Plotting and Re-Plotting Stories

Here is one of the wisest things about writing process ever told me, said by Syne Mitchell during a Clarion West Friday mystery muse visit: “Try different things, find out what works for you, and then do that. Lots.” Brilliant.

It’s to the point because everyone’s process differs, and may change due to time and circumstance. I can write with some ambient noise, for example, so I can take a notebook over to Soul Food Books in order to grab coffee and one of their tables and know I’ll have a productive afternoon. Here at home, I need more quiet, and it takes me a little longer to get focused, but once I’m started I can write fast and furiously for a stint that’s good for a chunk of words. I like writing in airports, but it’s scattered writing, flashes of notes, observations about people, notes for stories I’ll write later.

Sometimes I write on the computer, other times by hand in a notebook. I’ve tried dictating and at first it didn’t work well for me but over the course of a decade has become crucial to my process. I sample different notebooks – I like big artist’s sketch pads to write in, actually, because I like all that white space with plenty of room for extra notes and diagrams. I don’t like writing on small surfaces, like business cards or Post-its; I don’t think I’d get much done if forced to rely on those.

And actually, I take that back. If all I had to write on was index cards, I’d make that work. Because sometimes you have to, or else give up on writing. A new parent, for example, won’t have the uninterrupted bouts of time that they once had. They have to start thinking about writing in short bursts, or at a time they’d normally be in bed. The trick is to write, to resist the temptation to slack off, to give yourself a break.

Try new things. Go write somewhere today where you haven’t written before and turn out a few hundred words there: sitting on your front steps, or on an aquarium bench while tourists pass, or sitting on the back of one of the lion statues outside the Art Institute in Chicago while a November wind gnaws at your fingers. Or write a list of ten places to try – and then try at least one. Or stay at home in your usual place, that’s fine too. As long as you’re getting some writing done.

The mantra of our household is: writers just effing write. Because it’s so much easier not to do it, to spend time reading blog posts or alphabetizing the spice rack or making plans and blueprints for the wonderful story we’ll produce, once we get sufficiently prepared. Prepare yourself for the writing, don’t prepare the writing for you by fiddling with outlines or research or format.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Perefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

One of the things I stress to students is that you cannot wait for the muse. And, in fact, the more you wait for her, the less likely she is to arrive.

For example. The last few days I’ve been working at getting back into the flow of writing daily. I held myself accountable and post daily word counts here or on Twitter. And lemme tell you, some of those words were difficult to wrestle out of my skull and onto the page. One way I can tell things are going in difficult fits and spurts is that I’ll hop around a lot from story to story.

One of those projects is “Prairiedog Town” (which is definitely getting a different title). I started jotting down mental notes for it while traveling through Kansas, but only had a thousand words or so on it before last week. It was slow writing, partially because I wasn’t sure how I was getting from one point to another in the story. I knew it was a piece about a woman reclaiming her humanity and I had a good idea of what the penultimate scene would look like.

So I kept jotting words down in sporadic clumps of a few hundred at a time, yerking the story along in an awkward and impatient way. It helped when I incorporated a prompt from Sandra M. Odell, a woman finding an abandoned teddy bear by the road. But it still was slow slogging. Yesterday I took a break from it.

And then, this morning, while working on it, things began to fall into place. A secondary character had popped up, and I understood how to bring her back into the story — and why. A piece that was supposed to take three days suddenly shortened into a single night, and with that, the ultimate scene came clear. I went through, pulling the threads into place as close to a thousand words came spilling out and into the story.

It’s not done yet — maybe another thousand words to go, but I’ve got a map of it, and comments where I need to go back and insert things. Here, for example, is what a section of today’s work looks like:

They end up chatting. Talia asks after father. Relates that he’s died. Talia asks if she’s going to the funeral.

No
It’s what you’d say either way, isn’t it.
That’s true
I’ll be there. On the outskirts.

She freezes again. It’s an old code word they used to use, back in the days when they worked together. It’s someplace close but (some distance) to the (direction).

And most importantly at all, things have come together to a point where I’m excited about the story, feel that some clever stuff has been worked in or has had places made for it. It’ll end up being around 4-5 thousand words, and I know I’ll finish it by the end of this month, because it’s designated as the next story to go out in the Patreon campaign.

And if I hadn’t done that picking away at it — scraping those words out of my skull, even though it felt painful and awkward and uninspired — I would have never gotten to that point at all.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.