Designing Novels, Part 3: Plot
We are storytelling creatures, and I have an intuition that language evolved in parallel with storytelling as a survival skill: Relating where the game can be found, impressing women (and rivals) with your badass exploits, and so on. Kids are really good at creating stories, for entertainment, bluster, or to shift blame. ("The dog ate my homework!") So fashioning plots may be at once the easiest and the most difficult part of designing novels: Easiest because it's in our genes; and hardest, because it's so deep in our genes that it's difficult to control.
The way I plotted The Cunning Blood (and most of my earlier fiction longer than a few thousand words) was simple, effective, and occasionally infuriating: I created a broad concept, vividly envisioned an opening scene, then cast wide the gates and let 'er rip. The details of the plot (almost) always emerged in a form that would both gibe with my broad concept and move the story in a useful direction.
The broad concept often begins very simply, and for The Cunning Blood went something like this: Peter Novilio and his nanocomputer partner the Sangruse Device are sentenced to transportation to Hell, and Peter is offered a pardon if he can go down there and come back with useful information on what Hell is up to. While there he uncovers a plot to topple Earth's world government. End of plot outline. Going in, that's literally all I had.
It grew quickly, of course, but what I found amazing is how much of the plot detail showed up in a "just-in-time" fashion. Every so often I had to think hard about what would come next, but in most cases the ideas that would become the plot for Chapter X+1 came flooding in just as I was wrapping up Chapter X. Late in the book, when the action was no longer linear in a single thread, I had to take a couple of time-outs to sketch out sequences of scenes. (One such timeout was a very memorable autumn walk in Seattle with my close friend Michael Abrash.) But while I was writing a single thread, the details came to me as I needed them.
Every once in awhile the chipper/shredder in the back of my head spat out a dead end. This happened twice in The Cunning Blood, and I had to backtrack and scrap about 10,000 words. One chapter scrapped was just plain bad, although it had coalesced around an interesting idea. (I may use the idea in the sequel, if I write the sequel.) The other was a door to perhaps another 100,000 words of story complication, and I was already well past my first 100,000 and looking for an ending. I'm always annoyed when I have to delete text, but it was encouraging how easily my subconscious picked up the scent again with a little conscious prodding.
I'm a sample of one, and it's hard to generalize strictly from my own experience, but I have noticed that it helps to visualize early scenes as cinematically observed, and not just textual descriptions in a note file. That means just what it sounds like: Create a movie in your head and watch it. The first scene in The Cunning Blood as I originally wrote it had a heavily-armed assassin stalking Peter Novilio in an ancient graveyard. (The first scene as published was written later and added as a kind of prequel to give the reader some bearings.) I envisioned the graveyard right down to the crumbling walls and the glints of light on polished headstones, and I spent some significant time leaning back in my chair and following an imaginary video of Peter playing cat-and-mouse with his assailant. There is a strong visual component to our storytelling faculty. You have to see the sabre toothed tiger before you can spin the yarn of how you outsmarted it.
Those stories for which I didn't create a cinematic vision of the first scene tended to be static and talky, and most failed or weren't even finished. There's something absolutely critical about literally seeing the first part of the story in your imagination. If you can do that, the genetic story machine we all carry with us will do most of the rest. It may even be true that people who can't write fiction fail because they have insufficient ability to visualize a scene in full action. In other words, they could write it if they could see it, but they can't see it.
To summarize my method (if you can call it that) for plotting:
- Create a broad concept for the plot. Think of it as a bounding box for the action that frames the story. Don't be too specific; again, you need to give your subconscious plenty of room to move.
- Whatever it takes, imagine the first scene in full cinematic action, and run it through your head a few times, adding details as you go. This doesn't require that you be writing an action/adventure; you can envision two people walking home from the grocery store. But envision them richly. My story "Bathtub Mary" opens on a summer evening, as a blind woman walks home with an intelligent computer pinned to her lapel. Very little action, but I had the woman, the street, the pavement, the houses, and even the weeds along the roadside in utterly crisp vision. The story worked, and worked well, even though there's almost no physical action in any of it.
- Start the story by describing that initial scene, and pay attention to new visual clues that begin to emerge from your subconscious. If the clues falter, stop where you are and rev up the theater of the mind once more, with feeling.
- If you get really stuck, do some research, take a walk (I find that moderate physical exercise revs the idea machine) and play some music that strikes a deep emotional chord in you. The music needn't have any connection to any aspect of the story, though there are sometimes resonances. A cut called "The Plagues" from the soundtrack of Prince of Egypt helped me envision the scene in which Sahan Grusa levels the pirate colony Columbia by creating frightening (but harmless) fantasy creatures as nanotech macrobots, much like God raining frogs and such on Egypt. It sounds silly, but it worked.
- Don't give up if things fall apart in any given session. You may be distracted by the things of this world, so set aside your imaginal world for a night and come back to it fresh the next day, ready to see it in motion in your mind.
Plotting is really the core of the storytelling art. You need gimmicks and characters, but without plot, well, they're just ideas. Strive to be a visual person, and don't just sit at home all the time. Go out and see what animals and mountains and machinery actually look like. Travel. Experience. Like the commercial says, live richly. Imagination builds on the real.
It's November 1. I've told you what I know. Now get out there and write us a novel!