My guest today is author Lane Robins, also known as Lyn Benedict (Sins & Shadows). I like her writing style and from what I've read of her, I love the details she is able to weave into her stories so smoothly.Her topic today is on how to keep control of a story, both in character arcs and plot lines. Especially with deadlines looming. I've seen all sorts of visuals and story building devices to keep everything straight. Her visual is an intriguing concept.
Writing is the best job ever. It gives you the opportunity to create worlds, characters, plots. You get to play with magic, religion, history. Best of all, you get to play with the office supplies.
Call me irrevocably warped by long afternoons in my father's office, but I adore office supplies. As a writer, I get to use them whenever I want. However I want.
Every writer has their own process to creating a novel; mine involves a rainbow of sticky-notes and posterboard.
For me, novel genesis goes something like this:
I clear off the table, or at least half of it. I lay out a piece of foam core, posterboard, sheet of cardboard. I take the cats off of it. Repeatedly. Then I draw a giant W with a black permanent marker.
Most novels have reader expectations built into their frames—genre novels have perhaps more than most. In romance, someone will live happily ever after. In mystery, people will commit crimes and get caught. In fantasy, people will discover how magic can reshape the world. But all of these require twists and turns within the plot, points where the characters react and move in a different direction. The giant W makes me start with those major scenes that drive the plot forward.
So I've got a W, I've got the barest ideas of a plot, I've got a character waiting for conflict, and by god, I've got sticky-notes in scads of colors and shapes.
I start with the first point of the W: the inciting incident, where the story begins. In Kings & Assassins, that's the death of the king. It gets two notes stuck to it, one reads something pithy along the lines of Kill King Aris. The second note, a separate color, represents the main character's emotional track. I find it extraordinarily helpful to attach the character's emotional reaction to each event; it keeps me from forgetting that the characters need to feel. It's always a temptation for me to just move the characters around like little pawns, but that not only makes for an ultimately unsatisfying read, but bores me stiff while I'm writing the novel.
The second point is the first complication that spins out from that inciting incident. It always makes things worse/harder/more unpleasant for the main character. Again, it gets two post-its at a minimum. (The more complicated the story, or the more crowded the character list, the more post-its accumulate until some storyboards look like mosaics. Pretty, but a little daunting.)
The third point, the half-way point of the book is usually a new twist, a new complication, something out of left field for the character who thought they were getting a handle on the first set of problems. Also known as the "things get worse" point. Very often my brain provides a silly little dum-dum-DUM! at this moment as I stick the note on.
The fourth point: oh the fourth point is dreaded. It's the spot in the story that's always blankest to me when I'm brainstorming. I know it's the spot reserved for the character's dark night of the soul, the moment where they have doubts, feel fears, where their plans have failed, where life is bleak and bitter and probably looking like it's going to be cut brutally short. Sadly, I rarely know this point in advance—I guess my brain just likes to leave some mystery in the plot. It usually gets a place holder sticky with a few question marked ideas written on it. It may, however, have a very elaborate emotional arc lined out. After all, I know what my character dreads and fears, and I want him to feel it right there.
After that, it's a steady climb upward, the uphill battle leading to the climactic fifth point of the W, where my long-suffering character can finally triumph, though often at a steep price.
All writers are sadists. I personally blame the writing advice books which tell you to never make things easy for your protagonist, and to kill your darlings. The second advice is really about favorite scenes that don't add much, lines that are out of place, or anything that we put in that we love, but doesn't fit the rest of the story. Thing is, we're writers. We home in on "kill" and the characters suffer for it.
This is a picture of a bare bones W with the beginnings of a post-it note party that I’m putting together so I can write a narrative outline for an upcoming novel. You'll see that there are more than five points represented. The joy of the W is that it allows me to start filling in events along the lines to move my character from point to point in a driven way.
You can faintly see the black sharpie lines of the W beneath the post-its, as well as a scattering of brain food of choice (Peanut m & ms), my beloved and increasingly battered Mac, and a few post-it notes that haven't quite migrated up to the board but belong there. Eventually.
This is a single POV character arc. For multiple POVs, but only one main character—like Kings & Assassins, like Maledicte—the sticky-notes get more numerous, but the W stays static. Occasionally, an antagonist will get enough back story going that I might start a line down the side charting their past, their present, their desired future.
I've got another posterboard going for a more complicated book, a fantasy romance with two main characters whose plots will weave in and out of each others', and for that, I've put up a double W that overlaps. It's definitely ugly and crowded and makes no sense at all to the casual viewer. But to me? It's a road map to another world built out of ordinary office supplies.
***
Lane Robins was born in Miami, Florida, the daughter of two scientists, and grew up as the first human member of their menagerie. When it came time for a career, it was a hard choice between veterinarian and writer. It turned out to be far more fun to write about blood than to work with it. She has three books out currently, Maledicte, Kings & Assassins, and, writing as Lyn Benedict, Sins & Shadows. She currently lives in Kansas, with an ever-fluctuating number of dogs and cats. You can reach her at lanerobins.com Lane can also be found on Facebook.
Other books by the author:
I've posted several articles on writing humor. One thing most everyone will agree with is that writing humor is hard work. You have to spend a lot of time looking for just the right word or phrase or device to put the sizzle in you writing.
John Philipp is a weekly humor columnist for four Marin County, California newspapers and has won numerous humor and memoir writing awards. His humor columns are posted at http://johnphilipphumor.gather.com/.
