Cover art by Stephanie Dalton Cowan

Getting an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts is a little bit like going to school in a nebula. All around you, new stories are flaring to life. In workshops, at student and faculty readings, and especially at the readings given by graduating students, snippets of early drafts blind you with their brilliance, and you know those stories will have half the planets in the galaxy begging to orbit them in a few years’ time.

One of the brightest stars in my VCFA nebula was a little novella called WATER, which my friend Melanie Crowder began during our third semester of grad school. We shared an advisor that semester, so we talked occasionally about what we were up to. I was banging my head against my critical thesis and wrestling with a draft of my recalcitrant YA novel, which turned out to be more of a black hole than a star. Melanie, on the other hand, was working on a poetic and spare, almost fable-like story of children and dogs struggling to survive during a devastating drought. “That sounds cool,” I probably said to Melanie. (I was in a thesis-induced haze and cannot actually remember anything that happened in those six months.)

I first heard Melanie read from WATER right before our graduation in 2011. By then, of course, we all knew that WATER was something special—it had won a very competitive scholarship and earned a first look from the editors at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. But hearing Melanie read the book aloud sent chills down my spine. The opening chapter is narrated by a dog, Nandi, and if you’d told me two years ago that I would fall in love with a dog’s narrative voice, I would certainly not have believed you. But this dog is different. She speaks in bursts of poetry, and I couldn’t get her voice out of my head.

When Melanie asked me to read the manuscript a few months later as she prepared to send it to agents, I said yes right away. I was still dying to find out what happened to Nandi; to Sarel, Nandi’s human; and to Musa, the boy they meet on their search for water. Within one page, I was sure the book would sell. Within five pages, I was sure I would not be able to recognize Melanie after the book was published because she would be buried under a Melanie-shaped pile of medals and trophies. I admire Melanie’s language precisely because I will never be able to write like she does; the attention she pays to each word and sound is so intense and focused that most writers would crack under the strain. She describes herself as a “thin writer,” and even though the draft I read was significantly longer than its first incarnation had been, it was still barely 100 pages. I am most definitely a “fat writer,” and my style is very different from Melanie’s, so to me, WATER seemed almost like a new species of book—the sort of book I could never write, but the sort of book I could fall deeply in love with.

When WATER quickly found a great agency home and sold to HMH, I may have done a little bit of dancing around in my living room. (Sorry, neighbors.) Now, almost two years later, WATER has become PARCHED. It was published at the beginning of June. (Naturally, I danced around again, but my neighbors have moved out, so it’s ok.) I’m sitting here on the same sofa where I read that early draft, and PARCHED is right next to me—a real book! It’s got a beautifully illustrated cover, pages that feel soft to the touch, and the perfectly chosen font. Melanie and her editor have done a lot of work in the past two years; the story is still itself, only more beautiful.

I have loved watching my own book turn from a VCFA manuscript into an almost-published novel, but there’s something even more satisfying about watching a friend’s story go through the same process. (This probably has something to do with the fact that I didn’t have to work on any of Melanie’s edits.) I feel extraordinarily lucky to have known PARCHED since it was a bright young manuscript with a cowlick in its hair and a grand destiny, and I can’t wait to see what it does next. As for me, I already know what I’ll be doing next—curling up on this sofa and reading PARCHED again from cover to cover.

You can find PARCHED online or at your local bookstore, and you can visit Melanie Crowder at her home on the web.

I’m not comfortable assigning star ratings to books, but I find it helpful when other people do it, so I’ve decided to partake (especially on Goodreads, if not on Amazon, though they’re now under the same umbrella, which is its own problem). But I’m generous with stars, which I’ve managed so far by rating only books I can assign four or five.

I may change my mind about this, but at the moment I doubt low ratings are helpful. For one thing, except for classics, I rate mostly picture books. Should I try to ward people off with my one disgusted star? I think most people see picture books in person before buying them or act on friends’ recommendations or the reputation of the author/illustrator. They don’t need a warning from me.

And I’m not Kirkus Reviews, which serves a top-down role in the public discussion of children’s books. Kirkus Reviews and other journals are important, but I see myself as a bottom-up contributor, and I would rather signal which books grabbed me than complain about those that didn’t.

So I rate books I like. Those, for me, are the only ones worth thinking hard enough to write about. I know I’ve been talking about stars and not reviews, but I feel like a poor star rating should be backed up with a review showing cause. Even simple reviews require me to organize my thoughts, and I have no desire to tackle the work of organizing my thoughts to back up a critical rating.

I’ve decided to describe my approach to rating with this graph:

The curve is exponential. Since it’s not linear, the area under the curve between the fourth and fifth star is greater than the area from zero to four. If your rating style is exponential, more books deserve high ratings.

Still, generosity can be problematic: Just the other day, I gave five stars to a really fun, inventive picture book whose quality can’t possibly be compared to Middlemarch, my Platonic form of a 5-star book. How many books are as good as Middlemarch? Five? Ten? More? Certainly not the picture book I gave five stars to the other day.

Rather than worry about whether a book is so good that people will be talking about it 200 years from now, I’ve decided to give a book five stars if I don’t wish it were different than it is, if it strikes me as perfect on its own terms (and I like those terms). If I really like a book but wish it were a little different, I give it four stars. If I wish it were a medium amount different, I don’t rate it; I look for another 4- or 5-star book. There are enough of them, and finding them is fun.

But I said at the beginning that I find other people’s star ratings helpful. Will my liberal system help others? Sure. My ratings basically say, “This book is worth paying attention to.” And actually, maybe my graph is incorrect. I heard once that the best chess players don’t even see the bad moves. I’ve been visiting picture book walls lately to see what other picture book writers are doing. There are a lot of great picture books, but, to be honest (and at the risk of sounding self-congratulatory), there are many books I don’t really see, books that don’t enter my consciousness.

So maybe my graph should look like this:

It’s still exponential but in reverse. In this graph, the exponential curve shows an increasingly small number of off-the-chart ratings, books that deserve even more than five stars. Let’s say I don’t really see the one- and two-star books, and Middlemarch is off the charts. It gets a nearly impossible ten.

Or so claims Lisa Cron in “Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence,” and I believe her. Her entire book is valuable, but she hooked me with the Introduction.

When I was in college, I hoped my next step would be to earn a Ph.D. My dad had one, and he was the smartest, most accomplished person I knew. I wanted to be like him. I’m not. Two things characterize my working life: 1) Since my 20’s, I’ve made my living as an artist of one sort or another, and 2) since then I’ve also always been on the lookout for a more important, more valuable profession

Instead of becoming a scientist like my dad, and after casting about for years for a suitable profession, I became a children’s book author-illustrator. Huh? Is that important or valuable?

But I couldn’t help myself. I should have accepted my fate earlier and saved precious time. After all, although I do consider children’s books my true path, my first book only just came out, and I’m not young.

But is writing children’s books important or valuble? Of course, it’s easy to make teacherly arguments in favor of books and literacy and whatnot, but listen to this, from Cron’s Introduction:

Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution – more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to. Story is what enabled us to imagine what might happen in the future, and so prepare for it— a feat no other species can lay claim to, opposable thumbs or not. Story is what makes us human, not just metaphorically but literally. Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience reveal that our brain is hardwired to respond to story; the pleasure we derive from a tale well told is nature’s way of seducing us into paying attention to it.

I love her focus on story. Not that writing isn’t important but, according to Cron, simply telling stories is a big part of what makes us human. And it’s wonderful to consider that stories must be pleasurable or we wouldn’t pay attention and then learn from them. It’s like food. Can you imagine if eating weren’t pleasurable? Or sleeping? What we must do must also give us pleasure.

Cron continues, calling new ideas from neuroscience research about story “a game changer for writers”:

Research has helped decode the secret blueprint for story that’s hardwired in the reader’s brain, thereby lifting the veil on what, specifically, the brain is hungry for in every story it encounters. Even more exciting, it turns out that a powerful story can have a hand in rewiring the reader’s brain— helping instill empathy, for instance — which is why writers are, and have always been, among the most powerful people in the world.

Wow! Writers are the most powerful people in the world. I suppose that’s only true if you know “what the brain is hungry for in every story it encounters.” For that, read the book – though those of you who already write, or have studied writing, will find that the brain is hungry for what you’ve already learned to offer. But Cron’s neuroscience perspective is worth reading, and if I sense interest from Tollbooth readers, I’ll sketch in a synopsis on Friday.

In the writing world, you will encounter many acronyms.

You might even start to feel like you’ve joined the military.

Or you might have fun flashbacks to Robin Williams in Good Moring, Vietnam.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll jumble them all together in conversation. For example, it’s not unusual for me to say, “I really should join SCBWQ2ish-something or other, shouldn’t I?” And I should. I’m getting on that, I swear.

A few months ago, I spoke with my publisher about signing at BEA and realized quickly that I needed to get to the bottom of this acronym if I want to stay ahead of the marketing whirlwind. So, I wikipediaed:

BEA from the outside is a trade fair for book enablers, everyone from author to publicist to blogger. Okay, I thought waybackwhen, that should be fun. Like Comic Con for book nerds.

And boy, was it ever! I got a Smaug tattoo from the HMH booth, an embarrassing number of tote bags and as many books as I could carry (and believe me, some readers had three tote bags full on each arm).

The event was almost a week long, with people coming for a day or longer, depending. The floor of Manhattan’s Javits Center was divided into booths for various publishers, who sneakily “dropped” piles of books or ARCs to be swarmed and collected by those attending. The best way to describe the atmosphere of BEA is to say that whenever my friends and I stopped walking for a few minutes, we were immediately asked if we were in line for something, and if so, what.

I had my first book signing ever, and I also met my agent and my editor. Talk about a career boost of a day!

I signed 160 books in one hour. It was intense.

I was the best kind of exhausted by the end of it, and that’s mostly because I spent so much time talking to people–something writers can go weeks without doing.

In two days, I met a few hundred librarians, book sellers, bloggers and publishers, and while, yes, I was there to get my book The Color of Rain out there as best as I can, it was also an opportunity to commune with fellow book lovers and learn about exciting things coming out.

For example, two amazing books (written by dear friends) were featured during the Editor’s Buzz Panels, one MG and the other YA. (Please click the covers for more information on these upcoming releases!)

Another huge bonus to being at BEA was to commune with fellow writer friends, hold ARCs of their upcoming books, and discuss the ups and downs of the business. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? Writing can be too solitary, and all of these acronym-inspired conferences are a way for book lovers to come together. A really great way.

That being said, I’m off to join SCBW…I?

Cheers, Cori

Join me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter @CoriMcCarthy or check out my website!

Janni Simner

Janni Simner is the award-winning author of over 35 short stories which have been published in many anthologies, novels, and the distopian Faerie trilogy.  Janni writes an informative and fun blog. Be sure to go visit her.

Her latest book, Faerie After, will be released May 28.  You can read an excerpt on the book’s website.

Today in the Tollbooth, Janni answers some question about writing her Faerie trilogy.

Sarah: You have written about your writing process, which includes writing exploratory drafts, on your blog. Did you use the same process of an exploratory draft for Faerie After, the last book in the trilogy?

Janni: I did! I’ve learned for me the first draft of a book isn’t about telling the story so much as about getting a sense of the terrain the story will be told on. I basically go kind of stream-of consciousness as I write, following the words from one sentence to the next to see where I wind up. I’ve had friends with more orderly processes suggest that I do my thinking on the page instead of in my head, which may well be true–if so, thinking on the page works better for me than waiting until my thoughts are all neatly arranged to write.

And besides, it’s fun.

Sometimes my exploratory drafts have nothing at all in common with the final story–for one book, I wrote an exploratory draft set in the wrong town with the wrong characters in the wrong season with the wrong plot. Except “wrong” isn’t the best way of describing it, because I don’t think of my exploratory draft as a “mistake” so much as a necessary step on the road to my final story.

My exploratory draft for Faerie After was closer to the “right” story than some of my exploratory drafts, if you ignore the fact that it took 30,000 exploratory words to find the final book’s first scene. On the other hand, I really had to work harder than usual to get the last third of the book to work out, and added a sixth draft to my five-draft process just to focus on the final scenes.

Maybe that’s because saving the world is hard, and since Faerie After is the final book of the Bones of Faerie trilogy, it was both my and protagonist Liza’s last chance to try to save it. Or maybe it’s just because every book is different, and while knowing our own best processes is hugely helpful, each book has its own individual challenges, too.

Sarah : Any hints or useful tips about how to craft the overall plot arc for a trilogy? What about crafting the character arc over three books?

Janni: I didn’t start off planning to write a trilogy, though I did start off hoping I’d get to write more books in the Bones of Faerie universe. I wrote Bones of Faerie to stand alone, but was delighted when I got to write a second book, Faerie Winter, as well. Then I finished Faerie Winter, and realized that there was so much going on in that book that I needed a third book to make the trilogy feel complete. (Among other things, I’d always envisioned Faerie Winter as the book where Liza would return to the Faerie realm, but there was so much going on in the human world she never did! Instead that return is much of the focus of Faerie After, the third book.)

My editor gave me a useful bit of advice about my protagonist’s arc when we decided to continue the series. I’d been afraid Liza had become too powerful, by the end of Bones of Faerie, to remain a protagonist for future books. I was considering choosing a new protagonist for book two when my editor said, well, what if Liza’s challenges are bigger? This was both obvious and something I needed to hear directly. While each of the Bones of Faerie books are at least somewhat self-contained, each also now has stakes that are higher than–and that build upon–the challenges of the earlier books.

One other thing I did for the final book, Faerie After, was to re-visit some of the decisions my protagonist made in the first two books. I found that some of the things Liza did that were very right in Bones of Faerie were suddenly much more complicated and ambiguous in Faerie After. That strongly played into her growth as a character, too.

Sarah:  In addition to your novels, you have published numerous short stories. What differences have you found in world building for short stories versus the trilogy?

Janni: In some ways it’s not all that different. I take an idea, or a feeling, or a character, and I jump in with my messy writing process and see where it takes me. I think the difference is not so much in world-building as in final structure. With a short story, I usually stop after the main character’s first “turning” or moment of change, while in a novel there are several turnings, and how those turnings interact with one another to create the story is more complex. And in a trilogy, the turns and changes of multiple novels are interacting with each other, too.

It is also true that for a trilogy, every decision needs to be remembered across the whole series, and even small details can affect everything that comes later. What’s fun is getting to discover what those details mean in later books, because I don’t always know right away. In Bones of Faerie I knew I had a protagonist who didn’t like to lie, for instance, but it wasn’t until Faerie Winter that I thought about magic and faerie lore and realized that she couldn’t lie, even if she wanted to, and neither could anyone else with magic.

Sarah: You have said that part of the fun of writing is hands-on research. Did you have any fun research experiences while writing your Faerie trilogy? How did they appear in the books?

Janni: In a way, my research for the Bones of Faerie trilogy goes back decades, since the book is set in St. Louis, where I went to college. I had a lot of fun returning to St. Louis years later, map in hand, to trace Liza’s route for Bones of Faerie and to imagine how the city would change after the war with Faerie. I kept looking over my shoulder, imaging my characters watching me from the city’s post-apocalyptic future.

(Sarah: Here are some Photos from Janni’s research trip.)

I also did tons and tons of plant research for the trilogy, writing with printouts of Missouri plants and trees beside my computer, and I did some St. Louis-area hiking to observe the vegetation more closely. The trilogy’s wildlife research wasn’t quite as hands-on as for my Iceland-based Thief Eyes–for which I got to meet an arctic fox up close–but I did enjoy reading up on wolves and raptors for the books, too.

Actually, I’ve been doing lots of wildlife research for my next book (about endangered raven shapeshifters living in the New Mexico Wilderness), too. I think sometimes the process of writing and research can show us what our obsessions and fascinations really are, and provides a great place to explore them further!

Sarah: Thank you, Janni, for visiting the Tollbooth today.

Sarah Blake Johnson

Released this week from Running Press Teens!

As a brand new author, I’ve been encountering tough questions, and I wanted to take this launch announcement to discuss what I consider to be the hardest question:

The most succinct answer is that I was thinking about writing a gritty, YA sci-fi. Ideas came and went until one night, I woke up to the steel and flint spark of two ideas:

RAIN’s dedication

 

After the initial spark came a day when I sat down to write, and instead, called my best friend, Mario. Mario has a reputation for brutal honesty, so when I said, “prostitutes in space” I chewed my nails while I waited for his verdict.

Happy Day After Mother’s Day! Mother’s Day is really “Appreciation Day.” We get to spend the whole day telling Mom what she did well. We send flowers. We eat chocolate. We give her the recognition she deserves.

Today I’d like to take that feeling of appreciation and recognition and apply it to the writing life. The timing works for me! Today is also the first day of my newest online class. During this first week, many good things will happen. We will introduce ourselves. We will start an intense ten week conversation about the craft of writing. We will share our work.  We will become a community.

Last year, I wrote this piece on fostering creativity in an online community. A strong and satisfying online experience definitely begins with trust.

Trust begins with listening. And recognition. And appreciation. (See where I’m going now?)

When it comes to critiquing–possibly the most emotional and potent part of the process–most writers who come to my class have experience. They have already begun to “read like a writer.” They already know that they learn a lot by reading critically. They’re well on their way to completion and publication. But what they often still don’t know how to do is how to hear and expand upon a critique, especially the part we’ll call “the good stuff.”

Are you in that camp? Are you a writer who only wants to hear what is “wrong/bad/not working/could be better????

As a teacher, I work very hard to show writers what they are doing well. I think this is important for the process . . . and the soul. We do this work without the kind of recognition most jobs begin with: money.  It always makes me nervous when  a new writer proclaims: Don’t worry. I can take it. “I have teflon skin.”

(These manuscripts are our babies. We all near to hear they are beautiful!)

I think that knowing what’s right is even more productive.

In class, I try to give them specific examples of great chapters/lines/characters, so that they can build off those strengths. Still, I am no longer surprised when someone will accuse me of making up “the good stuff.” They say to me, “You’re just saying that, so that you can get to the stuff you mean.”

This is not true. And it is not a good practice. It doesn’t make you a vain person to acknowledge that you are successful. At every stage of the process, you must learn to celebrate and build on what you do well. Ask any published writer about editorial letters. You need to know! If you’re not, it’s really hard to go back into the cave of revisions.

Even if you are a writer with teflon ears, here are some tips to help you accept, enjoy and build on the good stuff.

1. Stop reading the critique before the suggestions begin. Enjoy and celebrate the things you do well. Let that feedback settle in. Let that feedback inspire new ideas. Don’t immediately go into fixer mode.

2. Reread the sections your critiquer thinks work. Ask yourself why they are working. Are they active scenes? Does the reader know what your character wants during these moments?

3. Look at the good scenes and ask, “How could this be even better?” Trust me: this works.  It’s easier to begin to re-imagine your novel when you start at scenes that are working well. Chances are they are your favorite scenes. Chances are spending time on them will make some of those harder scenes more fun to revise.

When you can acknowledge your good work and successes, you are more likely to thrive and write well. I know I write my best when I know that someone believes in my story. This kind of confidence can happen at every stage of the journey. When you know what you do well, you will feel better about the work. You’ll write with more confidence. You will be able to hit those all important goals.

May every day be an appreciation day! Have a great writing week!

I’m writing a sequel, and I’m terrified. Yes, I know, there’s not a lot of pity for someone who has to write a sequel. Boo hoo, you sold two books.

But, I never intended to write a series, and I am a YA book buyer for an indie bookstore who leads a monthly group of teen readers, so every four weeks, teens complain to me that the second or third book in a series is a HUGE disappointment.

Why? The character changes in book 2. The dynamic girl they fell in love with becomes weak and needy. The romantic triangle turns boring. A character they didn’t really like in book one takes over book two.

Not surprising then, that writing a sequel that will equal book one feels impossible to me at times. In fact, I had a dark night of the soul after I signed the contract and committed to delivering a 100,000 word manuscript in one year.

It was ironic and, perhaps, predestined when I snagged a last-minute spot at a weekend retreat with Martha Alderson, The Plot Whisperer. It was after midnight in my dark night, and I’d begun to read and work through her approach, and to feel my way towards book two.

I knew my sequel had to resolve the unfinished business of book one. My character had transformed from tentative to strong, but she was still in danger. Her romance had blossomed, but was still at risk.

Luckily, I was finishing rewrites on book one so I could leave more plot points unresolved. And my genius editor had forced me to add a hunky character in the last part of the book–insisting that I didn’t need to write a love triangle–but that I should insert the potential for one in the future.

Martha Alderson emphasizes character transformation–but how was my character going to continue to transform when she’d already gone from helpless to powerful?

How could her story be more than a run for safety?

And what part of my protagonist’s character had to die so she could be reborn?

For two days I listened to Martha, did her plot exercises, and finally talked through the plot of book one with her. The Aha moments started to happen.

How could my protagonist continue to transform? She could stop thinking primarily of herself while others sacrificed themselves. She could finally commit to the cause.

And what could prompt her to devote herself of the plight of others? Witnessing suffering even greater than her own. The world I’d built had to be even more perverse than she or I’d had ever imagined.

And the climax? The worst thing that could happen to my character who was on the run? She gets caught! No longer evading capture, abandoning all hope of rescue, she would have to face her biggest antagonist.

When I go to write every morning, I don’t always know where I’m going, and I’m not sure how all the plot points will weave together, but I know that I must be harsher, and braver than I was in book one. Maybe book two won’t please my readers, but unless I risk it all, it will be a faint echo of the first.

The Shocking Truth!

Novels have plots.

I have a confession-

For me, and a lot of other novelists, plotting feels IMPOSSIBLE. As unfathomable as an algebra problem. And just as bound up by some weird set of rules I thought I’d never understand.

Plot = bizarrely confusing + tediously proscriptive   

A few great writers, including Tollboother emeritus Carrie Jones, dive into their drafts with plot in mind. Carrie wrote a wonderful series of Tollbooth posts on plot here (step 1 and step 2) If you struggle with plot (or even if you don’t) I STRONGLY urge you to take a look at Carrie’s posts. I refer back to her sophisticated yet no nonsense understanding of how a story fits together often.

But many of us don’t “get” plot. What do you do if plotting feels like a foreign language?

Is there any hope? YES! YES! YES!

Of course there’s hope!   If I can understand and conquer plot you can, too.

It’s a simple matter of ORGANIZE AND REVISE. (And it even works for the hopelessly disorganized! I’m living proof.) I call this plotting for the plot impaired. Plotting is actually easy if you break it into really obvious, can’t believe I didn’t notice this before, parts.

Here’s what works for me:

Step 1 Write a messy (or not messy) first draft.

It doesn’t matter how you get your draft done. Fast, slow, outlined, by the seat of your pants. Just do it. Then put the draft away.

Step 2 List all your scenes

I get a pack of notecards. Then I list the scenes in my novel from memory, in the order I think they should appear in the final (a long time from now) draft. Norma Fox Mazer called this a “story ladder” but it doesn’t matter what you call it. Make a list, one scene on each card.

(While I’m doing this I’m thinking a lot about motivation- what does my character want? why? what does he do to get it? what will happen if he doesn’t get it (stakes)? what stands in his way?  I write all this down in my brainstorming notebook, pondering. When something doesn’t seem to make sense I rethink and re-imagine the story I’m trying to tell.)

After I’ve listed all my scenes I lay them out, take a step back, and see what I’ve got.

Step 3 Identify key scenes. I search my plot ladder cards for several super important scenes. If I find them among the scenes I’ve already written, great! I highlight or rewrite those scenes in red. Or re-do these cards using brightly colored index cards. The point is I want them to stand out.

If I don’t find all my key scenes among the cards I’ve created I brainstorm to come up with new scenes for the next draft. Then I make cards for those scenes, highlighted in pink or some other eye catching color that designates them as important unwritten scenes.

These are the specific scenes I’m looking for-

A. Where does the story really begin? This can be hard! Often your novel’s true beginning is NOT the first scene in your first draft. In fact I’d argue that you can’t really know where your novel should begin until you’ve written the ending. Consider whether you’ve started in the right spot. Be sure there’s a card for that first scene, already written or not.

B. What’s the inciting incident? What scene sets the events in motion? Often the inciting incident takes place in the opening scene but it may come a short time later. Make  a card for it.

C. The end of the beginning. The Plot Whisperer, Martha Alderson, talks about the first quarter of a novel finishing with a scene where the protagonist leaves his old world and enters the new world he will explore during the course of the novel. You can think of it as the start of the protagonist’s journey, or the moment when nothing can be the same again, or the end of the first act. Just be sure to include a card.

D. A good strong midpoint. When middles sag stories wander. And your readers’ attention will wander, too. Think literally for a moment. Imagine a tent pole that holds your plot aloft. If you hoist your story’s middle with a strong plot point scenes before that point will build toward it and scenes after it will result from it. It’s just that simple. I promise. Look at a hundred novels that work and you’ll believe me.

What makes a good soaring midpoint? Carrie says “halfway through the book and suddenly there is a STUNNING PLOT TWIST. This is the point of no return.”  This shift, twist, obstacle, whatever you want to call it will force your protagonist to recommit to his goal (reluctantly, enthusiastically, fearfully, angrily… whatever) And guess what. It inflates a saggy middle every time. So if you don’t have a strong scene midway through the novel come up with an idea for one now. And make a card for it.

E. Crisis  Usually something happens just as the middle is finishing up that makes it appear the protagonist’s goal is absolutely unachievable. Hero’s Journey people sometimes think of this as the hero’s ritual death. Whatever you want to call it, it’s the low point, often both emotionally and actively. Do you have one of these scenes? Find it! List it! Plan it!

F. Climax  Way back in the begining, my protagonist really really really wanted to achieve his goal and now he’s fought his way back from the depths of that crisis scene to accomplish it. Maybe he won’t get what he thought he wanted… but he will achieve something (even if its just wisdom.) Otherwise what’s the point of the novel? List the scene where your protagonist gets his just deserts, whatever sauce they’re dished up in.

4 Smile. Because guess what…It’s a plot! Those key scenes are the bare bones of a plot. The other scenes on the cards are the meat on the bones. I did it!!!

I have a real story! Or at least I will have one when I get to

Step 5 Revise! 

I arrange my scene cards on a big table or open patch of floor, adding new scenes where I see gaps, shuffling scenes to build tension, and cutting scenes to avoid repetition or trim narrative fat.

I make a story board to help me re-imagine what isn’t working or to make weak spots strong.

I stare.

I tweak.

Then I sit down and start writing. Again. And Again. And Again.

Do you think a novel has to have a plot? How do you do it?

~tami lewis brown

More thoughts on fully realizing your fictional world… 

No matter how fantastical or faraway your fictional world, it begins inside you, as the writer. We are all from some place, even if we are displaced. All a product of what we know and don’t know. Of who are, our culture, our parents, the landscape where we were raised.

If you doubt this, the next time you have an opinion about something, ask yourself where the opinion comes from. Your parents? Your culture? The books you read or movies you watch?

When I ask myself where I am from, I get many different answers, but they often begin with the natural world. I’m not only from water, but from mountains, canyons, trees and starry nights, the sprawl of a river town and its highways, as Ray Carver writes about in “Highway 99E from Chico”

The mallard ducks are down

For the night. They chuckle

In their sleep and dream of Mexico

And Honduras. Watercress

Nods in the irrigation ditch

And the tules slump forward, heaving

With blackbirds.

Rice fields float under the moon.

Even the wet maple leaves cling

To my windshield. I tell you Maryann,

I am happy.

I tell you Maryann, I am happy. Carver remembers this highway, this windshield, these birds, this trip, because of the emotion behind it.

If we seek to understand the emotions behind what we write, it can make our fictional world real.

Another California writer, Brenda Nakamoto, who writes about growing up as a third generation Japanese in Peach Farmer’s daughter, talks about creating her book out of a sense of needing to understand her roots, and a yearning for a grandfather she never met.

In missing the rural farm where she grew up, Nakamoto recreates it with sensory details. The peaches heavy on the trees, and her Dad’s old Ford truck bleached to the color of a faded sky.

And while she never knew her grandfather, who killed himself before she was born, she re-imagines him as an immigrant on a ship bound for Seattle. Although he was only 5 feet tall, she sees him as “a big so huge I cannot put my arms around it.”

A big so huge, I cannot get my arms around it. I love that line. And in creating place through specific details, Nakamoto’s world has become universal.

What makes a fictional world believable? How to you find the right words that will paint a place that feels every bit as real as Dad’s old Ford truck bleached to the color of a faded sky?

I believe these exquisite details emerge through the work of mining your own subconscious, to uncover your true reasons your writing. As Alice Hoffman says, don’t write what you know, write what you feel.

And when you are writing what you feel, symbol and metaphor naturally follow.

Listen to this moment in The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo when Rob cries at his mother’s funeral:

“They were both dressed up in suits that day; his father’s suit was too small. And when he slapped Rob to make him stop crying, he ripped a hole underneath the arm of his jacket.

’There ain’t no point in crying,” his father had said afterward. “Crying ain’t going to bring her back.’”

That hole in his jacket underarm is a symbol for the whole in Rob’s life.

In Cynthia Voights Homecoming, the story of four abandoned children walking to their grandmother’s house, the children are in constant search of food.

“Dicey and James pulled mussels from the rocks and washed them off in the water, while Maybeth and Sammy climbed back up the hill for twigs and larger pieces of wood. Soon they had a large mound of mussels waiting beside a crackling fire…”

Food in this way becomes not just a meal, but stands in for the missing mother, their loss and their yearning… a type of extended metaphor that TS Elliot called an Objective Correlative: or a “Set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for a particular emotion.”

In my own novel The Lucky Place, I returned to my water roots with my character Cassie. In this scene she is realizing that the stepdad she loves may die, as she walks into the ocean and is swept under:

“I’m underwater.

I’m rushing backward and down and hit something hard and sand stuffs my mouth. My cheek burns. When I hit I can’t hold my breath and I suck in water. I can’t find the air. I kick out for the surface, but it’s not there. My chest aches enough to burst. The blue is gone, replaced with black and bits of silver star. I’m sucked out to sea and I’m going to die.”

She doesn’t die, though, and is spit back out.

“My cheek feels scraped where it hit the sand, but nobody realizes. Nobody knows how scared I was. Or that I finally understand. Cancer isn’t a gypsy curse. It’s a huge smashing wave. It catches you and drags you out. And anybody can be spit back up, and anybody can drown.”

Earlier I said that just as in the real world, a fictional is not simply a place, but what is happening to a character in that place. And that what is happening to a character—the tension between her inner and outer landscape, at just that moment, is not static, or generic. It is specific, in motion, has cause and effect, like a crackling fire or a crashing wave, and if it rings true it’s because it’s part and parcel of the story itself.

Take the opening scene in Jennifer Donnelly’s A Northern Light which not only begins in motion, but sets the story world beautifully in time and place:

“When summer comes to the North Woods,” she writes “…time slows down. And some days it stops altogether. They sky, gray and lowering for much of the year, becomes an ocean of blue, so vast and brilliant you can’t help but stop what you’re doing—pinning wet sheets to the line maybe, or shucking a bushel of corn on the back steps—to stare up at it. Locusts whir in the birches, coaxing you out of the sun and under the boughs, and the heat stills the air, heavy and sweet with the scent of balsam. As I stand here on the porch of the Glenmore, the finest hotel on all of Big Moose Lake, I tell myself that today—Thursday, July 12, 1906—is such a day. Time has stopped…”

Time has also stopped for the reader. We want it to, at least the time outside the novel. While in the world of A Northern Light time is already on the move. Soon a girl’s body will be brought to the porch, and that idyl will be shattered.

Donnelly has created a perfect fulcrum between this sweet moment and what will happen next. And it’s worth noting that her character is crossing a threshold –literally and figuratively in this moment. And so are we, as readers.

A story world is created from within, they are your themes that manifest in your character’s point of view. This world is already moving as your reader crosses your story threshold. It is dynamic, changes as your character changes, is the world where your character is hot, or cold or moody or in peril. It is the place where a character first makes love or loses a loved one. It is set in time and has a spot on the map. It begins in the white hot center of experience, in all its sensory detail, and is the spark between your character’s inner motives and outer action. And building your world with emotionally powered, specific details allows your individual story to become universal.

Katherine Paterson notes in Spying Heart that the Japanese word for idea is “i, which is made up of two characters—the character for Sound and the character for Heart—so an idea is something that makes a sound in the heart (the heart in Japanese, as in Hebrew, being the seat of intelligence as well as the seat of feeling).

Paterson is talking about the “power of the imagination” that comes from the sound of a writer’s heart. It’s from this imagination that we create the symbols and metaphors that invite young readers in to figure things out for themselves. To be caught up in a story so fully that their own imagination then allows them to, as Paterson says, “listen to the sounds of their own hearts.”

                                                                                     –zu vincent