# data[].attributes.body
Once you have a substantial text, it’s time to look at it closely and hone the prose and make the formatting clear. Sentences should have variation in length and grammatical structure. You want your dialogue formatted consistently. Section or chapter breaks, too.  But there are some things that it is hard to see clearly without external help, particularly small language tics that  you use frequently.  Words or constructions that you default to, when a variation might provide a better reading experience.  These aren’t cliches in the sense of being phrases that are so overused in the culture that they have lost their freshness and meaning — they’re specific to your voice. The goal would be to observe how you express things, and make sure you’re not repeating things — whether words, constructions or ideas — excessively.

There is an online tool called Voyant that I like for searching out what I call “internal clichés.” These are phrases that you as a writer may tend to over use. I recently ran it on something I’ve written and discover I had used the word just 70 times. I was able to look at each construction with just in a list and decide which of them to eliminate.

It also generates a word cloud and other ways of seeing your text.

Try it, and see if it helps you make line edits and eliminate repetition or internal clicjhé, or just become more aware of your habits of diction.

https://voyant-tools.org/

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Link to a bb with Oblique Stategies draws….

# data[].attributes.body
The composer Brian Eno created a set of cards called Oblique Strategies, a kind of I Ching providing guidance in the process of musical composition, especially indicated when the composer might be stuck. It can largely be used for any sort of creative composition, though a few of the cards are specific to music and instrumentation. This website collects the cards’ aphoristic statements (the several years refer to different editions of the cards, which had some variations.) . You can click on different boxes to “draw” a card. See what you get, and if it helps you.

In exploring it,  I found I kept unintentionally clicking on the same card. (Faced with a choice, do both.) Maybe I was just attracted by that spot on the page, but it seemed like a strategy I should follow, so I took it as I sign, and I decided to try doing exactly that: both.

# data[].attributes.body
Whether you’ve written everything “in order” so far or not, there are likely to be continuity jumps — chapter or section breaks, places where you move back and forth in time or from on point of view to the next. This sort of structure creates both relief  — a natural time to take a break from reading — and suspense for the reader.  In so doing, it leaves narrative gaps.  You can just leave them, but an excellent technique for transforming the sense of vertigo a reader may feel when leaping across your narrative gorges is to bridge them with what I think of as link stitches. The French Link is a book binding stitch for connecting signatures that results in a gorgeous patterns of crossed threads. Narratively, the idea would be to be mindful of the endings and beginnings of each section of you book and make later sections pick up and continue the threads you have started and left hanging in prior ones.  Chapter 5 need not pick up the timeline just where Chapter 3 left off, but if there was something going on left unfinished there (a letter send, a vase broken, a call dialed), you can include a reference to it — possibly only a very brief one —and how it concluded, even if you have moved forward much further in time. You may want to develop a pattern to your links, whether it’s rigorously regular (probably most suitable for a highly suspenseful form or a chapter or middle grade books) or a little more complex and even erratic, say every other chapter links for a while, then a new thread starts, which eventually gets brought into the linking….  You should be conscious of the opportunity and make a decision about using link stitching  wherever breaks or white space occur, but chapter or larger section breaks are the most typical spots for this kind of linking.  As always, use this technique judiciously. If you make it too regular or overt, it may seem clunky, obvious or facile. If you do it deftly, it will create continuity and a wondrous sense of structure your text.

# data[].attributes.body
You know how time in novels can be nonlinear, what with flashbacks and internal monologues, and how we don’t have to walk or drive or sail through space to change our settings? Thank you, white space. It's a narrative superpower, but it can also make things pretty complicated.

To navigate your vast and possibly disorganized space-time continuum, you can create a set of narrative waypoints that represent scenes of your book. These may not include every scene, just as you may not need to add Schenectady as a waypoint on your route from Albany to Buffalo... you'll likely end up passing through along the way without having to schedule it in.

Waypoints can be plot events or moments or conversations, trips taken or  themes your characters  ponder. Any narrative element, possibly at the scene level, but maybe bigger or smaller.  Some of the most important to keep track of may be flashbacks, precisely because they occur out of chronological order.

While you don’t need to worry about completeness or comprehensiveness when building waypoints, do  try to come up with a good number -- between ten and thirty. The idea is to figure out the sequence of your narrative — the order in which events will unfold on the page, rather than in chronological time.

You might try doing it with index cards or sticky notes, because these are highly modular. You can rearrange them.  I like placing waypoints on a line graph with their place in the book as the X axis and either joy or anxiety on the Y axis. I might move things around till the chart looks like a volatile stock market.  If there's too much drama at one point, I'll take some of it off that spot on the docket and save it for later.

Follow your list waypoints as you write scenes, going forward. It is a map that can help you get where you’re going and keep track of where you've been. Because while you can get to Buffalo from Albany via Schenectady and Syracuse,  you can also do it by way of Montreal and Toronto — it’s just a different trip. Feel free to reroute when desired!

# data[].attributes.body
Send yourself your document on kindle or as a pdf -- or print it out -- and put away your pens, pencil, stylus, keyboard...

It's time to do a complete read through of what you have, without stopping to take notes.

If you absolutely must, allow yourself to jot occasional notes down on a pad to remind you of something you want to do, afterwards. But try to just read it through. In as few sittings as possible.

The point here is to get a feel for the way the whole thing reads, to learn if all the parts cohere and to discover where the holes might be. Once you've read it ALL, write yourself a note about what you want to change and what works, and then (if there's still work to do!), you can dive back in to the editing.

# data[].attributes.body
To reestablish focus as you progress through a larger text, ask yourself and answer The Three Whys.

Why are you writing this story now? This is something you want to be able to get down in the space of an index card (or say during an elevator ride). You can use it to explain your project to everyone from your mother to that famous guy you meet at a party (or see in that elevator coming down from the party?). It's for anyone who asks you what you’re working on. It should be short and simple, and remember, the index card is just an index card, not a microfiche. We’re talking one or two sentences.

Why should your reader care? This is the part you don’t talk to people about so overtly, because no one wants to hear what you think they think…  The answer may be anything from because they can relate to they want to escape reality  to  because they want to learn about parts of the world they don’t know about yet.  I don’t believe in writing for an audience, but I do advise keeping this question in mind as you go, as a sort of lodestone of anti-onanism.

Why does your protagonist do what they do? This part gets you back to writing.  Isolate a formative moment in your character’s past that influences their present behavior. Write it out, not as a flashback, but as a scene. Once it’s down, maybe you can fit it in as a flashback, in some way that helps you reveal the present better, but for starters, just focus on that moment in the past.

# data[].attributes.body
It’s a common dictum that you should write what you know, but as historical novelists understand, your knowledge base is not limited to your life experience.  You can learn.  You can research.  To do it right, you need to research both deeply and broadly, so that your knowledge is as rich and idiosyncratic as if your material were something you had lived.

Three tips for those with research to do:

1. Avoid the rabbit hole.  Many writers, once they get on the research jag, find they get lost in it and it detracts from their writing.  To start, do enough research to jumpstart your imagination, then lay off, and only research when you need specific info or more inspiration.

2. Read the paper.  Read historic newspapers for specific dates that interest you, and read them in their entirety, including the ads.  You’ll pick up as much or more from the society column or the hat ads as you will from the international headlines.

3. Avoid a review of basic or even lesser known historical facts that establish the background of what you're writing about. You don’t need to teach the reader of all the facts leading up to Kristalnacht to write a terrifying and vivid account of one girl’s experience of it. Unless your character knows all that, it's likely a narrative distraction as well as a point of view error. Instead, go deep on meaningful, specific and highly particular details: the way a street is paved, the way a lock is constructed, the fluctuation in the price of bread in an inflationary period.

Bonus point for writers of middle-grade works: do consider, if relevant, touching on material covered in the Common Core. Course adoption is one avenue toward bestsellerdom.

# data[].attributes.body
Acknowledge your gratitude for something from your life that has inspired your work.   Maybe it’s something good; somewhat more likely, it’s a conflict, a problem, a person you have a complex relationship to.  Then do reality a solid and change something substantial, putting distance between the source of inspiration and the version you’ve written.  Make that brother a banker, not a painter. Set the scene of the trauma in the woods, not the beach. If you’re working in autofiction and don’t want to make things untrue, consider a mashup of two true things, combining elements of both to give rise to an authentic moment that is nonetheless a hybrid — and very much your own.  Why do this? It will free you up, let you see things differently, and, by allowing you to choose what you’re changing it to, it will free you from the constraints of your memory, putting you in fuller control of your fictional universe.

And good for you, for writing today, even on a major holiday!

# data[].attributes.body
Analyze the patterns in your text. Start with basic shapes like chapter and section length. Most common, perhaps, is the text that has chapters of regular lengths, but any pattern will work. What rarely works is a text whose shape is erratic — say, with a few short bits here and there, one long one, and several of intermediate scale. A series of texts within texts could be hugely connecting, but if not curated and made to interlock, multiple texts could simply be confusing and disorienting.  For example, you could punctuate a novel effectively with recurring scenes of film or stage play-like dialogue.  But a text that has a play within a play, two newspaper clippings and a crucial telegram — that might seem random.  One rule of thumb is that if there’s one letter that’s important to the plot, there should probably be at least two letters in the book.

To figure out exactly what you have, you could make a table of contents for yourself, or just try zooming out to a 10% page view and looking at as many pages as you can on your computer screen, all at once.  Where’s the white space?  Once you’ve identified patterns in your text, ask yourself what form they take. Is there any sort of alternating or braided structure, where you switch between or among times, places or characters? If so, it should be satisfyingly regular without feeling machinelike or robotic. Do you have a beginning middle and end, a twelve month structure, 24 hours? A triptych with three point of view characters? A saga in which years and points of view fly past? How do you mark and delineate the changes?

Look to your text and find the patterns — they are surely there — and then perfect, enhance, vary and generally tend to them. The work will pay off by creating a very real sense of satisfaction in your reader. We’re genetically predisposed to love patterns.

# data[].attributes.headline
11/23 Write the awful scene...obliquely.  

# data[].attributes.subject
11/23 Write the awful scene...obliquely.  

# data[].attributes.body
If there’s not a calamity in the present timeline, consider your character's deepest, darkest, most shameful or terrifying moment, their unmentionable and unforgettable secret. Depending on the story, this could be the murder of a king, the betrayal of a friend, a lie, an act of omission, a deception, a petty theft, or perhaps it's an inherited trauma.

Next, consider the very specific ways your character would avoid thinking about this bad stuff or tell the story in such a way as to distract from the worst of it. Imagine a character looking at an inanimate object while a terrible act of violence occurs, but again, this could be much more pedestrian, a lie a child told to cover the truth...  That's deflection. So for the prompt, focus on what your character's greatest trauma or ugliest moment deflects to.

# data[].attributes.headline
11/22 There should be humor, even if it isn't funny

# data[].attributes.subject
11/22 There should be humor, even if it isn't funny

# data[].attributes.body
Comedy often works because of disjunction, whether between two things we'd expected to match that don't or two things we hadn't expected to be similar that are. It also comes when we dwell on what we wouldn't (or shouldn't) normally do, or when we fail to attend to what we ought — again, disjunction

Take Chapters 76 and 79 of Moby-Dick together, The Battering Ram and The Prairie. If this whole part of the book is an extended (quite absurdly extended, really) set of mediations on the head of the whale, these chapters in particular focus on the forehead and noselessness of the sperm whale.

The Battering Ram describes with outrageous foreshadowing the implement of the Pequod's eventual demise. The whale's flat forehead is highly padded and deadly, a heavyweight's boxing gloves gone exponentially large, yet also mystical, with blank page connotations, especially when we ponder Moby-Dick himself, whose forehead is a true white blank page.  With the chapter The Prairie, Melville returns to the same space, that flat forehead, but focusses on the lack of a nose in the whale, and noses, as Cyrano knew, are almost always comic. In their presence, but also in their absence. To say you can pull the whale's nose is to make us think of that silly act.

What's going on here may be a corollary to gallows humor: it's taking pressure off the heavy foreshadowing we've been subjected to, not that there won't be some serious calamities to come, thanks to whale heads, but just so the tires don't  blow before we get there, Melville makes the thought of it all more tolerable with a bit of a goof-off: "Dash the nose from Phidias’s marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder!" (Naturally, Melville must close this joke-filled chapter with something more serious, just to tip the balances: The return to the trope of hieroglyphics and Chaldean, reminding us of the impenetrable genius of the whale, on whose white-page of a forehead a utterly inscrutable language is written.)

PROMPT:

Wherever things are most serious in your text, seek the ridiculous.  Where things are frothy, seek murky depths. Juxtapose the comic and the grave, and do it in quick succession. Start by goofing off, having fun, writing something that doesn't need to be good enough. Then see if you can salvage the humor you've forged by actually welding the anomalous material into your story, for keeps.

# data[].attributes.body
This is good for when you’re feeling a bit burnt out with your project.  Read something utterly indulgent. Whatever you want. Genre, kids lit, whatever you love. For half the time you planned to write today, sit on the couch, or wherever your coziest place is, and let your mind be taken away. Maybe you can get away with an hour.  Then take that feeling of being swept away with you, and carry it over to your own work. Put the fun book down and write the most compelling thing you can think of that is still to be written in your current project. Forget continuity. Just jump in.

# data[].attributes.body
Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score, is about the ways that the body records and relives trauma — and how to escape that cycle. It's a revelation, and if you haven’t read it, would be great research for any writer, regardless of whether they have experienced trauma personally.

For our purposes, focus on the way a character’s body remembers what has happened to it. Does your character have a tic, do they somaticize their psychopathology by say feeling pain that represents a psychic wound? How do they stand when they feel a resurgence of that fear? Do they panic when they see pigeons? Why? How does that express itself, and what underlies it?  Find an instance of an idiosyncratic physical behavior that is triggered by a difficult moment in a character’s past. Put the behavior in your story in at least two places — after all, this is something that the character is locked in to, and a single instance won’t illustrate that —  but don’t necessarily explain it the first time.  Let it be a revelation or a realization to the reader, what this means.

# data[].attributes.body
That's it: Jump ahead and write your final scene. Or part of it. Or two versions of it, if you don't want to decide how it ends till you get there. If you already have written it, go back in and see if it needs updating based on what you've written lately.  The hope here is that this is a scene you're excited about, so it will come out with vigorous energy, but also that having it in place will function like a counterweight to get you through the middle, which can be a slog, and is so often the hardest part.

# data[].attributes.body
Backstory refers to the past of a character. It can come out in many ways, but often through flashback. Scene-level flashbacks are common, but I am very interested in the use of what I call microflashback, the use of a phrase, fragment or sentence to open up crevices into characters’ pasts. It can have large power, though the word count it takes up is small, and it's especially powerful when paired with the use of larger-scale flashback.

A text that expertly uses both macro and microflashbacks is Alice Munro’s story The Love of A Good Woman. It opens with a distant third-person narrator touring a museum of local history; then a dead body and possible crime scene are discovered by a group of boys; then the view changes to a woman taking care of a sick patient, a young woman like herself but with a fatal kidney condition. Though the story is in many ways about the history of the town, and the backstories of all the characters are key, initially, details emerge slowly, in microflashbacks.

First, at the museum, we learn that an optometrist whose instruments are displayed drowned in the Peregrine River in 1951. Nothing more about the incident, just the instrument.  Later, after much about the boys who found his body, we get a single line telling us that one of them, Cece Ferns -- the first boy to be named — once gave an interesting bone he’d found to another boy because he “could never take anything home unless if was a size to be concealed from his father.” Dark gyres of murder and abuse are introduced by these tiny references to backstories that we know must actually be massive.

In the third section, we learn that a nurse has the capacity to be cruel through a largerscale flashback. Enid makes an unkind joke about her patient and is reminded by the smile of the patient’s sister-in-law how she and her girlfriends had bullied the patient’s husband, back when they were in high school together. “That was just the way Rupert would smile, in high school, warding off some possible mockery.” This flashback continues, revealing the girlish cruelty Enid took part in, opening up the reader’s mind about the range of things the kind, stolid-seeming Enid is actually capable of, and thus a window of suspense about who (if anyone) actually committed a crime leading to the dead body that was uncovered by the boys.

PROMPT: For every large scale flashback you have, see if you can plant at least one tiny one, possibly tied to the larger one, that opens up the world of your character and implies much — without fleshing out the detail. For microflashbacks, don’t be vague, be specific — a cow’s hipbone given to an acquaintance, the chipped paint on a dead optometrist’s instrument — just do it very briefly.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Word clouds .. keys & legends … pattern analysis

# data[].attributes.headline
11/16 Mapping, many ways, to get a handle on the large scale text

# data[].attributes.subject
11/16 Mapping, many ways, to get a handle on the large scale text

# data[].attributes.body
I think that the best way to map your novel is old school. There are a lot of analog options. I like index cards, color coding, drawing charts and generally drawing various pictures of the shape of the text, with labels for the various parts of sections.

There is one digital tool I do like a lot — word clouds — because they throw back out a very analog analysis. You can get Google's free word cloud generator here.

When you set out to assess, map or organize the sprawl of your novel, first think about time. Did the story come out alpha-to-omega chronologically? Probably not completely, but is the main narrative of your novel chronologically linear? Maybe, in which case your time line is simple, but even if it is, is any novel, really completely linear? Almost every work of fiction of any length contains flashbacks.  What sort of flashbacks are you using? Longer set pieces or short glimpses, threaded into paragraphs or even into sentences that are set in the present?  Possibly both. If both, is there a pattern or a rhythm that governs when your flashbacks are longer and when they are shorter?  If there is no rhythm, should there be?

Next, think about the other narrative elements you're working with: points of view, settings, major events, characters, themes, narrative forms like letters, excerpts, or texts. List them, creating a sort of key to a future map, or maps. A map key or legend makes it easier to understand the different elements included on the map, but it also defines the scope of the world by saying what's included.

Then work your way through your text and chart the point-of-view changes, if you have them. (This could include changes from a younger to an older, wiser version of the same character or narrator, not just changes in individual characters.) Do you alternate? Is there one massive section from one point of view, then another of equal scale? Do you spend the most pages ont he most important parts? Would there be value to shuffling and intercutting more often? Or do you change very quickly from person to person and might you slow that down? Then look at your settings in a similar way, and from there, go through each narrative element you've identified and chart it. Maybe scenes alternate between the club in Vegas and the roadside stand in your protagonists hometown in Kansas, and always in between comes a road trip. Mostly, but there's one road trip you skipped. This can help you notice that and decide to add it in, if it would benefit the story. If you can't find a pattern, could you put one in?

Rhythms are pleasing to readers because they are predictable (but hopefully not too predictable). They can also help develop suspense. They imbue a sense of meaning through their regularity and variations. You should look for the rhythms you already have and heighten them. However, if rhythms don't appear, or your story structure isn't evident to you by now, this exercise can help you find them.

Ask yourself what is unique to your story.  Maybe your text is about baseball or hurricanes, dreams or invasive species or terrorism. Whatever it's about, there are sure to be structures innate to that concept: innings, spirals, shape-shifting, rhizomes, cells whose members remain anonymous but have parallel traumas and grievances...  All these things would make great structural schema.  Now, whether or not you are a visual artist, you might try to draw it.  Use the way the world you're writing about is shaped to help you structure your text.

I recommend doing this by hand. Of course, you can also type it, if that works better for you. But, whatever your medium, make maps that fit onto one page so you can see them in one glance. Perhaps you'll end up drawing dozens of different maps that could represent your novel differently. Make as many as you find useful.

As long as it continues to be illuminating or useful, keep searching for patterns and developing your maps.  Once you have a map or maps you like, you can use it to revise the text. Maybe you'll reorganize things in a big way.  What if you moved huge sections of text around? Could you create a better or more narratively satisfying structure?  As you consider such things, ask yourself: Where is your central conflict introduced? your crisis brought to a peak?  your catharsis?  Do you have (or need) a catharsis? Maybe there's an inversion or a new beginning at the place we expect that. Where are the moments of greatest energy, anxiety, tension, joy? Are there secondary plot lines? If so, consider their narrative shapes, too. Are there characters or storylines left unresolved? Ends that need to be tied?  Or maybe your changes will occur at the granular level. Take whatever the mapping has revealed to you back to your manuscript in any way that works.  Maybe you'll plug new ideas about structure, character and theme in to your writing app, or you'll try index cards, Post-its, or a murder board.  Have fun with it.

Blind Assassin Analysis by Elizabeth Gaffney

# data[].attributes.body
Go back and in and make your villain or antagonist a better character (not a better person, necessarily — but possibly?) Think about the Shakespearean notion of foils, and ask whether your villain and you protagonist have things in common or things that they do exactly opposite from one another. Could you write two scenes, one about the protagonist and one about the (or an) antagonist that parallel each other? What about the antagonist’s origin story? It may not figure largely in the project, but give that villain a childhood, a coming of age, and a formative trauma that made them into what they are.  Also, when seeking ways to deepen simple or flat secondary characters, consider widening your point of view (just for research purposes) enough to ask whether your character’s antagonist is someone else’s hero?

# data[].attributes.headline
11/13 Subtext, innuendo, and not (quite) saying what you mean. 

# data[].attributes.subject
11/13 Subtext, innuendo, and not (quite) saying what you mean. 

# data[].attributes.body
It’s about psychology. As a writer, you’re constantly trying to make people think what you think, visualize your world and your character, imagine worlds that are new to them.  People want to go to fictional worlds, but then again they don’t want to do what they’re told.  Of course, a riveting voice and dramatic story can help, but there are more tools in your kit for this, and a key one is using subtlety, subversion, subtext and innuendo. Don’t tell your readers what to think, and don’t even have your characters say what they mean.  Let the reader read between the lines and you’ll have hooked them.

In William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows, we see a lovely, brief instance of this technique in which a boy’s poor relationship with his father is delineated abstractly: “She held him off in front of her to see whether he had washed thoroughly, and Bunny noticed with relief the crumbs at his father’s place, the carelessly folded napkin.” Bunny’s love for his mother and alienation from his father are central to the book, and felt mostly strongly at moments like these when they are implied, not expounded.

So,today’s prompt is to find an inconsequential moment in your story and write information into it, obliquely, to reveal a highly consequential situation.

# data[].attributes.body
Every 12 hours and twenty-five minutes, the tide goes out. Six hours, twelve and half minutes later, it comes back in.  Two highs and two lows, every day, rinse and repeat.

Repetition is built into our experience of the world. We tend to like it, a lot, though too much, too fast or too long without pause can cause irritation.  Repetition on the syllabic level takes the forms of alliteration and assonance; on the level of phrasing, we call it parallelism.  This prompt is about a slightly larger scale of repetition, the refrain, but the main idea pertains to all scales of repetition. It can be used on both the micro and the macro level to engage the reader, to inform them about the narrative world without exposition. It creates meaning through rhythm and form, rather than explanation, meaning it makes a work more subtle, and at the same time it is a highly effective tool for controlling readers' emotional responses.

Examples of refrains include motifs, repeated imagery, parallel moments that occur for multiple characters or recur for a particular character, recurring dates or revisited places.  I've been thinking about the use of the date (and exact phrasing) "the 4th of August" in The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford.  It occurs 20 times throughout the book. The narrator, John Dowell tells us of many different incidents that take place on various fourths of August, from births to deaths to meetings of future paramours.  Is it all a set of coincidences? Are those coincidences implausible? Does his repeated use of that one date suggest unreliability, imply that he prevaricates, indeed, is outright lying, or possibly worse, that he has perpetrated crimes he has passed off as unfortunate incidents? The refrain becomes a plot device as well as a structural one, a key to understanding the book.

So, look to your material and see if there are elements you could develop into refrains. They can provide shape, momentum, and build reader agency by allowing readers to add up elements of a story without your needing to provide explanation.

# data[].attributes.body
Take a moment to dredge up the most awful thing that you've ever done, or the most shameful experience you've endured. Something you couldn't talk about with anyone, ever. It should be something utterly unpublishable, something that makes you sweat just to think about it. Now, write for as long as you can stand it about this topic.

Feel free to delete it or burn what you wrote as soon as you're finished.

Here's the useful part: Plant your secret — or something inspired by the secret — at the core of a character. Just as you may never talk about your secret, your character's secret never needs to be revealed, but even if it isn't, you can still use it as a kind of emotional thermonuclear reactor, a black hole around which their galaxy whirls.  This invisible, gnawing story can be used as a driving force, an engine of narrative, and could just possibly shape all your character's interactions with their world — all without ever being mentioned.

# data[].attributes.body
There are times when we feel we must get something down, some important part of the story, or whatever is supposed to come next, or the missing section that covers a gap in time … but it doesn’t seem to come.  Unless this elusive passage is so hard to write because it’s terribly important — the deep secret trauma that you’ve been avoiding (in which case you must write it!) — give yourself permission to leap over it.  Skip it, and don’t bother going back for it later. Anything you write out of obligation will be hard wading for your reader as well.

Instead, write to where the tension is for you. Forget about what needs to be done to work on your character or what is supposed to come next. Jump in, anywhere at all, or rather, exactly where you want to, wherever that may be.  Write the moment in the book you have been waiting to get to, the exciting part.

Then, try to make everything you write, writing to the tension.  When it’s dull or obligatory, leap over it.  You can work out the transitions in the revision. If you skip the boring stiff … you book will be miraculously turn out not to be boring.

# data[].attributes.headline
Support THE 24-HOURROOM.ORG. It's free and always open for inspiration ... but your support helps keep it online

# data[].attributes.subject
Support THE 24-HOURROOM.ORG. It's free and always open for inspiration ... but your support helps keep it online

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome. The 24-Hour Room is a free virtual writers space that offers writers fellowship, structure, solutions, motivation and intellectual sustenance. We began in the isolation of lockdown as a balm for writers bereft of their coffee shops, writers rooms and artists colonies. We’ve stuck around to connect and inspire writers whether they’re in their pajamas or on lunch break, before work or late at night. We’re open for inspiration anytime, anywhere, all across the globe.

# data[].attributes.headline
11/9 All-character stakes and desires inventory. 

# data[].attributes.subject
11/9 All-character stakes and desires inventory. 

# data[].attributes.body
It’s simple (and worth pointing out you should actually do this for all your characters, at least down to the tertiary level, and certainly for anyone with a name or more than one scene). Go through your full cast list and write down at least one central desire for each and one thing each character fears may happen or worries about losing.

# data[].attributes.body
In fiction, a feeling of authenticity tends to emerge from characters who are complex and idiosyncratic. This prompt is not about the deepest secret or the one terrible or great thing that motivates your protagonist but smaller level details that will add authentic granularity to their character.

Write several paragraphs with several new details about your character: 1. A small incident they have never told anyone in which they once did something that seems at odds with their present public persona — something cruel or debased for an overarchingly good character, something tender for a harsh character, something narrow-minded for a typically open-minded character, that sort of thing, or simply something so atypical for them that no one in their current life would believe it. 2. A totem object that is important to them because of what it represents. 3. Something they lost a long time ago that they still think about. 4. Something they they hide to protect it. 5. Something they hide because they are ashamed of it.

Don’t dump these all in the same place. Keep them in you narrative storehouse and sprinkle them in when you need to add complexity or depth.

# data[].attributes.body
Get out your notebook.  This prompt is best done as an analogue activity.  List your themes — the big abstract ideas behind your story — and then, get specific with motifs, the recurring images and elements that will instantiate your themes. Write down as many as you can, even if they are tentative. What might be your recurring places, situations, narrative objects (a park? a document? a parking lot? a gun? a one-on-one game of basketball? A funeral?).  Dredge your mind and keep adding as more occurs to you. Is there a cat? Do people eat in this book? What about weather? Does the action happen in a few special locations? Is there travel?  Once you have a list, organize it a little.  Maybe you can pair up things  that go together or that contrast or conflict with each other.  Now, rewrite your list as a column in the middle of a page (big paper or a two-page spread in a notebook might help here) and annotate the list on either side. On one side, show which characters connect to, inhabit or partake of which themes. If you have enough scenes sketched out to do it, you could also start listing scenes beside the themes on the other side. (Or hang on to this and add them in as you write.) When you get to writing these scenes, the list is there to jog your memory to include that guinea pig or the mist in the holler or whatever it is.

Let's briefly consider a few motifs from a classic text, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and think about how they are used as structural elements.  In such a big book, there are many, but we can easily put down parties and battles, courtship and marriage, and betrayals and commitments. (In War and Peace, much comes in pairs...) Many parts (and all four of the volumes) begin with either a party or a battle. The liaisons keep forming and shifting and reforming throughout, almost creating a braid form. Likewise with betrayals.

So, as you move toward a draft of your book, no matter how many pages in you are, take control of your themes and motifs. Extend them, if they don't feel like they pervade your text in its entirety — or get rid of them, if they seem simplistic and unnecessary.  Deploy them with deliberation and full awareness, and with sufficient regularity to give rise to patterns. Your reader will feel guided and connected as themes recur with whatever sort of rhythm you have chosen.  You will have added meaning and structure and make the text more satisfying.

# data[].attributes.body
Think about the story you are telling and its settings. Pick three places, including both outdoor and indoor spaces, where multiple essential scenes will occur. List them and briefly describe them. Think about the various ways your characters or narrator will approach or enter the spaces. Put a character in each one and write a few sentences. Do multiple characters go there? Then write the places differently with different occupants. As you write, you will necessarily describe, but get away from the visual as often as you can. Instead, bring the places alive through other senses and through events that have taken — or are presently taking — place there.

Using recurring locations saves you on materials for set construction, and it can provide structure. Once you have written scenes for each of the key places, consider when and how these locations will recur throughout your book. Plan them into your structure. Create satisfying rhythms, suspense and meaning by playing with the pattern of their recurrence.

# data[].attributes.body
Whether you’re wrangling multiple points of view or just multiple characters who have speaking roles in your book, chances are you have a need to create several distinct voices. How can you make sure they don’t blur together? For that matter, when it comes to narrative personae, sometimes even the same character has multiple ways of being and speaking, different when they’re speaking to a child than directing an employee or deferring to someone of higher social status.  And very different when they’re in control from when when they’re out of it.

To get a handle on all this, start setting up some rules for yourself.  Which character speaks in correct English? Which use slang or profanity? Choose a characteristic delay or filler word or phrase (or two) -- um, ah, so, well, you know, etc. -- for each character. Chose nicknames that characters have for each other and limit them to particular characters, so, for example, only Bob ever calls Suxi “love” but he does so with regularity.  Also think about sentence length and complexity. Which people are terse, when do they ramble? Which usually go on and on, and when do they finally s hut up? Allowing room for variation within each character according to their mood and situation,  decide which characters are more direct, saying what they mean,  and which talk about the weather or the price of tea, letting their ideas and feelings emerge through the cracks in the banalities or reveal story through physical actions. In this case, the obliqueness of their speech may be the key attribute.

Most of these considerations can be applied to narrators, of any point of view, just as well as to characters.  Remember also that narrators can evolve. The adult Scout Finch who narrates To Kill a Mockingbird sounds different when musing from the distance of years than when telling the story of her childhood.

Once you’ve thought through several characters or voice changes, pick up your story in a different place from where you last left off. Zero in on a different voice.  Make a point of distinguishing the diction and voice from that of the prior one. Focus of heightening the difference, so that each voice feels unique and distinctive to the reader. Do this again and again for all the characters (or narrative points of view) you’ve done voice studies for.

# data[].attributes.body
Inventory the Cast. List and rank your players according to importance. Analyze the list for excessive similarities between secondary and third level characters and consider combining some. Do the third level characters even need names, or can they go by monikers or descriptive phrases (like Wig Lady, boss or telephone operator...) This is a good time to make sure you don't have characters with similar names or multiple players whose names all start with the same letter, which can needlessly confound readers.  Finally, for each of your primary and secondary characters, write a short flashback developing a single moment from their past that is essential to their identity and why they do what do in the novel. These scenes might just be for you, as character research, but perhaps they will become scenes you decide to drop in here or there in your story, whether you build them out into larger scenes or keep them small, as microflashbacks.

# data[].attributes.headline
11/2 What’s wrong? What’s lost? What just happened? 

# data[].attributes.subject
11/2 What’s wrong? What’s lost? What just happened? 

# data[].attributes.body
Write a scene where a central problem or crisis for your character emerges.  A great way to get to this is to focus on a loss — anything from keys to a spouse to a job to personal dignity. Focus on the absence, the grief, but be subtle about it, so rather than describing exactly what’s gone, project the character’s emotion onto another space (what remains, in the absence of the loss) and describe how they behave without it (searching? sulking? raging? filling the void with meaningless replacements? If you have multiple primary-level characters, you might want to do this prompt separately for each.

Good writing!

# data[].attributes.body
Without dwelling on physical description of the characters themselves, write a new scene where your protagonist does some activity involving physical movement in a space that is important to the coming action. The idea is to focus on the action not the actor. Your action may be a small scale motion that you zero in on, and it may seem minor in importance at first, but keep focus on the movement itself and make it lead into bigger part of the story. The dynamism will help grab your readers attention. You can have more than one character, but again, don’t worry about physical description of them or summaries of who the characters are at this point. Focus on action. Also, don’t worry about whether this is the actual beginning of the novel. It could be, but the main thing is, it's the place where you begin this month of intensive writing — with a lot of momentum.

Good writing!

# data[].attributes.body
Here's a sneak peek at the prompt topics for each day in November.

1. Beginning.

2.  What’s wrong? What’s lost? What happened?

3. The Cast.

4. Voice(s).

5. Places: Public & Private.

6. Themes & characters.

7. Waypoints.

8. Your protagonist.

9. All-character stakes and desires inventory.

10. Narrative Structures.

11. Write to the Tension.

12. Refrains, repeats and recurrences, all over again.

13. Backstory & microflashback..

14. Map it.

15. A new beginning.

16. The end.

17. Revise your itinerary.

18.  Look askance.

19. Complicate your characters.

20. The Body Keeps the Score.

21. Even if it isn’t funny, it should be funny.

22. Pattern search.

23. Write the awful scene.

24. Change something big.

25.  Research — the rules, the rights, the responsibilities.

26.  Mash-up.

27. Cliché finder & internal cliché finder

28. Mind map.

29. Fast read through.

30. Rewrite the beginning.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Vija Celmins, Untitled (Big Sea #1) (1969)

# data[].attributes.body
[https://padlet.com/24H/okbqivclvo8y5shq]

A few weeks ago we did a Craft Prompt on using a book that's important to you as an inspiration, and that was all about pastiche: drawing heavy inspiration for a passage -- especially an important one, like a beginning, climax or ending —  from the language, sentence structure, format, diction choices, or some other aspect of a known text. If you didn't do that before, you might try it now.  If you did, then this is another variant on the pastiche, but it's a structural one.

Once again, choose a favorite text. Start with a couple or three and whittle down to the one that works for your project. It can be any text in any format, from the Bible to a comic book. Now, spend a few minutes trying to assess its shape. The idea of this is to find a narrative shape in this text, distill it down to some apprehensible idea or pattern, and apply that to the book your working on, or use it to build yourself narrative guideposts for working on your novel.

A couple examples coming up just below, but the quick synthesis of this prompt is:

Lean on a favorite text, either for closely modeling a passage of your own story, or for the larger structure that will guide you as you write.

In her amazing book Meander, Spiral, Explode -- which I was just turned on to by one of my students and have quickly devoured — Jane Alison describes some less well documented narrative shapes for novels. (The one everyone talks about is the five-stage structure of tragedy observed by Aristotle in the Poetics and made ubiquitous in fiction and modem drama by Gustav Freytag, with his pyramid.) Alison, a kick-ass feminist, points out that the 5-act structure is both absurdly phallocentric and extremely overused. You can glean some of the structures she dwells on from her title, but my favorite of her structural analyses is David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which she sees as not just a palindrome (the section structure is 12345654321, with the outer five stories divided in two and the central one told all in one)  but a set of hands in the prayer position that is also used to hold a book (or the orison, a recording and projection device that figures centrally in storyline 6). She brilliantly reads his book as a kind of prayer for the peace that so eludes the characters in the text.

I, lately, have been dwelling on Moby-Dick because we're reading it aloud in the 24-Hour Room in short sections, every weekday morning — twice. I have been inspired by it for the novel I'm just starting out on. I happened to choose a favorite woodcut of the ocean by Vija Celmins as the imagery for the Moby-Dick page on The 24-Hour Room, but even so, it took a while for me to realize how I read the story — as a series of narrative waves. I'm now actively tracking the wave structure that I find there and trying to create my own wave forms as I plan and draft sections of my new project.

So, now, go off and dig in your library and your mind for some great stuff to steal from your favorite book!

# data[].attributes.body
https://sites.google.com/view/24hourroom/craft/prompt-mind-mapping

# data[].attributes.body
GO TO www.the24h.org/rooms  THEN GO TO STUDIO