Unblocking the plot

It's incredible what a single idea can do to turn around a plot.

 

I've been struggling for about two weeks trying to see the shape of the early part of Volume 2 involving characters in the historical world. Somehow I've got to rescue Catriona and the crystal. I've spent days researching the area south of the Rhone, the historical environment, exploring battles and lots of associated ideas, but always with a dreadful sense that this wasn't working.

 

Now today I suddenly realise that the whole situation can be resolved without moving far away from the place she was trapped at the end of volume 1 and with that single idea the story arc becomes clear and simple.

 

It's like finding a key and realising it will open the lock. But although the solution to the problem is simple I don't know that there's an easy way of finding it other than spending a long time looking. Or having good luck.

 

It's a matter of being driven to find it. I've been really thoroughly depressed for days, trawling through mounds of information, going up and down many barren alleys and fruitless by-ways, eventually coming to believe that the whole project is probably a waste of time. It's part of my personality. My wife says I'm like a dog with a bone. I won't let go until I've chewed it all up.

 

Now, perhaps, this little idea will give me a fresh start. Gave me a lot of indigestion along the way though.

 

Chapter Plot Development Methodology

These notes describe in detail my method of working on the last chapter of Time Crystal 1, (although it might end up as several chapters) which is quite packed with action and is obviously crucial since it has to hook the reader into wanting to read (and of course to buy) Time Crystal 2. I take time out to record this for two reasons.

• The work is going well. I’ve got 7 days left and I’m confident I’ll finish the writing and produce the illustrations for (although not so confident that I’ll win) the Daily Mail First Novel Competition! Winning doesn’t actually matter too much. It’s motivated me to finish to a deadline and the publicity would be nice. But the money is almost irrelevant. £30k advance–not a prize only an advance–although more than the average UK family annual income, is not a great advance for a great book. It’s nothing like an adequate compensation for five years hard work when you consider that I used to earn that much in 3 months as a computer contractor! If I fail to win and publish with somebody else I’d be looking for at least £100k for this. When you consider its just the first in a fantastic series it’s a bargin.
• Also I think it’s important that authors share their methods of working. Writing is a craft, or rather a collection of crafts. I always compare it to building a cathedral. You’ve got the stone masons and carpenters and designers and painters and each of these is a craft. Then you’ve got to create characters and plots, and these are crafts too. Authors have to learn the techniques for performing these skills alone, by trial and error. Sharing experience might help reduce the apprenticeship time for others and suggest new techniques for other authors, like a guild of craftsmen. Might even help me when I come back and look at this later.

So here’s the technique I use to work out the plot of this crucial chapter, written at the same time as I actually write the chapter. You probably won’t find notes like this anywhere else.

1. Used Flash to storyboard plotpoints. I need to do this since I haven’t got a great visual imagination and an action scene is essentially a visual medium. Also it literally shows you the bigger picture. I’ve got almost the whole cast in this chapter. It’s easy to forget about characters. Flash is ideal for the job since it lets you create key frames which are snapshots of action and step through. I’m not bothering to add animation but use stars to indicate major incidents.
2. Used a background image to help me envisage the scene.
3. Used faces to represent characters. These are taken from Frameforge and I use Flash to cut out the background so they look like they belong to the scene. (To do this in Flash you import an image, use Modify Bitmap Trace bitmap, select the background and delete it, select the rest of image and Modify Convert to Symbol.)
4. Scene now consisted of nine key frames.
5. Stepped through frames and wrote outline in PowerWriter. Already got some plotpoints in the chapter. Added these new plotpoints as lines of text. Not sure at this stage whether they’ll end up as individual plotpoints or not. (The way I use PowerWriter is that I have 3 levels: Part, Chapter, Plotpoint. I’d have another level Volume if PowerWriter allowed it. Main reason for using is that I don’t trust Word when editing a document of more than about 20k words. At present TC has 155k, about 2/3 of which is Volume 1.)
6. Read through the outline, editing and re-organsing but still working at outline level (a few words on each main action, one action per line). Extra points are added as I begin to see the scene, points such as how characters feeling about what is happening. This adds motivation which in turn drives the events and creates new ones. These details aren’t revealed in the Flash storyboard, which is a fairly crude tool but good for stimulating ideas.
7. Realise that the major event in the chapter lacks adequate motivation. Having characters doing things without convincing motivation has caused major problems in the past. I’m thinking of the Alex/Boat/Volpone episode. Alex’s motives were just not credible, which error caused me to have to extensively revise and re-order several chapters. In fact that work is still not finished. I listened to the whole of part 3 last night (apart from this unwritten chapter) because I was too tired to write but still able to proof and realised that this revision is still not complete.
8. Go back to storyboard and play around with frames and character positioning, trying to find better character motivation. Can’t find it there. The storyboard tells me what I want to happen, the dramatic event but not the character’s motive.
9. Skip this problem and go on outlining remainder of chapter from the storyboard. I’ll come back to it later. Put a note [Why?] in the outline. I use square brackets for notes to myself. (I could use PowerWriter’s note facility but the program is so slow at searches I tend to avoid them.)
10. Reading through the outline and adding some extra points I realise how I can solve the problem.
11. Still not got complete outline but want to get feeling for the flow so far. Is motivation credible? There’s a blank line that marks the point of work in progress followed by for lines of outline which indicate how I want. So I now use TextAloud to listen to the outline. Listening is totally different from reading.
12. That doesn’t work. Outline is too compressed to be able to follow somebody reading it. Go back to reading it myself.
13. It’s 07:10. Been working about 2.5 hours so far and it’s breakfast time. Save the work and go and cook breakfast, watching France24 but without any hope of seeing Lea Salame. If she was working she’d have just finished but I’ve never seen her at this time of day.
14. 07:56 Finished cooking, eating, cleaning teeth, shaving, cleaning away the dishes and now back writing. (Of course I didn’t see Lea.) The start of this section is already written out as text so I listen to it and like it. (That is, I like the way it’s written. What the characters say is not pleasant but it’s not for me to judge them.) Having got this start I decide to continue expanding the outline that follows into text. This often changes the direction of the plot, introduces new ideas. This writing of text is a bit like the artist in an old cathedral coming along and painting over the plaster, but at the same time he might throw up a new wall or two, add on a bit of a chapel. You never know what’ll come out of the actual writing of the text. Ideas flow from somewhere at the back of the brain through the fingers into the keyboard. I type fairly well (first things I did after I left university were to learn to drive and to type). It’s one reason I write in the morning. I feel that my brain is more in contact with the subconscious, the part of the brain that generates dreams. Fiction is just dreams written down after all.
15. Not got far into the writing when I remembered I hadn’t checked the Crystal Map to see who can see Danny, something I’d made a mental note to do last night when lying in bed too excited by the work to sleep. Turns out it’s one of the characters already involved in the scene and another who’s not going to be involved so that’s no help, but it just shows you how easily you can overlook basic things.
16. The first draft of the text is usually terrible. Sometimes it flows well but often it’s rubbish. The secret is not to get depressed about it, but to press on. You can always go back and polish it up, like a fine old oak pew, but if you don’t build the pew in the first place you can’t polish it. So we’re going from outline to sketch (to shift metaphores from carpentry to drawing).
17. Go back over the first paragraph (elaborated from the first outline point), restructuring, polishing, refining. It takes on colour and shape. Character motives emerge. The text comes to life almost of its own accord. I know these characters so well now that, given the chance, they create their own text. See details of how things happen, details forced by circumstance, details you don’t see until you think through the events moment by moment. And all this flows as you cut and paste bits of text, change words, add in phrases.
18. 08:36 Not certain of exactly how large something is in CERN (don’t want to spoil the story), so not sure exactly what characters would see under given circumstances or, to be more accurate, exactly where they have to be to see what I want them to see. Open some of the technical drawings of CERN and start doing research. This is all quite normal. I’ve spent months getting the details as accurate as possible (which is quite hard given the fact that the equipment hasn’t actually been built yet).
19. Copied part of a technical drawing I’d already downloaded and converted into a pdf (the result of several days of work) and pasted it as new background for this scene. This dramatically changes things. Everything is now on a much smaller scale than before. Damn! (The reasons will be unclear without revealing the plot, and I don’t want to spoil things but I think I can say it’s got to do with the size of a bubble. Just believe me I’m having to rethink the plot to make things fit with the real situation. Obviously I should have done this earlier!)
20. 08:56. The result of twenty minutes work is that three or four words have changed in the paragraph but I now have a far more accurate storyboard to work with. The whole of this story has been driven by the desire for technical accuracy. I sometimes laugh at my early attempts to describe the technical situation when I just made it up. It was complete rubbish. This accuracy has a purpose, of course. It is intended to convince the reader that these events (which are essential unbelievable) might really be true. The art of writing is the art of the conjurer, trying to trick the reader into believing that these events are really happening and moreover that she is part of it.
21. Decided to take Ludo’s point of view. So far there hasn’t been one. It fits in with the action. There is a lot of talk among authors about whose pov you should take. Some say the person with most to lose. Trouble is she hasn’t arrived in the scene yet. Anyway you can always switch pov within a scene if you want to. I think it’s largely one of the decisions that should be made at this level, at the text level, and driven by story-telling requirements. I’m a plot-first author. I decide what I want to happen and then work out what the characters have to do to make it happen and then let the characters tell me why they don’t want things to go that way and we have a bit of an argument while I try to force them and finally we compromise and change things around a bit until they seem to happen naturally and you’d never know the heartache that lay behind them.
22. 09:17 So far only written one paragraph and already my plot has changed from the storyboard, characters in different positions, doing different things. The storyboard is really just a stimulator of ideas, a framework for thinking, and in this case a means of getting technical details right. But it’s not rigid. The main driver is dramatic force. The story has to be gripping, believable, vivid. All else is subservient to that.
23. Now a really dramatic change involving two characters swapping crystal. The idea just emerged while thinking about what would happen. It puts them back in the positions on the original story board. And it’s totally credible. I change the spreadsheet where I keep a record of who’s got which crystal. Astonished and delighted to find that this change will significantly help the protagonists later in the story! The crystal map is another major driver of the story.
24. Scrapped all but first frame of storyboard and now storyboard the second frame based on the text.
25. 09:34 Totally new piece of dialog emerges from writing, driven by character. In part this is due to the new tighter physical situation, but I hadn’t seen any of this dialogue while storyboarding.
26. Oops. I read the outline and find that the idea of these characters talking WAS in the outline! I’d forgotten and re-written it, although with a different tone. (Same melody, different key).
27. 09:41 Now got to produce some dialogue for a mentally unstable character in a tense situation. Tricky. Bring in another of my favourite techniques. Go and lie down and think about it.
28. 10:03 You have to think through what your characters have been doing recently, and what state of mind they are in. I’ve got that now, so I can write the next life of dialogue. God, I wish I had some talent so these things didn’t take so long. 15 minutes for 1 line! But it was worth it because once the conversation started the characters started doing things and the story came to life. Within a few minutes I had another paragraph. I think it was Hemmingway said that he had to find a line that was true before he could start writing. It’s the same thing here. You start with a line that is true to a character and the story comes to life and the plot lives and drives itself.
29. 10:17 Think I’ve done enough to give the flavour of it. If you want to know how long it takes to write you have to take off some time to allow for the fact that I’m writing these notes, of course, but not much.
30. 11:24 Don’t like the flow. It’s melodramatic and the motivation isn’t convincing. Start to use Frameforge to produce vivid 3D storyboards.
31. 12:00 Not sure why but constructing a very simple scene actually unblocked the writing. Finished the first draft in a form I can bear to listen to. Will transfer to disc and listen to the last few chapters again during the post-lunch walk.
32. 18:06 Finally finished the text after going out for a walk, listening to the chapter in the context of others and realising that I had forgotten to stitch together vital plot elements which had been laid down but never completed. I feel it’s not a bad ending to this part and to the volume.
33. Begin the most difficult task of all–writing a 600 word synopsis which is required as part of the submission.

ciao!

 

Exploring the consequences

I’m working through the consequence of having Catty go down the tunnel in 38 as I revise subsequent chapters. I’ve got a spreadsheet that tells me who holds which bit of crystal at each stage and I rely on that to tell me what is possible, but I no longer know what’s going to happen. I’ve achieved the objective of setting the characters down the paths I want them to go and now they’re on their own.

I’m still recovering from the effort of forcing Catty down the tunnel yet making it seem natural. I think that was my greatest writing achievement so far. Now hoping for a few more.

I feel like the rest of this volume ought to be easy except for the ending. I’ve already written enough chapters to just edit them and I’ve got five years worth of ideas waiting to write down. So far, however, I don’t know which cliff hanger this volume ends at. It’ll have to be a big one to make the reader long for volume 2.

 

Finally worked out plot

Finally, after a lot of agony and fiddling around in Flash, I figured out what happens in chapter 34. At least I think I have. I’m stopping now. I’ve given up most of a glorious afternoon to work on this because this chapter is crucial and I absolutely had not know how it would work out. As well as creating the graphics and storyboarding 34 I went back and storyboarded 18 so I could have continuity.

I’m a fairly happy bunny now but things may change when I come to complete the text of 34, probably tomorrow.

I sometimes imagine myself as a successful author being asked what advice I would give to a young ambitious author and I know what I ought to say. DON’T DO IT!

 

Computers, Love em or hate em

All the character images I had in Flash were out of date so I just spent an hour or so importing the new images, only to have the computer crash on me. It’s the second time it happened in a couple of weeks. I suspect the power supply which has caused a lot of problems in the past.
So now I’ve lost some of the Flash work (although not all since I tend to save often following the previous crash.)
I guess I should buy a new PC although I’ve only just bought a laptop so I’m reluctant to spend more. So are computers worth this hastle? Well of course. I couldn’t imagine writing without one let alone producing all these graphics, not to mention doing the research on the internet. It would be impossible to do this job without them.
In fact I got into computing in Cambridge in 1979 precisely because I couldn’t manage the amount of data I was collecting about hotu.
I love em, except when they go wrong, which is pretty often. I spent most of yesterday screaming at this computer, making me wait while it thought about what it wanted to do next.. I can understand why people smash them up! I’m surprised I haven’t done it myself.

 

Bogged down

Not sure any more whether Catty and Alex will find the entrance to the tunnel inside ATLAS or where the black hole exploded in Chapter 34, and I’m not sure either whether I really care any more.

Having to re-write these last fifteen chapters is soul-destroying. I heard a chap on the radio yesterday who says he works the same hours as me, five o’clock in the morning til late at night. Difference was he gets rewards for his efforts. He runs successful companies, gets good jobs at universities and on government committees. I get nothing (oh sorry yes I got my first ever comment on this blog yesterday) almost nothing in return. But that makes me treasure the few things I do get.

Ah well, plod on. Start by listening to the chapters leading up to this one, to remind myself what the characters do and how they’re feeling.

 

Still replotting

Yesterday I had Catriona crawling into ATLAS following a smooth tunnel made by the black hole as it came out and getting stuck as the hole got narrower. Couldn’t figure out how to get her out of this predicament so did some research. I really need PERSINT to visualise ATLAS but I haven’t got (and can’t get) a CERN implementation of RedHat Linux so I’m having to make do with photos of the inside of ATLAS made during construction and screen shots of PERSINT. The photos are probably better than PERSINT anyway since it’s only a simplistic cartoon.

Realised that there wouldn’t be a smooth tunnel through ATLAS. It’s got too many holes inside. I think it’s really only after you get past the solenoid that things get really dense, and even then there are gaps, in the pixel detector for instance which is made of concentric layers.

So I’ve scrapped the version of Chapter 33 I wrote yesterday and and replotting yet again.

 

Rethinking Plot

Having chopped out half a dozen plotpoints (major sub-sections of chapters) I am now beginning to have doubts about the whole plot. Would it be better to start the action “in media rez” as they say in creative writing courses, “in the middle of the action”, which in this case would be when Catty has travelled down the tunnel and got into a dramatic jam.

I keep mulling over an earlier scenario I called Time Mountain. Just looked back at the first chapter, written in 2001. It’s really not at all well written, being almost completely telling not showing, but also the scenario is not credible.

No, I guess I’m better doing what I’m doing now.

 

Rippling Throught the Changes

Having Catty enter ATLAS in chapter 33 has widespread consequences for the following 10 chapters which I’ve already written. Now going through and editing them, making them consistent with this new twist in the plot, trying to reduce the impact as far as possible.
So, for example, previously Catty had given the large fragment to Alex during the chase. Now she keeps it so I have to introduce spontaneous fusion in two of Alex’s crystals to explain how he has a large bubble.

 

Character’s voice to Narrator’s

Writing the new chapter 34, where Catriona finds the tunnel, I wrote it first in Catty’s voice, fast and fluid with lots of ands and no full stops and then gradually converted it into narrative description. This wasn’t planned, it just seemed that I could get more drama out of the description than Catty would be able to give by rushing through. But it seemed a natural way of writing and was how I saw it as I tried to live it through her eyes. I’ve never written anything this way before.

I used TextAloud’s editor to edit the text since PowerWriter insists on putting capital letters at the start of sentences which I didn’t want but mainly because I get tired of highlighting text and pressing CTRL-F10 which is my shortcut for reading aloud.

I cut up Catty’s monologue into phrases and re-arranged them into a slightly different sequence and grouping them into sentences. This also forced me to think through the moment-by-moment description which is so vital in bringing a piece of action to life but which the character would never give when recounting her own story. This is quite hard to write, since you need to see the situation vividly, most of which I’ve got to invent. It’s also not a skill I feel very confident at. I’m forever tinkering with the text, re-arranging bits. I don’t hear the text in my head and then write it down like, for example, Edward Gibbon used to to. Instead I tinker and then have TextAloud read it to me and decide I don’t like it and fiddle some more. Very laborious and time consuming, but hopefully I’ll get more efficient as I gain in practice. I hope so!

So this movement, from character’s to narrator’s voice, seems like a good method of text development. Wonder if I’ll ever use it again?