Article: Hold on to Your Plot Part 2

A continuation from the article I posted here, read about how you can hold onto your plot by working with your characters, etc.

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

Plot and Characters
This is a good point to begin learning more about the characters, because there is an intimate relationship between them and the story and plot. You can plan a carefully detailed, workable plot before outlining the characters but if you do, they run the risk of being unconvincing, mechanical plot devices. So it is important to see your narrative as a complex interaction between the plot and the characters.

To make your story work, the characters need to be comfortable with the demands of the plot. I have often found my characters refusing to do what the plot dictates, simply because it would be against their nature. When this happens the problem is more than likely to be that the characters were fleshed out too late in the process, and the solution may be to change the course of events, alter the emphasis or abandon the plot altogether and start again. This sounds drastic but rethinking the characters and their relationships is much less satisfactory than making changes to the plot. Tailoring your characters to fit the plot risks narrowing their potential, making them less interesting and lifelike.

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.

Quote: Tight Plot

Boiled down to its basic elements, a plot is comprised of people with motives which meet resistance, creating conflict and leading to consequences. Scenes must either advance the plot or develop one or more of your characters so avoid waffling on if it isn’t relevant. If when re-reading you do find a section which is a touch on the flabby side, rewrite so that it works with the plot and characters, or steel yourself and press the delete key.
- Mike Philips

Storyboarding

I am an alpha personality: I live by lists, I like things ordered a certain way, I like to be in charge, I like to be on time. So you would think I use storyboarding to plot my novels, right?

Wrong! This past weekend was the first time I ever attempted a storyboard. And let me tell you: It was wonderful. I started out by drawing a line across an 11 x 24 sheet of paper for a timeline. I’ve always loved timelines, so it made sense for me to do it this way. Plus, my story has a backstory spanning ten years.

Then, I began writing major plot points onto post-it notes, sideways. This way, I could write multiple points on a single post-it, cut the post-it apart, and stick the post-it piece where I wanted. The backstory managed to fit on one page, as the image suggests.

The main year of my story covers two pages, as seen here, and here. The second page is where everything gets thrown at my main character… you can tell because the post-its are packed together and there are multiple dots of color everywhere. The last page, the conclusion of the story, is understandably less. I span my conclusion out over a couple months.

So what are the dots, you ask? The dots of color stand for each character that has their own complete subplot/story arc. I created a legend to help.

But why create a storyboard, Belinda? Your WIP meter says you’re 57% complete! Yes, well… that was true about a month ago, when the muse was flowing. Then I started writing a scene where I realized I didn’t know why the characters were arguing, just that they were. I freaked out, shut the file, walked away from the computer. I started reading Self-Editing for Fiction Writers and found my manuscript riddled with weak writing. As I started applying the rules, the heart of my story shone. A lot of little things happen where it helps me to know the month, so I started thinking of a timeline. And since I finished the storyboard, the muse returned. I even have my ending drafted, something sweet yet not cavity-inducing; I’m pretty pleased.

* Image by Organic Designs

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.

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.

Quote: The Plot

The primary purpose of the plot is to give the protagonist a reason to change in the direction she needs to change.
- Alicia Rasley

Nifty Online Plotting Tools

I found these tools online by searching “character, writing tools” through Google. Some of these are actually meant for students to map/study an already published text, but I see no reason why we can’t also use them to analyze our own work.

Drama Map: this is a smiple organization tool to help with character, conflict, resolution, and setting mapping. Not the most detailed, but if you are working scene-by-scene, this could actually be very useful. Plus, it’s always fun to work with pretty graphics.

Circle Diagram: another way to map out scenes (or your overall plot) is to use the circle diagram theory. The idea is that you place the beginning at the 23:55 and the ending at say… the 00:05 position (if we’re thinking clocks). Then, you put the exact center of your plot at the 12:00 position. Keep filling in with plot twists, etc, and when you’ve filled the sides of the circle, you can start drawing lines across it. This allows you to draw on information that only you as the author knows early in the plot, and have it relate to something much later.

General Themes that (almost) all stories start from:

*The journey there and back.
*Winning the prize.
*Winning or losing the loved one.
*Loss and restoration.
*The blessing becomes the curse.
*Overcoming obstacles.
*The wasteland restored.
*Rising from the ashes.
*The ugly duckling.
*The emperor has no clothes.
*Descent into the underworld.

I’ll return later with quick summaries of all the books I’ve been reading. I sort of fell behind on my reviews. Such is the life of a student. Or rather, such is life.

Why Historical Fiction?

In this session, Whitbread award-winning novelist Rose Tremain looks at the issues around writing and publishing historical fiction. (From BBC – Get Writing [here ]).

Why Historical Fiction?
I believe that the ultimate goal of historical fiction is to evoke the past and its characters within that past in such a way as to create a ‘universal story’, one with which the readers of today (no less than the readers of tomorrow) can identify. The prime reason for setting a novel in history is to escape the confines and dictates of a narrow contemporary realism in order to explore the big themes of existence, such as love and betrayal, poverty and riches, success and failure, youth and age, war and peace, truth and lies, honour, friendship and death. Many great writers, including Dickens, Shakespeare and Tolstoy understood that novels or dramas set in past time can be every bit as powerful and ‘relevant’ to contemporary readers as those exploring a familiar quotidian scene.

We live in an age where the diversity and absolute strangeness of human life are more accessible to us than in any previous era, through television and the internet.

Our world vision is immense. That which is ‘strange but true’ – the thing which has actually been lived or done – amazes us because we then go on to ask ourselves whether we could have lived through it or done it or been as this or that person has been. That which is invented – though it may make us understand our lives better or differently, move us, terrify us or make us angry or make us laugh – doesn’t invite or challenge us to attempt identification of this particular kind.