The internet is awash with writing advice these days: the only plot structure you’ll ever need, five steps to the perfect character, the blueprint you must apply for success…
This is mostly a positive thing, of course, as writers and successful authors and writers of all stripes have developed and tested these ideas through years of trial and error, and are now allowing us to enjoy the flowers of their labour. The problems begin when the info overload kicks in, and when we’re no longer able to distinguish the good from the bad in a smorgåsbord of advice and a million perfect ways to do everything.
Most people intuitively understand the existence of multiple ways to get where you want go, none of them necessarily superior. Yet sometimes trying to pick the “right” way distracts us from finding “our” way, even if it deviates from popular opinion. To me, anything that works ain’t broken. For beginning writers, reinventing the wheel is not an advisable or necessary activity in any case. It’s better to find advice that resonates and structure your work based on tried-and-tested methods before trying to get too fancy.
Once you’ve got some solid roots on your writerly plants, you can loosen up a little and try something new. Everyone knows by now the basic concepts of plotters vs pantsers (if you don’t, just google it and you will), or their hybrids, and the common approaches to plotting, character creation, conflict, tension, theme, etc. ad infinitum. These broad categories are where most of the advice seems to be concentrated, with much emphasis on constructing effective plots. That is probably the safest and most guaranteed method of going about your story, especially if you’re not the type of writer who has backstory mysteries and intriguing character connections bubble up into their psyche out of the blue in the grocery line. Not to mention finding a way to logically connect them to the rest of the story.
Taking the Distance
One thing I keep seeing is writers struggling to move on through a section they’re stuck in. I used to be in this boat, feeling like I had to finish this scene with honor in order to move to the next one, like some level in a video game. Fortunately, that’s not how fiction writing has to work.
If a scene is behaving like a stubborn donkey, there must be a reason to that. Often you won’t be able to see the reason because you’re too close to the problem. Solution? Distance.
No, not leaving your manuscript in its naughty box and forgetting about it for 78 days. Distance can be done far more cleverly and effectively. Here’s a personal example to back up this completely scientific claim.
In writing my first novel, Hunt of Ravens, I got so stuck on chapter 11 that I didn’t know how to get around it in linear fashion. It’s not in my blood to either give up or let an obstacle slow me down, so I simply decided to skip it and move on from the next point that flowed naturally. This turned out to be an inspired decision, since it wasn’t until I was past chapter 23 that I even returned to Chapter 11 and was able to clearly fix what ailed it. With the perspective afforded by that distance and the new information provided by future chapters, the unclimbable obstacle became a blip on the radar, comfortably filled in with the information the later story would provide.
Once I realised what a useful strategy this “story hopping” was in general, I’ve never had to struggle being stuck on that one impossible scene. I called it the Mosaic Method, because it’s a bit like putting together a puzzle or a mosaic of several pieces already separately existing. Obviously, you can still have a hard time with thorny passages for way longer than you’d like, but it doesn’t have to come at the price of halting all progress on the story. A lot of the writer’s block advice is the kind where you’re just meant to sit there for half an hour staring at a blank screen because “writing time” or produce hundreds of words of absolute drivel on principle. This I have never found very helpful, but if you have, great. Sometimes it does help to just sit down and at least try, but if it’s not flowing, it ain’t flowing. Anything written uphill is probably just going to have to be rewritten, so why waste your time? Sure, words are better than empty space, but you should’t be writing gritting your teeth. That can’t be much fun. And if you’re not having fun, you won’t want to do it for very long. Work smart, not hard.
A concept intimately related to the Mosaic Method is the Two-Way Arrow. Time is often thought of as an arrow, moving from past to future in a straight line. In the physics of relativity, however, there is no one direction: time is an aspect of spacetime, technically traversable in the opposite direction. Without getting into debates about quantum physics and time travel here, I like the way it can be applied to writing. I call it “bidirectional writing” – not only does the past inform the future, the future also informs the past. It’s another way of viewing your story: instead of blocks building upon one another to make a house, you have what I call “flow points”, or the individual mosaic pieces making up the body of the story: scenes and events in that flow naturally from your consciousness, without tears or strife.
A Flow Point can be any scene in the story that gives you a kick to write, makes you feel that writer’s high and intrinsically
motivates you to tell the story.
You can start writing scenes and events way into the future of your current scene, and have them join the flow of the story later. This makes devices such as foreshadowing and backstory easier, since you’re holding a more comprehensive view of the entire story in your head, not only focusing on the immediate next thing to happen. It’ll also become second nature to jump back and forth to add and modify things, which helps you insert the necessary information in the right spots. This way you can cycle between the different flow points and never feel like you’re stuck. It allows you to simply bypass the thorn for now, and see if the simple act of moving on would solve it.
The Prerequisites
A word of caution, however: This works well only if you:
a) Keep your flow points within an executable story bubble. The risk of tangents is real, so an element of intuitive cohesiveness is required.
b) Have the ability to intuitively bridge any gaps or inconsistencies that might arise from employing the two-way arrow of time. You’re also willing to change scenes that don’t perfectly fit what the story ended up being, or ditch them altogether.
c) Have a clear method for writing down new information as it comes to you, and keeping track of the exact branches and logical connections between these “island scenes.” Otherwise you might have to deal with a bloated mess of a jungle by the time you get to the end!
With this method of flow points, you’ll begin to see your manuscript more as a malleable web of multiple interconnected nodes in magical spacetime, rather than a series of bricks you feel obligated to lay down in the right order. This is not to say that linear bricks are any worse – they’re certainly safer and more reliable, and better to start off with, but if the way your unique mind works doesn’t feel the sparks from masonry, maybe a more intuitive and fluid approach is the one for you.
For me personally, this approach affords incredible eureka moments and solutions that I had never imagined in the plotting stage. This works best if you’re intuitive by nature, but you shouldn’t feel bad if it doesn’t work: we don’t all get those lightning strikes of revelation as often, and everyone is programmed differently. It might be a fun method to try especially for pantsers, but anyone can give it a go. I used to think I was a plotter, but experimenting with “into the dark” writing told me other things. Speaking of experiments…
Stay tuned for the next, and have fun trying your hand at some mosaic-tiling.
x The Foxglove Scribe
The Foxglove Scribe 