Maybe you had a very clear vision for
the first few chapters of your novel, and you zipped through those, typing so
fast that your fingers blurred on the keyboard. Or maybe you started with the
ending, scrawling out a climax of epic proportions, and getting the characters
exactly where they needed to be.
Problem is, what do you do with the
rest of the story?
This is a difficulty that doesn’t just
apply to the non-planners among us. Even faithful outliners may realize that
they have a gap in their carefully-constructed plan that they don’t know what
to do with, or that can’t be fixed by what they have as a placeholder right
now.
When that happens, I say, go back to
elementary school.
Before deciding that I am completely
unqualified to be writing this blog post, hear me out. I know an
elementary school teacher who explained to me once the methods she uses to
engage students in reading. “We have them make predictions and connections,”
she said. “Sometimes it even helps them to show events in a visual way.”
She spread out a series of charts and
diagrams and organizational maps in front of her. Normally, I flee at the sight
of anything that looks remotely structured. When I saw those charts, though,
something in my brain clicked. These activities help kids because they take
them outside of the narrative structure and help them see the big picture. What
if the same thing would work for writers?
That said, here are some fourth grade
tools adapted for use by the big kids.
Timeline: This is a popular get-to-know-you
activity, along with a family tree, probably because they look good on
bulletin boards. Both are also great for helping you understand your main
character better—your protagonist’s family and the events of his or her life,
even before the story starts, are going to have an incredible amount of impact
on your story. Alternately, a timeline can be useful to plan the fictional
history of a fantasy or science fiction world. Think about how much our
nation’s past influences what matters to us now. It will be the same with your
fictional world.
Venn
Diagram: There may be other
ways to use this, but the single most useful on for me has been a Venn Diagram
answering the following question: “How is this story similar to and different
from my own life?” Drawing those two overlapping circles has shown me that my
protagonist is basically me in a different time period, helped me understand
that I was working through my own sense of grief and loneliness in one story,
and given me ideas for how I should change the setting of a fantasy so it
reflects a different set of values than contemporary America. A self-aware
writer is a better writer, and sometimes activities like this can help us
connect things that we wouldn’t have otherwise.
Book
Report Forms: Kids get all of
three lines of space to explain the plot of the book. This is excellent
practice for a writer. When you have to distill your book idea to a few bare
sentences, it will come out focused in your mind in a way that it never has
been before.
“If/Then”
Statements: This is one teachers
use to ask students to make predictions. Usually at the end of a chapter where
a character is presented with the choice, they’ll have the students write out
several options, and the consequence of each. If your character is wandering
around with no idea of what to do next, write out a few possibilities this way
and see if something clicks.
Mind
Maps: Picture a circle with
a central topic written in it, then a bunch of lines exploding from that topic
with subtopics, which each have lines leading to other bits of information.
This is one of the best generic templates for getting unstuck known to mankind,
because it lets your brain do what it naturally wants to do: go on sidetracks,
associate related information, and throw out a bunch of stuff into one
slightly-organized mass. If you need to plan possibilities, map out possible
sub-plots, or think of a character to introduce who would challenge your
protagonist in some way, this is a great method.
Brainstorming
Session: Sometimes, strict
organization is the way to creative ideas. But if you tend to already be a
Type-A writer, you might need to let loose a little. It’s very possible to have
a lot of mediocre ideas and no bad ideas. It’s rare, though, to have great
ideas with no bad ideas in the mix. So do what some elementary classes do—as
well as the animators at Pixar do during the planning stages of a new movie.
Write down all your ideas, whatever comes to mind, on notecards or sticky
notes. All of them, without stopping to shoot any down. Then, combine the ones
that are similar. Get rid of a few outrageous ones. Tweak others. Put two
unrelated ideas together and see what happens. Do the opposite of another.
Eventually, find a few that really stand out and use them.
Besides being really helpful for writers, these methods are just plain fun, even for me, and as I’ve mentioned, I’m not much of a planner. Don’t let the blank page stare you down. You can beat it.
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