On sandcastles and synopses - Rowena House

I love iteration, its back-and-forth, revisiting and refining ideas. It is the antidote to linear, post-fact rationalisation and a challenge to dogma, harnessing the fluid relationships between that and this, there and here, then and now.

Hilary Mantel’s posthumous A Memoir of My Former Self apparently traces some of the iterations in her thoughts, according to The Guardian’s review this weekend. * 

"We repeatedly see Mantel testing and circling ideas, developing her thoughts over time," says reviewer John Self,

I'd love her to have narrated the audiobook so we can hear her wry intelligence again.

Revisiting these ABBA posts has become a conscious part of my creative process as I refine the plot plan for the 17th century witch trial work-in-progress. From the rather scary place it's at – starting the first draft of Act II – I can see different uses for some of the plotting devices I’ve experimented with before.

For instance, the guru-inspired template synopses I generated last year (and blogged about here over several months) have now taken on new roles. At the outset, they were story development devices. ‘What ifs.’ With hindsight, the output of that process – distilled into roughly four discrete synopses for the whole manuscript – look more like glimpses into alternative futures, possibilities of the shape of things to come.

This shift in viewpoint – from ‘that then’ to ‘this now’ – put me in mind of a writing axiom that’s always sounded good in theory but which I’ve never been able to put into practice.

It is the notion that a first draft is a sand pit into which you pour your ideas, and only afterwards shape the sand into the castles of your story. It is a variation on ‘get it writ, then get it right’ (which, like iteration, I remember talking about here before).

The template outlines can, perhaps, be seen as half-way houses. Or half-way castles. Buckets filled with similar characters and events, each producing a different shaped story. Historical Crime is one shape, Literary Thriller another, and so forth.

Each synopsis poses a question: which genre, if any, best fits the characters and events of this tale, and is that type of story one I genuinely want to devote the time and energy needed to write it?

In the spontaneous moment when fingers hit keys, I don't think big questions like genre should matter. If they did, I doubt anything would get written at all. But outside that moment, after a break, wondering where the story got to and where it’s going next, a sand castle in a bucket turns out to be helpful.

You can pick it up and see what you like. What’s missing. What would be fun to do with it now. What doesn’t make sense any more.

For future reference – if there is ever going to be another story – template outlines have definitely earned their place in my writing tool kit.

@HouseRowena on X/Twitter

Rowena House Author on Facebook

*I'll try to remember to put a link into the comments once I've found it! It was published on Saturday, 14 October 2023.