“Okay,” a student writes, “here’s a question:

“Given that I am ending up with chunks of interesting information and scenes but not necessarily fitting the original incline, what are some tactics or techniques for figuring out how to fit the chunks together in a narrative?”

This is an exciting question that inadvertently (but not accidentally) taps into the heart of what storytelling is all about. I say “not accidentally” because when you write everyday, throwing yourself deep into a book as this person has done, you are bound to end up right in the lap of the creature, aren’t you? So there she is, with chunks.

Putting chunks together is exactly how to build a story. We contemporary readers-cum-screen-watchers can jump cut from one universe to another, from one point of view to another, from one era to another without pause. We do not need our chunks cemented with smooth transitions, with careful contextualizations, with complicated explanations. Show us the money, baby. Lay your chunks out like cards.

Cards is a great metaphor, in fact, because what matters when you are turning over one card and then the next–say in a game of War or Black Jack in not so much the card itself as its relationship to the card that comes before or after. But once you know the rules of the game, the cards can just be turned, and the story is all in the turning.

Check it: Twenty-One: First card is a five of diamonds. Second card is an Ace. What next? Tap tap: third card is a seven. You’ve either got thirteen or you’re over with twenty-two, yes? Tap, tap: an eight of spades. You’re golden. Lucky bastard. (Note: My Twentyone experience, such as it is, comes from when I was about eleven and attended a conference in Florida with my father. While he went to boring lectures, I hung out with the bartender and played Twenty-one.)

Five; Ace; Seven; Eight. Chunks. It’s the rules of the game that allow the juxtapositions to take on meaning. What are the rules of the narrative game? Things like this: Whatever someone is counting on will not come to pass; when things are looking very, very bad, something is going to turn around; when things are looking very, very good, something is going to turn around; people change, unless they are the kind of people who think they are going to change radically and profoundly, in which case, they will stay the same; actions build and stakes rise, so things can only get better, or worse–they can’t simply repeat, even in intensity; and it always comes down to a choice.

So you place your first card, and we’re looking to see what’s coming next. We know it won’t be the same. Things are going to go up or they are going to go down. We’re looking to be surprised. What expectation does your first card set up? Your next card is going to upend that expectation. Your third card is going to keep raising the stakes. Your fourth card is going to force a choice. Your fifth card is going to reveal that choice. Your sixth card will announce unexpected consequences to your choice.

So how does this related to real-life revision? Annie Dillard talks about the nine-mile hike you take, around and around a long table, when you are revising. You lay out your chunks–on the floor, on your dining room table, pinned to your walls–and you pace, moving them around. You are looking for electric connections, unexpected conversations between the pieces.

Story is about juxtaposition, as David Mamet talks about in his wonderful book On Direction Film, which is really on writing story. He’s using Eisenstein’s theories of collage–the story comes from the uninflected juxtaposition of two images.

A branch cracking. A deer looking up.

A little dog running toward a curb. A giant wheel of a truck rolling forward. Little dog. Wheel. Little dog. Wheel.

See? Uninflected images juxtaposed create a story. Create meaning. There is no narration. No voice over saying, “Poor little dog, if only I had known . . . “

This means: trust your chunks. Don’t smear loads of glue on the back that will seep around the sides and dry into white plastic paste on the construction paper.

When I first apprenticed myself to writing, I was twenty and had just moved to San Francisco. I had a very plain notebook, the kind you buy at a drugstore for a buck, and I filled it with short scenes. Then I read through it and looked for unexpected relationships between those scenes, and by laying them side-by-side, this character becoming that character, another character becoming roommates with the first, stories emerged from those pages.

I thought of this practice as setting up crosscurrents. A story was usually about at least two things, two unexpectedly juxtaposed things, out of which a third–call it meaning–emerged. The tension in story comes where the crosscurrents create suction, movement, a whirlpool.

Try laying out your cards. Shuffle the deck and try it another way. Card by card, lay out the story, until it’s one you’ve never heard before but which you know to be true.

[I am teaching a six-week-plus online / Skype course in Revision (for writers) and Editing (for editors). I am currently offering several holiday specials and discounts. To learn more, please visit my online learning center. I also send out a monthly newsletter with a writing tip. You can sign up to the right of my blog. Thanks! Elizabeth]

It’s a funny day. The fog gathered around my house this morning, turning everything gray and soft. Now the sun has broken through, but inside my head it still feels gray and soft. I’m in a different library, in the teen room, surrounded by the books that formed me. When I was a child, my father mostly read Scientific American and The New Yorker, and my mother read books about healthy diets and finances and thing. I didn’t know there were adult novels when I was little–though I was delighted to learn that there were.

What are the stories burning inside you? What are the books you desperately want to read that do not exist?

I put an ad on Craigslist for a babysitter and received, along with a passel of nice replies, the following:

“Who gave you the right to have kids? Under Gods law only a man and a women can have kids/raise kids, poor kids what example r u setting foe their future ? In school for instance, ohh yes I have 2 moms, right? They are going to ask, where is your father. Find God get them a real father, meaning! Get a man stop this sin, God made the woman for the man to rule this earth not the sick and depravation you are causing. Find God, you still have time to repent”

My own righteousness lies all in the practice of grammar, I suppose. Perhaps school is to grammar as church is to god. There are lots of people who go to school and learn nothing about grammar. There are lots of people who go to school everyday, but who do not care about grammar one little bit. On the other hand, there are people who forget that all human languages have grammar; school is not required for grammar to flourish. We humans develop systems for understanding each other whenever we gather together.

This is what I have to say to the man who is concerned about the depravation I am causing.

A long time ago, before I knew her, I took a class with Eileen Myles, and she had us watch an old movie with the sound turned off and to write as we watched. We were narrating the movie, essentially. Similarly, I could list off for you the titles of some of the books around me, and you could pick one and write your own book from it, or a short story at least. Angie listens to music when she writes–all kinds of music. I listen to interviews with writers while I clean the kitchen. My point, however, out of the soft gray fog of my brain (oh and I was leafing through Faulkner just now, which didn’t help), is that sometimes having two tracks running–the one you are imbibing and the one you are creating–can move you in different directions than just the silence of your own mind.

How does it feel to be hated?

Unfriendly, to be sure.

I was leafing through Light in August to see if I could map Aristotle’s incline across it. For example: There are 507 pages in the Vintage paperback edition I am holding, the one with the gold and burnt umber cover with a picture of a road on it. This one also has a sticker with a list of dates stamped and penned in (library book) and a Summer 2005 Selection sticker from Oprah’s Book Club (Faulkner being less able to object that the arrogant living writer who’d rejected her attentions). In any case, the midpoint of a 507 page novel should fall somewhere around page 254. Chapter 12 begins on 256 with the line, “In this way the second phase began.”

There is a mathematics to literature as there is to music.

I just finished reading A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon, who wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. I wrote in my newsletter tip about his excellent use of sensate detail. The whole books was visual; in fact, I would go so far as to say that it was nearly a film. Haddon has a background in writing film, so that may explain it. It was a funny and fast read–much like watching a romantic comedy with, say, Hugh Grant. (He could play the gay son, I think, or the sister’s fiance if he wanted to step out of type.) Omniscient narration with short chapters that spun among the main characters.

Haddon did a great job of pushing the story as far as it could go without becoming science-fiction or horror or something. Within its genre, I mean, he really let things happen and get bad and then worse and then . . . because it is a romantic comedy . . . better at long last.

Forgive this rambling little blog entry this morning. It is time to go retrieve the boys from the park and the babysitter and go have lunch. I leave you with five ideas for planning your novel, in case you, too, are going to start writing one in the next three or four days:

1) Write out everything you know about the book.

2) Write out everything you do not know about the book.

3) Make a list of twenty concrete images, scenes, people, moments that you want to include.

4) If you are stuck on a point, write out five different ways to solve it.

5) Ask yourself what you believe: what truths do you hold to be self-evident? Make a story up about that. Be sure you put that contrary character in there–the one who things that your best, most human self is a deprivation before god.