Treading Carefully and Raising Stakes

So one of the things I was struggling with over the last couple of weeks was unicorns. The fourth Nathaniel Fludd book centers around unicorns, and as I began to collect my unicorn lore for the the Fludd Book of Beasts, I became aware of just how tricky a thing it was that I was dealing with.

When dealing with something like unicorns, there are a number of people who adore them and their mythology (a large portion of them in the 6-10 year old girl population who will be reading the book.) Then there are others who find unicorns tedious or ho-hum or too rainbowey for their taste. However was I to accommodate both camps?

What I ended up doing was going back to all sorts of early accounts and mentions of unicorns in early literature, from the 4th century BC to the early 1700s. I combed through all of those readings, looking for common threads and strains and studied the data as if I were a beastologist. Then I took all that data and classified it as if I were a scientist. (For example, I determined that when broken down, it appears as if there are eight distinct species of unicorns.)

Then I had a little fun playing with some of the unicorn conventions and turning them a bit on their head.


The other thing was, no matter how I dealt with the unicorns, they simply weren't as threatening as basilisks or wyverns. They lacked a certain inherent danger and dramatic stake that those other beasts brought with them to their respective books.

This is where the notion of raising the personal stakes as a way to bring drama to a story became infinitely helpful.

For this book, it wasn't so much the beast that was fueling the dramatic tension, but rather Nate and the choices and actions he was forced to deal with. I hadn't consciously planned it this way, to have one of the less ferocious beasts be paired with one of the more highly emotional and dramatic phases of Nate's journey, but I'm guessing my subconscious did because it sure made for a nice balance. Or that's what I think today. I might have a totally different opinion once I reread the thing. :-)

If You Give A Book A Gremlin . . .

. . . it will acquire a mind of its own to go with it.

Seriously. Once you give in to this organic thing, all hell breaks loose. Mysterious elements show up out of seemingly (key word, that) nowhere, characters take on a mind of their own and refuse, refuse, to do what you’ve told them to. The bad guy decides he’s not the bad guy any longer and strange interpersonal dynamics and heretofore unsuspected relationships that you have given no conscious thought to, begin appearing on the page.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job? ☺

The thing is, this is one of the reasons people give for not wanting to outline--a fear of stifling just this phenomenon, and I totally get that; that's their process and choice. For me though, I don't know how to get moving on the page without some sort of outline or plot and it is only when I am actively moving on the page that these sorts of spontaneous things begin happening.

I read somewhere, and I can't for the life of me remember where (Katy, you might know the source of this idea) that the reason music became part of religious ritual was because the monks believed it created a space through which the Divine could enter.

Maybe for some of us outlines are like that. Creating an outline is like playing the music that will allow the Creative Spark to ignite...

The Plot is NOT the Story

It seems I have to learn this lesson at least once with every book I write:

The plot is not the story. The plot is simply (ha! nothing simple about plotting!) the device or vehicle that gets all the elements together so that the real story can happen.

The real story is the characters and relationships and growth that take place because of the plot.

I swear to god, I'm going to get that tattooed on the back of my hand where I can see it 139 times a day.

Getting My Gremlin On

I can't remember if I talked here about how Greasle came to take such a prominent role in Nathaniel Fludd, Beastologist. It is an important lesson that I have only begun to learn, and have certainly not yet grasped. Not if the last few weeks are any indication, anyway.

The mythology in the Beastolgist books is simply that all the mythical creatures featured in the medieval beastiaries are real. They truly exist in hidden pockets of the world and only the Fludds know the exact locations of those. Simple enough.

However, while I was writing the first book I ran into the problem of Nate and Aunt Phil having to travel all over the world (there's that travel issue again!) and how to make it interesting rather than episodic or a simple tour guide recounting. Drama, I thought! I need to increase the tension! Make Nate proactive!

So I had Aunt Phil send Nate out on the wing to go up to the propeller and see what was gumming up the prop. He'd have to do the aeronautical equivalent of singing for his supper.

And much to everyone's surprise (not the least of which mine) it was a gremlin who was gumming up the works and out she popped into the story.

B-but . . . I didn't want a gremlin in the book! It didn't work! It mucked up the world I was building and mixed mythologies and . . . and . . . No, I wailed!

But try as hard as I might, I simply could not write the book without her. And if you know how life works, it is probably not surprising to learn that for many readers she is one of the most popular parts of the book.

So the lesson was clearly that one has to embrace one's creative wild hairs and just go with them some times. Only apparently I haven't truly internalized that one yet.

I've been plugging along on the new book for weeks, and it hasn't ignited in that way that it usually does--the way that makes it the most fun thing in the world to be doing. And it's because I've been resisting this odd, different angle/approach/thread that keeps wanting to come into the story, and I keep thinking, No. It doesn't work.

Only, I don't know that it doesn't work. I'm just afraid that it won't work. (Yeah. Fear never makes a good critique partner.) But the story is digging in its heels and refusing to come to play unless I do it its way. ::sigh::

So this weekend I gave up and said what the hell, and began incorporating that odd little element, and vavOOM! We're off! I would be banging my head on the desk in frustration at my own obtuseness if I weren't so relieved I've figured it out. I've finally found my gremlin for this book.

For me, this is one of the single hardest lessons in writing--learning to trust that creative vision, that quirky spark that wants to play in the story world I've created. I tend to think things aren't allowed or simply aren't done or that trying to combine too disparate elements creates incoherency rather than something new or fresh.

I wonder how many more times the Universe will have to slap me up side the head with this particular lesson? Should we start a pool?

A New Plot Predicament

Remember how I said that each of my manuscripts demands its own, unique plotting method? Well, this book is no exception. ::le sigh::

As I struggle with this current manuscript, I’m discovering that there are a few structural things that are forcing me to look at this book’s plot in a completely different way.

For one, it is the first book in which I’ve changed locations this many times. It starts off in Cairo, then moves to Luxor, then the action moves to An Undisclosed Location, then back to Luxor. Even harder, the travel part is not necessarily part of the dramatic action, so that is dead time story-wise, and better left off screen. The travel sequences also rather neatly bisect the book into four acts.

Normally I write to the turning points; the big moment of dramatic action, the big reveal, or a reversal of some sort. However, the turning points in this book don’t exactly happen at the change of location moments, but since those so firmly feel like act breaks, I’m stuck having to factor those into the plotting momentum somehow.

What I find is that I am writing the acts as individual pieces of a whole, rather than writing to the turning points, which might be a matter of semantics. Or not. I can’t quite tell yet. But the process feels different, and that’s why I’m kind of stumbling around.

Hm. This just occurred to me. (And this is why I blog—just talking about this stuff brings clarity.) The reason it feels different is because normally when I write to a turning point, I leave one act at a moment of high drama which then propels us into the next act.

But by writing each act as individual units, I find that the highest point of drama comes just before the act ends, then there is a minor moment of resolution or transition before proceeding into the next act, which takes place in a new location. It mirrors the structure of the end of the book, with a climax and resolution, rather than a turning point acting as climax and building on that. So it's like four separate little stories (structure wise, not thematically) with their own completion rather than a set of building blocks.

I’m trying to decide if this is good or bad or just different, and how much energy, if any, I should spend fixing it or trying to massage it into a different shape.

Needless to say, this whole structure thing has made me painstakingly aware of the logistical difficulty of traveling during a story, which I will blog about in a separate post since it is a big enough issue to warrant its own topic.

Now Make It Worse

Let’s say you’ve spent some time and come up with this perfect conflict for your character. There is even something at stake if she fails. Go you!

Now think of a way to make it worse. Seriously.

My bff, Mary Hershey, and I had an opportunity to attend one of Donald Maass’s all day workshops, and he asked this question. Many times. So often, we got to giggling, however, it was highly effective in driving home his point. Push the limits. Dare to take your character to the wall, then blow the wall away and take him even farther than that.

So, have you found a way to make it worse? Good.

Now make it matter even more. No, I’m not kidding. And there is a subtle different between making something worse, and making it matter more. Making something worse is about upping the stakes, making it matter more is about upping the emotional intensity of those stakes.

For example, when I was writing Theo, my initial external conflict was that she was going to discover this cursed artifact and removing the curse was going to fall on her shoulders. To make it worse, I decided that curse had the power to bring feast, famine, drought, and destruction to the entire country. To make it matter even more, to twist the conflict so that it uniquely and intensely skewered Theo, I had it be her mother who had unknowingly unleashed this horror on the world. For a child who felt responsible for her parents and whose familial role was to take care of them, this really upped the intensity of the conflict. Not only was it the worst that could happen (death and destruction on a national scale) but it would be her family’s fault, which gave her an added impetus to stop it.

So now take a look at your conflict.

How can you make it worse?

How can you make it matter even more?

Can you make it even worse than that? Oh go on, try. I bet you can.

Some things to consider:
Make your characters suffer. Whoever your hero cannot live without, cannot possibly succeed without, remove them. (Maass suggests killing him, but I write for kids so I take a gentler approach.)
What is your character’s greatest asset? Take it away.
What is sacred to your hero? Undermine it.
How much time does he have? Shorten it.
What matters most to your character? Threaten it.

You get the idea.

The thing is, Maass said that of all the manuscripts that cross his agency’s desks, few fail because they go too far or push too hard. No, the majority of them fail because they don’t go far enough, they don’t take things to their extremes. Which relates to my post of a couple of weeks ago about failing gloriously. Don’t let your failure be a whimpering one. If you aim for the bleachers, you have a better chance of getting past first base.

(Or something like that. I’m not so good with sports metaphors.)

Speaking of Conflict

Okay, back to plotting…

Conflict drives the story. It’s pretty much that simple. If you don’t have conflict on some level, you don’t have a story. The good news is, conflict comes in many shapes and sizes, flavors and colors. The bad news is, most people tend to avoid conflict, so it can be difficult to grab it with both hands and force your characters into the thick of it.

Besides, we writers usually like our characters. We don’t want to put them through the wringer. But alas, if we want to effect a transformation in their lives, we must. Remember, we are the meddling, interfering Olympian gods in our book’s universe. It is our JOB to mess up our characters’ lives and force them to change or teach them a life lesson.

One of the first things I do after I’ve managed to come up with an internal and external GMC for my characters is I step back and try to decide if the nature of the conflict is actually big enough to sustain a book. The truth is, all of the manuscripts that languish under my bed are there because the initial idea simply wasn’t big enough or didn’t contain enough conflict to sustain an entire book. It is also one of the most frequent mistakes I see when editing or critiquing beginners' work. Keep in mind that an average MG book is about 100-150 mss pages, and an adult book is around 300. There’s a fair amount of conflict needed to keep things clipping along toward the end. Without conflict, you have no dramatic push or narrative drive. Things just float along, attention wanders, and suddenly readers are putting your book down so they can go surf the net or watch a reality TV show.

So one of the first questions I ask myself is, If the protagonist doesn’t attain her goal, what is at stake? What does she stand to lose? And I usually need two answers to this, one that can be addressed by the physical actions of the story (if Theo doesn’t return the artifact to Egypt, her mother will have infected Britain with a curse so vile, it brings down the entire country) and a second one that addresses the emotional wounds or scars of my characters (If she saves the world, surely they’ll love her then. They'll have to.)

The second question is, Why this character and this problem? This is where irony comes in, or Fate, or Kismet. Why has the universe graced this particular character with this particular problem? Why her?? Why is this the worse thing that could happen to her?

In fact, if you have a character in mind for a story and you’re not being able to get any sort of conflict to gel, ask yourself, what is the worst possible thing that could happen to her? That is conflict.

The thing is, random crappy stuff happens to people in real life all the time. Life is hard and then you die, as the saying goes. But the one thing we can do to prove that saying wrong is to choose to embrace our circumstance and learn from it. As writers, we simply have to plan that out ahead of time. Fiction can't be random, it needs to mean something in order to resonate with readers.

Theo, a child who is emotionally abandoned and somewhat willfully ignored by her parents, gets by by being invisible and uber responsible. So if she suddenly starts blabbing about magic and curses, her parents are going to see her as being very fanciful, irresponsible, and constantly in the way and underfoot. They will stop taking her seriously, and she will lose what tenuous connection she has with them and will be completely dismissed by them. Considering the day and age she lived in, she might even be committed to a sanitorium. If her parents were more attuned to her, or more doting, she might have stood a chance in telling them the truth. But in light of their current dynamic, the truth didn't stand a chance.

On the external plot level, the Why her? question is embedded in Theo herself, a young girl with few resources except an ability to detect ancient magic and evil curses. If she didn’t have that ability, she’d never have gotten wrapped up in all this business to begin with. For all intents and purposes her parents museum would have suffered a normal burglary and that would be the end of it. But since she does have that ability, she gets drawn into far more than the average bear.

So take a look at your conflict. First of all, do you have any? And if so, is it big enough? Is something truly at stake for your character if they fail? Lastly, why this character and this problem?

Plotting - Sources of Conflict

So Greek Girl had a great question in the comments yesterday. She asked how to work this plotting thing when the character's problem was poverty or racism, something societal or cultural.

Some writing theory says that the conflict should take the form of an antagonist, a real live breathing human being that acts in opposition to the hero. I am not quite that set in concrete. I think other elements can work as a source of conflict; self, acts of nature, Fate, etc.

I do think though, if you’re going to have the source of conflict be society, it makes it much easier to write if you can encapsulate societies views and mores in actual characters in a book rather than simply an abstract concept.

For example, if a person is struggling against racism, that absolutely manifests itself through relationships with people; coworkers, strangers on the street, teachers, familial ties, the banker you deal with, the person you buy your groceries from. Racism comes in all forms, too. Conscious, mean spirited, and clueless. How much more powerful will your novel be if you can show all those different ways discrimination raises its ugly head?

One route to conflict might be the hateful, bigoted racist, some specific person making your character’s life hell on earth intentionally.

But it is important to remember that all an antagonist has to do is obstruct the main character’s goals, and that can be done out of love or a sense of protection just as easily as it can out of a sense of hatred or anger. In fact, if you look to your own life, who has caused you the most pain, set the most obstacles in your path? Those who love you or those who hate you? So cast a wide, broad net as you look for the source of your conflict, but if it’s society, do consider encapsulating society’s views into an actual person.

The second societal conflict, poverty, is harder because it isn’t necessarily imposed on one person by another. It can be very impersonal. Again, if you can find secondary characters to help personify this, you may have an easier time of writing it. The social worker who can only do so much, the teacher who can offer only the smallest of aid, the friend who tries to make it better, but ends up making it worse. Those kinds of things.

But ultimately, I think the trick to making poverty an active force in the novel is to really delve deeply into the character and get those personal reactions to poverty onto the page; all those small deaths by a thousand cuts type of ways that poverty destroys ones spirit. If you live in a world ruled by poverty, you live in a world entirely different from the one many of us occupy. If you’re writing about that, make sure you get that different world view on the page so we readers can experience it viscerally.

If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend John Scalzi’s post on poverty, intense, heartbreaking stuff. Just a few examples:

Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.

Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.

Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.

If you even pick a handful of the experiences on his list to incorporate into your character, it will be very powerful.

Please feel free to ask more questions in the comments. And don’t forget, everyone who comments will be entered in a drawing at the end of the month for a copy of Orson Scott Card's, Character and Viewpoint.

Plotting - Baby Steps

Okay, so let’s say you’ve figured out—kind of—what your characters motivations and desires. You even have a pretty good idea as to what is standing in their way—a bad guy, a raging storm, a stalking fae, a lovesick werewolf, whatever. Now how do you take what you know and shape it into a plot?

What I do at this point is I sit down and look at both the internal and external GMCs. Then I try to brainstorm four to six baby steps the character will need to take to achieve both the internal goal and the external goal. In real life, change may happen over night, but in fiction, we readers want to see the process of change, make that journey to a new, improved self along with the character, so it helps to be sure and break down the change into manageable bites.

Now is probably a good time for me to explain that I don’t do all of this at the very beginning. I usually spend some time writing what I do know, either snippets of scenes or dialogue, details about the world, setting, or characters. Sometimes, I’m pleasantly surprised by how very much I instinctively know about the story. Then I use these exercises to fill in the blanks.

Other times I’ll have a pretty clear idea of the external plot, but then need to be sure the action precipitates growth in the character. In that instance, I’ll look at the baby steps for my internal GMC, and make sure that the scenes I have for the external plot change the character’s internal landscape, using those baby steps as my guidelines.

Other times, I’ll have a solid idea of an internal journey, but no clue as to what has to happen physically in the story. In that case I’m pretty wide open for brainstorming the most effective (and dramatic) external events that will bring about those changes.

It’s also not a bad idea to write an entire discovery draft, learning about your characters and their internal landscape, friends and relationships, before applying any plotting or structure to the manuscript.

The point I’m trying to make here is that whatever you way you approach the story is the right way. It’s just a matter of finding a process that allows you to plug up the holes you don’t know yet.

How To Grow Plot From Character

In order to understand what actions will effect a transformation in your character, there are a few things one needs to know. Debra Dixon addresses this brilliantly with her concept of Goal, Motivation, and Conflict, and if you haven’t read the book, I highly, highly recommend it. She talks at length about needing to have both an external GMC (plot) and internal GMC (internal growth arc).

Goal – What your character wants.
Motivation – Why do they want it? Why are they pursuing this goal?
Conflict – What is standing in their way.

Ideally you should be able to answer those questions on an external and internal level for your character.

One of the things I constantly stumble over is giving my protagonists an actual, bona fide goal. It takes me a while to figure out what they want, and sometimes I realize they don’t actually want anything. Or at least anything that they could articulate to themselves or anyone else.

However, it finally occurred to me that sometimes simply allowing oneself to want something can be a dramatic act all its own. In fact, I wonder if that’s one of the reasons I write kids books, because they are immersed in learning they have the right and the power and eventually the responsibility to act, not just observe or get carried along. Maybe that thematic issue kind of clusters around kids books. Or maybe that’s just one of my personal themes. Not quite sure about that…

Anywho, sometimes I have more luck by asking myself what my characters needs or longs for. Those words seem less self aware than goal, and especially with young protagonist, having an unarticulated need seems a more realistic way to drive their actions. At least initially.

Often I will start with just the germ of an idea; What if a girl could see curses and black magic on artifacts in a museum that no one else could see? Then I have to step back and decide what kind of girl would have this skill, and how it would affect her. Then I massage and poke and scratch my head until I have at least some semblance of GMC. For Theo, it was pretty easy.

Goal: To neutralize black magic and curses before it harmed anyone
Motivation: Because it was nasty, vile stuff that could cause great harm to those she loved; plus she was the only one who could see it, so the responsibility landed in her lap.
Conflict: She was only a child, with few resources; no one would believe her if she tried to explain; and certain bad guys wanted to let use that magic for their own gains.

Knowing that allowed me to begin to design the framework of the structure of the novel; what the inciting incident would be, what the turning points might look like, how the conflict and tension would rise.

But that was only the externals. To give the novel depth, I had to find a way to put what I knew about Theodosia emotionally onto the page. These physical events had to force her to some new understanding or awareness on her journey to becoming an adult.

I knew that one of the things that Theodosia hungered for was her parent’s attention as she was often overlooked. (Luckily, there was a fairly hands-off child rearing philosophy in 1907, so her parents didn’t appear to be horrid people.) She also wanted their professional respect, perhaps simply an extension of the above, since her parents were consumed by their professions, she felt that would be the best way to gain their attention, with her professional expertise.

For me to be able to develop the internal GMC, I often have to look to my character’s wounds or scars; what is lacking in their life, what hole are they trying to plug up, for those are often what drive our actions. So the internal GMC might look something like this (and notice how I word them differently so they make sense to me):

Goal (Emotional need/longing/desire): To be reassured that her parents really do care about her.
Motivation (Why she has that longing/Emotional Wound): Emotionally abandoned by her parents
Conflict (What prevents her forward growth): Parent's preoccupation with selves, child-centric perspective

Dixon has designed a nifty little GMC table that looks a lot like a tic-tac-toe square and goes something like this:




Can you fill in those blanks for your character?

A couple of additional things: Goals can be to NOT want something, to NOT move, or NOT go to a new school. They can also change over the course of a book as they character grows or acquires new knowledge.

Plots - Getting Started

If, as Julia Cameron says, transformation happens through action, then plot is simply the actions our characters go through in order to grow and change.

Of course, in real life, we all stumble upon events and revelations, epiphanies and sudden tragedies, all of which can move us to change. But fiction is different than real life. Fiction has to make sense. Therefore, it is up to the author to take their characters through a sequence of actions that force those characters to grow or transform.

Now some writers do this instinctively. Others have such beautiful prose or skillful characterization that we never even notice a lack of plot in their writing. But not all writers—or not me at least—possess that innate skill. I have to work at it.

The thing is, we have all been studying plot since our parents first began reading Good Night Moon or Harold and the Purple Crayon to us. Ever since our first cartoon, we became consumers of story, and most classic story comes with a plot.

In its most simple form, plot is merely a beginning, a middle, and an end. And really, as a reader that’s all we need to know. Well, that and whether or not the combination of beginning, middle, and end works for us.

But as writers, or more specifically, writers for whom this is not instinctive, we need to break it down a little more.

First Act - Beginning
Second Act - Middle
Third Act – End

And as long as one act pulls the reader along into the next act, you’re golden. But as writers, how do we make that happen. I think the first step is to understand the structure behind the structure.

First Act (Awareness of problem/situation)
Second Act (1st Attempt to solve or fix the problem/situation)
Third Act (Second Attempt to solve or fix the problem/situation)
Fourth Act (Third and successful attempt to solve or fix the problem/situation)

Wait a minute, you say! I thought we were talking about three acts! For me and my process, it is hugely helpful to break that middle act into two parts, thus Act Two becomes in my mind Act Two and Three. The reason for this is that I think the middle of the book is a very important moment, one that deserves to be included in the structuring of the novel.

So that gives us a vague idea as to what different acts should entail, but still maybe not enough to actually start writing the dang book.

But first, some definitions so you won’t all think I’m speaking Greek.

Story – a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Plot – the physical actions of your story that drive the narrative; the choice of events the author uses to propel their character’s growth.
Acts – the sections of a story; beginning, middle, and end. Usually mini stories within the bigger story framework that build toward the ending.
Arcs – the forward trajectory taken by the plot or character.
Turning Points – scenes that come at the end of an act and propel the reader into the next act, either by a dramatic revelation, ramping up the stakes, increasing the tension, or spinning the story off in a new direction.

Now let’s take a look at all the structural components of a plot, from a writer’s perspective.

First Act
Set up - Section of the story that gives a sense of who the character is, what is missing from their lives, and what they will need to change and grow.

Inciting Incident - what forces the character to engage in the elements of the plot, where the trouble starts, the day that is different

1st Turning Point (TP) - the scene that propels the reader into the next act


Second Act
Increasing Conflict/Dramatic Action – action that has some meaning or purpose within the greater context of the story as opposed to simple physical action.

Rising action – scenes increase in dramatic tension as the plot progresses. Also causality. This happens, because something else happened, which in turn forces even more conflict to happen.

2nd TP - MID POINT - this scene propels the story into the next act, but it also is the point of no return, the hero cannot go back to who they were, must go forward, which is why I think it needs to be marked on its own.


Third Act
Continued Rising Action (Protagonist and Antagonist engaged in escalating struggle)

Final TP - the moment when everything coalesces to propel the hero toward the final showdown


Fourth Act
Climax – the final confrontation (either internal or external but preferably both) that the story has been building to.

Resolution – how the newly changed character, using skills and knowledge acquired through the course of the story, fixes the problem or comes to terms with the situation.
~ ~ ~

So that are the basic components of a plot. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how to go about creating them from your what you know about your characters or story idea. And please feel free to ask questions in the comments!

Pick a Card, Any Card

So, after wrestling with my plot and trying to figure out where in the hell I am with it and the many threads I have going, I gave up and went back to the basics: index cards. And not just any ol’ index cards, but colored ones. Perhaps I am more visual than the average author but boy, nothing screams obvious plot holes to me like seeing all the threads laid out in brightly colored hues.

It’s an incredibly simple system, I merely write a one line description for each scene on an index card. The one trick is that I choose different colored cards, depending on what plot thread or subplot the scene pertains to.

So here you can see my first and second acts laid out on the kitchen island (and yes, every writer needs a spouse who will build them a kitchen island for laying out plot cards). The first act is in the background and the second act in the foreground.


It becomes immediately clear that the pink, yellow, and green scenes are on the skimpy side. That most often translates into: I have dropped those plot threads or not fully developed them.

Here is the second act:


While all the colors are present in the second act, the pink ones indicate scenes which focus on my heroine's personal growth. And since this is a 1st person book about her, uh, clearly I need to look at that. And while it's true that all scenes should accomplish multiple tasks, if nothing else, I have to go back and review some of the other colored scenes and be sure that my heroine is the one driving the action, even if they pertain to one of the other threads. And that green card, well, that represents actions taken by my antagonist, and while his identity is hidden from the reader until the last act, he does need to be engaging more with the heroine, even if his hidden motives remain unclear. So, not too bad, but definitely needs some tweaking.

And then we get to the first act. Oy!


No green, at all, which is a real problem because I need to get that antagonist acting and engaging in the first act, and he is completely missing. I also like to at least mention all the plot threads that will be in play during the book in the first act, so I also need to get at least one yellow card in there.

But the beauty of this system is, it all becomes immediately clear what is missing. Of course, I still have to figure out how to fix it...but now I know what to concentrate on.

Strucutre: Where You Least Expect It

Lots of times when talking about plot or structure, some writers recoil, feeling as if such aspects of craft are merely devices, templates, if you will, for those who are not skilled enough to write a character driven book.

Obviously, I don’t hold the same opinion. But what is also true is that structure can be so integral to the story and so much a part of its very fabric, that the reader is never even aware of it. I thought I’d use a couple of picture books as examples, as people often (mistakenly) assume that something as short as picture books don’t really require structure or plots.

One aspect of structure is the concept of causality—of the events of the story building on themselves, creating a tighter and tighter spiral that the main character must deal with. [A] happens, then the character tries [this], which makes things worse, because…

There really is no better illustration of this concept than If You Give A Moose A Muffin by Laura Joffe Numeroff. (Her If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, works well to illustrate this, too.)

In the book, our protagonist gives the moose a muffin in a misguided attempt to get rid of it. But this makes things worse, because then the moose wants jam to go with it. But that makes things worse because they are so tasty he wants more and more. Until they are all gone and it’s time to go to the store, which is even worse because now he needs to borrow a sweater, then needs to mend it, and on and on in a great big rolling snowball of complications. That, my friends, is structure. It is subtle; a charming, integral element of the story, but structure, nonetheless.

A second terrific example, and perhaps my favorite, is Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. That simple, less than 500 word book, encompasses the entire Hero’s Journey. Check it out:

1) The Ordinary World. Max dons his trusty wolf suit and gets into trouble
2) The Call to Adventure.Max is sent to his room, where a forest appears
3) Refusal of the Call. But Max doesn't do anything until it grows even more
4) Mentor. Whoever sent the boat...
5) Crossing the First Threshold. Max sails away in that private boat that shows up
6) Tests, Allies and Enemies. Max sails for over a year
7) Approach to the Inmost Cave. The most dangerous place in the Story World. Max arrives where those scary wild things live
8) The Ordeal. And they do their level best to scare the bejeezus out of him. But he stands up to them, see…and stares them down.
9) Seizing the sword. The hero often receives some reward for surviving. And the Wild things make him their king.—the most wild thing of all.
10) The Road Back. The hero must deal with the consequences of all that he/she has done in order to gain the reward. And now the real rumpus starts!
11) Resurrection. This is the second Ordeal, the final confrontation. Then Max, grown lonely and homesick, stands up to them and makes them stop. Not only that, he punishes them--just as he was punished.
12) Return With the Reward. Then a wiser and calmer Max arrives back in his room and found his supper waiting for him.

I just think it’s so interesting to see just how much things like three act structure or the hero’s journey are a part of our storytelling patterns, even before there was a book that talked about it as a guideline for writers. It’s important to keep in mind that the hero’s journey was recognized rather than invented, recognized after analyzing thousands of years worth of myths and legends and tales. It was merely putting a label to the way man had told stories for generations.

Now I think that it’s absolutely true that some writers don’t have to think about structure or plot in order to have it appear in their work (and I try not to hate them too much for that) but neither is plot a four-letter word. I’m just sayin’.

Edited to add:

In honor of Buy Indie Day, I'm going to my local bookstore this morning and buying a copy of Donald Maass's newest book, The Fire in Fiction, to give away in a drawing this month. All you have to do to be entered is leave a comment. How easy is that? Maass's book, Writing the Breakout Novel is one of my bibles, so I'm very excited he has a second book out.

Of Plot Threads and Sub Plots

Now that I’m diving into revisions for Theo 3, I’ve been thinking a lot about subplots. I tend to have a lot of them in the Theodosia books. Actually, what I have in the Theodosia books aren’t so much subplots as they are plot threads, which may be a distinction only I get, but it’s important to me.

I think of subplots as plots that are totally separate from the protagonist—say a love story involving the best friend, or a sibling dealing with a bully at school.

A plot thread, on the other hand, is simply another area of the protagonist’s life that the main plot affects. So using Theo as an example, the main plot is her dealing with some horribly cursed artifact. However, her actions in dealing with that impact her relationship with her parents, the other curators, her brother, and her grandmother, ergo plot threads rather than subplots.

For a really specific example, in Theodosia and the Staff of Osiris, Theo’s dealings with the Arcane Order of the Black Sun is a plot thread because it is a consequence of Theo’s primary actions in dealing with the story problem. The governesses aren’t a subplot either because their appearance in her life is caused by Theo’s behavior as she tries to cope with the story problem. In fact, the only true subplot in that book is Will and the Grim Nipper, because that dynamic is entirely separate from Theo’s actions. However, like all subplots should, it does intersect the main plot at the end. This is probably a fairly fine distinction, but one that feels important to me.

In Werewolf Rising, the Luna and Ranger relationship is a subplot and truthfully, probably doesn’t intersect back with the main plot as solidly as it should. It was, however, an effective way to show the social constraints of living in a wolf pack, rather than just tell of the rules, so in that way I think it worked as an echo of the themes Luc was dealing with; would he submit to blind obedience like Luna, the most extreme example of what that total submission could cost an individual?

It seems to me that good subplots should foreshadow the protagonist’s struggle, act as an echo of the themes the protagonist is dealing with, set up a foil, or illustrate the road not taken.

In Theo 3 I have five (okay, five and a half) plot threads. However, because of the greater amount of character development in these books, one of the plot threads has almost turned into a subplot: Stilton and his relationship with the Black Sun. Initially, it was a plot thread because Theo came under their attention due to her curse-removing actions, but the more time we’ve spent with Stilton, the more he’s developed as a character in his own right, and now has his own arc which, again, echoes some of the themes Theo is dealing with, and intersects with the main plot at the end.

One of the reasons this distinction is important to me is because I don’t think all books need subplots—a second plot line separate from the protagonist’s—but I do think most books need plot threads. The story needs to show us how the main story problem affects the characters in all aspects of their lives. Because the truth is, if something happens in our life that is momentous enough to cause us to change, that change is going to reverberate throughout all facets of our lives. You know how it is. When something happens to you, an accident, you lose your job, you have a major fight with your best friend, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You still have to relate to your parents or your spouse or your children, you still have to show up at work, do you chores, get to school every day. And because we’re human, the emotional tension and ripples caused by the main problem are felt in the other areas of our lives. And I think by pulling this into the story, it gives a more richly textured plot AND character—those plot threads SHOW the character in the act of changing and dealing with the main problem.

It also helps with causality. Often the characters own actions are what make her situation worse (because really, aren’t we all our own worst enemy?) So by making sure the plot affects all areas of a character’s life, you give yourself lots of opportunity for the character to make things worse for herself.

Spreadsheets - A Writer's Best Friend

Whenever I mention that I find spreadsheets incredibly helpful in my writing people look at me oddly, as if I’ve passed the line from eccentric writer to bona fide crackpot. So, in the interest of proving my sanity, I thought I’d post a picture of one of my spreadsheets and show how I find it so helpful.

Here’s the spreadsheet for Act 1 of Theodosia and the Staff of Osiris.



This is a great way for me to see my novel as a whole. Note the lovely colored lines. They have a greater purpose than mere decoration. I color code each scene by plot thread. In TATSOO, I had five plot threads moving throughout the book, thus the five different colors. Color coding like this is a terrific way to “see” the balance of your plot and subplots, you can easily determine if you’ve dropped a subplot or gone on too long without mentioning it. (The astute among you will note that there are only four colors. That's because I hadn't found a way to work the fifth plot thread into the first act yet.)

Next look at the scribbling in the right handed column, where I make notes. I can look and see when the last time a certain character appeared, or make a note of the first time some element is introduced so I don’t have the characters talk about it before then.

It’s also a great way to look at the plot arc, to make sure that scenes happen in the order that brings the biggest impact.

And lastly, it allows me to work on the novel in smaller, more manageable chunks.

Next up, how I use the spreadsheet to graph my novel.