the writing turtle

writing, editing, coaching

[turtleiswriting]

what we do here

hi! however you found me, i’m glad you’re here. i’m a writer and editor with three years’ experience editing professionally, and at least ten years of editing and coaching on a personal basis. i’d like to share my encouragement with you, to demystify the writing process, and to help you break free of whatever is holding you back from writing what you want to write.

on this page:

you can send me questions about the craft of writing, questions about your own work, or request feedback on a few lines of your work, and i’ll try to get back to you as soon as i can!

i’ll slowly start building up a collection of useful information, practical knowledge that you can use to help your creative writing

outside this page:

i offer line editing and writing consultations/cheerleading via my website.

i also collect samples and try to look professional over there

i retweet stuff and pretend to know what i’m doing on twitter @bekaturtle

[turtleiswriting]

kika

i’m posting this novel, online, not because i think it’s a masterpiece but because i’ve been inspired by my favorite web novelists and my own experiences with fanworks and wanted to see if i could take on the challenge. i do love the story, and i hope other people will find it worthwhile, too.

chapters 1-3 are already up, and chapter 4 will be posted this week! after that, i’ll be publishing one chapter a week until it’s finished.

you can read it here, if you want, or share it with someone you think might like it!

<3, 🐢

[turtleiswriting]

Writing this on my phone, at my parents' house, because I forgot that I had to be social today.

All I wanted to say for today was, give yourself a break from that manuscript. You have a beginning, a middle, and an ending, and maybe it's messy but it's finished. Good work!

Now set it aside and get started on that idea that was nagging at you, pick up one of those shiny new objects, and start again!

...or don't. But please give yourself a breather from the story you just wrote, let yourself become a bit distant from it. When you come back with fresh eyes after a few weeks or even a few months, you'll be able to see things much more objectively. Some things I dread coming back to only to find they're way better than I expected, sometimes it's the opposite. But I won't have the perspective to know until I leave it alone for a while.

Not earth-shattering advice, I know. But true nonetheless.

B.

[turtleiswriting]

day 29: final images

photo: Marc-Olivier Jodoin 

The image you leave your reader with is as important as what you start with. It can also be what you started with.

Ending with an image that’s similar to, or a transformation of, an image from the beginning of your story can be effective because it brings home the feeling of there being a larger arc encompassing the story within. By repeating an early image after the full story is complete, you can also imbue new meaning into it by giving the reader a chance to think about it again with the new perspective they’ve gained by reading your book.

Annie Dillard begins Pilgrim At Tinker Creek with the image of an old scrappy tomcat visiting her in the night and ends with that image. At the beginning she’s distant from the tomcat; he’s an unknowable stranger. But after the full story is told, she tells the story again and we see a kinship with the tomcat, a similar wildness between them. It’s the same image but given new meaning because the narrator has changed.

You can also end with similar settings or motifs—near the beginning of a piece I’m working on I write a party where one of the main characters runs away from the people they love, and at the end I write a party where they stay with them and everyone leaves together. It’s a bit obvious, maybe, but it does the job of providing a mirror to the beginning.

You don’t have to have a big wrap-up at the end, you don’t need to tie anything up with a bow for your audience. As an editor, this is one of the most common things I see writers do—they think they need to spell out what they mean, what the purpose of their story was.

This is where the repeating scene or image can come into play. Rather than telling, let the readers see your character in a similar situation to something from early on, and show how they act now that they’ve gone through the events of the story. No need to wrap up with a final message.

Speaking of endings (smooth transition I know), tomorrow’s the last day of this mini-challenge, and if you’ve been following from the beginning, I’m grateful! We’ll be talking about what to do once you have a draft finished.

Thank you for following along, and I hope at least some of this was interesting or useful for you!

B.

[turtleiswriting]

day 28: commencement

photo: Yinan Chen

This is not an original observation, but: there’s a reason that high school and college graduations are called ‘commencement’ ceremonies rather than ‘closing’ ceremonies. They mark the end of one story arc, but not the end, at least  for most of the people involved.

The journey to earning a diploma is a pretty good metaphor for our definition of a story: it’s a change in a character, and the journey that got them there. The frame is the school itself, the character’s beginning state (no diploma, maybe a bit naïive) and end state (they’ve earned a diploma and have learned more about the world and themselves) are clear, and they most likely struggled, succeeded, and suffered setbacks along the way.

Still, what I like most about this metaphor is the ending: no one leaves a commencement ceremony feeling like their life is over (but if they did, I would be very interested in reading a story that subverts that character’s expectations). You can imagine every person walking out the door and doing any of a thousand different things, you might feel curious about what happens next, but you’re satisfied that this particular story, the one where they’re in school, is now complete.

I won’t belabor this point. I just wanted to remind you that your end is not the end, it’s an end. Even in stories where the main character dies in the end (eg A Lantern In Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich), the shift in perspective to another character or to a distant narrator at the end of the book, after the main character is gone, reminds us that their story was just one story among many and that things continue after this story is done.

.

.

Do you have to end your story like this? Of course not. Go wild; end the entire universe, cut off the story with a

[turtleiswriting]

day 27: what is an earned ending?

photo: Lubo Minar

Sometimes, you’ll hear an editor say that an ending doesn’t feel ‘earned.’ But what does that mean, exactly?

An ‘earned’ ending is an ending that feels inevitable, yet surprising (this is not my term; it’s common to many writing courses).

By the time you get to the end of your character’s arc it should be clear that events have lined up in a way that made this outcome inevitable. However, it shouldn’t be so obvious that the reader isn’t surprised. For example, by the end of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, it feels obvious that the couple would have ended up together again, but because we spend so much time watching the husband try to get away we’re still surprised and horrified when we realize the inevitable really has happened.

Earning the ending means you can’t info-dump (aka try to justify things all at once); instead, seed the information that will make your ending feel inevitable into earlier chapters, like puzzle pieces, so that by the time the ending is revealed there’s enough evidence already built up that the reader can look back and put all the pieces together.

As an example, think of the difference between a good villain speech and a bad one:

In a bad villain speech the villain explains every single thing they did to get to this point, because the writer didn’t leave clues along the way and needs to make things clear to the writer post-hoc.

A good villain speech barely even needs to exist; by the time you realize who the villain is, they only need to say a few words for you to understand what they’re doing and why.

Ok, but!! beka, you didn’t tell us about this from the start? Why bring it up now??

I have a good reason; it’s because, unless you’re sticking exactly to your outline, your story is going to end up evolving in directions you didn’t expect. There’s no need to worry about seeding clues into your story until you know exactly where it’s going.

This is also why I implore you to write forward rather than going back and editing what you’ve already written; it’s wasted effort, until you know exactly where your story is going.

Once you do know where it’s going, you can do the trick of going back and tweaking dialogue, having characters react in certain ways to things that signals something the reader doesn’t know about yet, and adding in little details here and there that are the clues people will piece together later, when the full story is finally revealed.

How much of this you will do, of course, depends on the type of story you’re writing. In The Fault in Our Stars by John Greene, for example, there’s very little ambiguity; we know the characters are going to fall in love and that they will die, the only question is when, and what they do along the way to make their deaths feel even more gut-wrenching. But even in a story like this, you can still go back and seed in clues for the small plot twists that you didn’t think of until the moment they appeared in the scene.

This is the great magic trick of writing: your readers read the story from start to finish, but this is not how you have to write it.

Ok, I’ll end this before I get on a soapbox. Tomorrow: more endings.

Happy writing!

<3, beka

[poiregourmande]

me: you’ve already used this exact turn of phrase two paragraphs ago, that’s too repetitive

me, an intellectual: if I use it three more times it becomes a motif

[turtleiswriting]

day 26: what if all of my character arcs don’t tie together at the end?

Character and story arcs naturally end at different points in the story (for example, see the ‘nesting dolls’ story planning tool), so they probably won’t all wrap up at the same time as the main character’s arc.

Your arcs should, however, all contribute in some way to the main arc of the story (ie the one that frames story). If they’re not, you need to either:

Figure out what they really have to do with your main story arc and rewrite them so the connection is more clear, or

delete them.

It’s fine to cut characters and character arcs that don’t contribute to your story. Everyone ends up with one at some point. Sometimes you’ll think an interesting side story will tie in only to discover that it doesn’t. This is fine. It’s not a waste to delete it if it helps you get to a better story in the end!

Tomorrow: what is an ‘earned’ ending?

Until then, keep writing!

<3, beka

[turtleiswriting]

day 25: wrapping up character arcs

[The rest of this series is going to focus on endings. I’ll be using my character-based outlining structure, but this is just my strategy, so feel free to take what’s useful for you and ignore the rest!]

photo: Leone Venter

First:

Which character arcs do I need to wrap up?

Any arc that interacts with the main character’s arc should be wrapped up in some way.

These are usually the arcs you took time to plan out at the beginning, but they’re not the only ones. Sometimes there are other, side characters who gain importance in ways that you didn’t expect, and you should think about wrapping up their arcs, as well.

How do I wrap up a character arc?

You need to show the character’s final state in some way. That’s all.

Wrapping up doesn’t need to be complicated. If it’s a minor character, don’t spend too much time on it. Even a few sentences showing the character’s mental and physical state at the end of their arc is enough to satisfy your reader that the character wasn’t forgotten.

Characters whose arcs you don’t need to worry about are:

Characters who don’t change over the course of your story (for example, maybe a group of townspeople stays bigoted throughout the whole story, and it’s your protagonist who changes and gets out of that place)

Characters who only appear once (they can’t have an arc if they don’t have any page-time).  

What if I want to leave a character’s ending open-ended?

If you do want to have an ambiguous ending to a character’s arc, you do still need to wrap it up. If you drop the arc without completing it, it will seem to your readers that you’ve forgotten about the character.

Instead, try to hang a lantern on it (aka signal to us that you know something unusual is going on): make a note of how no one knows what’s happened to this character, or have them show up in a scene without telling us it’s them (eg someone thinks they recognize the character, but we never get confirmation it’s them). This sort of ending for a character can be very useful if you’re planning on continuing their arc in another story, or if you want readers to come to their own conclusions about what happened to them! It’s not very satisfying, though, so use it sparingly unless your goal is to make people finish reading your story feeling ambiguous.

There are lots of ways to wrap up character arcs; the one thing you don’t want to do is to reach the end of the story and have important questions left unaddressed.

How can I tell if I’ve left a character arc too open-ended?

This is where a good beta-reader can be a major help. You can ask them what they’re frustrated about, what they’re confused by, or what characters they feel they need to know more about, and use that information to help wrap up the character arcs you let fall to the wayside or to fill in the ones you did address but which need a bit more clarification.

(A reminder, though: you do not need to listen to your beta reader. If they complain that something is frustrating, and that’s the emotion you want, then take their complaint as a sign your story is doing what you wanted it to do!).

Tomorrow: Should my character arcs all tie together at the end?

Until then, keep writing!

<3, beka

[turtleiswriting]

day 24: why I’m not giving craft advice

This series is about coaxing your writing turtle out of its shell. Helping you learn to be gentle with yourself, and your ideas, and to simply enjoy the process of getting your story onto the page.

You know what doesn’t coax your writing turtle out of its shell? Too much advice.

There are so many posts out there with ‘11 tricks for writing realistic dialogue ’ or ‘7 things to make your scenes pop,’ and some of them are great, and some of them are not so great, and all of them are pointless until you’re at the stage where you have enough written that you actually have material to edit, and improve.

Too many tips and tricks and rules will only make writing feel more complicated than it is. Of course you want to write something that people understand, but that comes with your editor’s brain. We’re not in editor’s brain right now.

The other side of writing is writing something that people connect with, and that’s what your writer’s brain does. Your writer’s brain tells the stories and it’s the stories, not the packaging, that people connect with. Remember, you can have perfect prose, but if there’s nothing underneath it your readers can tell. We’re trying to cultivate your writing brain right now.

After this series is finished, I will do another focusing on areas of craft that can help writers drastically improve their final draft, but those tricks aren’t something I want to burden you with now, as you’re trying to get your story out of your brain and into words.

In the next few days I’ll share a set of posts about wrapping up and tying together narrative threads, and about figuring out how to end your story, and then after a short interlude we’ll start on elements of craft.

But this series is about designing, writing, and finishing your story. You don’t need to be burdened by rules yet. Let yourself enjoy being in the moment, let yourself be messy. I promise, the more you let go of those tips and tricks, the more authentic your writing will be.

[turtleiswriting]

day 23: lessons from fanfic: writing for an audience

photo: Kane Reinholdtsen

One of the most exciting and terrifying things about writing is the thought that someone might read your work. Sometimes, having people see what you do can be motivating; sometimes, it can be paralyzing.

Even more than this, though, what many writers who do hope to share their work someday fear the most is that no one will read what they write.

Fear not: no matter how weird or specific you think your writing is, there will always be someone (usually many someones) out there ready to read it! The trick is finding those readers.

Of course, you can submit to magazines and agents (and you should if you want to!), but those take time to reach publication, and if they are the only places you’re sending your work you’ll end up with a very skewed vision of how interested people are in your writing. Traditional publishing is inherently exclusive. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that your work will get rejected most of the time, based on nothing but the taste of the editor or how well they think it fits with their brand. It’s not a good metric of how good your writing is, or how interested people might be in reading it.

While you’re submitting to traditional publications, take a leaf out of the fanfic writers’ books and just start posting stuff.

I know this sounds flippant, but it’s true; you don’t want to wait until you have a book deal before you start writing for an audience. There are places online where you can start publishing right away and build an audience who is invested in your work.

I personally like publishing fanfic on AO3; it lets me get in the habit of writing and publishing regularly and helps me hone my writing skills in a supportive environment, surrounded by other fans who area already prepared to love whatever I write.

But this is not the only place you can publish: many of you reading this already publish your work on your Tumblr blogs, some post their fiction on Reddit or Medium. Others set up their own personal websites or blogs to share their work. And some people even post directly to their Twitter or Instagram stories. The important thing is to just start posting, and to post regularly.

A brief reality check: unless you are writing for a very large or active fandom, your writing is probably not going to get very much traction at first. Maybe just a trickle of readers here or there.

This is fine. Just keep posting.

You might start to think that no one is interested in your work.

This is fine. Just keep posting.

You’ll appreciate that you did when people do start finding your work and you’re able to serve them with a backlog of things you have written. They can become invested in you as a writer by falling in love with the things you posted back when no one was reading your work. 

The lesson from fanfiction is: don’t wait for someone to ask you for the thing you’re writing. Just share it. It might take time to reach its intended audience, but if you’re persistent you will eventually get there. Your future readers want to see your work. But you have to share it in order for them to find it.

Tomorrow: why I’m not talking to you about craft.

[turtleiswriting]

day 22: but my writing still sucks

photo: Nubelson Fernandes

If you’ve been writing every day for this challenge, chances are you’ve sat down several times now and despaired over your writing. Your phrases are clunky, the words aren’t even all in order. Sometimes, you just drop a sentence right in the middle, and never come back to it.

This. Is. All. Fine. And. Normal.

As a reader and editor, I can promise you: we accept pieces that are messy. We accept pieces that have missing words, or creative use of punctuation, or even structural or pacing problems. We take stories that are messy.

What we don’t accept are stories that have no heart.

You can drill yourself into writing perfect prose, or you can let yourself just write what you want to write. The thing about perfect prose is that by itself, it’s lifeless. It has no heartbeat. Of course, perfect prose on top of a true, heartfelt story is nice, but so is messy, wild, unrestrained prose on top of a true, heartfelt story.

What matters is the story, not the packaging. I am happy to work with people who have no idea what they’re doing, but have a vision for what they want. If you have a destination, I can get you there, as an editor.

If you have no destination, having perfect prose is (pardon the clichée) like rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Why make it look perfect if the thing beneath is already sinking?

If you think your writing sucks:

A good editor can help you level up your writing, but you’ll learn those things in the editing stage, not in the drafting stage. Gradually, as you write and edit more, you’ll internalize some of those rules, but please don’t actively think about them while you’re writing your first draft.

-First: it doesn’t. It just doesn’t. I’ve never met someone whose writing is as bad as they think it is, and if it really is that bad, that’s what I’m here for. -Second: just let it suck. When you’re drafting, you need to let things suck. Let them stew. Let yourself wallow in the shit of your shitty writing. Enjoy it. -Third: it doeesn’t suck.

Why? We’re trying to spare your ability to write, here. Perfect prose is the bow you tie a story off with, it’s not the story.

No one, not other writers, not your editor, and certainly not your reader, cares if your writing sucks. Let it suck (it doesn’t, but if you need to believe it does in order to embrace the idea of letting to, then go, embrace the suck).

[turtleiswriting]

day 21: the myth of shiny new object syndrome

photo: Kelly Sikkema

If you’ve been working on your project for a while, you might be starting to feel a bit worn out, a bit tired of working on the same idea day after day. Then, a new idea comes in, fresh and new and shiny, and you want to chase it.

Then you remember all of the writing advice you’ve gotten telling you not to give in to temptation. Maybe on top of that advice, you have a collection of half-finished manuscripts as evidence that you can’t focus on anything, or get anything finished.

Maybe, you think, you’re a victim of Shiny New Object Syndrome, that dreaded state of being unable to finish anything you start before you go running after something new, only to abandon that new idea as well.

You’re not, I promise.

Why? Because Shiny New Object Syndrome is a myth based on the idea that you mentally can’t handle multiple projects at once. However, as many professional writers will tell you, having multiple works in progress is actually quite common. Furthermore, having multiple projects can actually help you be more productive by:

giving you an outlet when you can’t focus on one project any more;

giving you a chance to reset your mind, which lets you write more without getting burned out on any one project.

Having multiple projects is not a problem. It’s learning how to properly manage those projects that makes the difference between successful multitasking and a string of abandoned pieces.

What should I do when I get a shiny new idea?

When you encounter a new idea while working on your current manuscript, take some time to think about it. Why did this idea come to you now? Is it because:

You’ve been inspired and really want to tell this story?

You’re struggling with where to go next in your current story and think a different/better idea will make everything better?

If #1, great! Write down the idea, give yourself some time to brainstorm, and then let it sit and steep in your mind while you continue with the draft of your current piece.

If it’s #2, check out day 8, day 9, day 10, day 11, day 12, day 16, day 17, day 18, and day 19 of this series for some help and inspiration to move forward with your current story!

You don’t have to abandon the new idea, but give yourself a chance to push through the stuck feeling you have before you let yourself brainstorm the new idea. This step is important because if you get used to switching to a new idea every time the current one gets rough, you will actually train yourself to abandon stories when they start to get tough. I promise, as painful as it is to push through this awkward stage of drafting, it’s worth it for the satisfaction of having a finished manuscript.

When do I get to start writing my shiny new idea?

You get to start your shiny new idea when you’re at the point in your current manuscript that adding another project won’t derail you. This stage is different depending on how experienced you are, how fast you write, and how long the stories are that you are working on.

For example, if you’re working on shorter pieces (10k or less), it’s probably safe to work on three or even more at once because each draft can be read and edited in a single sitting. If you’re working on longer pieces like novellas or novels, you might want to wait until you’ve finished a full draft of your piece, and then start drafting the new idea while you’re editing the first one.

Having pieces at different stages of the drafting/editing process can help keep you from getting burned out on any one project by giving you distinct mental states to switch between (creative brain for drafting, critical brain for editing).

There are also many people who like to draft multiple long pieces at once. They like staying fully in creative mode, but need to be able to switch between different stories when they’re feeling frustrated or burned out on the idea they’re currently working on.

When you choose to add another project to your list of current works in progress depends on you. If you don’t know what’s best for you yet, experiment. Try drafting two pieces at once. If it’s too much, put away the new idea until you’ve finished the first draft of your current story. All of that work will still be there when you come back for it.

The most important thing is to not abandon your current work. Don’t let it go just because you’ve started something new. Keep writing forward, but let yourself chase after new ideas, too. Brainstorming new story ideas is a great creative outlet, and can even help you on your current work by giving you new ideas or helping you think of new aspects of the story you hadn’t thought about when you first wrote your outline.

In conclusion: chase after those shiny new ideas. Plant them in your mind and let them bloom. But don’t uproot the ones that are already there. You had the idea for a reason, give it a chance to flourish.

Shiny new object syndrome only happens if you give up on your current idea. Otherwise, it’s just called having multiple works in progress. Also known as normal.

[turtleiswriting]

day 20: write forward

photo: Roland Lösslein

At some point while you’re writing you’ll probably go back to reread parts of your story. Maybe to refresh your memory, maybe to get ideas about where to go next.

You’ll probably find errors you’d like to fix, lines you’d like to make prettier, ideas you’d like to clear up.

Don’t do it.

Why? When you go back and edit before you’re done with drafting, you’re doing two different things, neither of which is good for your brain or your work:

1. You’re judging yourself and your work before all of the ideas are even on the page.

This makes your writing turtle very anxious, and might even make you give up on a perfectly good story. Editing too much when you’re trying to be creative and let ideas flow can cause those ideas to stop altogether, because you’re starting to judge your ideas before you’ve even had a chance to write them out.

2. You’re trapping your story into a set path that might not be the best version of the story.

The more time you spend editing while you’re trying to draft a story, the more chance you’ll end up falling for the sunk cost fallacy: that is, thinking that you have to keep going with something just because you’ve spent lots of time or money on it. The less you polish your work before you get done with the draft, the greater flexibility you have to change as new and better ideas come up.

You might end up with plot holes, by writing forward. You might end up with bits of scenes, or entire scenes, that you need to cut later on. That’s okay. The point is to get the draft finished, not perfect.

One of the hardest skills to develop, as a writer, and one of the most valuable, is separating the editing from the writing. But it’s also one of the easiest to practice.

The whole trick is to just write forward. All you have to do, when you see something you want to change within the text you’ve already written, is to make a quick note about it, and then move on.

<3, Beka

[turtleiswriting]

day 19: mining your text for ideas

Today’s strategy for how to keep writing is simply a reminder that you already have more, and better, ideas than you probably realize.

If you feel like you’ve lost the creative spark in your story, like you don’t have any ideas for where your story is going next, or like you’re going to leave plot holes if you keep going, go back and look at what you’ve already written. You will have more material to work with than you realize, I promise.  

What is mining the text?

All I mean by this is to re-read everything you have so far; not for editing (remember, we’re in a judgment-free zone right now, just writing down our ideas! Don’t scare your writing turtle back into its shell), but rather to see what

Images

Ideas

Themes

Plot points

Characterizations

You have written so far. This list does not need to be organized. It can be a random list. When you’re finished, go back and do a brainstorming session like you did before you started writing. Just let your mind wander. Go do some chores, go for a walk. Keep the list in mind. Let ideas come and go and write down the ones that are interesting.

Because you’re the one creating this story, you might be too ‘in the weeds’ to be able to see everything you’re doing with your writing. If you feel overwhelmed by the idea of going back to read what you’ve written, or you have tried and aren’t getting any new ideas, it’s time to call in a friend.

I know this can be terrifying, especially for writers who aren’t used to sharing their work before it’s completely finished, but a fresh set of eyes can make the difference between finishing a story and letting it languish.

When you send your story to your friend tell them you’re looking for:

What the story makes them think or feel

What images, ideas, or themes stuck out to them

What questions they have about the story (aka why did this happen? what are you going to do with this thing that happened?)

Tell them you’re not looking for

Edits (proofreading, line editing, etc.)

Suggestions about how to ‘fix’ the story (even if you really want to ask them for this)

If you do bring someone into your drafting process, make sure they know this is not the editing stage! They are only allowed to answer the questions you tell them to answer. This takes a lot of stress off of both of you, because you both know what to expect from each other.

Now, the one big exception to all of this is if your friend happens to be a developmental editor. If they are, what are you reading these posts for? Go, run, talk to them! Talking to a real person will always be better than getting advice from this old turtle.

What happens after I’ve mined my text?

Armed with the ideas you’ve gleaned from your current text, you can

revise and fill in your outline,

rework your story-structure style outline to include the new ideas, or

just keep the list so you can look at it and remember the themes and questions you’ve decided to address as you write forward.  

How you use this list is up to you, depending on how structured you are with your writing.

You can go back and mine your text any time; I’ve done it more than once for some short stories, and not at all for some longer ones. It’s just another tool to keep in mind if you’re feeling lost.

A word of caution

Mining your text can make you aware of legitimate problems in the parts you’ve already written that need to be fixed, or of little things you’d like to polish or tweak in your story.

Please, don’t fall into the trap of editing at this stage. I know it can be tempting to work with words you already have written, rather than generate new words, but you can’t let yourself get distracted. More than that, you need to keep your future options open, and too much editing at the beginning erases your options. Don’t do it!

Tomorrow, I’m going to talk about the importance of writing forward, not just as a strategy for finishing your first draft, but for creating the best possible version of the story you want to tell.

Until then, keep writing! <3, Beka

[turtleiswriting]

day 18: treating your plot points like dominoes

photo: Bradyn Trollip

I mentioned on day 16 that sometimes, when you don’t know what to write next, it’s because your story is starting to feel contrived. Like you’re just going through a list of events until you get to the end.

This can happen when you’re more concerned with ‘things happening’ than with what actually matters for your story.

It’s fairly simple to fix this problem, once you realize what’s going on. Just think of your plot points as a series of dominoes; knocking over one leads to the next falling over, which knocks the next over, until every domino has fallen down. Cut out parts that don’t feel like part of the natural flow of events, and add more to scenes that are naturally connected but don’t seem that way yet.

There needs to be a thread of connection between events, more than simply ‘they’re all happening to my main character.’ Remember on day 0.5, when we talked about framing? The dominoes strategy is all about framing.

One place where the dominoes strategy can be seen in action is a crime-solving story, where answering one question about the case leads to another question, which leads to another question, until finally we’re led to the final question/confrontation. Everything that happens to the main character can be tied back to the investigation (even if you hide this fact from the readers until later in the story), and any memories or backstory that is revealed abou the characters will be triggered by events that happen in the investigation.

The framework of the investigation becomes the hand lining up the dominoes, putting all of the various story events into an arrangement where one event leads clearly into the next until we reach the end of the story.

The dominoes strategy can often be seen in parables and children’s stories, too. The story ‘If You Give a Mouse a Cookie’ by Laura Numeroff is one example: a small gift to a little mouse leads to bigger and bigger requests until the story reaches its absurd conclusion. Or Orwell’s Animal Farm: where small acts of tyranny lead to greater and greater social control (tbh I’m not a fan of this story, but it’s a good example of the form).

Even if you don’t have a story that’s this straightforward, you can still use the dominoes strategy to think about how one event would trigger the next, if you were telling your story in chronological order. Then, when you rearrange things to fit your story framework, the reader will feel this cohesion even when things are told out of order.

If you can’t find a clear connection between events, or some way that one leads into the next, think about these two questions:

Are your events out of order (ie, are you trying to force something to happen before it should)?

Is the event outside the frame of your story?

Remember, you don’t have to tell us everything that happens to your characters, and you shouldn’t try! If you keep in mind the story you’re trying to tell, it will be easier to imagine how events can be connected, and you can take out the events that aren’t helping your story.

Tomorrow: mining your text for ideas!

Until then, Beka <3

[turtleiswriting]

day 17: First In Last Out

I’m so excited to share this tool with you; it’s one of my favorites (shamelessly stolen from Mary Robinette Kowal, if you haven’t looked her up yet please do!).

photo: BilliTheCat/pixabay

What is First In Last Out?

This is a strategy taken from coding and math, where you often have operations nested within operations (for example, in the equation (1+(2*(3+4))), we know to solve 3+4 first, before multiplying by two, before adding one to solve the equation).

When applied to stories, the idea is that story arcs are nested within each other, and the ones introduced later in the book actually need to be wrapped up first, because they’re nested within the ‘larger’ story arcs. You have to wrap up those arcs before you can wrap up the bigger ones, or else your story will feel wonky or unbalanced.

How can I use it in my story?

To use FILO in your story, look at the conflicts, problems, and themes you’ve set up in the first third of your book and ask yourself, in which order do these things need to be addressed?

Go through your work and list the conflicts out in the order in which they happen, and then think about how to wrap up the most recent one first, and how that will help you wrap up the next most recent conflict, and work your way out until you get back to the original conflict. This can become your map forward into the rest of your story.

As you get into more complicated story structures (ie, ones that aren’t perfectly chronological), you might find you have an overarching conflict or problem that isn’t revealed until later in the text. That’s fine! Even if it’s revealed later, if it happens first chronologically and provides the context for the later conflicts then it should be listed first. Then, when you’re wrapping up your conflicts, it will still end up being Last Out, since it was the conflict that set up everything that came later in the chronological timeline.

What does it mean to ‘wrap up’ a conflict or story arc?

All I mean by ‘wrapping up’ is that the conflict needs to be addressed clearly in some way that makes it feel like it’s over in some sense. It needs to physically remove the character from the place where the conflict is happening, or make the character feel emotionally that the conflict is over in some way.

Wrapping up a story arc does not mean that you’ve solved all the problems, or answered all of the questions that you raised. That would make the reader feel like they were being lectured to, and lead to a very long-winded story.

Think about the ending of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Nothing was actually resolved in that ending; she ran away. However, it feels like it’s been wrapped up because the main character has left the situation behind. It’s a satisfying ending because it gets her out of the bears’ house and away from danger, but it’s unsatisfying in other ways: the interpersonal conflict with the bears is never addressed.

You don’t have to make the readers happy, you just have to get them to a place where they can agree that this part of the story is over. Perhaps in a sequel of Goldilocks she apologizes and makes friends with the bears, but the original story arc, the one of Goldilocks breaking and entering, is wrapped up.

Example of First In Last Out

First-In, Last Out is the structuring tool I use the most often when I’m unsure about how to continue with my story.

For example, in the portal fantasy I set up on day 2.5, there are three main conflicts introduced in this order:

The protagonist is struggling to adjust to life back in her hometown and struggling to survive as an artist.

She meets and starts reconnecting with her old friend, but isn’t sure if the friend has romantic feelings for her.

She is immersed in a fantasy world that wants more from her than she’s willing to give.

Each of these problems is interrelated (she goes into the portal because she’s feeling stressed about being home, and she reconnects with the friend because both of them have moved back recently and feel out of place), but they also have an order of operations. So, once I’ve gotten my story going, and I’m struggling to figure out what to write next, I can think about what I’m doing to wrap up the conflict in the portal world, and how that will help me wrap up the other two conflicts later on.

Just like with a math equation, solving the nested problems should help you to solve the larger ones, so that by the time you get to the end of the story it feels like everything has been addressed and the reader can put down the book not feeling cheated (this is different from feeling happy; it’s up to you whether you want them to feel happy at the end. But the one thing you don’t want is for them to feel like there were plot holes because you forgot to wrap up one of your nested problems!).

How do I make my conflicts/plot points feel interrelated?

This is something I’ll talk about tomorrow, with the ‘dominoes’ strategy!

Until then, keep writing!

<3, Beka