Next week, I’ll once again be leading my POV class for LitReactor (still some seats if you’re interested!) And I remember eight years ago (gulp), when I taught it for the first time, one of the participants made an interesting discovery about his process. He realized that he had a habit of developing a scene starting with a plot point, after which he invited a distant third-person assessment of the plot point. He shared this anecdote:
When I hit a plot point that could be told from any one of a number of povs I start by dashing down the scene in objective 3rd and stay out of anyone's head. The scene sketch is rather thin this way, of course. Until this class I had no idea I was doing this--I only registered annoyance at the thinness of some scenes.
Now I see that I have just been delaying the move to 3rd limited until I understand the needs of the story and can dive into the right head. What's freeing is that now I don't feel like I'm "doing it wrong"--more that I'm doing it in stages.
I love that he shared this, and it made me realize that there are myriad approaches to harnessing that illusive relationship between plot, character and story-telling, in service of infusing all of this mishmash into the heart of the final recipient. For writers, this process can feel like a dance of intent with the unknown. A scary, untethered place to be sometimes.
As an editor, I often ask my clients questions like: What is the job of this scene? What are the consequences of your character’s actions? How do those actions impact the cause-and-effect trajectory of the story on the whole?
These questions are in service to making connections—neurological connections—to the reader. Yes, folks, brain science! The magic that blurs the edges between the work and the audience.
So what does this mean in terms of “approach” to narrative? How can you blend a natural approach with a framework that leads to a satisfying outcome? Is this, after all, what is meant by craft? Taking ephemera and concretizing it without losing its heart. How do you hold, as the Sisters of the Abbey sang in Sound of Music, a moonbeam in your hand?
Today, I want to share with you one person’s approach.
I’ve been coaching Sara, an Episcopal priest here in Portland, through her creative nonfiction book that she describes as part neighborhood church case study, part social commentary, and part memoir.
Here’s a little Q & A interview with Sara, with some accompanying pictures.
SV: In weaving these elements together, how did you keep track of all the moving parts?
SF: Laying each chapter out via post-it notes does it all for me. I think of the parts—church case study, social commentary, etc.—as threads that need to weave through each chapter, or at least, through most of the chapters. Each color post-it note represents one of these threads.
SV: Which organizational infrastructure did you find most helpful, and is there any particular part of your system that stands out as particularly helpful?
SF: For me it’s important to see the whole thing. Hence the post-it notes on the wall (or rather, on the closet door). The color coding allows me to see if I’m consistently carrying the threads through. My very favorite thing about this system is that when I’m done with a chapter, I compress the post-it notes. Even more satisfying than crossing it off a list!
SV: In designing an organizational system, did you go down any rabbit holes that you would not recommend?
SF: Everyone is different. I tried laying out the chapters to fit in a traditional five-part “hero’s journey” and found that so discouraging I considered abandoning the whole project until I remembered that the first rule of structuring a memoir is to break all the rules. (Right? That is the first rule, yes?) I tried clumping the chapter titles by themes on large sticky notes on a wall and then running a string as connective tissue. It looked like a patch of bad macramé and was no help at all. But, again, the most important thing is that everyone is different. My bad-trip rabbit hole might be someone else’s eureka.
I’m pleased to report that Sara has a complete book proposal and about 75% of the actual book finished. The sticky note process (I’ve used this too—in my debut novel, The Moment Before), is just as effective at pointing out what doesn’t work as it is in defining and amplifying the strengths of a work-in-progress.
Now, there are many other approaches to building a story. There’s Jennie Nash’s Inside Outline (this last picture with the scene, point, therefore notes is part of that method; then there’s a method that I used while editing Faultland that was introduced to me by one of the Ooligan Press editors—and I’ll go into that one more at length on a future post.
How about you? When it comes to moving bits and pieces of your work-in-progress, what sticks with you? (Not that pun, I’m sure.)
Wow! That’s brilliant & uncanny, I’ve been thinking today how much I love post-its & wouldn’t it be great to use them like cards... I’m doing a stationary shop tonight!
Love the color-coded Post-it Notes--I heard once about a woman who worked with three spools of ribbon by her desk, one color for each major thread of her novel. Whenever a chapter touched on one of these threads, she advanced the corresponding ribbon by an inch or two, and this gave her an intuitive sense of which thread she needed to "weave in" next. In the current revision of my WIP, which has a lot of heavy lifting to do in terms of backstory and exposition, I've been experimenting with using different-colored highlighters on the sections that advance each thread in this regard--the idea being that I should easily be able to go back and see what each of them adds up to, in terms of a picture in the reader's mind. We'll see!