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: 

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!

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!

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.

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. 

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.

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.   

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.

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.

 

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. 

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/