In the last post I discussed the Mosaic Method, utilising the concept I call Flow Points: scenes in the story that act as anchors for action, pieces of a puzzle to weave into the web of your novel.
The method of Flow Points is very intuitive, and not very secure. What I mean is that you definitely won’t get a “do these five things for a guaranteed success” formula from it, not even an easy-to-follow structure. Then why would I even write about it?
Because it’s like skydiving: high-risk, but high reward. And really, really fun, while deleting into smithereens that horrible feeling called writer’s block. It’s best approached in a casual manner at first, before even dreaming of adopting it as your only fundamental method. In taming a wild horse, you don’t expect to jump in the saddle in a neat three weeks of following set instructions. Every horse will behave differently and have a unique relationship to you, and so will this method. It’s about getting to know your intuition and learning to ride it. It’s about going on a journey, into something new and maybe scary, dipping your toes in the waters of unexpected perspectives. You need to develop a level of trust with the horse, discovering new things about yourself in the process.
And how to begin with that?
Let me show you how I like it.
I. The Inner Movie /Slideshow
To use flow points to construct a story, you first need to create those points. For this, alas, no formula exists or ever will, apart from jumping headlong into the tunnel to Wonderland: your subconscious mind. Everyone will have a different way of finding it, but you don’t need to get all mystical about it. It’s simply about tuning down the overly conscious noise of your prefrontal cortex for a while, and tuning up the smooth, rich music of the deeper psyche.
I’m personally very visual, and if you are, too, you’re in luck. The easiest way to find a flow point is fishing in the river of images flowing through your. They can be pictures, scenes, feelings, atmospheres, an interesting line of dialogue, a description of a place…
It doesn’t have to be visual, though for many this is a natural way of imagining things. If it makes you feel like you’re perceiving interesting snippets of a movie you want to see in full HD, you’re probably on the right track.
ACTION – Take a blank piece of paper, put on some music if it gets you in the zone, and sit with your mind. Look at the images that form, listen to the thoughts, feel the vibe of your inner landscapes. Jot them down, make notes in whatever form feels natural to you. If you don’t even have a story idea yet, this can be a great way to fish for an interesting spark. If you do, you can direct your flow of imagination around that approximate theme and visual world.
What’s coming up? Any interesting vistas, characters, symbols? An argument happening on a cloudy beach, or someone running away from a party, clutching a violin? I find it helps to play a piece of music that fits the general mood I’m going for, then watching the “music video” play out in my head. Even if you don’t consider yourself very intuitive or visual, this can be a great way to train that and experiment a little.
II. Sifting the Gold
Hopefully you have some really cool ideas written down by now. Pick the ones that intrigue you, excite you, and make you feel that spark of “man, I need to know what’s going on here!”
Then, just…write. Write whatever tumbles into your mind, just get it on the page and don’t listen to any critical voices. If it’s crap, it doesn’t matter – you’ll figure that out later. Keep writing as long as the flow carries, then read it from the top.
Does it sound like a part of a greater story? Is it leading your mind to explore more of the world and dive deeper into the lives of the characters? Do you have interesting characters?
If so, keep it in your scene-storming document!
ACTION: In a separate document, note everything down. I like to make a table-form grid with the scene name, a brief description, and even the time if I have an idea. At the very least the season the scene is set in, so I can approximately place it in a story, or change it if I need to. This quickly becomes necessary to prevent getting lost as you rack up these ex nihilo-scenes, and lets you keep an eye on the patterns emerging. If everything you’re writing bears absolutely no relation to each other and can’t be connected, you might want to steer your scene-storming efforts with a little more controlled focus. Maybe what you have are ideas that belong to different stories, and cataloging them like this will help you see that before you get lost.
This also goes for the characters: write down what you “discover” about them as you go, and feel free to consciously add anything you like. Instead of an artist sculpting with clay, building from raw material, you’re sculpting stone, gradually finding the shape of the masterpiece from a lump of rock.
III. Connecting the Dots
Now that you have a collection of cataloged and organised scenes, hopefully featuring roughly the same characters and a similar collection of themes, locales etc, we can start the puzzling. Look at what you have, and figure out if Scene A could be connected to Scene B, and how. Maybe two more scenes need to be written in-between to naturally carry the plot over, and later you might find that Scene B is also a convenient location to foreshadow something that happens in Scene H. By now the characters should be taking shape, their profiles growing, and the rest of the world filling in detail by detail. For example, you’ve written a scene where Elsa was having the time of her life on the yacht party in the Bahamas. You can figure out she’s probably an extrovert who likes to party, OR…maybe she’s just playing a role in order to get close to the yacht’s flamboyant owner and achieve her objective, later detailed in another scene that you can go write now!
In doing this you’ll probably get ideas for more and more scenes, but this time they already relate to the story that’s emerging and won’t be as random. Write down a title for each scene, and a brief description of what the essential priority of that scene is and why it has to exist.
This is the stage of coming up with the web itself, or the bridges between islands.
ACTION: Keep track of every move you make. Literally, every single move. Because this is a weird form of “story reverse-engineering”, it’s imperative to keep a log of all the things that you discover about your story as you go along, to prevent them from sprawling out of hand into a nonsensical fever dream. The following is a list of aspects I recommend tracking:
⨳ Characters and their relationships – names, dates, quirks, characteristics, all that stuff.
⨳ Environments and locations – The “Where” of the story. Describe them all.
⨳ Major plot points, sub plots and scenes – Causality is still a thing, or its not a story.
⨳Themes and tone – You want to make sure it stays consistent and on track
⨳ Worldbuilding details – Anything about the world that is relevant to the story
The what’s and why’s of these are useful to refer back to when you finally begin taking a “proper” look at your story.
IV. Boiling Down the Story
You thought you were just gonna keep throwing mud at the walls, ad hoc all day? Nope.
Whatever your writing jam, effective storytelling does eventually require things like an actionable, logically flowing plot, clear themes and character arcs, throughlines and all that stuff you hear about in sanctioned writing advice. Since the nature of the flow points is very, er, flowy, it’s up to you at what stage you turn that critical, editorial eye upon your own creation. My recommendation would be not to leave it too late. If you only go with whatever your mind merrily spits out, not paying any attention to the construction of a coherent story, you’ll just end up with the ingredients for ten different cakes and no clue how to bake the one you want.
In connecting the dots we prune and cultivate, setting the stage for the writing of more focused scenes. The more intuitively connectable scenes you already have, the easier it will be. The ones that serve no purpose, or were cool but don’t fit where the bulk of the story is going, just gotta go. But don’t delete them! Consign them to their own document, and who knows what gems you can mine from them later. Perhaps you can even rewrite them and twist them around to fit some other purpose in your story.
ACTION: Take a good look at your spiderweb of scenes and the connections emerging between them. Now it’s time to do some good old-fashioned plotting!
⨳ What I did with my own experimental manuscript of flow points might help you as well:
I arranged all the scenes that I had so far in an approximate timeline order, shuffling them around in a way that best seemed to point to a coherent story forming. Then I simply cut and pasted them into the appropriate spots in the manuscripts, all properly titled for ease of recognition. Looking at this simple structure, it’s much easier to see where potential connections already exist or are lacking. Now you can write those connections, strengthen the elements of the story, and make it work on all levels.
For example: I had a couple of scenes where the main character muses on having to return to a certain city for a specific mission. This already gives me several new scenes to work with: the sequence in the future where she actually returns (Why, what does she need to go there for? How does she feel about going back? How was it relevant to the current story? So many questions) and the sequence in the past, when she last was in the city (Did it happen in this book, or in past history? Did something important take place? Were other characters present, did they play a role? Is there a spot for foreshadowing? )
As you can see, the story almost writes itself at this point, when you keep following the threads while keeping them firmly in your hands.
Following this basic concept can be a great way to break out of your writing rut, or simply approach writing in a fresh and exciting way. Sometimes our brains get too used to the way we’ve always done things, and a little shaking up is exactly what we need to get the juices flowing again.
So give this a go, and see what happens! You might be surprised.
Flowy writing,
x The Foxglove Scribe
The Foxglove Scribe 