Does This Novel Seem Crowded? A Rerun

[Author note: If you’re a pantser, sit down and make yourself comfortable. I'm hoping to show that some pre-writing activity can save you work later without killing creativity. Honest!]

Character, characters everywhere! But do they have a job to do? That’s a good question to ask. Just like you’re created with a purpose in mind, your characters should be, too.

It’s so easy to overpopulate a story. That’s how I’ve collected so many dynamite deleted scenes. But creating a cache of deleted scenes is not my objective. I need to look at my characters as part of an organic whole, not as detached individuals. Each character should help define the others.

According to John Truby in The Anatomy of Story, we learn the most about our protagonist when we can compare her to the other characters on four different levels: by story function, archetype, theme, and opposition. 

Today, I’m going to talk about the story function of your characters, because this helped me the most with crowd control—and revolutionized the way I think about developing characters.

This is my gift to you after being so snarky about Maass’s chapter, “Standout Characters.” Deepest apologies again, Mr. Maass, sir.

Every novel starts with a premise. The premise is what your story is about in one sentence. For instance, the premise of The Hunger Games (HG) is: In post-apocalyptic America, a teen-aged huntress takes her sister’s place in a last-man-standing battle against representatives of the eleven other districts of Panem.  

Once you know your premise, you create characters. Start with your protagonist or hero. She’s the one with the central problem. (Katniss must take care of her sister.) She’s the one who drives the action in an attempt to solve her problem. (Katniss volunteers to take Prim’s place in the hunger games.) The protagonist drives the action, but she isn't without her weaknesses and needs. (Katniss is a loner, but she must partner with other contestants to survive, knowing she will later need to kill them in order to solve her problem.)

This is where things get interesting. All other characters in your novel will represent an opposition, an alliance with the protagonist, or a combination of the two. Every character has a job to do to tell your story according to the premise.

Antagonist: The antagonist should want the same thing as the protagonist, which will bring them in direct conflict. This doesn't mean they hate each other, necessarily. Think of them as opposition, a less brick-wall kind of word. (Katniss has one big antagonist, the government, plus twenty-three contestants that want to live to take care of their families, so they must kill her.)

Ally: An ally helps the protagonist solve her problem. They listen to the protagonist, giving the reader a chance to hear in the protagonist's own words what she values and wants. Again, their goals are usually the same, but sometimes the ally has her own goal. (In HG, Katniss has an ally in Gale, her hunting partner in District 12. Also, Cinna, her stylist uses his cunning and skill to make Katniss a favorite in the games.)

Fake-Ally Opponent: This is where things get really interesting. This character seems to be on the protagonist’s side, but is really an opponent. This is how twists and turns are added to a story, as well as tension. (Effie Trinket plays this role for Katniss. She’s very proper and gathers a team to help Katniss, but she represents the government, the source of all Katniss’s problems. As the government’s representative, she facilitates the death of at least one, if not both of her charges, Katniss and Peeta.)

Fake-Opponent Ally: These are fun characters to write but not as common in storytelling as the Fake-Ally Opponent, but HG is full of them. This opponent appears to be fighting the protagonist but is actually a friend. (Peeta, of course, is the first of Katniss’s opponents to come to mind, but don’t forget about Rue. The most powerful Fake-Opponent Ally is Haymitch, Katniss’s supposed mentor. He is drunk and useless most of the time, but he sees something in Katniss that makes him believe she is finally the one who can survive. He recruits sponsors and sends supplies at just the right moment.)

Subplot Character: Their role is to give another opportunity to define the protagonist through comparison (they want the same thing or have the same problem but go after the solution differently) and to advance the plot. In HG, Katniss’s mother is a subplot character. She wants the same thing, to take care of Katniss and Prim, but her grief has paralyzed her. In this way we see the heroic side of Katniss. The mother moves the plot along by her passivity. Katniss is all Prim has in her broken world.

HG might not have been the best example because there are lots of characters, but they fit very nicely into their roles. Let’s look at a “smaller” story world to see how this works.  Feel free to disagree with me.

In The Language of Flowers, the premise is that a young woman uses flowers to say the things she cannot say on her quest for love. 

Victoria is our protagonist. Her central problem is that she wants to love and be loved but can’t do either. As a product of the foster system, Victoria has never properly bonded with a caregiver, so she probably suffers from reactive attachment disorder (RAD). She uses the language of flowers she learns from her foster mother to try to make connections. 

Her antagonist is RAD, I think. She sabotages herself in all of her attempts to make meaningful connections. 

The author brilliantly gives Victoria two strong allies, Renata the florist and Grant the flower grower. Renata gives Victoria a job to rescue her from homelessness and allows her room to be ellusive, and Grant is the most patient man in the world, and he loves her, literally and figuratively challenging her flower language. 

Victoria’s false-opponent ally, and this is up for debate, is her caseworker. Name? She comes off as making hurtful decisions for Victoria, but she introduces her to the only mother she will ever know because she understands what Victoria needs. 

The false-ally opponent is her foster mother, Elizabeth. She needs the same thing as Victoria, love, and she gives it freely until what she loves more than Victoria is destroyed. She ends up wounding Victoria worst of all. 

The subplot character is Victoria’s assistant whom she brings in from her old group home. Again, name? She’s there to compare how two foster system kids react to emancipation.

So, there you have it, a purpose-driven approach to populating your novels. Personally, this information has helped me develop a wider variety of characters with greater capacity for conflict and helped me to focus the story on the premise by not adding characters who aren't needed. (This is how adorable yet menacing Fred got booted from Goodness & Mercy.)

I would love to hear what you think of Truby’s story structure approach to populating your stories. Have you tried this approach? What benefits or hindrances did you experience? How do you keep from over-populating your stories? Have you ever asked yourself while reading a novel, "What is this character doing here?" 

Plotting a Novel: Contest for Writers! A Chance To Find The Heart of Your Story with Bonnie Grove

Re-Run Post--but a current contest for writers! This post first appeared in May, 2011, but the contest portion is CURRENT!
Comment below to enter using the abbreviation: FYTS, and you could win me this summer.

Huh. That didn't sound right.

Read on!

To outline or not to outline, that is the question. If you as Roger Rosenblatt he'll say, "Never!" If you ask John Truby he'll say, "Always!" If you ask me, I'll say "Somewhere between never and always." What I mean is there are elements of a novel that I work out in advance of writing, and there are things I trust to the writing and don't try to plan out in advance. Today, I'm going to share some of my ways of plotting a novel (and at the end, there's a new contest!) with two disclaimers: Disclaimer 1) I write non-genre novels. If you are writing a genre novel, you will need to plot very differently as you will be expected to hit all the expected plot points of that genre. 2) There is no sure-fired right way to plot a novel. And every novel you write will make its unique demands. It's far more important to trust what the story is telling you then to worry about if you're "doing it right". Writing is fluid and any attempts to restrict the flow of story will result in a dried up narrative.

When I approach a new novel (this is after I've done all the preliminary work ensuring the idea is novel worthy), I focus on "plotting" key elements of the story before I begin writing. These key elements are:

1) Strong characters. I need a protagonist and an opponent. These two characters are after the same thing in the story (the desire line of the protagonist runs the story. Everyone else in the story exists to either help the protag to get what he wants, or to try to stop him from getting what he desires. Everything hinges on this element), so they both have to be outstanding. They have to be compelling even if they were standing against a blank wall.

1a) In conjunction with strong characters, I don't start writing until I can hear them speak. Dialogue is plot. Knowing how my characters speak is the first step to discovering what they will say.

1b) A moral argument/theme. In great stories all the characters in the novel live out various expressions of the stories moral argument. I need to plot my characters so that as many facets of the moral argument or theme is being played out.

2) A strong sense of movement in the story. I tend to start with theme when I begin thinking about a new story. So I need to ensure my themes have taken on flesh and started walking around before I start writing. Until there is movement in the story, all I have is a collection of interesting ideas, and pretty images.

3) Setting. My favorite editor will laugh at this (I'm notorious for vague settings), but setting or non-setting is a huge influence on plot. There are things that can only happen because of where the story takes place. And there are things that cannot happen because of the setting. Also, setting is another character in the story and must also reflect the moral argument.

Here are some Bonnie Grove FAQ:

Q: Do you write a "pitch line" for a story before you write the story?

A: Yes. It's a premise line and I think it's necessary to write one before I start writing the novel. It guides the writing. This is both more simple and more difficult then it appears.

Q: Do you write a synopsis before you write the story?

A: No. I write a great many details and do a great deal of planning before hand, but nothing that resembles a synopsis. When or if I require one, I can write it quickly enough.

Q: Do you outline?

A: As stated above, the answer is sort of. After I do the plot work above, I write a scene weave sequence--which is a sentence or two about the main action of all the scenes I want to write. (e.g. At the store: Dan and Bob argue about money. Bob leaves angry.) Doing this allows me to track the tension/action throughout the story and still be able to make tons of changes without having to do a bunch of rewriting.

Q: Do you know the ending before you begin?

A: Yes. But I've rewritten endings, too. I like to know where I'm headed when I start out, but I am prepared to be wrong about my choice. I try to stay flexible. And I know when I start, I'll likely end up in the expected emotional/moral place I wanted to, but it might look very different when I arrive.

CONTEST!! Find your True Story:

Comment on this post today and through the week to be eligible to win. A winner will be chosen randomly on Thursday, July 3rd.

Prize: The winner will submit their short synopsis. I will work with the winner, digging through the story to find the key elements, and the heart of the story. Then, we will craft a killer pitch line (premise) that will be the guiding force behind plotting and writing your story.

Got a story you that won't come into focus? Want a steady hand to help you work through a problem area? This is your contest! Enter today! Not everyone who comments is necessarily entering the contest. We welcome all comments! If you would like to be entered include the abbreviation FYTS at the end of your comment.

Good luck!

Fiction in the Garden

First, champagne glasses up! We have passed 400,000 page views at Novel Matters. Thanks to all for your support and friendship.

On to the matter at hand. I applaud all of the authors of our serial story, "Out of the Garden." Such inventive minds! The characters are fully realized and the potential for conflict with Peta is very real. And there have been lots of fun surprises. You are talented writers!!! (Sorry for shouting.) Not bad at all for thirteen different writers, who never discussed the story.

There was an important element missing--no one's fault but an excellent chance to learn--we'll be talking about today.

Bonnie introduced me to John Truby's book, The Anatomy of Story, a few years ago. I've studied it like a sacred document and mentioned it here many times. I know, here I go again.

He does an amazing job of dissecting what makes a story work. He deserves a careful listen. I've tested his ideas against the best and the worst of the books I've written in the last few years, and he's so right.

In the "story world," Truby describes a dramatic code, which is a template we all have embedded in our brains that expects a person/character to change over time. Our characters don't change in a vacuum. "Change is fueled by desire."

We aren't necessarily talking sex here, but keep reading anyway.

The DESIRE is what the character wants in the story, not in her lifetime, just within the context of the story, a goal. At the beginning of our story, it seems that Maeve's desire is to move on from grief to life, a laudable goal but not easily measured for success.

And so, while our story has become rich with interesting characters and revelations, not much has happened. Maeve isn't moving toward her desire, and desire is the driving force of a story. We hadn't decided what that was for Maeve, and we probably would have stumbled upon her desire eventually, as pantsers do in their multiple drafts.

And so, we could have continued on, but if we didn't know her desire, how would we have known when she achieved it and resolved the story for the reader's satisfaction?

We average over 1,000 readers each week for the story! They're expecting action toward desire (even though they may not exactly know that beyond their subconscious) and a satisfying resolution.

That doesn't mean Maeve must accomplish her goal. She may decide that her goal was misguided, switch goals, and pursue the new goal. That's fine. She may discover that what she pursued was always withing reach too.

Here's something else about desire, according to Truby: "Desire is intimately connected to NEED. In most stories, when the hero accomplishes his goal, he also fulfills his need."

Let's say, then, that Maeve's need is to move from grief to life. She still requires a desire that can be accomplished within the scope of the story that will help her fulfill her need.

Just to clarify: NEED has to do with overcoming a weakness within the character. Maeve can't get her feet under her to live without Don. DESIRE is a goal outside the character. And that's what gives the story legs. The hero is overcoming obstacles, trying and failing, and pushing hard to achieve his desire.

I gave Maeve a desire in last Friday's installment here: Return Princess Orlagh to Donegal. I also threw in that Peta was not only an obstacle to her achieving this desire, but she could destroy the whole fairy culture. The stakes are definitely raised.

The story now has its legs, its desire. We would have come up with something, but we feared we'd be writing this lovely little story beyond anyone's attention span. Writers definitely don't want to run into that problem.

While the desire is declared, there are still many questions to answer. How will Peta try to stop Maeve and the princess? Will Maeve get the princess back to Donegal through magic or United Airlines? Will TSA be a problem? Who else, already in the story, will provide resistance to Maeve's desire? And how will we know that Maeve has had her need met and achieved her desire? And what about some of these memories I didn't explain, like her grandmother?

The only thing tougher than writing a strong beginning to a story is writing a strong ending that satisfies the reader. We're well on our way of doing just that.

Any questions?

Does This Novel Seem Crowded to You?

[Author note: If you’re a pantser, sit down and make yourself comfortable. I'm hoping to show that some pre-writing activity can save you work later without killing creativity. Honest!]

Character, characters everywhere! But do they have a job to do? That’s a good question to ask. Just like you’re created with a purpose in mind, your characters should be, too.

It’s so easy to overpopulate a story. That’s how I’ve collected so many dynamite deleted scenes. But creating a cache of deleted scenes is not my objective. I need to look at my characters as part of an organic whole, not as detached individuals. Each character should help define the others.

According to John Truby in The Anatomy of Story, we learn the most about our protagonist when we can compare her to the other characters on four different levels: by story function, archetype, theme, and opposition. 

Today, I’m going to talk about the story function of your characters, because this helped me the most with crowd control—and revolutionized the way I think about developing characters.

This is my gift to you after being so snarky about Maass’s chapter, “Standout Characters.” Deepest apologies again, Mr. Maass, sir.

Every novel starts with a premise. The premise is what your story is about in one sentence. For instance, the premise of The Hunger Games (HG) is: In post-apocalyptic America, a teen-aged huntress takes her sister’s place in a last-man-standing battle against representatives of the eleven other districts of Panem.  

Once you know your premise, you create characters. Start with your protagonist or hero. She’s the one with the central problem. (Katniss must take care of her sister.) She’s the one who drives the action in an attempt to solve her problem. (Katniss volunteers to take Prim’s place in the hunger games.) The protagonist drives the action, but she isn't without her weaknesses and needs. (Katniss is a loner, but she must partner with other contestants to survive, knowing she will later need to kill them in order to solve her problem.)

This is where things get interesting. All other characters in your novel will represent an opposition, an alliance with the protagonist, or a combination of the two. Every character has a job to do to tell your story according to the premise.

Antagonist: The antagonist should want the same thing as the protagonist, which will bring them in direct conflict. This doesn't mean they hate each other, necessarily. Think of them as opposition, a less brick-wall kind of word. (Katniss has one big antagonist, the government, plus twenty-three contestants that want to live to take care of their families, so they must kill her.)

Ally: An ally helps the protagonist solve her problem. They listen to the protagonist, giving the reader a chance to hear in the protagonist's own words what she values and wants. Again, their goals are usually the same, but sometimes the ally has her own goal. (In HG, Katniss has an ally in Gale, her hunting partner in District 12. Also, Cinna, her stylist uses his cunning and skill to make Katniss a favorite in the games.)

Fake-Ally Opponent: This is where things get really interesting. This character seems to be on the protagonist’s side, but is really an opponent. This is how twists and turns are added to a story, as well as tension. (Effie Trinket plays this role for Katniss. She’s very proper and gathers a team to help Katniss, but she represents the government, the source of all Katniss’s problems. As the government’s representative, she facilitates the death of at least one, if not both of her charges, Katniss and Peeta.)

Fake-Opponent Ally: These are fun characters to write but not as common in storytelling as the Fake-Ally Opponent, but HG is full of them. This opponent appears to be fighting the protagonist but is actually a friend. (Peeta, of course, is the first of Katniss’s opponents to come to mind, but don’t forget about Rue. The most powerful Fake-Opponent Ally is Haymitch, Katniss’s supposed mentor. He is drunk and useless most of the time, but he sees something in Katniss that makes him believe she is finally the one who can survive. He recruits sponsors and sends supplies at just the right moment.)

Subplot Character: Their role is to give another opportunity to define the protagonist through comparison (they want the same thing or have the same problem but go after the solution differently) and to advance the plot. In HG, Katniss’s mother is a subplot character. She wants the same thing, to take care of Katniss and Prim, but her grief has paralyzed her. In this way we see the heroic side of Katniss. The mother moves the plot along by her passivity. Katniss is all Prim has in her broken world.

HG might not have been the best example because there are lots of characters, but they fit very nicely into their roles. Let’s look at a “smaller” story world to see how this works.  Feel free to disagree with me.

In The Language of Flowers, the premise is that a young woman uses flowers to say the things she cannot say on her quest for love. 

Victoria is our protagonist. Her central problem is that she wants to love and be loved but can’t do either. As a product of the foster system, Victoria has never properly bonded with a caregiver, so she probably suffers from reactive attachment disorder (RAD). She uses the language of flowers she learns from her foster mother to try to make connections. 

Her antagonist is RAD, I think. She sabotages herself in all of her attempts to make meaningful connections. 

The author brilliantly gives Victoria two strong allies, Renata the florist and Grant the flower grower. Renata gives Victoria a job to rescue her from homelessness and allows her room to be ellusive, and Grant is the most patient man in the world, and he loves her, literally and figuratively challenging her flower language. 

Victoria’s false-opponent ally, and this is up for debate, is her caseworker. Name? She comes off as making hurtful decisions for Victoria, but she introduces her to the only mother she will ever know because she understands what Victoria needs. 

The false-ally opponent is her foster mother, Elizabeth. She needs the same thing as Victoria, love, and she gives it freely until what she loves more than Victoria is destroyed. She ends up wounding Victoria worst of all. 

The subplot character is Victoria’s assistant whom she brings in from her old group home. Again, name? She’s there to compare how two foster system kids react to emancipation.

So, there you have it, a purpose-driven approach to populating your novels. Personally, this information has helped me develop a wider variety of characters with greater capacity for conflict and helped me to focus the story on the premise by not adding characters who aren't needed. (This is how adorable yet menacing Fred got booted from Goodness & Mercy.)

I would love to hear what you think of Truby’s story structure approach to populating your stories. Have you tried this approach? What benefits or hindrances did you experience? How do you keep from over-populating your stories? Have you ever asked yourself while reading a novel, "What is this character doing here?" 

Of Befuddlement and Theme

It’s not enough to know how to do something. You have to know how to speak and/or write it, meaning that you use the correct vocabulary. And then, if you know how to communicate it, you can teach it to others.

When I taught 4^th and 5^th grade, mastery of multiplication included vocabulary words like factor, multiple, and product. Easy!

No one asked me to teach calculus. Reason #1: I didn’t know how to do calculus. #2: I didn’t know calculus-ese.

For the last year, I’ve been focusing on mastering the concept of story structure.

This should be straight forward. Stories have been around since people formed language, and much of what the ancients wrote about story—Plato and Aristotle, for instance—is still true today. Good stories share common attributes.  And there are lots and lots of books out there to teach me everything I need to know.

A smidgen of frustration (understatement) entered my quest for knowledge because people who write about writing, don't use the same vocabulary. For instance, there's "theme." Theme influences character arc and the internal and external conflicts of a story. In fact, theme should influence absolutely everything in a story.

Again, talking about theme should be straight forward.

It’s not.

Especially if you read more than one book on the subject. Maybe I should have been a mathematician, specializing in elementary math skills. There’s not an ounce of ambiguity about the definition of a sum or what a rhombus looks like.  (Polygons rule!)

But I’m a writer. I should have read ONE really good book about structure and been satisfied. Instead, I read five, which has landed me straight into the category of befuddlement. (The Category of Befuddlement would be a great book title. Dibs!)

I’ve experienced this befuddlement because each author presented different definitions for theme that were enough alike that I could eventually say, “Ah-ha! They’re talking about theme!” But two of the authors gave theme a new name. 

Is theme a bad word?

The first book I read, of course, was John Truby’s book, The Anatomy of Story, strongly suggested by Bonnie. Truby says at the beginning of the “Moral Argument” chapter that “a great story is not simply a sequence of events or surprises designed to entertain an audience. It is a sequence of actions, with moral implications and effects, designed to express a larger theme.”

I get that. Tell me more!

Theme is the author’s view of how to act in the world. It is your moral vision. Whenever you present a character using means to reach an end, you are presenting a moral predicament, exploring the question of right action, and making a moral argument about how best to live. Your moral vision is totally original to you and expressing it to an audience is one of the main purposes of telling a story.

This was a new way for me to look at theme, but it made sense. When I tested the idea against stories I’d read, it worked. Suzanne Collins must believe that personal sacrifice is the highest form of love. Lisa See believes traditions can tie a family together and rip them apart. Anne Tyler believes that what we may think is loving, others see as belittling and settling.

Alan Watt in The 90-Day Novel comes up with his own name for theme. He calls theme the dilemma.

There is a dilemma at the heart of every story…It is the core struggle around which every character in the story revolves. Some people call this the theme (Thanks for the hint, Mr. Watt.) or the dramatic question. It is personal to the hero yet universally relatable to the reader.”

Most recently, I picked up The Moral Premise by Stanley D. Williams, Ph.D. He’s talking about theme as the moral premise. This is how he introduces moral premise:

Every…physical obstacle that the protagonist confronts is rooted in a single psychological, spiritual, or emotional obstacle. And to overcome the many physical obstacles, the protagonist must first overcome the singular psychological obstacle that his journey…is really about…Moral Premise—a statement of truth about the protagonist’s psychological predicament.

These authors are saying very similar things about theme. It’s up to me to create a working definition of theme for my writing. I’m very tempted to go back where I started, with Truby—“theme is how the author believes the world should work.” While these other writers on theme have deepened, corroborated, and expanded my understanding, I prefer this simple yet widely applicable definition. 

Distilling down the themes of books you’ve read—or written—is a great exercise. I’m a bit tardy, but I’ve done just that for my novels, plus my work in progress:

Like a Watered Garden: Expanding our perception of others allows us to grow and gain independence.

Always Green: Friendship is the best foundation for romantic love.

In Every Flower:  Being a family requires more courage than love and the ability to bend and stand against resistance.

The Queen of Sleepy Eye: Harsh judgment of others leads to self-incrimination. Forgiveness leads to personal growth and deeper love.

Seeing Things: We hang on to those we love by surrendering our desire to control them.

Goodness & Mercy: Running away from guilt only brings us back where we started.

Ring!: To free ourselves from regret, we must live without excuses and embrace living in the present.

Notice that theme is not the storyline (plot) or premise (one sentence that tells what happens to start a story and what the protagonist is going to do about it). Theme is the underlying truth of the story from the author's perspective.

What are the themes from your stories? What frustrations have you come across as you’ve learned the craft of writing? Is there a danger in reading too many writing books? What contradictory advice have you been given either by a teacher or in a book? And by the way, if I've got this theme-thing all wrong, tell me now!

THE ART OF ENDING, a guest post by Ariel Allison Lawhon from She Reads

"Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending."

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning I wrote “The End” to a novel that has consumed my mind for over two years. This book, more than anything I’ve ever written,  has tested me as a writer. The premise, though compelling, was ambitious—almost impossible. And the structure a balancing act so precarious that the manuscript constantly threatened to tip over into chaos. It was no easy task to braid the narratives of three diverse, complex women while simultaneously staying true to the historical context of the story itself. Harder still was weaving those threads into a satisfying ending.

And this is what you need to know: I have failed to do so. I realized this upon waking the next morning, after sending the manuscript to a few trusted author-friends. My mind settled into that sense of dread known only to the writer who realizes she’s gotten the ending to her novel wrong.

In his book, The Anatomy of Story, John Truby has this to say about endings:

“A great story lives forever. This is not a platitude or a tautology. A great story keeps on affecting the audience long after the first telling is over. It literally keeps on telling itself.”

Three endings come to mind as I consider Truby’s words: Aibileen’s final reminder to Mae Mobley in The Help: “You is kind. You is smart. You is important;” Henry visiting Clare one last time, at the end of her life in The Travelers Wife; and Amir running to catch the kite for Hassan’s son in The Kite Runner. Each ending expertly built upon an adept weaving of structure, character development, theme, story world, plot, and scene construction. A good ending is the sum of its parts. More important than the opening, by far, it is what a reader takes away from a novel. And creating stunning endings is nothing less than an art form.

An art form I have yet to master.

Again, Truby has great insight into why some endings don’t work (mine included):

“The reverse of a never-ending story [is one] whose life and power are cut short by a false ending.”

My current ending is false. It is too small.

But the good news is that I know where I have gone wrong. And I know how to resolve the problem. That is the beauty of emptying the full story onto paper. It allows us to see the thing with fresh eyes and a renewed mind. It is part of the writing process—though a part only seen in places like this, where the bones of Story development are spread out and discussed.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go knit the ending of my novel back together. But this time it won’t take me two years.

Questions for you: how do you feel about the current ending to your novel? What novel have you read recently that had the perfect ending?

Story World Matters: Part III

To begin, I would like a show of hands: How many people would like to join me on a teaching conference call to discuss story world further? I would set up a time, you call in online, you will be able to see only me, but we would all be able to talk. I would need at least 15 people or so to make it work. If you would be interested, leave me a short comment.
  ~
When it comes to story world you can’t escape the word organic. All the elements of our novels need to connect structurally in non-forced ways. Organic means the story is honest, and that the parts have grown naturally, one idea feeding the next until we have a cast of characters living in a believable world and acting truthfully. Whenever we try to push a concept through a cookie cutter template we end up with a generic formula story that lacks vitality and depth. It’s just like every other story. In Part two of this series, we discussed how to ensure connectivity by story world being a physical representation of the conflict between characters.

The second type of conflict that story world demonstrates is the internal conflict of your hero. When you create a character web, you examine in detail how the various characters oppose one another. The only way to do that is to fully grasp what it is the hero wants, and then how the other characters try to prevent the hero (and each other) from getting his or her desire fulfilled.

In the best stories, the hero has a strong desire at the beginning, which changes (is altered) over the course of the novel. The lessons learned through the course of the novel temper the desire in some way (strengthen it, weaken it only to reveal to the hero the stronger desire he/she was suppressing, etc.). For example, the hero of a murder mystery wants to find the killer, but by the end of the story he discovers his greatest desire was to prove to himself that he doesn’t possess the mind and instincts of a killer himself. The story world helps the reader to see the hero’s internal conflict—the war inside.

There are two things to hold in balance while you craft a story world that physically demonstrates your hero’s struggle for what he desires.

First, ensure your story world properly reflects the kind or type of journey your hero partakes of in the novel. This is a question of story structure. You can read more about this in part one of the series. Secondly, focus on building a story world that reflects the hero’s weakness, and need, as well as desire.

For the first part, we are concerned about the overall arch of the hero’s journey, the structure of the novel that takes the hero from the place he or she lives at the beginning of the novel, and moves him to a new moral, ethical, emotional, and sometimes geographic location by the end. In broadest terms, there are two states a hero can live in: freedom or slavery. Your novel is the story of how your hero moves between these two states of being.

There are pits stops along the way, places that appear to be freedom, but are actually deeper slavery, and places that appear to be defeat (or a visit to death), that lead the hero toward freedom. This journey is organically built into every aspect of your story including the story world. The places and things your character encounters are every bit the hero’s journey as are the dialogue, character interaction, backstory, and plot. John Truby says it this way, “The connection between hero and world extends from the hero’s slavery throughout his character arc. In most stories, because the hero and the world are expressions of each other, the world and the hero develop together.”

The second part requires us to consider our hero’s weakness, desire, and need. Story world demonstrates the hero’s weakness in physical ways. Need is personified inside of place. Desire for freedom is sketched out in the landscape of places, and the systems that are in place. It’s Luke Skywalkers home planet Tatoonine, a dessert place where a living must be coaxed from the sand. It’s Harry’s room under the stairs. In Gilead, it is the box on top of the bookcase that John Ames cannot manage to take down by himself. Often our stories begin with the hero living in slavery (to an idea, a system, an unloving family, a haunting mystery, an old hurt, etc.), and has specific weaknesses. The story world, then begins as a place that highlights and exploits that weakness. As the hero fights for the goal, the story world changes to reflect the small success and larger failures along the way, until, finally, the hero reaches the goal (or fails to reach it) and the story world is changed because it.

It’s a dance where the world and the hero are in step, mirroring one another. The reader understands the movement of the novel because it pulses all around.

The take home is that story world is a physical manifestation of the hero’s inner conflict, weakness, need, and desire that changes over the course of the novel.

It’s been a great week on Novel Matters. We’ve gone deep into story world, yet there is much more we could have talked about. My biggest difficulty in crafting this series was all the material I had to leave out of the discussion for the sake of articles that didn't run several thousand words long. 


If you would be interested in a live conference call, leave a comment and let me know. If the numbers work out, I’ll schedule the call and we can meet up and talk more.

Meanwhile, what has been the take away for you this week? What have you come across in your reading that touches on story world? Do you have questions? 
~
Debbie Fuller Thomas is on She Reads today talking characters and writing what you know. A great article! Check it out.

Story World Matters: Part 1

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It's story world week on Novel Matters. Three articles examining three aspects of creating an organic story world for fiction that feels like real life.

I'm taking over the week and teaching some of the basics. I hope this will touch off a series of questions, discussions, and contributions from each one of us. I offer these articles as starting points, things to consider and fiddle with as we write. I don't pretend to have all the answers or suggest that this is the only way to create story world. I know it works for me, and I offer these ideas up to you for your consideration.

~

Like all elements of fiction writing, story world is multifarious. Meaning, it isn’t one thing, but a composite of techniques, perspectives, and aspects of the writing craft, which are also multifaceted.

Story world is exactly what it says it is: the world in which your characters live, breathe, and have their meaning. It includes the setting, but is much larger and complex than setting alone. It is the world you create in order to express your characters. Story world “shows” (demonstrates) your hero’s personal growth as it morphs and changes throughout the story.

In this way, writing fiction is the opposite of real life. John Truby puts it this way, “In good stories, the characters come first, and the writer designs the world to be an infinitely detailed manifestation of those characters.”

The key here is “manifestation of those characters.” Story world isn’t separate from your characters. It isn’t a rigid space that existed before your characters came into existence. The space your story takes place in (a house, a town, a city, a jungle) represents your characters. And it changes as your characters change.

Where do you begin building your story world for your characters? It starts by knowing exactly what kind of story you are writing. I’m not referring to genre. I’m talking about story structure, the bones of the kind or type of story you want to tell and how you want to tell it.

This is a difficult step that will take a great deal of time to work out. I’m against formulas in fiction writing as a rule, but I will offer you this “formula” for puzzling out how to decide story structure because it is an organic one rather than paint by numbers.

Story structure is: Story process + original execution.

Story process refers to the type of story you are telling (love story, fairy tale, coming of age, dystopian, journey, fish out of water, myth, masterpiece, etc). Original execution refers to the unique way you will tell the story.

Here are some examples of this formula:

The Time Traveler’s Wife: A time traveler learns to love his wife and leave a legacy for his child knowing he will die at age 43. (Story process: love story. Original execution: he is a time traveler, plus the ticking clock of his approaching death)

The fact that The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story means that the story world is largely made up of man-made, indoor spaces where people are thrown together in intimate ways. Apartment, house, crowded bars, even the library where he worked. He moves from man-made space to man-made space and each move is more claustrophobic than the last. Only the sprawling meadow (a natural arena that juxtaposes the man-made arenas in the rest of the book) by Clair’s childhood home provides a utopia for Henry. There, he falls in love and becomes a man. This made it all the more poignant when Henry meets his demise in the meadow.

Notice the amount of detail that went into creating this shifting, intimate, and yet menacing world? The story world expressed Henry, not the other way around.

Let the Great World Spin: A single moment in history is the catalyst for tragedy and hope, expressing humanity’s irrevocable connectedness. (Story process: Allegory/myth hybrid. Original execution: bringing diverse and seemingly unconnected characters together inside a defining moment in history.)

Story world: New York City, beginning in the heart of Manhattan, and spidering out into the various boroughs.

The story world in this novel is overly familiar: New York City. McCann takes the city and creates a series of enclosed spaces where the characters live out their disconnection (a hovel apartment in a dangerous neighborhood, a space under a bridge, a sweeping Central Park apartment, cabin, an institutional home for the physically impaired), crowned by the space below, and around the World Trade Center buildings.

Here’s and example from John Truby’s book The Anatomy of Story:

It’s a Wonderful Life: Express the power of the individual by showing what a town, and a nation, would be like if one man had never been born. (Story process: dystopia to utopia= fairy tale. Original execution: An angel shows George two versions of his small town.)

Story world: Two different versions of the same small town in America.

Because the structure of It’s a Wonderful Life is a fairy tale, it requires a kingdom in which the characters live and our hero rules over (in this case a small town). And, because the original execution is two towns, every element of the first kingdom had to have a contrasting element in the second version (which also had a different “king”, the banker Mr. Potter). No detail could be missed, from the buildings, to the town’s name, to the weather, to the moon overhead.

Your story world is no less detailed.

Detailed and limited. You need to erect boundaries around your story world. The drama of your novel will take place inside of these “walls” (even if there are no walls at all—State of Wonder, Ann Patchett’s latest release takes place in outdoor spaces, first the streets of a city, then the jungle). When you think of your novel, you need to think in terms of contained space. Where are the boundaries of your story? Is it a town, a city, an island, a house, a boat, a shoreline, a hut, a jungle, etc.? Then, within those boundaries, you will create secondary spaces (rooms with in a house, a house within a city, a campsite within a forest, etc).

If your story structure requires multiple worlds (for example: Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Pleasantville, etc.) you must connect the worlds in some fashion. My newly completed manuscript takes place on an island off the East coast, but I have a man-made space on the mainland that I need to include in my story world (it symbolizes futile attempts to attain wellbeing outside of the character’s organic story world); therefore I used the system of ferry service as a bridge between the two worlds. That meant that I needed scenes on the ferry, and that the ferry itself be organically part of the larger story world.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, a brief introduction to the topic of story world. There is a great deal more to consider based on the specific story structure you will use, and the original execution you will employ. We’ll explore further in part two, coming on Wednesday.

For now, the key take away is that the world your characters live in is a manifestation of those characters.

Thoughts? Also, feel free to ask any questions or for clarification. I’ll do my best to engage with your ideas and ponderings and together, we might come up with something helpful.

Lessons on Truth from Novel X

What a great start to the year--a guest post by Ariel on Monday that reflected what we intuitively know about a great book but she put into words: "Character and Plot and Setting and Theme slip away with time. But I can pull any book from that shelf [of keepers], dust off the cover, flip to a favorite passage and tell you exactly how it made me feel. And really, that’s all that matters in the end." If you missed Ariel's post, backpedal a few days to enjoy her passion for a good read. And then, there's Katy's post on Wednesday that left us gob-smacked as she gave voice to her astonishment, the true calling of the novelist, according to Annie Dillard. Thanks, Katy.

At the end of Katy's post, she said, "Truth is what happens underneath, and how it resonates like a great voice through a vast impossible mouth." And that's our job as fiction writers, to tell the truth.

I gave this a lot of thought. I know excellent fiction is truer than life, but what goes wrong when it isn't?

It just so happens I finished reading a novel for my book club a few days ago, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why it left me flat. I'm not going to tell you the title or author. The Novel Matters writers are looking forward to reviewing novels in the coming months, novels that matter for their craft and for "the way it made [us] feel." This novel (Novel X) was a worthwhile read, to be sure, but not one that gob-smacked me, so I'm only using my reading of the novel as a jumping off point for our discussion.

I must say that the author did an amazing job of plunking me into a landscape and culture of intense contrasts and unequaled beauty--the mountains of Kentucky--with exceptional skill, so much so that his words set my heart longing for a place I'd never been. And his descriptions--oh my.

But the read was dissatisfying, despite the plethora of 5-starred reviews the book received. (The novel read more like a memoir, which should read more like a novel, but that's a topic for another day.) I think my dissatisfaction came down to the question of truth. John Truby says in his book The Anatomy of Story: "...You must give the hero desire. Desire is what your hero wants in the story, his particular goal...Desire is the driving force in the story, the line from which everything else hangs."

In Novel X, the hero wants what she already has, and that would be a fine desire to structure a story around, if the author had created obstacles to the hero keeping her family and home, but there weren't, not really. And that's not truthful. We are all driven by desire, and we all fight against an army of obstacles to obtain those desires. This is the very reason we read novels. We want to see the hero struggle toward their desires, just as we do, sometimes failing, perhaps being betrayed, always being sidetracked, and frequently a bit misguided.

What I'm suggesting is that a big part of "the truth that happens underneath," as Katy said, is desire, and the stronger the desire the stronger the obstacles and the more satisfying the story when that desire is met, or traded in for something higher, more noble, or holy.

Perhaps Novel X's hero's lack of desire hit me because I'm guilty of this flaw. Not that I lack desires. I'm a zoo of desires! But it's scary to embue my hero with a desire that will take him or her places that make my skin itch, or toward a thicket of obstacles with no discernable path. It's a process, for sure. Here's a recent conversation I had with my latest hero-in-the-making to demonstrate my point:

Me: So, Reece, what do you really, really desire?

Reece: For the last year to go away.

Me: That's not going to happen. I wish it could, for your sake, but then we wouldn't have a story to tell. Think about it. What do you desire? What are you willing to die for?

Reece: I want my family back.

Me: Your ex-husband is married to another woman. Maybe you should desire something else.

Reece: You asked me what I would die for.

Me: So I did. What's your first move?

Reece: Isn't that your job? I could use some direction here.

Me: Well...uh...you probably shouldn't have had the affair.

Reece: Are you sure you're qualified to write this story?

Me: This isn't getting us anywhere. Tell me about your parents. Why are you back home?

Reece: My mother's crazy, always has been, and she's finally driven my father away. She can't live alone, just can't.

Me: Let's see, you're a divorced adultress who wants her married husband back, and you're trying to save your parents' marriage. I suppose there are kids involved. This is getting messy.

Reece: You're the one who asked about desire.

Me: So I did. Let me get back to you.

As you can see, Reece and I have some work to do. This piece of the story--the hero's desire--is so very important that I'm willing to revisit it many, many times. Without a strong desire and plenty of obstacles, I don't see how we can say our fiction is truthful. This is where our heros find their motivations, after all.

What about you? How important is desire when conceptualizing your hero and his/her story? Are there other story elements more important to establishing truth in a novel? If you've read a Novel X--let's be nice and not name it--what was missing?

Storyworld: An Introduction

Like all elements of fiction writing, storyworld is multifarious. It isn’t a stand alone concept but is a composite of components that are, in and of themselves multifaceted.

Storyworld is exactly what it says it is: the world in which your characters live, breathe, and have their meaning. It goes beyond setting. It is the expression of your characters. Storyworld “shows” your hero’s personal growth as it morphs and changes throughout the story.

In this way, writing fiction is the opposite of real life. John Truby puts it this way, “In good stories, the characters come first, and the writer designs the world to be an infinitely detailed manifestation of those characters.”

The key here is “manifestation of those characters.” Storyworld isn’t separate from your characters. It isn’t a rigid space that existed before your characters came into existence. The space your story takes place in (a house, a town, a city, a jungle) represents your characters. And it changes as your characters change.

Where do you begin building your storyworld for your characters? It starts by knowing exactly what kind of story you are writing. I’m not referring to genre. I’m talking about story structure, the bones of the kind or type of story you want to tell and how you want to tell it.

This is a difficult step that will take a great deal of time to work out. I’m against formulas in fiction writing as a rule, but I will offer you this “formula” for puzzling out how to decide story structure because it is an organic one rather than paint by numbers.

Story process + original execution = Story structure

Here are some examples of this formula:

The Time Traveler’s Wife: A time traveler learns to love his wife and leave a legacy for his child knowing he will die at age 43. (Story process: love story. Original execution: he is a time traveler, plus the ticking clock of his approaching death)

The fact that The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story means that the storyworld is largely made up of man-made, indoor spaces where people are thrown together in intimate ways. Apartment, house, crowded bars, even the library where he worked. He moves from man-made space to man-made space and each move is more claustrophobic than the last. Only the sprawling meadow (a natural arena that juxtaposes the man-made arenas in the rest of the book) by Clair’s childhood home provides a utopia for Henry. There, he falls in love and becomes a man. This made it all the more poignant when Henry meets his demise in the meadow.

Notice the amount of detail that went into creating this shifting, intimate, and yet menacing world? The storyworld expressed Henry, not the other way around.

Here’s and example from John Truby’s book The Anatomy of Story:

It’s a Wonderful Life: Express the power of the individual by showing what a town, and a nation, would be like if one man had never been born. (Story process: dystopia to utopia = fairy tale. Original execution: An angel shows George two versions of his small town.)

Storyworld: Two different versions of the same small town in America.

Because the structure of It’s a Wonderful Life is a fairy tale, it requires a kingdom in which the characters live and our hero rules over (in this case a small town). And, because the original execution is two towns, every element of the first kingdom had to have a contrasting element in the second version (which also had a different “king” the banker, Mr. Potter). No detail could be missed from the buildings, to the town’s name, to the weather, to the moon overhead.

Your storyworld is no less detailed.

The good news is, your storyworld has set boundaries which you erect around it. The drama of your novel will take place inside of these walls. When you think of your novel, you need to think in terms of contained space. Where are the boundaries of your story? Is it a town, a city, an island, a house, a boat, a shoreline, a hut, a jungle, etc.?

If your story structure requires multiple worlds (for example: Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Pleasantville, etc.) you must connect the worlds in some fashion. My newly completed manuscript takes place on an island off the East coast, but I have a man-made space on the mainland that I need to include in my storyworld (it symbolizes futile attempts to attain wellbeing outside of the character’s organic storyworld); therefore I used the system of ferry service as a bridge between the two worlds. That meant that I needed scenes on the ferry, and that the ferry itself be organically part of the larger storyworld.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, a brief introduction to the topic of storyworld. There is a great deal more to consider based on the specific story structure you will use, and the original execution you will employ.

The key is to remember that the world your characters live in is a manifestation of those characters.

Thoughts? Also, feel free to ask any questions or for clarification. I’ll do my best to engage with your ideas and ponderings and together, we might come up with something helpful.

How to Write a Great Villain

Good villains aren’t born they’re created. Chilling as this sounds, it’s nice folks like you and me who are responsible for some of the most heinous characters in fiction. If you’re looking to write a story with staying power, a tome to remember, you need a great villain.

Iago from Othello
Moby-Dick from Moby-Dick
Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca

What do these characters have in common? They’re more than mere bad boys and girls. More than the simple villain of old who tied innocent girls to the railroad tracks while twirling a long black moustache. Each of these characters is a symbol for a force that exists inside a dominant culture.

When you are beginning to craft your villain, it’s best not to think of that character as a villain at all. In John Truby’s book The Anatomy of Story, he understands the antagonist (or villain) as “opponent”. He says, “[. . .] don’t think of the opponent as someone the hero hates. He may be, or he may not be. The opponent is simply the person on the other side. He can be a nicer person than the hero, more moral, or even the hero’s lover or friend.”

Opponents aren’t trapped into being the bad guy; instead they are free to express other facets of the same issue the hero is exploring—but in a very different fashion, and for a specific reason. A good opponent is the personification of a base human state and/or a cultural system (and good protagonists, too).

Let’s look at that list of villains again:

Iago from Othello. For centuries literary critics have pondered the slightness of Iago’s reasons for wanting to destroy Othello and everything he loves. He is a character that stalks the souls of everyone who reads or sees the play. He is honest, yet pure deceit. When I read this play, I see not a man consumed with human envy, but the personification of Lucifer standing before the throne and refusing to bend the knee. He is the pride of life that every child of Eve wrestles.

Moby-Dick from Moby-Dick. That great white whale is so much more that a defiant fish. "The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them." Here is the story of a man made to confront his own actions when faced with a foe as large (speaking in a literary sense only) as God. He is all that is wild and unpredictable about life.

Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca. This woman drives a young bride nearly to suicide, and is consumed by flames in the end (or is she?). She is the personification of the establishment that leave no room for the dreams of the young and that imprisons us within our own doubts and try to keep us from rising above our circumstances.

I recently saw a staging of Wicked: The True Story of the Witches of Oz. In it, we discover that the Wicked Witch (Elphaba) isn’t wicked at all. In fact, she is a brave, deeply principled young woman who is fighting the forces of the Wizard and his minions. That makes the Wizard the villain. But he’s no ordinary run of the mill bad guy whose mother didn’t love him. If he were, the story would be ho-hum, a passing distraction instead of one of the most enduring and successful musicals in modern history. The Wizard is the personification of racism. He is the force in our dominant culture that smothers voices of smaller groups within the culture. He stands for something that is as real and powerful as what Elphaba stands for. And when he falls, every member of the audience prays that this piece of hatred they carry within has died a little more too.

That’s why it isn’t enough to have a character that is mean, petty, vindictive, or murderous just for the sake of needing a bad guy. And that’s why it isn’t enough to have an excuse or reason for why your opponent is “bad”. A writer understands that ‘evil’ is a descriptive, not a character type. It can describe an action, but it is never a trait for a character. It must be more layered than simply saying, “He is evil.” The opponent must be intricately connected to a large construct that exists in the human psyche and/or the dominant culture.

Who is your favorite villain? What does she or he personify? Or what about a character you’ve created?

Is Kvetching Absolutely Necessary?

Yay! We have a winner!!! Marian, choose one of the books listed below. I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks to all for your comments.

Thanks so much for taking time during your Independence Weekend celebration to drop by Novel Matters. You deserve a special treat. If you comment today, I'll enter you in a drawing for one of the four books I mentioned on Wednesday in our roundtable discussion, your choice--Home, Mudbound, Half Broke Horses, or The Book Thief. Yes, it will have been gently read, by me, but books shared among friends are the best.

So, here we are for our book chat of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. We're focusing on the chapter, "Plot Treatment" today. Remember, reading the chapter isn't a prerequisite for participation. Yammer away with me!

Everyone I know flails around, kvetching and growing despondent, on the way to finding a plot and structure that work. You are welcome to join the club.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Just to summarize:

Lamott spent two-plus years writing a beautiful story where nothing happens. Her editor refuses the manuscript, and, after a period of depondency, she gathers herself to try again. She rearranges pages, paragraphs, and scenes on the floor of her apartment. Satisfied that she has a string of story pearls, she travels from San Francisco to New York to discover she'd only managed to make the story prettier. The story brimmed with witty writing, stunning imagery, and well-developed characters doing absolutely nothing.

You've read novels like that. You wait and wait for the story to start, all the while marveling at the clever use of language and the fresh description. Within pages of the end, if you get that far, you're still wondering when the story will begin, which means there are wants and conflict to care about. Evidently, Lamott is lucky to have an editor who pushes her to "build" a story with sound internal logic before actually publishing it.

Here's a bit of wisdom from Lamott's story: Lamott went back to her editor, head in hands, and asked for help. He tells her to write a plot treatment for her story, which turns out to be a chapter-by-chapter super-charged synopsis. (Side note: A synopsis is a great way to discover holes, gaping or otherwise, in your plot.)

After the plot treatment, she says, "The book moved along like the alphabet, like a vivid and continuous dream."

I'm such a Girl Scout--be prepared and all that. Lamott's process of writing a complete manuscript, three times, sounds like pure torture to me. Perhaps you see her experience as a glorious, organic process you hope to emulate. Go for it. Absolutely, go for it.

Not me. I do tons of thinking about structure and plot before I start a novel--and I'm doing more now than ever. That doesn't mean I don't tweak, delete, and augment along the way, that the muse doesn't whisper in my ear, that I don't hit a wall at 30,000 words. I do, I do. I've been asked by editors to shore up a sagging middle and strengthen an ending, but, egads, rewrite a manuscript three times? Lamott has persistence. Perhaps that is the true wisdom of this chapter--listen to your mentor and keep trying until you get it right.

But let's go back to plot and structure. (I'm reading two books on the topic right now: Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell and The Anatomy of Story by John Truby.) Notice Lamott didn't discuss the how-to of plot and structure in this chapter, only that the struggle for plot and structure is worth the prize. I expected her to recommend a plot treatment or other such tool, but she didn't. I find that curious, especially since she experienced success once she'd had a plan.

I'm learning that plot and structure is so much more than deciding to write by the seat of your pants or to outline every scene and sneeze. Plot and structure is the logic, the motivations, the reader's satisfaction, the author's world view...sadly, it's too big of a topic to develop here. Sorry.

I hope what you'll take from this chapter of Lamott's book is that plot and structure make beautiful writing entertaining. It's worth all the agony and kvetching. Whether you work a plan or rewrite to strengthen plot and structure, it's hard work. No way around it.

Do you consider plot and structure before you start writing? Where have you learned the most about plot and structure? Do you have a story like Lamott? Have you done complete rewrites to bolster plot and structure? What kept you sane? Motivated? Do you outline? Write a synopsis? A plot treatment? Do you believe plot and structure can happen organically as you write? I'm so curious about this topic. Tell me everything!