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5/14 | Building structure, momentum and suspense with dangling threads

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5/14 | Building structure, momentum and suspense with dangling threads

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Whether or not you've written everything in your current draft or work-in-progress "in order" (which could mean either the order it will take on the page in your final draft, or the chronological order of the primary narrative), there are likely to be continuity jumps - chapter or section breaks, places where you move back and forth in time or from one point of view to the next. This sort of structure creates both relief - a natural time to take a break from a plot line - 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 your book and carefully make sure that 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 sent, a vase broken, a call dialed), you might want to include a reference to it - possibly only a very brief one - and how the matter concluded, even if you have moved forward much further in time. If you leave such threads dangling, it frustrates the reader. If you connect them or tie them off, it pleases the reader. You decide.

You may want to develop a rhythm to your links, whether it's rigorously regular or a little more complex and even erratic - say every other chapter for a while, until a new thread starts, which eventually gets brought into the pattern. 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 likely spots for this kind of linking. One caveat: if you make your links too regular or overt, they may seem clunky, obvious or facile. If you deploy them deftly, you will create continuity and a wondrously subtle structure in your text.
Share The Engines of Narrative

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So, I started thinking about the way that a prism breaks up light light beams to reveal the multitude of colors hidden within a seemingly uniform whiteness. Which got me thinking about how writers create effective complexity in characters, how they make the unexpected, previously hidden qualities of their characters believable, even delightful. How does this work and how does it differ from attempts at complicating characters that fall flat because they just feel contradictory?

PROMPT: Taking the spectrum of visible light with its seven colors — ROYGBIV — as a template, put your character through a prism. Can you delineate seven different qualities or moods or ways of being (or being seen by others?) in your character?

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Motifs and Refrains, Repetitions and Variations

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5/2: Building relationships and narrative structure through common or parallel backstory experience

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5/2: Building relationships and narrative structure through common or parallel backstory experience

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1. For two or several characters — especially characters in close, mirroring relationships such as friends / foils, lovers / rivals, progenitors / descendants, role models / admirers, teachers / acolytes — try developing their relationship with common experiences.

Did they both experience some similar or parallel experience? This could be fairly banal, what they ate for breakfast as a child, liking a certain book or game, or something more formative, being bullied, abuse, loss of a close family member, or another trauma?

This isn't necessarily about their interpersonal relationship, though it might be. What happens if they find out about their commonalities? Even if they don't, the reader will.) Their experiences need not have been similar.

Do they know they share knowledge of this commonality, or maybe only one of them knows, or some other character(s) just the reader? If they know, will they find it out?

Consider parallel but dissimilar details of their lives, say by describing how they both got to school as young children, one on foot, the other on a schoolbus or in a carpool.

Try using objects, pets, or other people rather than events. Did your characters both have a lovey or totem object? Were they similar? Or very different, say a doll or stuffed animal as compared to a pocket knife. Were they both obsessed with an unattainable love object, assaulted by a sexual predator, ditched by a seeming close friend? Did they lose a beloved pet? Or maybe one of your characters was a victim in such a scenario, while the other was the perp?

Decide whether this common backstory will be something that comes up between them or is drawn by the author for the reader to use in comparing the characters.

2. Use these parallel moments or entities in a stuctural way, across the span of your text. Maybe we learn all about one character's parallel backstory element in part 1 and not about their foil's version of it till part 2. Or maybe every chapter unfolds some new expansion of the many parallels between two seeming polar opposites?

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4/29  | Multidemensional Story Mapping, part 1 overview

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4/29  | Multidemensional Story Mapping, part 1 overview

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Beat sheets are plotting tools that help writers lay down and structure storylines. In the film and tv world they are crucial documents that facilitate collaboration between creatives from writers to directors and show runners. Breaking down story this way has been done since time immemorial, long before Aristotle, who was one of the first western thinkers to codify ideas about narrative structure in writing, in the Poetics.

There are quite a lot of well known and commonly used such templates out there -- the Hero one, the Cat one, you can find more. I encourage you to explore any relevant or interesting templates but also to go off template, if you're at all tempted to. After all, you probably aren't here to stamp out widgets.

Over the next few posts, I'll discuss an approach to story mapping that blends the beat sheet idea with some other dimensions. It's a strategy that can be useful at any phase of writing, whether you're developing and writing an initial draft of a story, editing or restructuring a subsequent draft. Even (and perhaps especially) for writers who don't yet know the order of events in their story, how it ends,or quite everything that will go into it, this method should be useful because it can be done modularly and the outcome used to determine story structure.

A basic overview of the steps follows, and a template / worksheet is attached. You can upload or adapt it to your specific text. Elements of it could certainly be turned into a spreadsheet, too, but I strongly recommend you go analogue with this project, if you decide to try it.

1. Inventory and color code your narrative elements to help you track and take control of opportunities for rhythm and patterning. Use this color coding in making the subsequent documents.

2. Make a chronology, documenting key events from the stone age to the latest point in time you cover, using calendar time.

3. Draw a graphic rendition of the story as you understand it, at this opoint, and try to include secondary or other plot lines.

4. Start a beat chart organized by the order of telling, the order in which events unfold on the page. The left hand column will be a scene or "moment" inventory.

5. Continuing with your color legend, map out most important narrative elements that occur in each scene, using categories such as character, point of view, place, weather, motif, flashback and the inclusion of non-dramatic passages such as found texts, world building or introspection .

6. Draw maps of the terrain, pictures of characters or objects, family trees and anything else you think will help you.

This is kind of a big document, that will take a while, if you decide to do it all. Do whatever helps you and no more. I'll be post in more detail about each step of the Multidmensional Map Method, so stay tuned if this may be helpful for you.

Good writing!

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The 24-Hour Room Guide to Multidimensional Mapping.pdf

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4/30 | Character: Posture, paralanguage, body language & how a character moves

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4/30 | Character: Posture, paralanguage, body language & how a character moves

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Willa Cather first describes the protagonist of Lucy Gayheart, in paragraph one of the novel, as "a slight figure, always in motion; dancing or skating, or walking swiftly with intense directio, like a bird flying home." Cather eventually gets to a description of her face, coloring and eyes, but writes that "Photographs of Lucy mean nothing to her old friends. It was her gaiety and grace they loved."

Introducing characters with this kind of dynamic description — yes, visual, but far from the typical description of a person's looks by the tone and texture of their skin, eyes and hair, an assessment of their features or clothing — can set a story in motion and help writers to sidestep the low hanging fruit of descriptive stereotypes. If you develop a strong sense of how your characters move, you will also provide yourself with a powerful arsenal of descriptors with which to evoke them in future scenes.

For more thoughts on and examples of Body Language, check out this post: https://open.substack.com/pub/enginesofnarrative/p/body-language?r=12tyn3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

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ASSESS + PLAN

1. Briefly describe your project, including your title, your central idea and/or theme, the primary setting and the most important two or three characters. Where are you are in the writing process and where so you want to get this spring? Feel free to write it out in a paragraph or use a bullet list.
2. List three things you need to work on. These could be writing tasks on any scale, from finishing the storyline, completing certain scenes or chapters, developing a particular character, purging cliches, addressing a pervasive technical issue such as tense or point of view, integrating flashbacks, or eliminating needless repetitions. Be ambitious but not absurdly so.

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What single thing does your protagonist (or do you, yourself, if you're working on memoir) want RIGHT NOW, at whatever moment you're writing about.  This desire could be an object, a person, an experience, a state of being. What is wanted may vary and shift over the span of your text, may turn out to complex and be multifaceted, may morph into its exact opposite, as with Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But for now, focus on a single, simple, motivating desire. Describe it, explore your character's yearning for it and the obstacles that are in the way.