Write & Rewrite: Plot

This post first appeared as the July "Write & Rewrite" column in WritersTalk, the newsletter of the South Bay Writers branch of the California Writers Club.

 

Plot is arguably the most important part of any story. Even complex characters in a richly detailed world won't hold a reader's attention if they don't do anything significant. A plot can be subtle and compact, as in a short story consisting of a single tense conversation, or it can burst with exciting incidents that build to a revelatory conclusion, as in a thriller novel.

To discuss plot, let's consider a highly simplified outline that could serve as the basis for either a short story or a novel:

1. Married couple Ella and Art have both lost their jobs and can't afford to pay their mortgage.
2. They put their house on the market and move in with their grown son, Mike, and his family.
3. Living in Mike's house leads to tension and arguments.
4. Art finds a new job, and the couple is hopeful that they can get their house back before it sells.
5. Ella also secures a job, and they're able to reclaim their house just in time.

The outline opens strong: The characters are in a tough situation that they will have to struggle to get out of. This can be a great way to begin a story, but only if things get worse from there. In this plot, life does become more difficult for Ella and Art. However, the additional problems follow as a direct consequence of the starting situation rather than arising from new obstacles, so while the first half of the outline has promise, it could be better.

Now, Where Was I?

In June, I reached the blogging milestone of one year since my first post. After much deliberation, I decided that the best way to celebrate the anniversary would be to completely ignore the blog for over a month.

No, of course that's not exactly what happened. In June, my regularly scheduled creative endeavors were interrupted by higher than usual levels of reality. These conditions persisted right up until some previously planned weeks of vacation. For the sake of my sanity, I let the blog lapse into an unannounced hiatus.

I'm back now. And I'm just as unsure how to go about this blogging thing as I've been all along. As I feared at the beginning, I'm a slow blogger, and the time I spend writing posts usually comes at the expense of time I would have spent on the novel. After a year, blogging hasn't become easier or turned into a more natural part of my routine the way I hoped it would.

Still, I'm glad I started this blog, and I intend to continue. I'm happy with the posts I've written this year. I think some of them have been useful or inspirational for other people (and I always like hearing when they are, hint hint). Some favorite posts:

→ Index Cards for Fun and Planning

→ Getting the Story Right

→ Why I Quit NaNoWriMo But You Shouldn't

→ Recommended Books on Writing

→ What We Write About When We Write About Love

→ Just 10 Minutes

→ All of the columns originally published in WritersTalk, which are longer and more in-depth than my standard blog posts

I'm pleased with my system of monthly reading plans and recaps that encourages me to read more books and post about what I read. I still find it tricky to compose more detailed book recommendations, but I'm gradually figuring out how to review and discuss books.

I have some vague ideas about possible new directions for my blog. For now, though, expect things to remain as haphazard as always around here. If you, my loyal readers, have any thoughts about what you'd like to see more of (or less of), please let me know. Thanks for reading.

The Right Amount of Detail

As I read IF SONS, THEN HEIRS by Lorene Cary, I was struck by the number of nonessential but delightful details and moments that were woven into the story without ever bogging it down. I call these details "nonessential" because each one individually could have been omitted without losing crucial story information. Yet they aren't the pointless, boring descriptions I railed against in a recent review and column. These are specific, compelling little pieces of narration and dialogue that enrich the world. They make the characters more identifiable and the situations more believable, and they never last long enough to detract from the plot's momentum.

I'll give an example, though I'm not sure it's meaningful out of context. In one scene, a boy interrupts a serious conversation between adults to pester his dad about soda. In the next scene, an elderly relative scolds the boy about the way he's throwing away the soda cup. There's nothing important about the soda, and what's shown about the characters in these interactions isn't substantial new information. It all could have been cut without impacting the story. But there are subtle reasons for including the soda: The interruption makes the serious conversation more palatable for both the characters and the reader, and the boy's realistic behavior adds credibility to a novel that's partly about raising children. None of these purposes stick out. On the page, it all blends naturally into the action.

I wish I was capable of analyzing exactly how Cary achieved the proper effect so that I might offer some writing advice more useful than "Include the right amount of detail." I'll try to expand a bit: First, notice when you've included details that don't directly move the story forward. Next, don't edit out all of them.

I have a rather spare writing style and a tendency to expunge any line that I can't justify as serving a clear and necessary purpose. In revision, I agonize over the revealing but tangential moments, fearful that I love them too much to impartially judge whether they are superfluous. IF SONS, THEN HEIRS served as a good reminder that some of my beloved nonessential details may still have a place in my novel.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Nathan Bransford deconstructs How to Craft a Mystery in a Novel: "A character's desire + Consequences/stakes + Obstacles + Delay = Mystery"

→ Melville House bestows the Moby Awards for the best and worst book trailers. (Thanks, The Millions!)

June Reading Plan

I'm carrying two books over from May:

→ THE CITY AND THE CITY by China Miéville - Looking forward to starting this, after hearing a lot about it.

→ GREEN MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson - I'm a little less than halfway through this big book. I'd like to try finishing it this month.

Since I know I have a busy month planned, I'll just add one more book to the list:

→ 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein - Eleanor Brown did a joint book event with Goldstein a few months ago. My mom attended, bought this book, and recommended it. It's a novel about academics debating religion. Flipping through the book, I see lots of typographical gimmicks like email messages and lists, and I love that sort of thing.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jessica Francis Kane, author of THE REPORT, which I wrote about in April, discusses the label and nature of historical fiction. (Thanks, The Millions!)

→ Artist Chip Zdarsky presents posters for children's stories reimagined as Hollywood films. (Thanks, Nathan Bransford!)

May Reading Recap

Writing and real life have been taking precedence over blogging lately. But it's a new month, so let's see what I read in May:

→ THE INTUITIONIST by Colson Whitehead - This is a novel about elevator inspectors, set in an alternate version of 1950s New York in which elevator inspection is a really big deal. The Department of Elevator Inspectors wields significant political power in the city, inspectors graduate from the Institute for Vertical Transport, and tension is building between those who inspect empirically and those who test the machines through intuition. The book's protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, is a black female Intuitionist who is forced into a confrontation with the Department's old-boy network when she becomes the target of an investigation. It's a weird, fascinating premise, with a plot that gets quite exciting as Lila Mae uncovers a series of conspiracies and secrets.

→ IF SONS, THEN HEIRS by Lorene Cary - The book opens with a family tree charting the many members of the Needham family, who are descended from slaves. The novel is set in the present day, with some flashbacks to other eras, and concentrates on a few members from one branch of the tree. But all the other relatives are important because the story's main conflict concerns a piece of heir property, land owned jointly by all descendants of the original owners. The characters and storytelling in this book are fantastic. There's a wonderful balance between big issues -- the property, a character finding the mother who abandoned him, concerns about an aging relative -- and minor everyday problems like how to keep a small boy entertained.

→ GREEN MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson - I got through another chunk of this book early in the month, but I haven't picked it up in a while. Maybe I'll focus and finish it in June.

I also read a manuscript for a friend who is getting ready to self-publish. I'm looking forward to announcing her release sometime this summer.

I didn't get to the final book on my May reading list, THE CITY AND THE CITY by China Miéville, so it rolls over to June.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ The Intern explains how a plot is different than a series of events after musing on "how funny it is (and how perplexing) that you can write an entire novel (or even several drafts of a novel) and only realize at the very end that -- oops! -- you forgot to give your story a plot."

→ Nicholas Tam presents a detailed essay on fictional maps: "So when we open up a novel to find a map, we can think of the map as an act of narration. But what kind of narration? Is it reliable narration or a deliberate misdirection? Is it omniscient knowledge, a complete (or strategically obscured) presentation of the world as the author knows it? Or is the map available to the characters in the text?" (Thanks, Pimp My Novel!)

Moving Right Along

The writing has been going well these past few weeks, though if you'd been watching me at work, you might have thought I was in the process of being eviscerated by hamsters. Revision can be painful. Especially when for several chapters in a row, the outline says little more than "will have to add some new material to this chapter." Gee, thanks a lot, Past Me.

After a few agonizing planning sessions (thinking is also frequently painful), I came up with the required new material and rewrote the problematic chapters into a series of tense, gripping scenes that move the plot along and provide crucial character insight. At least that's what I hope I did. If nothing else, the new version is an improvement over the sagging middle that was there before.

The next few chapters in this storyline are going to stay fairly close to the previous draft, so that will be easier. There are more changes ahead, but I may be through the trickiest parts. And then it's on to the other two storylines, which I expect to be more straightforward, but let's not think too much about that right now, okay? I'm in a good enough groove with the section I'm working on, and I don't want to get distracted.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ From author Will Allison, a powerful essay about his second novel and his marriage: My Editor, My Wife. (Thanks, The Elegant Variation!)

→ The New York times presents Book Covers That Got Away, and Flavorwire pairs the rejected covers and the final products.

How to Survive the Zombie Menace and Common Writing Pitfalls

FEED by Mira Grant has a fantastic premise, an exciting plot, and characters I enjoyed spending time with. My recommendation of this book is tempered with the caveat that I wish it had been better written (or failing that, better edited). Still, I'm enthusiastic enough about the other elements to overlook the writing flaws, and it must be emphasized that I'm rarely so forgiving.

The story takes place twenty-six years after a viral outbreak caused a zombie epidemic that took out a third of the world's population in a few months. At the time of the book, zombies continue to pose a serious threat, but the healthy population has secured enough safe zones to carry on a heavily restricted version of pre-outbreak life.

The book's narrator is Georgia Mason, a journalist in her early twenties. Along with her daredevil brother Shaun and their colleague Buffy, she runs a fairly successful blog collective. In the post-outbreak world, blogs have become the main source of news and information, and bloggers who leave safe zones in search of stories are subject to stringent goverment safety regulations. Near the beginning of the novel, Georgia and her team get the opportunity to go on the road and follow a major story that will help them score big ratings.

I'm a fan of stories about siblings, and the portrayal of Georgia and Shaun's relationship in this book is great. They've grown up in a world in which people tend to stay isolated and avoid trusting others, and they've come to depend only and completely on each other, though the two of them are different in many ways. Their closeness is further cemented by the recognizable phenomenon of "you're the only person who understands what it's like to have my parents." Georgia and Shaun are unrealistically adept at trading clever quips at life-threatening moments, but that fits with the tone of the book, and otherwise their actions are believable and consistent.

The world-building in FEED is fascinating and comprehensive. I like to read about epidemics, but fiction involving plagues often glosses over the details of how the disease spreads. This book, even though it's set long after the initial outbreak, doles out sufficient plausible backstory. There are realistic details, such as that the virus spread especially quickly in schools. And there are clever insights, such as Georgia's hometown of Berkeley faring better than other college towns because it was pre-populated with the kind of people likely to believe and act on crazy internet rumors about reanimation of the dead before other cities understood what was going on. The novel also does a good job at imagining the kinds of social changes and government policies that would emerge in the aftermath of a zombie uprising.

What disappointed me about this book is that it continually exhibited the easily avoidable problems of narrating too much detail and not trusting the reader to be paying attention. Over-narrating is related to the over-description I discussed in my post on describing settings: both stem from how perfectly a scene appears in a writer's head. If the writer can visualize exactly what's happening, it's natural to want to record every movement that every character is taking, but it's unnecessary and eventually annoying. FEED contains inconsequential sentences like "The [guard] on the left leaned over and took the tray from the one on the right, who opened the door." These may have left me screaming at the book, but they also serve as a good reminder that during my own revision, I should think about what actions really matter to a scene.

Another problem to watch for during revision is repetition, specifically explaining the same piece of information too many times. Since this book is set in a world different from our own, many aspects of the characters' everyday lives require explanation. For a crucial plot element, it may be reasonable to mention the same information a couple of times to get the point across. And if the point is that this element is a ubiquitous irritation in the world of the book, it could make sense to refer to it over and over. But there are only so many times it's worth saying the same thing, and readers are good at filling in the blanks. By halfway through FEED, I was really wishing Grant had the confidence in her readers to trust that we assumed Georgia had put on her sunglasses to protect her sensitive eyes, and that we understood the ever-present blood tests involved needles every time.

So those are my complaints about the writing, which I'm airing because they provide such a good lesson for writers in what not to do. I still found FEED to be a highly enjoyable read, and I'm looking forward to the second book in the trilogy, DEADLINE, which will be released on May 31.

Setting the Scene

This post first appeared as the May "Write & Rewrite" column in WritersTalk, the newsletter of the South Bay Writers branch of the California Writers Club.

 

When writing a story, whether a work of fiction or a nonfiction narrative, it's a good idea to describe the setting of a scene so the reader can imagine where the action is taking place. Here's an attempt at doing that:

Nora walked into her old childhood room. It looked almost the same as when she left home twenty years earlier, from the pale pink carpet to the eggshell paint on the walls and ceiling. To the right of the doorway, alongside the wall, was a single bed covered in a comforter with a green and black abstract pattern. Opposite the foot of the bed stood a tall pine dresser with six drawers. The dresser top displayed a collection of glass animal figurines arranged on a piece of blue silk. To the left of the dresser was a window framed by pale green curtains, and to the left of that, an oak desk with three drawers on one side and a hutch on top with two shelves.

The writer has described Nora's old room in painstaking detail, so the reader should have a clear mental picture of what the character is seeing, right? Well, probably not, because chances are, the reader skimmed past this paragraph, fell asleep, or threw the book away.

A powerful description goes beyond cataloging every object visible in a scene. It shows the reader what's important in the setting while providing insight into a character. Learn to create effective descriptive passages, and you'll keep readers engaged and paying attention to every word.

May Reading Plan

I'm carrying over two books from my April list:

→ THE INTUITIONIST by Colson Whitehead - Haven't start it yet.

→ GREEN MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson - Read about a hundred pages.

And I'm adding two more:

→ THE CITY AND THE CITY by China Miéville - This book was mentioned frequently at FOGcon, which had a theme of "The City". It was recently handed to me by a friend along with a glowing recommendation. What I know about the book is that it's a fantasy concerning two cities that exist in the same physical location. I've previously read Miéville's UN LUN DUN, set in a mirror version of London.

→ IF SONS, THEN HEIRS by Lorene Cary - A new release that I probably read about on some book blog, though I've lost track of which one. I didn't realize until I received my copy that Cary is the author of the memoir BLACK ICE, about her time at a New England prep school. I read that book -- it must have been soon after its release -- in a class at my own (different) New England prep school, and then Cary came and spoke at a school assembly. Anyway, I was attracted to the new novel because it involves several generations of a family.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Robin Black at Beyond the Margins contemplates story beginnings: "In the moment before the story starts, the reader knows nothing, and the author knows everything."

April Reading Recap

Despite a bunch of non-reading days while I engaged in vacation-y activities with visiting family, I did pretty well on my April reads:

→ FEED by Mira Grant - Finished. A page-turner about a sister and brother working as journalists at a time when zombie infection is an everyday threat. I was sucked right into the story and couldn't stop reading. I didn't like everything about this book, but I'll be picking up the second installment of the trilogy, DEADLINE, when it's released at the end of this month.

→ THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY by Hannah Pittard - Finished. A collective coming-of-age for a group of friends. When a high school girl goes missing, her male classmates (speaking in the first-person plural point of view) imagine what might have happened to her. The girl's different hypothetical futures mix with the accounts of the boys' lives as they grow up, start families of their own, and cope with the often-unwanted responsibilities of adulthood. The book jumps around in time and focus, using this odd narrative style to gradually tell the mostly-complete, mostly-sad story of the residents of a suburban neighborhood.

→ THE INTUITIONIST by Colson Whitehead - Haven't started yet. I'm looking forward to reading it next.

→ GREEN MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson - About a hundred pages in. As with the first book in the series, I expect to read this one over a few months while also reading other books.

In addition to the published books I read this month, I also reviewed and critiqued a manuscript for a friend. I'll probably be looking over a different manuscript in May.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ The Intern offers Ten Reasons You Should Rewrite That Scene: "In Draft One, you account for every minute in your characters' lives. Big scenes in which your characters experience major conflict are strung together with long, creaky suspension bridges of little scenes showing what happens in the meantime (vacuuming, taking a shower, going for a walk, etc.) Do we need to know what happens 'in the meantime'?"

→ The Guardian Books Blog is asking readers to help build 24 hours of fictional time using lines from literature.