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Planning your “storyscape”
Arguably the most difficult part of the entire writing process is planning your project, so it has a distinct beginning, middle and end i.e. so it has a sense of direction. People often ask me how I “come up” with ideas and organise them all into continuous prose. Unfortunately I’m not always sure how to answer them, since most of the time my ideas just seemed to jump out of my imagination (usually at inappropriate moments, like at 2am as I’m trying to go to sleep!) There isn’t a set recipe for devising a piece of writing. Unless you are tasked with creating a piece for a specific purpose, like a magazine article, the initial concept will often stem from within our own minds and isn’t always intentional, rather it’s a product of our emotions and experiences – the cause of wanting to write, not the effect. This part we can’t necessarily control. The bit we can manipulate is the stage where we have a set of vague, disjointed concepts in a notebook and we reorganise those into something resembling a book (…article, poem, song etc.) These two stages are often confused in those ‘non-writers’, wondering how we ‘simply’ spat-out a fully rounded, totally polished work of writing. We didn’t! The real skill is not conceiving the idea, it’s taking that and crafting it into something readable. Even the most famous works (think anything from Pride and Prejudice to the Da ‘Vinci Code) weren’t anywhere near the finished product when their authors first jotted down their initial plan. Every book has gone through an exhaustive editing process to shake everything into place. But herein lies the difficulty…
Image: adamr [FreeDigitalPhotos.net]
You’ve got your ideas down on paper, you have a good beginning and at least a faint inkling of how you’re going to end the thing, but you have no idea how to shuffle everything in between so you have a clear path from A to B. This is your ‘storyscape’ as I call it and even if you’re writing non-fiction, think of everything that follows in this article in similar terms, as most of it still applies.
As you’re planning your book, you probably have several key events in mind that you hope to use to flesh-out your work and give it direction and substance. The hard part is imagining how these will all connect up and how you will take the reader from one to the other. This is because of a ‘flaw’ in the way the human mind works (well maybe not a flaw, but definitely a quirk that is mismatched with how the writing process works) – we tend to think linearly. The temptation is to start at the beginning and work all the way through to the end, in a perfect “left-to-right” direction. The truth is this rarely works – something you discover as you find yourself sat at your desk for hours, twiddling your thumbs and staring at a blank screen. Ask yourself this: does Hollywood film their movies starting with the opening scene and wrapping up on the last day by shooting the final sequence? As if! Although I’m not expert, I’m pretty sure that scenes are filmed in an order that is anything but in-sequence. In fact they are shot to a fairly understandable schedule – that of the most economical in terms of budget and time. They film scenes they are able to film on that day i.e. when the required actors are available and on-set all day. What’s the point of shooting a single scene with Johnny Depp in it, sending him home and then asking him to come back three hours later?
The same applies to writing a book- write what you can, when you can. If you know exactly how a chapter is going to pan out, why wait to write that until you’ve figured out the preceding chapter (which you’re stuck on and which may have no direct influence on the pages that follow it.) This approach requires a further skill: being able to step out of the prose and see the whole ‘storyscape’ at once. Whilst it certainly helps to be able to imagine things from your character’s perspective (how will events affect their next move?) sometimes you have to remember that the story is yours and you have the author’s prerogative of being able to jump ahead in the timeline of the world you’re creating. Imagine the whole story mapped out on the floor of a big room and that you can climb on to a balcony overlooking it. From this perspective, you can see where there are gaps, where the pivotal events occur, where the characters have found themselves in geography and time and where you need to bridge these points to draw everything together. It’s a bit like a pilot plotting a flight plan, where they insert ‘waypoints’ – key coordinates along the journey which the aircraft follows to stay on-course and arrive at the destination on-time. Naturally you can map out your story on paper and lay out the pieces on the floor of your office (this certainly isn’t a bad idea by the way) but you might not have to be so literal. Sometimes just visualising those key events is enough to calculate where you are along the ‘journey’ and what needs to happen next to get your characters where they need to be, in time for the next ‘waypoint.’
When it comes to character placement, it definitely helps to map out in physical form where everyone is at each point. Draw a rough plan of where each location is in relation to the others (it obviously doesn’t need to be to scale) and list who out of your cast list is present around it. This can be done in good ‘ol MS Word but I’d also recommend MS OneNote, as its diagram feature is perfectly suited to this. Then at the end of your planning stage, note down a full flow diagram of the individual journeys of each person. While this sounds complex and time consuming, in reality it takes minutes and beats digging yourself into a plot-hole!
Lastly, to keep yourself on-track, draw up a chapter summary, where you outline for your own memory a very brief overview of what happens in each segment of your book. If you’re a non-fiction guy/gal then your summary could quickly remind you of the theme of each chapter and (as with the slides of a PowerPoint presentation in a lecture) can ensure the info you’re conveying is dished out in a logical order.
So to summarise, here are those points again:
Don’t expect your initial ideas to be concrete and perfectly ordered – that will happen later
Don’t be afraid to write your chapters out of sequence – if you want to write the exciting bit now, then do it!
Be prepared to ‘jump in’ and ‘jump out’ of the timeline – sometimes you’ll have to look through your character’s eyes and sometimes a 3-dimentional view is best; looking at your ‘storyscape’ from above, so you can see all of your characters at once, and where they are headed…before they know it!
Map out character placement, as this makes it easier to plot how to move them around…a bit like chess pieces
As you plan, create chapter summaries, breaking your story down into manageable chunks – this allows you to see how events are progressing
If there is one point that sums all of this up perfectly it’s that you are god when it comes to your tale! It’s very easy to overlook this, but you are not part of the story, you’re watching it unfold. HOWEVER, unlike the readers you can change how events progress. When you lose sight of the path ahead, take a step out of the prose and take in the wider view.
Bonus tip: why not try assigning a key plot point to each room of your house, then in your mind walk from one end of the building to the other, filling in the minor events as you move between rooms. This can help organise your thoughts, giving you a clear and familiar path to walk – and giving your book a direction. It’s very hard to get lost in your own house (unless you’re the Queen.)