In Service to Story

The tales we tell are broken down into chunks. A novel. Chapters. Scenes. This, presumably, is done to make the whole of the story easier to consume.

It's also useful for working through a narrative line. None of which should be construed as support on my part for any kind of extensive story plotting. I, too, am a totally character driven writer. As such, I require something slightly different of my scenes that my plot-driven counterparts.

To survive in a book a scene has to:

• Touch on the external conflict - preferably via action and/or dialogue
• If no external, then it must hit the internal conflict - also via action or dialogue
• Challenge the protagonist and make things MUCH worse unless we're in the last few pages of the book
• Advance the over progression in the overall story arc

But above all things, the scene must serve the protagonist. Note I didn't say 'serve the story'. For a character driven writer - or at least, for me, it's the same thing. Everything rises from character - the conflict, the motivation, the goals, the arc, all of it.

My secret weapon for figuring all of this out is a book/workshop called Break Into Fiction. It's heavy with templates asking you questions about your protagonist and what drives him or her. It's invaluable. The book (with all the templates) is available, too. Taking a few days to work through the templates gives me enough information that I know what my characters MUST face in order for them to change - to morph into the people they need to be to face the antagonist.

From that point, I have a vague notion of what scenes need to happen where. I say 'vague' because inevitably scenes I think happen near the climax of the book are actually necessary within the first third of a book. And then everything thereafter has to shuffle to adjust.

That said, I want scenes to work as hard as possible. I really want them doing at least three things at once (see list above). During rewrites, that's what I shoot for - taking two lazy scenes that only do one thing each and finding a way to merge them so they DO more. Cherry Adair likes to say 'what the fuck's the point of the scene'? She also advises getting into scenes late and then leaving them early - meaning, I think, that you want to keep your scenes packed with action. I like to keep those comments in mind - both while writing scenes and editing them. I *want* my scenes tight and filled with tension. Of one kind or another. That doesn't happen if I'm allowed to meander. It's alarming to me how someone who claims to be a writer (me) so instinctively wanders away from conflict rather than headlong into it when she's allowed to putter about in her scenes. Thus - short, tight, and jammed full of stuff that has to happen.

All of that said, it's fascinating to me how other people approach their work. So more please. Has there been something left unsaid about scenes this week? What do YOU require of your scenes?

Pantser or Plotter or...

My post it a little late this morning because the calls for Golden Heart and Rita finalists went out this morning. After the butterflies and angst over whether Enemy Within was good enough or not good enough, the phone rang once at 8:02 and then again at 8:09. :)  The book finaled in Best First book and in Paranormal. I'm still shaking. Now, however, I'm supposed to think clearly and work.

My answer to the panster or plotter question is: yes. I do an odd amalgamation of the two. There's another question that I have to ask in order to explain what I do. Are you a character driven or plot driven writer? If you're plot driven, what happens in your story defines who your characters are. If you're a character driven writer, who your characters are defines what happens in your story. I totally made those definitions up. But it really is how I think about story. I'm distinctly a character driven writer and up until the start of Enemy Within, I was 100% pantser. Which is to say, I had no clue where a book was going or why. I knew where it began and I know vaguely how I wanted it to end, but everything in the middle was a mystery. The result was a series of events that happened to my characters simply because I said so, or because I thought 'hey, this would be cool'.

Not a one of those books is publishable, much less published. By coincidence, just as I began Enemy Within, I took a Break Into Fiction workshop given by Mary Buckham. That's where I realized how very character driven I am and how desperately my storylines need to come from the strengths and failings of my characters.

So. I'm a plotter in that there's a huge set of templates (directly from Break Into Fiction) I work through for both hero and heroine before I can start writing. This puts me directly into their conflict and dilemma set. I have a good grasp of their emotional start points and of the arc necessary for each of them if they are to achieve their HEA. That, then, leads to situations and scenes that must occur to challenge the pair. But you'll note there's no actual plotting happening. That's because like several of my fellow Word Whores have already said, if I know too much about what happens, why should I write the book?

On the other hand, I can't know too much about the characters. The more I know, the better the book becomes. The more I know my hero and heroine, the better the chances that they'll start running scenes in my head without any input from me. Usually at night. As I'm trying to get to sleep. That's when I know a book has taken on a life of it's own. When it begins spontaneously generating, the characters and their story have begun living and breathing in spite of me. But I still don't know what's going to happen. I do sometimes wish I could be a plotter. I'd like to be a faster writer. This driving off into the fog thing isn't the most productive method around and I have a twisted desire to be insanely prolific.

So there you go. Panster? Yep. Plotter? Kinda - from a character arc standpoint. But now, to accommodate my wish to be prolific, it's time to go to work.