In my first formal creative writing class (back in, gulp, 1990), folks liked to bandy about that E.L. Doctorow canard: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Being a make-it-up-as-I-go-along type generally, I loved that idea. It seemed to encourage unbound creative license. Glimpsing micro moments of an invented narrative made writing sound so sexy and magical. I mean, that whole thing about a story writing itself—combining the genesis of an idea with a depository of experienced ephemera where anything could happen—as a Pantser, I bought into the philosophy completely.
For me, the “headlights” paradigm worked well for idea-driven short stories that coalesced around a theme. In other words, a trip to the 7-Eleven down the street at night in the fog. But when I applied it to a full-fledged cross-country road trip? Not so much.
Years ago I wrote about my first experience using a plot board. Employing a broad-strokes outline, I wrote the first draft of The Moment Before (then called Raising Cheer) in two months. Jeez, was that almost a decade ago? Really? And yet, with each subsequent project (I wrote Faultland, reframing the story from studs out at least five times), I wasn’t as successful relying on a plot-based outline. Possibly, because of the multiple POVs, and possibly because I yearned for the complexity of the fog and those delicious surprise shapes that lurked just past the headlight beams. What is that old saying? You can take the girl out of Neverland, but you can’t take Neverland out of the girl?
Well, I’m trying something hybrid for my latest project. Something not-quite Plotter/not-quite Pantser. Or a little of both. Fog AND foglights AND the robotic voice of the maps app chiming away as I go.
I started with an idea: twins separated at birth and raised under different circumstances, set in the near future, when climate change has rendered the country even more partisan than now. It’s a theme that will become more nuanced over time, but the correlative involves drilling down into the psychology and cultural background of these two 18-year old girls when they first come together as the culminating scene of the first act—and how that shifts and changes over the course of the narrative.
I know where I’m starting, and have an idea for the ending (can you see the Google Maps metaphor? The blue dot and the red dot?), but the line in between is faint, and my job is to make that line darker.
How?
Back in workshop, critiquing, say, a chapter, Chuck Palahniuk liked to ask, ”What’s the purpose of this chapter?” What he meant was, what concrete, plot-specific, reason did it have for existing. In other words, What’s the fucking point? The answer needed to be clearly distilled and articulated in a sentence. It could not be something like, “Well, I’m introducing this character that will eventually, blah, blah…”
Chuck’s eyebrows would get all pointy if you couldn’t come up with a concrete purpose. You knew, at that table, if you’d lost him. A slap in the face to any dyed-in-the-wool Pantser type, right? But here’s the thing. In order to pull the reader into your dream, characters need to act. They need to perform. And the way that they act must lead to consequences that then create the tension that moves the story forward.
In an earlier post, I mentioned a tool that I learned during an Author Accelerator course: The Inside Outline (IO). It’s a tool often used during the revision process, when you’re revising a complete draft, but I’m doing a modified version of the IO for a first draft of the aforementioned project. Starting with a beginning and a speculative ending, before I write a chapter, I enter into the iterative IO document the chapter’s concrete purpose and its emotional consequence on the chapter’s central actor. I also bridge the consequence to a possible next scene that results from the actions of the scene at hand. Headlights? Check. Fog? Clearing.
I’ll let you know when I reach my destination. Meanwhile, any thoughts or ideas? Comments welcome. Oh, and, by the way, this month I’ll be teaching my Dialogue Class for LitReactor. It’s a fun one, so feel free to check it out!
I'm also working at generating material at the same time as I try to find the whole. I have a basic structure, mostly in my head, I'm bad at mapping things out, but I'm also allowing the fragments of the story to emerge by simply asking 'what happens next?', how can I keep the reader engaged as the plot lines begin to emerge. But mostly I'm trying to concentrate on having fun.