Three Plot Tips:
1) Ask, what do my characters (or I) expect to happen now? Make something utterly different happen.
2) Ask, what was true in the beginning of my book? What was the status quo? How is that changing? What would challenge that more? What would turn it on its head?
3) Ask, what else is going on, underneath what is going on? What else might be revealed? What do I assume? How might what I (or my characters) assume be absolutely not true?

We all want the perfect family and the perfect day, but the stories come from the problems and troubles. We want it to be easy; we want it to be simple; we want it to be pure joy. But life is more complicated than that, and your stories should be, too!

Here are some more tips for writers that holiday celebrations drive home:

1) Unwrapping half the fun? Worrying about being able to smile and thank Aunt Matilda for the horrible present keep you up at night? Anticipation is more involving than payoff. See my blog on withholding.

2) Shared childhood? Hardly! Each person remembers different moments, different aspects of what happened and who did what and what pieces of the world around mattered. Hence the interrelation of point of view, plot, character and setting. Who tells the story will determine what gets recounted, what gets noticed and remembered.

3) When everything is happening all at once, it’s exciting, but it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on, let alone appreciate it. Sequences and causality support the creation of meaning.

No matter what kind of holiday (or childhood) you had, you can use it to strengthen yourself as a writer. The interior narrator, like the interior soundtrack, can get you through a lot until you’re back to the wide expanse of your own blank page.

Atchity and Me

I am writing this off the top of my medicated head as I recover from wisdom-teeth extraction, so take it with a grain of ibuprofen and go get Kenneth Atchity’s great book A Writer’s Time for yourself. I began teaching my Book Writing Cycle (BWC) this week, and one of the techniques I am recommending is based on Atchity’s use of index cards. I’m going to explain something about this system, as I’ve applied it to my own projects. Recently, I’ve switched over to Scrivener, so that my index cards are computerized. We’ll see how that goes . . . (My To Do List is also computerized, has been for a year or so, and I’m still on the fence about it . . .)

The Math

The idea with the index cards is that you will gather up a bunch of them, doing exploratory and then focused research (which, for fiction, and even memoir, is already a lot more open than for non-fiction), and then organize them, and then use them as stepping stones when you write your first draft.

Since my BWC participants are all going to write a full manuscript in seven weeks, in November (as part of NaNoWriMo) and for three weeks in December, they have (coincidentally) seven weeks from today to collect their cards. So the first thing to do is the math. Let’s say you want to write a 300-page manuscript (at 300 words/ page, that’s 90,000 words). And let’s say you want 2 cards to carry you across each page. You’re going to need 600 cards to write the manuscript. But not all cards you create will survive to your final stack (more on that soon), so you aim for, say 700 cards. You can toss 100 and still have enough.

Including today, there are 50 days until Nov. 1—manuscript launch day. In all fairness, Atchity gives twice this much time to research and doubles the number of cards per page to four (though he’s more flexible for fiction), but we’re working in an accelerated timeframe. That’s part of the fun and challenge of NaNoWriMo and the BWC.

So: in order to gather 700 index cards before Nov. 1, starting today, you have to create 14 cards/ day.

The Cards

What the heck is on these cards?

For the “expansion” phase, Atchity has you wandering in the stacks of the library, making your way through various books and interviewing people, too. Interviewing for fiction is fun—more focus on quirks and sensate detail than just the facts. I also make my way through books on writing—currently John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story, for example—and use the suggestions and exercises in there to spur ideas that go on cards.

When you sort the cards in preparation for the focused part of your research, Atchity suggests that you be sure you have enough dialog, action and setting cards. So those are three good categories to focus on. Character cards are important, too. I also have notes like, “Maybe Lucy and Magdalena went to high school together and the whole pink elephant scene happened between them.” A lot of my cards start, “What if . . .?” What if Lucy were writing a book about Magdalena’s ex-husband? What if Edward and Magdalena already had kids? What if Magdalena’s trouble about the truth of her book happened at the same time as Edward’s job sent him to Israel? Some of my cards contradict each other. At the gathering phase, I’m not worrying about that. More will be revealed. Always. As long as you keep wondering and writing down your notes.

In essence, if our job as writers is to ask questions whose answers we do not know and then to answer those questions, index cards, those neat, open, blank spaces, give us the tiles in which we begin to explore answers. Something from nothing, here on this 5 x 7 rectangle. It’s manageable and exciting at the same time. You have a blank stack of cards, 14 cards, and some bit of time in front of you. So you make notes. You turn to the world, you turn to your imagination, you spark ideas—and you write them down. That’s it. There’s a lot of intuition and trusting of your storyteller in this system.

Here’s another metaphor: the index cards are firewood you are gathering from the floors of the forests where you wander. When you write, you will burn your way through them to keep things hot.

About half, or two-thirds, of the way through your card gathering phase, you take stock of what you have and what you need. You need more information about Edward’s journey to Israel. You need more about Magdalena’s book and Lucy’s motivation. You need more dialog cards. Whatever. The last phase of your gathering, what Atchity calls “Contraction” is about filling in the gaps.

The System

And so, the day arrives when you have your 700 cards. (Atchity gives you days to sort and road-map with vacation days in between. Again, for BWC folks we are modifying this system so that we can jump in and write like crazy.)

Atchity’s rule is “NO THINKING” for the first part of the sorting. Here you are making two piles: Yes or No. You ask yourself, Is this card dramatic or not? Will it create a memorable scene or image or not? Yes or no? He suggests you go through the entire pile once and then quickly again, to be sure you got it right or to adjust.

The next stage of sorting is into piles. First card goes into its own pile. Does the second card join it or begin a new pile? Go through all the cards, creating piles. Then go through them again, correcting and confirming and looking for ways to combine piles. He suggests putting rubber bands around your piles, so you can then move them around, looking for a natural order—beginning, middle and end—to your novel. Somewhere in the book, he also suggests that you order the middle of your book into “beginning, middle and end,” and do this as many times as you need to keep the middle taut.

Basically, he’s applying non-fiction research and writing methods to fiction, allowing for a lot more open, loose application of the techniques. If you stop needing the cards, he urges you to let them go and keep writing. They will be there as a roadmap if you lose your way or your momentum.

Order and Creativity

I was a strange child. I make up plays and played dress-up and wrote stories, but I also loved filling in the blanks in notebooks. Atchity’s well-organized system reassures me. In the end, I will move back and forth between the plan and my own urges and intuitions. But note, the plan itself is based largely on intuition. Having a structure creates a pathway for your intuition. It gives you a way to begin that does not ask you to know where something belongs or how it will become a book. It gives you a way to proceed until you have a book.

The following is the letter I wrote to the brave group of folks who started–and yes, finished–books with me last fall. I thought it might be useful to anyone gearing up to write a book. If you want to join my group, check it out HERE.

Dear Book Writers,

Why a Frame? Why are we starting with plot (and character)?

It has been my experience that the hardest thing to go back and put into a novel after it’s written is a strong plot based on a deep sense of character. In other words, actions must grow out of the motivations and psychology of your character.

Now, you can create a character who will, by nature, do the actions required of him or her in your plot, OR you can create a plot that grows, naturally, out of the will of your character. In either way, you want a character with some serious motivation and a backbone (even if it’s initially hidden from us or from him- or her-self).

Writers can work for years on books, so there are very many things one could do in preparation for writing a manuscript. In fact, I urge you to write at least a page every day where you are just thinking on paper (or on screen) about your novel. Writing about writing is actually a much more powerful planning tool than simply thinking about writing. It’s the power of the keyboard or the pen–the power, if you will, of writing.

In these pages, you can think about your characters’ histories, about the setting of your novel, about images that move you, fragments of the world that inspire you. Think about the underlying idea or theme that drives your story.
By the same measure, when you are writing 1670 plus words a day in November, you will be thinking and writing about these things all the time. That’s what’s so powerful about NaNoWriMo and the writing life itself. Right now you are tilling the fields.

Together, we are going to have three intertwined foci:
1) Building a strong, logical, exciting plot
2) Based on a motivated, backboned, interesting character
3) While revving the engines by inspiring each other and addressing any real questions or fears.

For some of you, this may be so effective that you will always use this approach in all future books that you write. For others, you may learn that you want to start with place or imagery, that your plot grows more naturally from an exploration of other material. For now, I ask you simply to respond to all the challenges: to try. Anything you do will move you further down the path of your writing life, which is to say, the project of creating worlds.

JOIN THE BOOK WRITING CYCLE HERE.

Warmly,

Elizabeth

Sitting in our local green cafe the other day with author Dorothy Hearst. My brain and my storyteller were, as usual, wrestling for control over this novel revision. I was doing some fruitful planning and feeling the need to get my bearings with this new plot, new character arc, and so forth, but also worrying because I’d made this commitment to write 1000 words/ day on the novel.

“Writing about the novel counts toward the 1000 words,” Dorothy said. She’d been charting and process options for days and was ready, just that day, to return to the writing. But she’d never stopped. That was her point.

Perhaps I could have integrated my brain and my storyteller right then. I’d be unstoppable, really, if they could only work together better. But in fact, I did write about 500 words of scene, and produced something unexpected and exciting that actually taught me something about what I was up to, also. And then I did a bunch of exercises and wrote the rest of my words, and then some, about the novel.

Now I’m on vacation. I really wanted to keep the writing going throughout driving with the two toddlers (and Angie) to Santa Barbara, and though the family festivities. But instead, I am going to have to step it up, hard, when I get back. I am on deadline. That’s the second secret offered up in today’s blog.

Secrets to writing the second draft, summary:

1) Writing about the novel counts as writing. But only so much. Then you have to get back in there and see what happens.

2) Writing for a deadline that matters to you will make the wishy-washiness of your daily options give way to the force of that looming hard stop.

The price must be paid for going public, and I am ready to pay it. I hit several instructional snags, which is not to say that learning got in my way but that my getting in my own way might have something to teach you. Or me. Whoever is paying attention.

I wrote 1000 words a day for each of the five weekdays last week, and then I hit snag one. I had not officially decided whether or not I was required to write on the weekends, and so I went on not knowing until the day had spent itself on chores and stuff and some fun and was gone. Since I had not written on Saturday, it was likely that I had in place a policy that I would not write on the weekends, but I considered that perhaps a six-day-a-week schedule might make sense. Thus did I spend Sunday watching the time go elsewhere until there was no more Sunday left and only a Monday to face.

By this time I’d not-written enough to send myself into a bit of a crisis. My brain wrested charge of the project from my storyteller, and my brain was not altogether pleased with what had been done in her absence. The brain never is pleased with extra-brain activities. Mine was no exception.

Hrumph, said my brain. This is terrible stuff here. (Actually, we–my committee–had all been most pleased on Friday when I’d finally given over to the flow of the story and shut down the brain’s commentary sufficiently and really let it rip, but by Monday all that was long in the past, and we had new concerns.) You need a plot. You need to know where you are going. And you can’t go to Tel Aviv if you haven’t been there since you were thirteen.

This was a problem. My storyteller is hopeful and adventurous. My storyteller believes that what she can’t remember of Tel Aviv, she can imagine, either accurately or better, as it should be rather than as it is. My storyteller believes in The Secret and in fairy tales and in the undercover lives of teddy bears. My brain knows that she is not to be trusted.

My brain put the kibosh on all this nonsense and got things going in another direction. My brain enlisted the brilliant Pilar Alessandra. She is a discovery of Angie’s. She teaches screenplay writing, and Ang is a real fan and finally bought her DVD. So last night we put it on and I did a bunch of brainstorming and got a lot of exciting ideas. My brain was happy. My storyteller was excited, too.

Today, I am halfway through my 1000 words, and have not yet incorporated all these new insights. But just by going back to the writing itself, I learned new things about my character, Edward, and about his story. I remembered the gifts of the storyteller to discover through invention rather than through thinking. To create through letting go rather than through controlling.

I know that I will continue to wrestle with these two parts of myself, and I know that the strengths of my writing depend upon both of them. I just wish they didn’t get in each other’s way so much. It feels as if I’d have more time for writing if I could stop arguing with myself!

” . . . or you write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you a silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then someone says yes to it, to something you are liking, or doing or making and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed that you had then when you were writing or liking the thing and not any one had said yes about the thing.” –Gertrude Stein

I just had a wonderful conversation with someone who said yes to my goals. She is successful in her own right and she gave me some great advice. I know it is great advice because it is advice that Angie has been giving me for years, advice that makes sense and it practical and doesn’t require anything impossible. And yet because this person said it to me, I got all fired up and ready to go. She said, make a plan. Even if it is a bad plan, it will be something to go back to when things aren’t going well or when you don’t know what to do.

A long time ago, when I first wanted to write a novel and I had no idea how to begin, my wise and wonderful sister Nanou asked me to think about how I’d accomplished other things in my at-the-time realatively short life. Well, I’d accomplished other things by a contorted method of examining every option I could think of it excruciating detail until I finally plunged in one direction. It was torturous. She said, “It sounds as though you do a lot of mapping and planning, and that this leads you to take action.” This was more than kind, but in any case, it set me in a direction that worked quite well for me, indeed.

There’s a wonderful book by Kennith Atchity called A Writer’s Time, that became the perfect road map for a planner like me.

Now it is time for me to make a new road map for a new project. I won’t say too much about it right now, except that it builds on the great online community that has been growing out of the courses I am currently teaching in novel writing and (upcoming) revision.

Around the time that David Foster Wallace killed himself, Terri Gross replayed a part of an interview she did with him some years back. He seemed so scared to step outside of the generational cynicism that dogged him and yet so trapped and frustrated inside it. The conversation reminded me exactly of my graduate school days, the fear I’d had of being sentimental. It’s a terrible place to be, though, because life packs some serious wallops, and pretty soon you don’t know how to address all the feelings you are having that turn out to be common and human, because common + human = sentimental, and sentimental has somehow become the worst thing of all to be.

Of course, the sentimentality that is problematic is a more glib approach to feelings, a desire to tap into emotion without earning it, to push the reader somewhere instead of taking her there. And it’s a tough line to walk, no doubt about it.

But the people who are succeeding–on a variety of fronts–are optimistic, organized, and aware. I am thinking of this woman I talked to this morning who has made herself into a successful wealth manager, but also of Jamie and Laura who have shepherded their baby son Simon through a harrowing ordeal of months in a hospital.

In order to be optimistic, organized and aware, you have to risk sentimentality, you have to risk the muck of human feeling and the dangers of communicating it, to yourself and to others.

I know that out of the exhaustion and surprise of becoming a parent, I really had to earn those feelings that are most frequently described as “automatic” or “maternal instinct.” I had to develop a conscious relationship to those feelings through getting to know these two beings who’d been placed in my hands. Now that they are with me in abundance, I revel in the joy of them. I don’t worry if it is cliched to think my kids are as gorgous and brilliant as anybody on earth; I do notice the texture of it and the specificity of them: Charlie’s joy in saying, “No” in his rumbling baby voice. “No! No!”  Leo’s intent focus as he stacks blocks higher than his own height. Charlie’s witty repartee, as when it is time for good-night songs and he knows what is coming: “Rowrowrowrowrow.” Leo’s process of deciding which car seat he wants this time, heaving himself out of one and into the other, rolling back and forth between them.

See? These are small miracles for me and likely impress you very little. That’s okay. I am saying yes to my sons and yes to my own hard-earned maternal adoration and yes to my big plans. I am saying yes to the risk of sentimentality in the exploration of human connection. Our pediatricians have a handout that suggests that you give your kids ten yesses for every no, that when you say no, you automatically owe them ten yesses. I think I’ll try that with myself for a while . . .