Plotting a course

This past weekend, I had to write a plot summary for a book, and suddenly, I found myself back in my undergraduate computer science classes. Huh? I realized that I was a whisker away from making one of those flow charts they always (back then, anyway) taught you to make when you were designing a program. This kind of flow chart is a series of statements, questions, and answers, organized into a diagram designed to show you the entire structure of a program, including—you hope—all the different situations that could come up, and what should happen if they do. If you do it correctly, the program most likely will do what you want it to. Leave a step out, or neglect to include all the possible answers to the questions, and the program will fail, and you have to figure out why.

I’ve written in earlier essays that I generally start a book with a setting; once I know that, I know who will be there and why and what’s at stake, et cetera. I don’t generally outline right away; when I do, it’s near the middle of the writing process, a list of things I have to have happen before the ending (which I often know). With this book, I started with the characters and a “what-if,” began noodling around, and realized that the complexity of the story required that I come up with an outline sooner rather than later.

When I started making individual timelines for the characters, to see who finds out what when, I knew I had to start making decisions. Who’s in league with whom, how the big revelation occurs, what leads to the next thing. And that’s when I remembered the flow charts.

(Mind you, this is a memory from more than twenty years ago, back when monitors were monochrome and you had to pick the pterodactyl poop out of the keyboard. Now, run, go get Grandma another Cosmo, and crank up The Cure while you’re at it.)

All plotting comes down to asking questions and making decisions. I know this. I emphasize this when I teach classes on writing. It’s the basis of panels I’ve done at Mayhem in the Midlands and the New England Crime Bake, where the panelists make up a story based on questions asked by the moderator—who’s the main character, what does he look like, how does he get embroiled in the murder mystery, who is the villain, why, etc. It’s the scene I love so well from Shakespeare in Love, when Kit’s helping Will figure out Romeo by making decisions, starting with the known (his name is Romeo) and working toward the unknown (who is he in love with?). Every writer knows this—so what was the big revelation?

Apparently the visual metaphor I use to plot a story makes a difference to me. Who knew something that subtle could make that big a difference? An outline—something that looks like the table of contents of a book—only took me so far. The flow chart struck me as a more fluid, structured model. It has the logic, timing, and order of operations built right into it. It’s still tough to figure out all that logic, but at the end, I had a more organized vision of what, how, and when things had to happen.

It’s what every writer will tell you: you have to figure out what works for you. I’m still learning. Stay tuned.

San Antonio!

I tried to post sooner, but the blog ate my homework. Note to self: compose and backup, then post. Single-celled creatures eventually learn to avoid pain stimulus, so I'm sure I'll get the hang of this eventually.

Update on the office cleaning: it's going slowly, but now Kate da cat can actually make it over to her basket to flake out while I work. She used to just peer in from outside my office, with a nervous look that said, "You're on your own, Ma. Hic draconis." Yes, when I do dialogue for the cat, she uses Latin phrases as well as bad language.

(By the way, Kate is the intense-looking cat in two of the pictures in an article written by friend and fellow Femme Fatale, Elaine Viets. Her article, "The Mystery Writers' Mews," on crime writers and their cats, is in Mystery Scene #92. Elaine writes like a dream, so you should check out her "Dead End Job" and brand-new "Mystery Shopper" series, too.)

Last weekend was spent in sunny San Antonio, Texas (you can't imagine what it's like to experience temps in the mid-70s after leaving Boston's sleet and freezing rain: lovely). I got to see downtown, The Alamo, the Riverwalk (where apparently 800 people a year fall into the river from the narrow pathways), the Marketplace, and the McNay Art Museum, which has an incredible private collection of modern art, Impressionists to the mid-20th-century.

I also had a chance to stop by and do an event at my friend Patsy Asher's wonderful mystery bookstore, Remember the Alibi. There was a great group of readers there, and I hope they had as much fun as I did. My friend, writer Dan Hale even dropped in. Actually, yet another writer friend, Maria Lima (originally from San Antonio), was great about telling me what to check out,
so San Antonio turned out to be a really mystery-friendly place. With traditional Mexican cuisine, Tex-Mex, and a few margaritas. Nice.

One thing that took me by surprise was the amount of screaming I heard. It wasn't the "yee-hahs" one might expect (the Rodeo was underway), but armies of cheerleaders in town for a national convention. Very young, but very well developed lungs. The first time I heard them, I jumped a mile, then started looking for the emergency (I don't have kids of my own, so I'm still learning to distinguish good, "we're-having-fun," screams from bad, "call-an-ambulance," screams.) And since I spend most of my time in my very quiet (albeit, messy) office, you might imagine this took some getting used to. Down on the Riverwalk, one group of cheerleaders would espy the competition and try to out-holler them. The competition would respond in kind. All amplified by the river, the bridges, the buildings. I don't know how they competed all day, then ran around, highly vocal, until late at night. It made me feel old. And more than a bit fuddy-duddyish.

But now it's back to the real world with an incoming storm and dealing with the landfill that is my office. Yikes.

Calling Hercules

I have an account of my awesome trip to San Antonio to post, and I promise I will, just as soon as I get the pictures settled. But at the moment, I'm in one of those brief and useful lulls between revisions and copyedits and I'm taking the opportunity to sort out my office.

The problem is, the more I work at it, the worse it gets. It's like chewing raw squid. It's just not going away.

Maybe I'm just aerating the mess, but I'm starting to think there is something evil going on, because I'm bringing piles of manuscript out to the recycling bin, putting books back on the shelves, physically removing things from the place, and after three hours, my office is worse than when I started. Admittedly, it wasn't great before, but it was navigable. There was a sort of equilibrium, and now that's been disturbed. We're not that far from the coast: Perhaps The Old Ones are displeased.

Friends have suggested A.) renting a leaf blower, B.) using a flamethrower, C.) getting a goat, or D.) moving. I try to explain that's why I have a door on my office. As an archaeologist, I'm fascinated by what I'm finding, but somehow that isn't going to see me through this endeavor. It's going to take guts and tequila.

While I'm plagued with images of the Augean Stables and the Hydra, I'm also finding all kinds of things that remind me of how much work I've been getting done in the past few months. In addition to the book (Ashes and Bones) and the short story ("The Lords of Misrule"), there are essays, lectures, notes from traveling from the fall tours. It's been a busy time, and I need to remember, this is just what happens when life slows down.

Enough procrastinating: I'm going for Option B.

Editing yourself

As I've mentioned recently, I've been working hard on editing, both the short story and Ashes and Bones. Editing a completed draft is one of my favorite things. (Note that I make a distinction between completed and finished, where completed means it's a readable first draft and finished means a piece of work has been revised several times, polished, and buffed to a high gloss...well, finish. It's the difference between a chair thrown together with two-by-fours and something by Thomas Chippendale; the first might be functional, but it's not anything you want to look at for a long time.)

As satisfying as editing is, it's also a bit of a two-edged sword, because, like most elements of writing, you need to learn to overcome yourself. With editing, you have to face your bad habits: the overused word, the fact that all the secondary characters' names start with "M," the hiccups of continuity, the little things that happen when you're focused on getting a story out of your head and onto the page. That's okay, because in that initial rush, the plot and the emotion--or whatever starts a story for you--has to be paramount, and those bad habits are crutches to get you through the first draft. Once you get that draft down, you can clean up the language, improve a point, reinforce a subplot, and add nuance. You can do anything in the world.

Editing is great because you can take the stuff that makes you cringe and FIX it. Is there anything better, for a perfectionist? While I'm editing, I get this weird and satisfying feeling of bustling domesticity--tidying and repairing--that I assure you does not extend to the real world. You can take a clunky idea and streamline it or use a new metaphor or get rid of it altogether. Removing a word or line or paragraph or even an extraneous character can be a thrill. I'm not much of a gardener, but I do understand the importance of pruning, clearing away the overgrowth and dead wood; it's a lesson I continue to learn. Or it could be the opposite problem, where you think you're being all kinds of obvious, but the point you're trying to make isn't apparent to your reader.

I can't overstate the importance of having first readers you trust to respond to your work in a thoughtful, critical fashion (not just "I love it!" or "It's dumb," but a response that tackles the virtues and flaws in a piece in such a way that you can make it better). Even reading your work aloud to yourself helps, because you notice when something sounds awkward or when you're out of breath and need to break down a sentence. There's a lot to be said for getting past any shyness you might have about showing or hearing your work. You're going to have to do it sometime.

There's a true sense of power in learning to spot your own weaknesses and improve them. And no one ever has to see that crappy first draft, because you have the opportunity to refine the emotion that inspired the story. Eventually, you'll even train yourself out of some of those bad habits.