewrites for What Remains of Heaven. I’ve also participated in the presentation of an all-day workshop for aspiring writers at our local Barnes and Noble; had my youngest daughter home for spring break, and presented a luncheon speech at the Metairie Literary Guild. I started plotting my sixth Sebastian book, tentatively entitled What the Dead Tell (I know I won’t be allowed to keep that one), and then, yesterday, I sat down in a white heat and wrote the first chapter.

Coming up this month, I need to finish nailing the plot of the Sebastian book and write the first 35 pages and synopsis; plot the third thriller and write that proposal; and participate in the Jubilee Jambalaya conference down in Houma, where I’m presenting a workshop on plotting. It’s still a lot to do, but this is the part of writing that I love. Unlike (cue morgue organ) the dreaded edits.

Why do I hate edits so much? Because at that point, almost every book I’ve ever written strikes me as a piece of cr*p. I am painfully aware of the story’s warts and weaknesses. But time (or my own talent) has run out: this is as good as it gets, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s never good enough.

But the proposal stage (cue bird song and time elapse photos of spring flowers unfurling) is a time for falling in love, when my story idea is still a bright shiny bauble toward which I reach with excitement and wonder. There is no book, only an idea, and as we all know, falling in love with an idea is so much easier than loving a reality!

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Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Learning from Syd Field

The granddaddy of screenwriting instruction is Syd Field. While there has been a movement away from some of his teachings in recent years, he’s had such a profound effect on Hollywood thinking that he’s still a good place to start.

Field harks back to Aristotle’s division of fiction into a beginning, middle, and end. According to Field, the beginning of a film, or Act One, sets up the story, introducing the hero, his problem, and (in the words of the hero’s journey) his “call to action.” Act Two, the middle, is the main body of a screenplay, the scene of action and counteraction, of complications, the chess game of move and countermove. Throughout the middle, the stakes rise until the characters reach a point of no return. It’s here, at the point of no return, that the story flips into Act Three, the climax, the resolution, the end. Anyone who’s ever watched a movie will recognize these three segments. The beginning corresponds to the first 20-30 minutes of a movie, the middle is the largest chunk, the next 60 minutes, while the end or climax fills the last quarter of the film.

So how do we, as novelists, use this? Well, if we apply Field’s division to a 400 page novel, Act One would be the first 80-100 pages, Act Two is roughly page 100 to page 300, and Act Three is the final 100 pages. At this point you’re probably saying, Well, duh. But it’s the next part of Field’s teaching that is so helpful to novel writers.

Field is big on what he calls Plot Points: important, pivotal scenes that take the action and flip it in an entirely different direction. The two most important plot points are the critical scenes at the shift from Act One to Act Two, and from Act Two to Act Three. But Field also identifies three other key plot points: the Midpoint at around page 200 of our book (or half way through a screenplay), and two “Pinch Points” at roughly page 150 and page 250.

What this means is that, as a novelist beginning a new book, I can identify my pivotal scenes—the ah-ha moments in my story, when the action suddenly goes zinging off in a totally unexpected direction, like a pinball zapped by a quick-fingered pinball wizard. I can lay out those pivotal scenes, deciding, ah, yes, this will be my first Plot Point, this will be my second, and so on, spacing them out and making sure the tension and the stakes escalate until I reach my final plot point of no return.

So picture it: before I ever sit down to write, I know that Here, in my first 80 or so pages (I personally favor a shorter Act One), I’ll introduce my hero and his problem. Then, I'll have this pivotal scene that sends me into the middle part of my book. Then 50 pages to the first pinch point, 50 pages to the midpoint, 50 pages to the second pinch point, and 50 pages to the plot point that will send the action spinning into the climax. By breaking a 400-page novel down into these short interlinking segments, plotting suddenly becomes So Much Easier.

Conversely, if I’ve written a book and I have this nasty feeling that something is wrong, I can write a quick description of each of my scenes on a 3x5 card and lay my story out on the dining room table. It’s then very easy for me to look at my story and go, Oops! This is what’s wrong! I don’t have well-spaced pivotal scenes; I don't have a well-defined beginning, middle end; my story is too linear here, too crazy here. I need to even it out.

I’m a big fan of plotting with 3x5 cards. And I’m a really big fan of the pivotal scene concept. If you take nothing else from screenwriting techniques, this is a good one. But like I said, there is a new movement in Hollywood that does this a bit differently. And that’s what I’ll look at next time.

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Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Pantsers, Planners, and the Box Myth

Sphinx Ink has an interesting response to my question, How Do Pantsers Write a Book Proposal? It seems that after she mused on the subject, author Tim Hallinan—a pantser--contacted her by email.

According to Hallinan, he writes the first 10,000 words of his manuscript, brain storms possible developments and plot points both by himself and with friends, writes it all up into a short synopsis and sends it off.

You know what? That’s actually not all that different from my approach. I suspect the main difference is that I take the time to think those developments and plot points through a bit more carefully, write it all down, and then use those brainstorming sessions as a guide when I sit down to finish my novel. Hallinan basically ignores his synopsis and sets off on a journey of exploration. Some of those ideas he uses, some he doesn’t.

There seems to be this myth that pantsers write character-driven books while those who preplan their books create plot-driven stories that become—to use Tim Hallinan’s unflattering description—“a box to squeeze characters into.” No, no, no, no!!!

When I sit down to preplan my books, I don’t build a plot and then stick my characters into it. I ask, What would X do next? How would Y react to that? What is he thinking and feeling at this point? What’s the worse thing that could happen to X? (“Put your hero up a tree and throw rocks at him.”) My plots are very complicated with lots of twists and I like being able to shift things around at the planning stage rather than after I’ve invested months writing scenes that then need to be changed. It’s why the more books I’ve written, the more I’ve tended to preplan. I’m a basically lazy person. I don’t like wasting time and effort, and I don’t like tying myself in knots with rewrites. I also have this thing about control.

I understand that for pantsers, preplanning takes out all the fun. For me, it takes out a lot of the frustration and anxiety and severely reduces rewriting. It’s a trade off I’m willing to make, and can make, since I still enjoy the process of fleshing out the scenes I’ve envisioned.

How much do I preplan? That varies. Sometimes I’ll write down snippets of dialogue if they come to me. But mainly I focus on the conflict in a scene, and the outcome. When I was writing my medieval, THE LAST KNIGHT, for instance, I had a segment where the hero is thrown into prison and the heroine is locked up by her uncle. In my outline I had written, “They escape.” When I finally got to that point in the book, I looked at those two words and thought, “Yeah, right! HOW do they escape?” That was not preplanned. That was a fun, rollercoaster exploration that was actually four escapes—the heroine escaped from her room, then freed the hero, then together they escaped from the castle, and then the next morning they escaped from the walled city. Was it plot-driven? Yes, in the sense that I knew they had to escape (or the story would have ended). But it was also character driven, and character revealing. My heroine was the kind of woman who was risking her life to save her brother; of course she wasn’t going to simply sit in her tower room and say, “Pass the embroidery thread.”

There are also times when I’ll reach a scene and realize it’s wrong, that a character wouldn’t do what I’d envisioned. What I don’t do is squeeze my character into my preconceived plan. I change the plan. In MIDNIGHT CONFESSIONS, I was halfway through when I decided I needed to change the murderer. I’m a big girl. I can handle that.

But I also don’t allow my characters or my imagination to lead me astray. I keep a fairly firm hand on the reins, always conscious of where I’m going. That’s a personality thing, though, and has nothing to do with whether I write plot-driven or character-driven. I mean, I used to write historical ROMANCES, remember? No genre is more character driven than that!

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