Dear Diary - by Rowena House

It’s been full-on for the past week as I try my hardest to meet an academic deadline to get the development edit into my PhD supervisors by Easter, plus Draft 1 of a B-plot which, after five years of working on this one story, came to me last year.

My back can’t take much more sitting down, so here’s a selection of recent morning musings on my Facebook live diary about writing the seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress.

Happy Spring Equinox to anyone else who’s always surprised when it’s not on the 21st.

March 20th. 05.58 approx. Today I'll attempt to pull together ideas for an All is Lost chapter for Tom's plotline out of the mess of multiple chapters I left as dross in Draft 1, with the new thoughts informed by my new fear that the Draft 1 ending is wrong. Not totally wrong. The basic idea is salvageable, I think, but it needs to be more nuanced if it's to be plausible. I'd like to type it, but I think that's just the urge to get it done. Rushing this won't solve the problem. My March ABBA post is due tomorrow so maybe I can think this problem through 'on paper' for that. Not yet six am.

March 19th. 06.58. A day of life jobs. I'll go back to Alys if I get a moment. Then I should write an ABBA post. Hmm. Not ideal if I'm still even vaguely thinking I might make the Mar 31 deadline, though the request was 'by Easter', so, what if I say Tom's development edit & Alys's Draft 1 will be done & dovetailed by the close of Easter Monday? Doable? Pic: yesterday's dog walk. Twas lovely. 

March 18th. 06.05. Woken to a desire to put the work-in-progress aside after yesterday's dismal discovery of yet more major revision being needed. After three months plus of solid concentration it felt like a kick in the teeth to find I'd left chapter after chapter essentially at the Draft Zero stage of meandering half-discovery with a veneer of nice writing that utterly fails to tell a story. I should have flagged it up as needing wholesale rethinking. Surely, I knew it did. That's the end-March deadline blown.

March 17th. 06.31. Waking up to a big question. Is this 'a' development edit or 'the' development edit? Unfortunately, the answer isn't the one I want it to be, nor the one my PhD timetable expects it to be. By definition, if I'm still writing Draft 1 for Alys (or horror of horrors, Draft Zero, fumbling more or less blindly towards her story) then this cannot be 'the' development edit, and whatever I deliver to my PhD supervisors will be preliminary.

Is that conclusion an opportunity to break free from the self-imposed pressure to get it 'right' right now or a threat of more (endless) procrastinating because I don't have a deadline? Is craft a strength (let's get this done) or a weakness (let's package Alys & Tom's stories into industrial-shaped containers)? I guess the answer is personal. The deadline is hugely motivating, but I am fumbling in the dark for the dovetailed ending, hoping my storytelling instincts are good enough. With The Goose Road the denouement was the thing that my editor said she bought the manuscript for. That's a truism for any book: it's only as good as its ending.

So, a lot to play for but how do I play it? Plough on or step back & plot? In other words, what have I learnt about myself as a writer since starting out seriously to write fiction in 2007?

March 16th. 06.55. NB, I need a table charting Tom's shifting opinion of the trials from brilliant examples of justice to fiascos by the time he meets Beth, and ultimately to examples of injustice by the end. I probably need to add an explicit statement about each change of heart to keep myself & the reader aligned with this arc [so that the Act 3 deviation between his beliefs and what he's writing is clearly shown, rather than the reader needing to be told].

NB 2, identify the exact point Tom's story enters its Act 3. There will be opportunities as well as constraints from Alys's story taking some of the weight of the James denouement. Keep an open mind where Tom act break might be [e.g. this chapter you're working on!!!] [NB it wasn’t. All is Lost & the Dark Night of the Soul chapters are still to come.]

NB 3. Don't get frustrated. Tom's story has changed a lot because of the introduction of Alys's plot. Don't expect it to be simple to dovetail the two.

Re the development edit in general, it's interesting that I remembered the current London sequence as being aligned with the Draft 1 denouement, but yesterday I found a whole chapter that make absolutely no sense. From memory, I'd layered into this chapter Tom's evolving thought process about the past, having not known what it needed to be in Draft Zero, the very first full draft in which I was working out what the story might be.

Basically, the story was more evolved in my head than on the page.

I'll have to be meticulous about expunging this old story DNA from the development edit lest it damages the beast that is 'becoming' on the page. It will almost certainly take a fast read through of a printed version to see if I have made this arc clear. But that will have to wait till after I've dropped this version into the PhD system.

Re writing in general, this story needed to be edited at speed to establish coherence. Hopefully, being forced to draft Alys's story at speed will limit its incoherence. Overall lesson about discovering a stream-of-poo when you thought you were almost 'there'? Don't be fooled into thinking any of this is easy.



Rowena House Author on Facebook.

The whoosh of a collapsing plan - by Rowena House

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, I love making plans. I like the whooshing sound they make as they collapse.

His original quote was about deadlines flying past. But having watched Master Blasters on TV years ago, I'm going to say edifices collapse with a whoosh as well, and a satisfying mushroom of dust, leaving a pile of rubble from which to start building again if that’s what takes your fancy.

The plan thus demolished?

That having finished draft one of the seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress back in April, I would power into the development edit on retreat in June and finish it in time for an historical writing course at Moniack Mhor in November.

However. 

A series of well-placed detonators went off in the real world, starting in May, and reverberating until now, leaving me surrounded by rubble, wondering if I’ll be able to pick up a trowel again before November.

Which is fine. My sort-of deadline for this story is end-September next year, and since I don’t have writing plans after that, there’s no pressure to finish this manuscript early.

Where, therefore, is the WIP in its fragmented state of becoming a story?

The A-plot is undergoing a thorough development edit to bring out its protagonist’s character arc as it evolved during the drafting. Before the latest detonation, this edit had reached the midpoint of Act 2 part 1, with the outline of further structural revisions tucked away safety in various synopses. So I should be able to pick up these pieces as soon as time allows.

The development edit must also integrate an entirely new B-plot into the A-plot. I’d planned to draft this B-plot before plaiting the two together, but in practice I found myself writing both in tandem – in alternating chapters – so I’ll carry on with that when I can. Meanwhile, I’m hoping the ‘backroom girls’ of my creative unconscious are already working out how to dovetail their dual denouements.

The shape of this ending is mostly being driven by the internal logic of each plotline, but external drivers are in the mix, too. 

For example, back in September, at another super-productive writing retreat at Chez Castillon [pic below], our leader, author and writing tutor Rowan Coleman, recommended the A- and B-plot protagonists have a closer relationship than the one I have plotted. She wondered about a romance between them – as had the tutor at the June retreat – an option I don't think is plausible in the world I've created for them. 

In two previous iterations of a female protagonist for the B-plot, both women were in a significant relationship with the A-plot hero, Tom. However, neither the role of lover nor surrogate mother suits the current B-plot heroine, Alys.

On the other hand, Tom's story would benefit from a more dramatic Q-factor to catalyse the final battle. So that is the specific story problem I have set the BR girls: how can Alys trigger Tom’s climax action during a face-to-face meeting?

For those not a fan of plotting via story beats, the Q-factor is – from memory – James Scott Bell’s term for the beat where a character or event that happens early in the story enables a critical action later on. It’s named after Q in the Bond films, the character who gives James Bond a gadget which will save the day.

Away from such structural plotting, the contours of Alys’s character arc are also growing in the cracks and dusty corners left in the rubble of my plan.

Earlier this month, for instance, the BR girls suggested a more relatable emotional wound than the one I had plotted, resulting in more poignant psychological scar and consequent immoral action. Perhaps her confession/self-revelation about her wound might factor into Tom’s Q-factor scene. Who knows.

Meanwhile, a separate suggestion arrived from the backroom last weekend. Since Tom’s story is at its core about a conformist who learns to think for himself, perhaps Alys’s story should - at heart - be about an outsider who chooses to come in from the cold.

Perhaps her self-revelation about her wound is what decides her to end her self-imposed exile, and finally meet with Tom. Hmm...

However it happens, the need for this significant meeting between Tom and Alys was reinforced last weekend by another serendipitous event. 

The leader of the Moniack Mhor historical fiction writing course in November is the author Andrew Miller. I adore his Costa prize-winning Pure and find his blogs and interviews about his approach to writing fascinating. So, for National Bookshop Day, I bought his 2025 Booker Prize short-listed novel The Land in Winter and read it over the past two weekends.

Now it’s finished, I don’t know what to think about it. Atmospheric, yes. Beautifully written in parts. But it's not my kind of book. Wrong era, wrong characters. It happens. But [spoiler alert] right at the end, all four point-of-view characters meet.

I'm not into signs, but this was a sign, right? Tom and Alys must meet. I just hope the BR girls are onto the case. 

 

Rowena House Author on Facebook and Instagram.

Development editing: a tale of two halves - by Rowena House

What a summer, hey? Hot, long, and creatively a season of two halves, the first full of despondency, the second far more rewarding.

With hindsight, I can see that the despondency stemmed from events linked to, but essentially outside the writing process. That is, after finishing Draft 1 of the C17th work-in-progress in April, I set it aside to ‘compost’ for at least six weeks while I began the PhD’s critical commentary.

That commentary required me to re-read five years’ worth of research and creative notebooks to re-discover what I’d forgotten along the way.

Instead of inspiration, however, the 2020 and 2021 notebooks triggered memories about family deaths and associated crises during those years which I thought I’d dealt with, but which exploded afresh, leaving everything else in ruins. Inevitably, it took time to pick up the pieces.

Fortunately, research came to the rescue in the form of a deep dive into legal history, a nice, solid and simple thing to do. Or so I thought. In fact, the bigotry of the seventeenth century drove me mad which turned out to be jolly useful, as I’ll explain below. Meanwhile, jangled nerves were soothed by a meeting with fellow writer friends at an academic conference. 

The subject of the conference also proved instructive. It was about the discipline of creative criticism, something I’d not heard of before, but turned out to be what I was doing! That is, the WIP responds creatively to another writer’s work, in my case that of a pamphleteer. Who knew?

I think that conference might have been a turning point in terms of getting back on track with the development edit, but it didn’t feel it at the time. Rather, I felt dumb for not knowing that’s what my story was about. Hey ho.

Anyhow, summertime offered opportunities for the familiar pick-me-up of physical research trips. I went to a restored Norman keep, similar to the one where the witch trials took place and wandered around it for hours, and later to the location of the witch trials on the same days they took place. Well, almost the same days as I failed to account for the shift from the Julian to Gregorian calendars.

Despite the eleven-day discrepancy, places and times that had, up till then, been purely imaginary became real: the slant of the sun on a window, landscapes my characters would have lived in, plants they would have seen. Wandering through France had been a big part of researching The Goose Road and making WW1 feel real; I knew it would help this time. (Why I put it off for so long is probably worth exploring, but not now.)

Anyhow, back in June, while still feeling miserable, a brief one-to-one with an editor had convinced me to revisit the feminist B-plot which I’d put on hold in 2024 after failing for years to come up with a convincing and relevant female character and plot.

Having re-committed to this idea, the anger I felt over the irrational bigotry of powerful seventeenth-century men regarding the (im)possibility of witchcraft super-charged something in my subconscious, which promptly delivered both a character and the bones of her plot within hours of making that decision.

It happened on retreat at Casa Ana in the Sierra Nevada, Spain, a break from home which I’d hoped would end the blues but turned into a disaster for the aforesaid reasons about triggered memories. But perhaps the emotional extremity of that period was one of the drivers behind that sudden creative moment. 

So, ta, patriarchal bigots, then and now. You’re seriously worth fighting against.

Since then, her story has developed in leaps and bounds, fed by years of research and guided by trusted plotting systems like John Truby’s seven story steps and Story Grid’s foolscap templates, along with the ‘backroom girls’ of the unconscious who’ve come up trumps repeatedly when set story problems to solve.

It feels good to have a woman’s viewpoint interrupting my male protagonist’s story. She’s not an obvious heroine. Not a victim. Not a witch. Just a woman in and of her time who can speak to us (I hope).

Thanks to her and another retreat at the ever-brilliant Chez Castillon this month, I now have the first quarter of their combined manuscript on file, with the development edited A-plot braided with Draft 1 of her B-plot, plus a head buzzing with ideas. Phew. 

PS Daily writing updates over on Facebook at Rowena House Author. Would be lovely to chat there.

Not on X or Instagram much. 

Draft 1, Book 2. Talk about tough! – Rowena House

It’s done! A 77,300-word first draft of the seventeenth century witch trial novel-in-progress is now backed up, awaiting printing and the start of the development edit.

What a blooming marathon. Five years almost to the day from starting the research seriously until I typed 'The End', even though I'm calling it 'An End' out of superstition.

Everyone says the second book is tough. Boy, they aren't kidding.

The biggest creative eye-opener of finishing the full draft was an entirely unexpected release of pent-up creative thoughts which arrived in a rush AFTER I spent a week tweaking the resolution. Years of fiddling with single sentence commercial pitches fell away, replaced by a solid plot one-liner (15 words).

More importantly, a character one-liner arrived out of the blue, too, which, with hindsight, I can see is the heart of the story, the universal wood hidden within the story trees. The specific character journey on which I had been fixated turned out to be a metaphor for something simpler. Wow. Good to know.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that feeling confident about the ending at this stage represents progress since (from memory) I didn't figure out the grand finale of The Goose Road until the end of the first of two rounds of development edits.

Back then, I had the luxury of working with a wonderful cohort of fellow writers on the Bath Spa MA, plus the insight of the inestimable Marie-Louise Jensen, my MA manuscript tutor. The Goose Road then went through a second development edit, requested by Mara Bergman, my editor at Walker, before she bought the manuscript. 

You could therefore say it's too soon to congratulate myself on reaching An End for Book 2 when I’ve no idea what the future holds for this story. Reworking the synopses has, however, been encouraging.

Which ever way I look at them, An End is satisfying. The rest of the story needs at lot of work to get there, but it is a worthwhile place to arrive at. Thus, An End has resolved a deep-seated worry of mine for the past five years that there wasn't a real story within the history I’m re-writing.

Basically, I’ve been afraid each iteration of ‘the story’ was a bolt-on, something to carry the external plot, and the protagonist merely a vessel for that plot. The universality of the character one-liner therefore came as a shock as well as a huge relief. There is a story in there after all.

The other main lesson I’m taking from finishing Draft 1 is just how much perseverance it's taken. The trade publishing environment has got even more precarious in the past eight years since The Goose Road came out, with advances apparently even smaller than they were, or non-existent. Thus the juicy carrot of an (imagined) paid publishing contract which kept me going last time simply isn't there. OK, this manuscript might get published, but there’s a good chance it won’t, and even if it is, we all know that’s no guarantee of anything in terms of marketing or sales.

On the upside, self-publishing has all but shed its second-hand status in the intervening years, so that option is now a matter of personality and whether one can handle all the marketing involved. Having perservered thus far, I guess I will just press on and worry about all that later.

Meanwhile, a delightful and very welcome surprise since I locked the manuscript away for the requisite four-to-six weeks is news that Sara Grant is publishing an editing guide with Writers & Artists, The Ultimate Guide to Editing your Novel, coming out in June. 

My copy was instantly on pre-order. The advice from her and her fellow tutor/mentors at Book Bound and Scooby were the foundations for developing The Goose Road into its publishable form. I've every confidence that Sara's new guide will become a bible for loads of us, me included.

What else to say in this pause between drafting and editing? 

Draft 1 owes its existence to a bunch of writing gurus, which I've talked about here for years, including Story Grid, Save the Cat for Novels, James Scott Bell's oeuvre, John Yorke's Into the Wood, Robert Mckee' Story, John Truby, and Will Storr to name but a few. Jeff Lyon's patterns of decline and elevation are also a good way of thinking about character development, imho. 

I'm also reviewing my own OCEAN-based personality profiling system - that's the Big Five personality traits openness, conscientiousness, extraversion/introversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism - which I developed for The Goose Road and blogged about here yonks ago. I've changed computers since then so these ABBA posts turned out to be the best archive for all that work!

This time, I'm linking OCEAN person-based traits to my protagonist's social identity as a lawyer, imagining how his in-group's group think about witchcraft influenced him, both in terms of his beliefs and his behaviour. I think this is going to be super instructive for the development edit, and I'll blog about that in the future.

So, there we go. Eighteen years of writing fiction on and off, and I can says with confidence that everyone sticking with their Book 2 is a hero. Solidarity to y'all. And a huge hat-tip to every author with a shelf full of titles. Awesome, guys. Just awesome.

@HouseRowena on Musk’s cess pit

Rowena House Author for a live Facebook diary about the WIP 

PS Apologies again for the lack of photos. I've got loads to upload, but whenever I try a big Google message shows up and just sits there, blethering about accessing cookies. Also, it's Easter Sunday and my dog is telling me in no uncertain terms I've been on the computer long enough. 

All the best!

The river banks of story - Rowena House

I’ve a memo on my phone with a commercial pitch line for my work-in-progress which I edit regularly, often first thing in the morning or last thing at night, circling around twenty words or so which express the essence of what I think I’m writing.

According to some writing gurus, the pitch line is your lodestone, giving direction to your writing through the twists and turns of the plot. My latest version: ‘A young pamphleteer discovers why tyrants are hunting witches, a truth that threatens his life’ (15 words).

Unfortunately, it’s useless as a lodestone. It’s what happens in the plot, without any sense of the drivers of the narrative, either for me as the author or for my protagonist. If I engraved it on a fancy background and stick it up on a wall above the computer, it would achieve precisely zilch, which may be why this story is taking forever to write. [Another explanation for the slowness is, do I really want to finish it when getting publishing is a soul-suck? But that’s another blog.]

The current academic version of the pitch line – the WIP being the body of a creative writing PhD – is rather more useful in terms of a reminder about what I think I’m up to. That is, ‘The novel is an exploration of self-delusion and societal group-think grounded in the unreliable historical record of a witch trial’ (21 words).

It’s taken nearly three years collecting research material and writing two spiked drafts (neither completed) to get to this point – huzzah – but I now believe this academic pitch to be ‘true’ to my intention. It is an expression of why this subject – witch trials – appealed to my subconscious.

Essentially, I’m looking into the intersection between the psychology and the ‘sociology’ of how and why we lie to ourselves, using the historical record as a particular – and extreme – example.

Thus when I arrived at the latest Break into Act 2 scene, I both am but also am not writing about an impoverished, persecuted, long-dead boy who got beaten up in his cell – even if he is the most dramatically 'alive' character on those pages. Instead, I was (meant to be) writing about the protagonist’s reactions to evidence of torture, including his conformist, religious denial of empathy for someone accused of witchcraft. It is here in the psychology of everyday immorality that I hope to find the universal within the particular, that magical core we’re all meant to be writing about at some level.

Another way I'm trying to articulate the central driver of the story (mine and the protagonist's) is by adapting John Truby's concept of a central, defining, necessary action by the protagonist that unites the story. In Truby’s Anatomy of a Story, this one action - "Luke fighting the enemy" in Star Wars - creates a ‘cause and effect pathway’ that coheres the story. As an idea, it is well worth looking up, imho. 

I’m still coy about sharing my cause and effect pathway as a) it’s the USP of the WIP, and b) because I forgot to finish this post amid a bunch of life stuff this week and I’m writing this last bit on the morning of the 15th and don’t want to share stuff that later I'll wish hadn't. Silly, I know, but...

Anyhow, during last night’s insomnia, when I realised I hadn't posted this blog, I had a mini-epiphany about all this and came up with the following image which sort of explains my current framework for long-form storytelling. It is based on a bunch of stuff gleaned from various gurus over the years and my experience of analysing the writing process during the PhD and previously on the Bath Spa MA. 

This story-in-progress is a river, with the historical record one bank and the structural beats of a contemporary novel the other. The flow between them is the cause-and-effect pathway of the narrative. At the denouement, the protagonist will work out how and why their central action wounds themselves (the psychological self-revelation) and hurts others (the immoral consequences of their wrong behaviour). The final image is the flow of this one life entering the universal sea. That is, bringing their life lesson to humanity. This may be utter tosh, but it’s been a tough week. 

In any event, here’s hoping our stories bring us relief if no one else. 

@HouseRowena on X/Twitter where I can be found bringing reputational risk to something or other (see current ACE advice controversy)

Rowena House Author on Facebook where I blather (aka moan) about writing this C17th witchy WIP.

Takeaways from a 10K writing challenge – Rowena House

Last month’s personal challenge to write ten thousand words during NaNoWriMo threw up several lessons, good and bad, which I’ve been trying to capture while they’re still fresh in my mind in the hope they might help me complete a first full draft of C17th witch trial work-in-progress next year, having failed spectacularly to reach that goal this year.

That failure is another story about spanners in the works of life, now best forgotten, because the good news is I DID IT! Ten thousand story words now exist that didn’t on October 31st. Even with zero words written on three days, the total accumulated in fits and starts.

Lesson One, therefore, is that it can be done, even at home with life doing its usual tricks. Expensive writing retreats are luxuries, not essential.

In my initial notes about Lesson Two, I also claimed that November's concentrated bout of writing demonstrated it is possible to pull the story back on track ‘on the hoof’ as it were. That is, plotting while simultaneously adding new words.

I thought I’d achieved this by first reviewing the structural aim of the new scene and making any adjustments necessitated by the previous scene/s. I then wrote a short first draft of that new scene, taking the protagonist or plot from A to B; finally, I increased the word count by weaving in nuance, meaning, and detail, plus polishing dialogue, before starting over again with the next scene.

Two subsequent events proved me wrong, however. First, my beta readers (AKA two PhD supervisors) couldn’t see the story in these 10K words; there was too much trial, they said, and not enough story. Second, I agreed with them.

Pondering the reasons why this 10K didn’t work in story terms (even though I'd covered a lot of plot ground) brought me back to something a very smart lady told me at a writing retreat early this year. She said I’m exploiting the witches to write my story, just as others have done over centuries.

I accepted that criticism then. I still do now. The people hanged as witches deserve our respect for their suffering. In light of this, and in hindsight, what I suspect I have been doing in my first versions of their trials – completed during MyNoWriMo – is writing stories about dead people with imaginative respect.

I refused to make them victims. I gave them a voice, which is the purpose stated by many writers for writing about women in the past.

But giving silenced women a voice is not what I’m doing in my work-in-progress. At least, not in the A-plot. The A-plot is about the pamphleteer. A young man in my fictional history of the trials.

Powering through 10K words in four weeks thus showed up a weakness in my emotional cognition (if that's a thing) as much as holes in my plotting. Basically, I hadn’t assimilated my creative purpose sufficiently to write the story truthfully. Out of a sense of duty to the past, I felt it necessary to first show the witches* respect.

Having sat on this idea for a while, I would now argue that dramatizing the trials was a necessary stage in the creative process, but it was clearly far from sufficient.

On the other hand, writing this blog, I can now articulate a benefit which I hadn’t anticipated from this year's forensic rewriting of the semi-official record of the witch trials.

When studied closely, one can see between the lines of the original account slights of hand pulled off by the pamphleteer (or perhaps by the prosecutor), tricks of presentation to fool the jury, the reader, or both.

One could even say, belatedly, I have spotted an elephant they’d hidden in the room. An elephant that can now stir again and trample about my story. Mwahaha.

Lesson Three, therefore, is thanks for that, MyNoWriMo. Now let the real work of plotting begin.

Two years ago, I noted here advice from author Hisham Mattar about the need for creative openness, which he explained during an Arvon Foundation writing masterclass back in July 2021. He said that without such openness, we risk becoming trapped by our original intentions; to access our deeper levels of intuitive invention, we should avoid planning the first draft altogether.

That, perhaps, is what happened during MyNoWriMo.

Despite my conscious efforts to follow The Plan, what came out was an undirected recreation of the past, liberated from my conscious control by the dictat of a daily word count. In it I honoured the witches’ memories, creating agency for them in mini histories of each trial.

If this interpretation is true, the question thrown up is this: if I want to write about witches, why write about the pamphleteer? If, on the other hand, I am writing about the pamphleteer, is the witch character I thought important actually incidental?

At the moment, I believe the latter.

After all, I’ve got half-way through the A-plot and she’s barely appeared. Thus, either the B-plot is hers, not Beth’s, or ... What? She isn’t there at all? Or nothing more than an ephemeral presence on the edges of his imagination? It seems cruel to erase her again, yet the witches’ story never felt like mine to write.

To put it another way, having honoured them in words, can I now escape from a subconscious, guilt-driven original intention?

Who knows. Maybe next year will tell. Meanwhile, midwinter greetings to you all. May 2024 treat you kindly.

@HouseRowena on Twitter

Rowena House Author on Facebook

*I use the term witch and witches to describe the people accused and convicted as such. This also is fiction. They weren’t witches in the satanic, supernatural meaning of the word employed back then.





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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.

Groundhog Day – with a machete – by Rowena House

This month I restarted the WIP after an enforced break of three months, so this post will honour the spirit of last month’s about the (happily) narrated self by recounting all the useful things that came out of that creative void, while consigning the bits that sucked to forgetfulness.

Good thing, the first: re-reading the first 10K words with fresh eyes.

After three years researching, planning, and drafting, and many more mulling the possibilities of the story, the opening works. MEGA hurrah. We have a solid launch pad in terms of voice, form, and content which, after seemingly endless tinkering, rewriting, and starting again, is progress – and journalist me can stop that eye rolling right now, thank you very much.

Good thing, the second: the main character ‘exists’ outside the specifics of the plot.

Last year’s intensive planning of scenes and sequences driven by the main character’s neuroses have delivered a sufficiently robust outline that it can withstand change. I.e., the emotional and psychological drivers of the story can take the plot wherever it needs to go. Ta, especially, to Story Geek guru Jeff Lyons for that – though, please, Jeff, drop the enneagrams.

Good thing, the third. Darlings to kill? Hand me the machete, mwa-ha-ha. They’re just so 2022. 

Pic: Staples Inn, from C17th witch trial work in progress

Good thing, the fourth. Intuition rules.

For example, certain decisions have been taken without a conscious process. The ‘real’ ghost character, for instance, is gone. Just like that. She’s not my problem any more, just the protagonist’s, and I understand why he believes in her and feel for him. She is as real to him as he is real for me. Like Angelique from The Goose Road is real. Crazy, huh? But true.

Meanwhile, other plot problems have stepped out of the shadows and said, Solve me. Now. Specifically, the kick into Act 2. No matter which way I twisted it, the main character – the person I know – could not step in any self-propelled way into the new world, whatever the rulebook says.

Fair enough, then. Find another route. The antagonist will just have to kick him there instead. And guess what? The story works better for it! Cue more eye rolling, like you didn’t know rules are there to break.

Good thing, the fifth. Some of the stuff that came out of the memory locker makes more sense than what went in last year.

An example. A lot of 2021 (yup, that’s not a typo) was spent – don’t say wasted, this is happy narrative self here – fretting over how to align form, content, and voice. Actually, now I write that I realize it’s not true. I didn’t think of them as a unit. Instead, my experiments with voice were separated conceptually from experiments with form (first person, third, retrospective and framing devices etc) and content (the events to be recounted and the specifics of scenes).

In other words, the what-to-write content, the how-to-put-the-manuscript-together form, and the tone/voice/style of the words had seemed to be different problems.

Now that the opening is finally singing, it’s clear they were harmonies in the same tune. Pieces of a single puzzle. A set of problems only solvable together. [Yeah, yeah. Duh, right? It’s been a tough three months. Anyhow…] Eureka! John Truby’s designing principle pops out of the memory locker as a great planning tool, not just another trick to storytelling I didn’t get.

Here’s what Truby says about the designing principle in The Anatomy of Story: “[it] is abstract; it is the deeper process going on in the story, told in an original way…

“Let’s say you are a writer who wants to show the intimate workings of the Mafia in America, as literally hundreds of screenwriters and novelists have done. If you were really good, you might come up with this designing principle (for The Godfather):

“Use the classic fairy-tale strategy of showing how the youngest of three sons becomes the new ‘king’.”

Yeah, okay, I get it now. Having read the book three times!

To be honest, sifting through all this stuff after a break feels like Groundhog Day, with the half-forgotten only strangely familiar. The slow dawn of recognition is embarrassing. Perhaps our creative selves can get lost in a dark faerie realm where months pass like years. If so, thank goodness for signposts like Truby’s on the route to escape.

Twitter: @HouseRowena 

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Website: rowenahouse.wordpress.com

Plotting with Pixar

 Having spent Christmas in bed with covid, binge-watching Disney Plus, I am now an expert on Pixar movies.

After something like my sixth movie, I noticed they fell into two broad shapes. To keep it neat, I've made a table.

There's more to it than that, of course. There'll be villains and sidekicks and lessons learned. But to prove it works (at least some of the time) here's a recent movie versus an old classic.

Some of my favourite Pixar films run both plot outlines side by side with different characters. I really am in a table mood today:

I find these kinds of outlines useful at the planning stage. What kind of a person is your main character? Are they striving towards a goal or trying to maintain the status quo? Will their goal change during the course of their adventure? What is the thing that matters most to them (whether they know it yet or not?)

Claire Fayers

www.clairefayers.com

To plop or to plot ...

To plop or to plot … that is the question. Well, mine anyway. I’m currently writing my next book and I’m excited and filled with hope about a new idea. My natural instinct is to launch right in, to plop myself down in the middle of a comfy chair and race into the start of the story (and eat the last of the biscuits). Such is my keenness to inhabit any new idea, to look and see what I might discover there - rather like a visit to a continental supermarket - that impatience can get the better of me.

Similarly, I’m a technical-manual-refuser. A gung ho gah-I’ll-learn-as-I-go gal. Give me a manual and my eyes will soon glaze and blur in much the same way they did at school in subjects that weren’t History or English (sincere apologies, Notre Dame Comprehensive, Sheffield). It's why I still can’t operate anything that hosts buttons and flashing lights in my house. 

Which is fine, I can live with the inability to change channels remotely. But with writing - more often than not - I find that if I do just plop into a new story without some serious plotting first, I risk officially losing the plot.

And so, for my past two novels, I’ve been purposefully increasing my pre-plotting time. I’ve found – for me anyway – it not only helps develop my story structure, but it can really boost better idea generation. More ideas help to form a tighter structure; a tighter structure often enables more ideas. 

Therefore, fresh from a summer of plotting and filling up more notebooks than Nancy Drew, here are some of the crafting exercises and activities I have employed to help me avoid too much plopping …

Plotting exercises

📗Charts: I do lots of these as I begin forming a story. They can include charting key Strands, Character Arcs, pivotal Crisis Choices, Cause & Effect.

📘Craft books: re-reading screenwriting books such as ‘Story’ and ‘Into the Woods’ – I find guides that set out the science of our craft can really help develop structure and brainstorm ideas.

📙The 3Cs: Conflict, Choices & Change. A bit of a cross-check for acts and chapters against these critical 3Cs.

📕Story analysis: In my plotting period, I tend to analyse and critique more books and films. Assessing their midpoints, climaxes, motifs, character arcs ... and reflecting on my own.

📗The Circle: I get a bit addicted to drawing circles, lots of them. I quarter them into four acts and review how my story comes full circle, how scenes might mirror one another, how characters develop over time.

📘Map of Connections: I map settings, external and internal, present, past or imagination and I chart connections between these settings and the characters’ journey arcs.

📙Layer Trifle: I layer up revelations like a trifle, with key twists until the final reveal.

📕Stage set: I often draw key scenes as if they were stage sets, examining where characters are in relation to each other and to the audience (the reader).

📗Remember the Reader: possibly the most important part of plotting. I ask myself how the reader might engage with my story. What do they expect? How can I subvert expectations? What questions do I want them to ask? How will this make them feel? 

As Kevin Costner said, almost, Plot and the ideas will come. So, these days, I’m a reformed plopper; a born-again plotter through and through. However, technical manuals? I believe I’ll continue to press my remote control like it’s run out of batteries and wait for one of my teenagers to come home.

     

      Alex Cotter’s middle-grade novel THE MERMAID CALL was published on 7 July 2022 with Nosy Crow. She has also written THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE. Find her at www.alexcotter.co.uk or on Twitter: @AlexFCotter

Twelve days to birth an editable Chapter 1 - by Rowena House

What a month! After years of research, six-to-eight months of detailed plotting, and several false starts, the drafting of the work-in-progress finally began in earnest on 28 August 2022.

As it’s still going well (enough) this is a quick blog as I don’t want to lose momentum, especially as today I’ve reached a special moment in the story, when nineteen witches are brought into the courthouse for the trials of their lives.

This moment requires a detailed deconstruction of the original trial pamphlet to try and work out exactly what my protagonist, the pamphleteer, could plausibly have known about them at that instant, and what other information and opinion about them were definitely, most likely, or possibly retrofitted afterwards.

Since themes of time, memory, truth, and co-constructed narratives all weave together in the story, such details are important to me. Yes, it’s yet more research, but research intimately linked with the fiction, where I quote the pamphlet, and elaborate on it, weaving my words with his. How I’m going to deal with the issue of plagiarism for the PhD I’ve yet to work out. But I’m highlighting all direct quotes so I know what’s him and what’s me.

But I want this blog to be a snapshot of this month’s process, rather than looking again at the narrative. Specifically, what it’s been like using a detailed chapter breakdown to begin a first draft.

Turns out, it’s hard to write a story even with a plan. Yeah, I know. Who would have guessed.

By the end of Day one of a twelve-day retreat, I had a thousand new words, very few of which now remain in the draft. In fact, I cut the same number of words on Day two. Luckily, several write friends were kind enough to keep me company on Facebook and What’s App during this time, and they all pointed out how necessary and typical it is to get things wrong.

Day Two’s words were better than Day one’s, which was nice, but they still didn’t make the cut. Day three, I edited a prologue first written in October 2020 as the start of a novella-in-flash. I’m not sure it belongs in this version of the story, but it does introduce the idea of the trial being a stitch-up, a conspiracy. Which, plot-wise, is useful in giving the reader more knowledge than the protagonist from the get-go, and process-wide, it reminds me about the forces of antagonism manoeuvring off-page. The prologue can stay for now; the delete button is always on hand.

On Day four, I tore up the lot and started again. At 02.33 on Day 5, I was on FB muttering enviously about Hilary Mantel having got the voice for her Cromwell trilogy straight off. The breakthrough came when I told myself off later that same day. I’d got a plan but wasn’t sticking to it. Borrowing from the military (and Scuba divers) I wrote a new motto: You’ve planned the book, now write the plan.

Basically, stick to it (the plan) and stick at it (the draft).

Those blinkers helped me yesterday, too, when detailed study of the pamphlet caused a creative wobble over the sheer misery inflicted by one lot of human beings on another in the name of an impossible crime. Despite my best intentions, writing this story is sometimes depressing. At which point I start wondering if I’m wasting my one wild and precious life writing it. But here we are again today, sticking to it, sticking at it.

Day six of the retreat included pacing out the front boundary of an important place in the story: Knyvet House, which became Downing Street and site of the PM’s and Chancellor’s official residences. Roughly, the frontage of the property in 1612 stretched from where the Cenotaph is today to the beautiful WWII women’s memorial on Whitehall. As best as I can work it out. I also wandered around legal London again. Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, and Staple Inn, and visited tombs in Westminster Abbey. Another time, when I've learnt how to get my photos onto the new laptop, I’ll post some of the amazing pictures I took of places where you can still touch this point in history.

Day seven (I think) was the sort of day you really can’t afford to repeat too often. Seventeen hours writing and editing, interrupted by packet soup breaks and a couple of cheese sandwiches. A productive day, during which I totally ignored my new rule ref. writing the plan and consequently had to ditch the lot on Day eight. Not a happy bunny.

Days nine and ten were frustrating, too, with the words seeming contrived and unoriginal. But then, around midnight, I chucked everything out and started again, leap-frogging the story’s inciting incident entirely, and writing the protagonist’s reactions to it instead.

And there it was the next day, saying, Will I do? And, yes it would. An experiment which cut five thousand words down to about five hundred, but they were all that was needed. A launch pad of pure character, just him and his inner thoughts, with plot and backstory only implied. I am editing it, natch, but it’s enough to say Draft 1 got started properly on 5 September 2022. Or the 6th since by then I’d lost the plot at bit. Anyhow, phew.

Where and when, then what. But most of all, who, how & why - Rowena House

Two years ago today, here on ABBA, I went back to my old stamping ground - journalism - to see if the basic questions good reporters ask of a true story could help me plot authentic historical fiction which is also a decent yarn.

Happily, I can now say it worked as yesterday (hence the late posting of this blog) I finally completed the development and planning stage of the work-in-progress with a full chapter breakdown.

Ho-bloomin-rah.

Who, what, how, where, when and why is the order I always remember these founding questions of news reporting.

But for historical storytelling I now think there is a better order in which to tackle them: where and when, followed by what, then the cluster of who, how and why.

Where and when set the scene for any story. For historical writers, another time and another place create the realm both the author (conceptually) and their characters will inhabit. Selecting where and when is, therefore, a preliminary step.

The basis on which we decide might be intuitive or subjective, influenced by a place and time we’ve loved reading about. Or it could be objective: there’s a gap in the market for X or finding an incident that has under-explored and dramatic possibilities.

An intriguing event defined the where and when of my WIP: Lancashire and London in the second half of 1612. Neither were familiar, so the story demanded a lot of research, which is great. Learning is one of the joys of historical fiction as a genre.

Learning is also fundamental to a story’s What.

For this WIP, nailing down the What has occupied much the past two-and-a-half years, since it requires both a broad and a detailed understanding of my small corner of the past, fathoming what lies behind its official history and what was never recorded.

What is also an artistic choice about theme and focus and genre. It encompasses the biggest question of all: ‘What on earth am I trying to say here?’ Often accompanied by its nagging sibling: ‘Are you sure that’s really worth all this effort to say?’

My What is not done yet. It’s a question I expect to return to again and again as I’m drafting and editing, refining and nuancing. What is the story: a work-in-progress. Progress, however, proved impossible until I had sorted out the cluster of Who, How, and Why.

Who a story is about can be a complex, value-laden decision. I’m about to make time to read the new work by Janina Ramirez, Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages Through the Women Written Out of It. The title, I think, says it all.

In my period, known as early modern, few women left written records behind them, either. Privileged and powerful men dominate its history – rulers, occupiers, churchmen – though (male) scientists and secular thinkers were becoming more significant. For my story about a witch trial, only one primary source remains, a propaganda pamphlet written by a male court clerk who quoted the male trial judge directly and at length but mediated and manipulated every word the accused women were meant to have confessed.

Since no other record survives, we can never know what these women said, nor what was asked of them by powerful magistrates and the goaler who had them in manacles and chains. I think my book blurb should read, ‘In this dark corner of England’s past, it is the record itself that falsifies history’.

But back to those questions…

Two years ago, I hadn’t worked out how to deal with the real people on whom my characters are based, beyond some vague pledge that queens and witches would be treated as equals. (Pompous, moi?)

I had also made what I now think was a creative mistake, linking the What of the story with the question of How it would unfold, how it would be structured. I blamed not knowing How the story would work technically for its painfully slow progress.

As a result, I spent months researching experimental structures, tandem storytelling techniques, flashbacks, flash forwards, and new fiction genres. It was great fun mixing and matching subplots and inventing a dual timeline/dual narrative, but it all got rather complicated, and the result got ditched earlier this year as self-conscious and ‘clever’ rather than the sort of thing I’d want to read myself.

How, then, did this wonderous beastie, a full chapter breakdown, come about?

I reframed the question.

To explain.

Back in August 2020, I said here on ABBA, ‘My How is now well and truly underway; and given the Who, What, Where and When are largely determined by the historical record, that just leaves the Whys to figure out … Why did the clerk write his pamphlet? Why did the trial happen all at? Why were the dedicatees given such fulsome praise, and why did a mere clerk feel empowered to quote the king extensively?’

These proved valid questions that needed answers, but they were also misleading when the aim of asking them was to write fiction rather than to understand history.

Put simply, the answers didn’t tell a story.

As a writer of character-led fiction I only found the necessary answers after reframing the questions: who were these people? How did they think and feel? Why might someone with their unique thoughts, beliefs, fears, doubts, hopes, ambitions, backstories, and anxieties do what history suggests they did?

Which gets us to the issue of agency and power.

At heart, I believe the degree of agency we give our characters is a function of our desire for authenticity over escapism.

Superheroes have agency, power, and self-determination in abundance, with a splash of weakness thrown in to make them ‘human’. In kids lit, children make decisions.

IRL, wealth, power and social status are inexorably linked. Joan of Arc got burnt by the English for not staying in her lane; employees get told what to do employers.

For my story, a more authentic question than why a junior clerk felt empowered to quote the king in 1612 is who told the junior clerk to quote the king and why. How an individual navigates their personal web of power relations then becomes the engine of the story.

After all, what says more about character than how someone responds to those who hold power over them (complying, grovelling, deceiving, defying) and to those with less power (bullying, ignoring, helping, enabling)?

Now I write it this all seem obvious. I wonder why it wasn’t back then?

@HouseRowena on Twitter

RowenaHouseAuthor on Facebook

Website: rowenahouse.com

John Truby's The Anatomy of Story - by Rowena House

With a month to go before the PhD deadline to complete a detailed outline for the work-in-progress, I got side-tracked by a storytelling craft guide I’d meant to read for ages, only to discover it is a goldmine of great plotting advice, and the timing of its arrival proved perfect.

John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story was recommended to me years ago by author friend Lucy Van Smit of The Hurting fame, and now her very successful A Writer's Journal for the Writers & Artists Yearbook. She said I’d like it and she was right. 

Among its many excellent features is a recommendation that rather than developing the main character arc from its beginning, better to plot backwards from the protagonist’s psychological self-revelation near the end.

Intuitively, I wanted this to be ‘right’, partly because I’ve conspicuously failed to make progress by starting the current seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress with Chapter 1, and partly in homage to all the still-born mauscripts mouldering in an old laptop which also began at the beginning.

On the other hand, I’d just spent $325 and five weeks of my life delving into the pre-story of my protagonist’s life, working out an ‘origin wound’ that is poisoning his life when the story opens and causing his immoral behaviour.

Why, then, start again by plotting the main character arc backwards if I already have a beginning? Isn’t that redundant or procrastination?

The answer, I think, is a need to stress test all the plotting decisions made so far before the next big step of scene weaving (to use Truby’s term). To explain...

If you’ve been reading my recent ABBA posts, you’ll know that for most of this year I’ve been using template synopses to outline the WIP, including (at last) a full Story Grid for the protagonist’s A-plot, plus the detailed backstory of his wound and its implications, thrashed out during Jeff Lyons’ intensive Anatomy of a Premise Line online course.

Truby, then, is the third leg of this stool: a way to check my workings before moving on.

Truby and Lyons are a good fit even though they seem to start the story development process from opposite ends of the end-product – Lyons from before the action starts, Truby from near the finale. But they both rely on the same foundation: a psychological and emotional ‘weakness’ (Truby) or a ‘moral blind spot’ (Lyons) which restricts the protagonist’s personal growth at the outset and creates their need to overcome their flaw by the end.

Before I began this experiment with template synopses, I was suspicious of this sort of predetermined basis for all stories; if you’re a writer, no doubt you’ve come across it endlessly, too, as the ‘want’ versus the ‘need’. But I’d paid my money for Jeff’s course, and gave it a really good try, and found myself happily surprised. Not only did this 'healing-a-wound' method create a workable outline, one that got my A-plot the commercial thumbs up from Jeff, but it also unlocked the workings of Story Grid and now Truby, too.  

Proof that it’s helpful for subplots as well came this morning when I was reviewing my preliminary notes about Truby for this post, and suddenly found myself in the middle of the spontaneous creation of the best working outline of Beth's B-plot I’ve managed in two long years!

Yes, I had a ton of research about Beth under my belt. Yes, I had fixed her Story Grid internal and external genres. But Truby cut away years of agonising over her root motivation and how that could get her from the story's A to Z. Now I can see the wood for the trees.

So how does Truby’s system work? Natch, I can’t summarize the whole thing here, so I’ll describe a couple of its key features instead. 

Despite its subtitle, “22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller”, The Anatomy of Story is less prescriptive than, say, Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid and its outgrowths (all useful), as Truby applies his character-led plotting process to all stories, rather than being genre-specific.

Within his twenty two steps, Truby says seven form the core of all plots, including subplots; if these steps aren’t on the page, the reader will feel cheated.

The seven are: i) the protagonist’s psychological and moral weaknesses, which together determine their inner, long-term need; ii) their object of desire AKA their concrete, short-term story goal; iii) a strong and ‘necessary’ opponent (see below); iv) the plans drawn up by the protagonist and opponent to achieve their mutually exclusive desires; v) the climactic battle between protagonist and opponent; vi) for positive endings, a self-revelation where the protagonist (and the opponent in better stories) “strip away the façade” they have been hiding behind, and an acknowledge how they must change to thrive/survive; and vii) the new equilibrium in which they enact their new better selves for a happy, prescriptive ending. In cautionary tales like The Godfather, the protagonist fails to see themselves for who they truly are (and, in Michael Corleone’s case, ends up a monster).

For fans of story structure this is familiar stuff, as are many of the other fifteen steps (7+15=22). But that is by no means a criticism. This book is clear, thorough and persuasive.

For example, his advice on the opponent includes the following: “the single most important element of a great opponent is that he [sic] be necessary to the hero. This has a very specific structural meaning. The main opponent is the one person in the world best able to attack the great weakness of the hero.”

This definition caught me by surprise. Hitherto, I’d thought about opponents in plot terms: how they would stop the hero from getting what he wanted in some direct confrontation or by a devious route. But of course it doesn’t have to be that way!

She (my main opponent is female, thank you, Mr Truby) doesn’t have to attack Tom, the protagonist, head on. Other characters can do that, including those who will credibly spend time with him through the middle build. But by undermining his confidence early on, by exacerbating his emotional and psychological weaknesses, she could render him incapable of action over a long time period and across distances, paralyzing him with his own inner toxins. Ye-ha.

Even as I write this, part of my brain is saying, duh. Yeah? And seeing this technique at work in every movie on Netflix. But that’s the thing about passive and active knowledge: there’s a point at which you internalize it properly, and then apply it.

Reading Truby and applying his principles is like that overall. It's as if I've been given a fresh pair of eyes to check over my every planning decision. One last example...

This month I finally managed to complete the full Story Grid foolscap outline for the A-plot, thanks largely to the confidence boost received last month when Jeff Lyons signed off its underlying premise and short synopsis as commercially viable.

It turned out that having confidence in these foundational elements was key to unlocking the Story Grid’s worldview (revelation) internal genre, which in turn resolved many of the plotting issues with the external genre, now designated as historical crime.

Jeff Lyons’ Anatomy of a Premise Line also gave me a specific neurosis for Tom, worked through from his childhood to the story’s present. It is a highly exploitable neurosis, making him vulnerable to a wily opponent, and one that complicates his other main weakness, ignorance, which is the negative value provided by his internal Story Grid genre. So Tom’s opponents have two targets to attack – his neurosis and his ignorance – as well as his plan to disrupt, and their own strategies to achieve. It all adds up. Tom’s plot looks good to go.

With the subplot getting more focused, too, it’s possible I’ll even meet my mid-June deadline to have them both finished. Wouldn’t that be a turn up? Meanwhile, time for a dog walk in the May sunshine. Enjoy the longer days if you’re getting them where you are.

@HouseRowena on Twitter (story tweets and rants about the world)

Rowena House Author on Facebook (now a journal for the work-in-progress)

rowenahouse.wordpress.com (lots about The Goose Road)

That's ironic: endings that don't have to be - Rowena House

This post is a bit of a cheat as basically I’m repurposing an ABBA article I wrote a while back – and re-found via Twitterific Writing Links, an excellent compendium of free writing advice compiled by elizabethspanncraig.com – to wonder out loud about how to repurpose classic ironic endings to serve the work-in-progress.

The reason I need to cheat is the fast-approaching end of a brilliant online plotting course run by USA story consultant Jeff Lyons, which I’m desperate to get the most out of. More of that another time...

The nub of today’s post is WHICH ironic endings might make good scene or act turning points?

Here’s the link to the original post about endings:

https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2019/08/endings-part-i-where-to-start-by-rowena.html

And here’s a summary:

Storytelling craft guides broadly agree there are four main types of endings for archetypal plots, i.e. those with one or more lead character with a defined story goal.

A positive ending is one where the protagonist achieves their goal and is happy about it, a staple for romances, for example.

A negative ending is one where the protagonist does NOT get what they want and is sad/angry/devastated about it. Or dead – and not in a nice, self-sacrificing way, either. Think Shakespeare’s King Lear, Macbeth etc.

Ambiguous or open endings leave the reader guessing whether the protagonist got what they wanted (if it’s clear what that was) and tend to be found in short stories and towards the literary end of the novel spectrum.

Ironic endings: our starting point today.

The 'character knows what they want but not what they need' ironic plot is now so popular in storytelling guides it’s hard to know if it’s a cliché or a convention. Yes, this type of irony can be powerful – Shakespeare’s Othello learns he had what he wanted all along, a loyal wife in Desdemona, but only after he’s killed her in his unwarranted jealous rage – but a want/need dichotomy is so far from original, I wonder if it still deserves its primacy in plotting manuals.

Other classic examples of ironic endings include a protagonist who:

· Gets what they want, only to find it wasn’t worth the getting (a variant on the positive ending).

· Doesn’t get what they want, but is glad about it due their transformation wrought by the story’s events (riffing on the negative ending).

· Realises they’ve thrown away the very thing/person that could have made them happy (see Othello above); a variant of which is,

· Realising they’ve rejected the person who could have been their friend/ally/true love in favour of someone who isn’t.

· Being destroyed by the person/thing they’ve set out to destroy.

· Discovering a deeply held belief is a lie.

· Discovering an ally is an enemy and vice versa,

Of these ironies, some lend themselves more obviously than others to twists and turning points before the final battle and/or resolution.

The false-ally-as-unknown-enemy is a well-worn device which could set up the climax of any sequence where the false ally betrays the protagonist, although, as with its inverse (enemy-turned-ally), it needs to be fairly deep into the story, with a convincing build up, to work dramatically. If we hadn’t been convinced Severus Snape was a death eater (spoiler alert) his sacrifice to save Harry Potter wouldn’t have been a shocking character revelation as well as significant plot action.

Discovering you’ve deeply believed in a lie would also need to have had profound negative consequences for the protagonist on the page before it would work as a meaningful epiphany, so that kind of ironic reveal might work best as a midpoint crisis or dark night of the soul.

More broadly, coming face-to-face with any cruel irony at the close of Act 2 could be the shocking revelation which precipitates the final crisis decision and climax in Act 3, including ‘getting what you want, only to find it wasn’t worth the getting’.

In that vein, I’m trying to remember the name of a 1950s romantic comedy where the hero got exactly what he wanted at the worst point/doom moment. His wedding was the point he realised that what he’d strived for all along (a rich wife) was a disaster because he'd fallen in love with a poor beauty. From memory, it might have been Tony Curtis marrying the rich woman when he’d fallen in love with a poor  Sophia Loren. Ring any bells? Anyway, I’m sure it’s been done since then, too.

And there must be a romance plot out there where Othello susses Iago at the last minute and stabs him, not Desdemona, and the couple lives happily-ever-after.

Being destroyed by the thing you set out to destroy sounds familiar from action stories. I’m thinking about a commander killed in action, whose death flips their battalion from defeatism to a commitment to win.

What about the protagonist who doesn’t get what they want, but is glad about it due the transformation wrought by the story’s events? Not sure how that can be anything other than an ending, but maybe with time its potential as a twist might become apparent.

Ironically, the more I write this blog the more I realise that nothing I’m saying here is original. Which is roughly where I am with the seventeenth century work-in-progress: at some point in the past fifteen years of writing and studying fiction, I’ve almost certainly come across the answer to every problem I’m having with its plot; it’s just a matter of tracking down the right answer.

Going back over old ABBA posts is about to become a habit.

Happy writing!

@HouseRowena on Twitter

Rowena House Author on Facebook

Website: rowenahouse.wordpress.com

Template synopses Part III: the sense of an ending - Rowena House

Six weeks into a concentrated period of plotting my PhD novel-in-progress, a psychological drama based on a seventeenth century witch trial, I’ve drawn two main conclusions about using synopsis templates as planning tools.

Firstly, it’s about timing and knowing when to grab that favourite guide off the shelf or open that e-book. Second, and this is related to the first point, it’s about knowing where you most need help.

Example 1: for my debut novel, The Goose Road, synopsis templates – and the planning systems that underpin them – came to my rescue after I’d got a comprehensive rejection email from Andersen Press, a generous analysis of my MA manuscript which proved to be an invaluable editing tool.

An anxious six months later, Walker’s Mara Bergman, a wonderful editor, offered a raft of great suggestions about how to make Angelique’s story publishable.

It was the combination of Andersen’s and Mara’s advice and my own imaginative ‘knowledge’ of the story that got The Goose Road over the publishing line, but only because I’d learnt by then how to order these new elements ‘properly’.

Basically, the templates I needed back then were those that helped me to spot what was missing in the narrative and, as a consequence, why the story flagged.

With the help of James Scott Bell’s Complex Plot Grid from his Plot and Structure guide, for example, I re-wrote the manuscript so it told a staged but linear story, with all its energy and drive focused on Angelique’s journey.

This structural/development edit didn’t create the story, however. Nor did vast amounts of work with plotting systems and template synopses save the umpteen failed book twos I’ve started and discarded since then.

Why, then, have the past six weeks working with template synopses been so exciting?

That’s example 2. 

The plotting systems I’m finding useful now aren’t spotting gaps; they’re talking about overall structure and how to arrive at the best end possible. They work, I think, because two years of research, character building and experimentation with voice have provided a wealth of specific ideas to test out against their templates.

The PhD itself is handling all sorts of other stuff, like why I’m writing this story at all, and what I hope to achieve with it; I’d also delivered to my supervisors an outline for a dual narrative and twin timeframe, which got their thumbs up, before setting out on this current voyage of discovery.

Meanwhile ABBA blogs, plus notes on my Facebook author page, offer a means to analyse my writing processes in a non-judgmental way.

What was missing was the cool professional voice which say, yeah, that’s okay, but that bit sucks.

Enter the story gurus and their synopses. 

Past experience has proved that writing my way into a story is guaranteed to end in a hellish place of confusion and disappointment. Thus, when instinct suggested synopsis templates as a subject for the January ABBA post, I believe that was my subconscious saying, hey, dopey, here’s what you’ve got to do next.

That’s what I mean about timing. Last time I needed help after rejection. This time, before drafting a full manuscript. Next time (if there is one) maybe it will be after a first draft or whenever the brain yells, Stop! You need help, girl. Go find some.

This, I suspect, is why Bell’s Complex Plot Grid didn’t come up trumps this time. I’m asking different questions, and can’t expect answers from the same places (although his Writing Your Novel from the Middle again proved a good cross-reference for other guidance about midpoints).

Story Grid, on the other hand, once re-read in full, simplified a complex structure of time shifts, jump cuts and dual narratives into a logical sequence of external and internal progressions spanning five acts. I had faith it could be done; Shawn Coyne helped me figure out how.

In the past two posts I’ve gone on enough about Jeff Lyons’ plotting systems for anyone to think I’m his PR agent, so I won’t mention him again except to say my fandom extends to shelling out $325 to do his Anatomy of a Premise Line online course. Starting Wednesday. Ye-ha. That’s not to say he is the ultimate guru; it’s just his system is a good fit for the work-in-progress.

Last month I was struggling for a metaphor to describe this process of using templates as test beds for creative ideas. On Twitter, I suggested it’s futile to invent the wheel for each story, so nab someone else’s and give it a spin.

Lately, I’ve stolen another image: a mansion of many rooms. Open each template door and see if you like the layout and décor. If you do, go in and sit awhile, then design your own room.

Or maybe it’s best to stick with Stephen King and his On Writing toolbox. Template synopses are gadgets that help make stories better. When you need one, dip in.

For what it’s worth, at the start of this plotting process I thought I would be ‘nailing the story down’ and wrestling my work into shape. The story itself felt like a force of antagonism I had to get under control.

It’s not been like that in practice. And it’s not been about solving technical questions, either.

Working with plotting systems has been fluid, creative, and energizing. It’s been about opening some doors and closing others. It’s been about making more informed choices about the material I’ve got and finding out where I need more.

Working deliberately and carefully with these guides has also silenced the inner demon that insists planning is procrastination and makes snide remarks about how few words I’ve written. The story will be better for thinking first and writing second. I’m sure of it.

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Facebook: Rowena House Author

Website: rowenahouse.wordpress.com

PS I’ll close this series on synopses and plotting now, without, as promised, talking about the OCEAN-based character arc system until I figure out if it’s useful again this time around. ''ll post links to the original ABBA articles about it on my FB author page in case anyone is interested.

Six plotting synopses that are coming my rescue: Part II - Rowena House

Since last month’s post singing the praises of synopsis templates as story development tools I took my own advice and applied the first two I mentioned – Jeff Lyons’ premise line and Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid – to my work-in-progress.

Things didn’t go entirely as expected.

First up, Jeff Lyons has totally overhauled his plotting system since I read about in 2013, so it was his current, more complex, character-based ideas I’ve been exploring rather than the short, plot-based outline I described here last month.

[I have a niggling suspicious that some of us would have liked him to keep the old within the new, but there we go.]

Secondly, I worked out why I couldn’t explain Story Grid succinctly last month: I had misremembered it as an outlining tool, when in fact it is a dynamic structure to guide progressions within a well-developed story idea.

In fact, being unable to fill out the Story Grid’s Act-level boxes for my B-plot proved where I needed more detailed plotting and character development. Gaps in a grid showed where the story had holes. Duh.

 

Anyhow, rather than waffle generically about another three templates as planned, I thought this month I’d fess up and look at what went wrong and what went right – and change the title of this mini-series to the present tense from the past.

Before we get going properly, though, I will say one more thing.

Thus far, I stand by my underlying premise that tried and trustworthy story forms – expressed as synopsis templates – offer pathways into more imaginative content than stumbling into a story more or less blind.

Applying different templates to my draft outline has been super useful in terms of drilling down into the details of the dual plotlines, and a sharp reminder about the amount of plotting I’ve still got to do before embarking on a full draft.

But that’s the point, right? Better to know your map and compass are duff before heading into the woods.

So...

Working with an outline for my B-plot – one which had already established the basic plot and character components of Beth’s storyline – Shawn Coyne’s Foolscap Story Grid suggested her tale fitted best with his internal genre of Redemption.

That in turn gave Beth a Story Value of selfishness versus altruism.

[As mentioned last month, you do have to buy into Coyne’s and McKee’s concepts about Story Value as the engine driving scenes before embarking on this process. Very crudely, the flip from the value to its opposite and back again in every scene maintains energy and suspense.]

Designing scenes and sequences that force Beth to choose between selfish and altruistic outcomes is a clear, dynamic and plot-able driver of dramatic tension, one I doubt would have occurred to me had I (as planned) focussed on her personality profile, or, indeed, on any of the character archetypes out there in writing guru-land.

Thinking about plotting in Coyne’s technical way was also a useful reminder that characters aren’t people and that stories aren’t real life. Yes, a character’s psychology and emotions must be believable and coherent, but a plot is about more than people getting lost in their problems.

When planning this exercise in synopsis templates, it had seemed logical to work sequentially from an outline to a development synopsis, then amalgamate that with a Big Five personality trait-based character arc, plus a classic ‘tent pole’ structural synopsis, to create the necessary ingredients for a long-form narrative synopsis and/or to start writing draft one.

In practice, however, working iteratively with Story Grid and Jeff Lyons’ updated premise line – which now rests heavily on an internal ‘moral’ driver for the protagonist – proved surprisingly productive.

By comparing and contrasting these two systems, and feeding ideas from one to the other, I began to get a feel for how far and how fast they might take the development process, either separately or together, and more importantly how deeply they drew me into the story, the idea being, after all, to use these templates as accelerants of imagination, not cut-and-paste story designs.

Certainly, both systems flagged up areas where more research of fact and imagination are needed. They also demonstrated how important it is to integrate the different story components highlighted when following each process.

Let me explain that last point in a bit more detail.

When planning this post, I tried to think of a metaphor to illustrate what I’m attempting to say about synopses and story development. I imagined someone preparing to prune a bonsai tree, with the plant sitting on a revolving table surrounded by a glass box.

Each synopsis template – outline, development, psychological and structural – represents one side of the box; each one offers a distinct way of viewing the tree.

I intended to suggest the glass box lets us see the whole tree in 3D, and what it might eventually look like before one picked up the secateurs.

Now, however, I’m not sure I like that metaphor.

For one thing, you have to have a tree to start with. That is, a clear outline of the story as a whole. But then we are talking about development tools, so let’s assume that we do have a basic story outline ready to go.

[This is where I think Jeff Lyons’ 2013 Premise Line was really helpful, even if his updated version is more thorough.]

Another problem with the glass box metaphor is its implication that each window onto the tree remains separate when, as noted above, they need to be integrated.

This was brought home when I was reading Jeff Lyons’ Rapid Story Development which builds comprehensively on his updated Anatomy of a Premise Line. 

I like this book at lot. Its moral internal driver and structural design for a strong middle are especially alluring, even though I don’t buy into its commitment to Enneagrams as the answer to (basically all) problems about creating characters.

Ironically, though, studying this comprehensive story development programme alongside Story Grid highlighted an obvious benefit of using multiple plotting templates, i.e. the opportunity for cherry-picking.

For example, Jeff’s moral driver exposed a weakness with my own (much loved) tables for plotting epiphanies based on the Big Five personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

It turns out (sob) that I had been trying to overlay my ‘tent pole’ structural synopsis with a chain of Big Five-related epiphanies which were causally related to key plot points, but not driving them.

That, I now realise, is how I plotted The Goose Road, with Angelique’s staged process of maturation the result of her experiences on her journey. Her character arc was in that sense bolted onto the journey plot.

As Jeff’s analysis identified, that made Angelique reactive to events: she is a passive protagonist. (Argh!) Yes, she decides to take her geese north to save the family farm, but it is the journey that changes her; she doesn’t drive the change herself.

If I want my seventeenth century A-plot protagonist Tom to be truly proactive, to create his own predicaments as well as get himself out of them, his personality must be more central to his tale than Angelique’s was to hers.

Thanks, Jeff. Grrr...

[If your eyes are rolling at this point, bear with. The work-in-progress is based on historical evidence for a witch trial so key events in it are fixed. The challenge is to tell a good yarn that makes the points I want to make without abandoning historical credibility.]

My next plotting task would seem to be to rethink Tom and his Big Five personality profile.

But that’s good, because now I’m not only wondering what epiphanies he will have, which is where I was at the start of the month, I’m also imagining which epiphanies he will resist like fury. In other words, a whole new avenue of imagination has opened up.

By next month – hopefully – I will have more of this stuff worked out, and can move onto other synopsis templates which are helping to develop the story.

Meanwhile, spring is around the corner! Ye-ha. Thank you for reading this far.

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Facebook: Rowena House Author

Website: rowenahouse.wordpress.com