I'm always trying to add new writing tools to my toolbox; ways of plotting and replotting stories for rewriting are always useful.Here’s another example of using a Stumbleupon-discovered post to spur a rewrite.
The story I just finished, whose working title is “Villa Encantada,” is one whose beginning I wrote over a year ago. I picked it up last summer and added a couple of scenes, but something about it has felt wrong and it’s been just lumpy scenes stuffed full of description of a balcony garden. I was pretty sure it didn’t begin where it was supposed to, and also pretty sure that the best thing to do would be to start it again from scratch, write it, then mine the previous efforts to see what should get folded into it.
So when I read this post on plotting out stories, I decided to use it to plot out mine. All you do, according to the oridinal webpage, is complete the sentences. I’ve thought about the story and its theme and know it about halfway well enough, I think.
1. Once upon a time . . . there was a woman who could not forgive herself.
2. Every day . . . she tried to kill herself in the very smallest of ways, cigarettes and high heels on stairways.
3. Until this . . . she meets a new neighbor, who is bossy and ominous and presumptuous.
4. Because of this . . . she tries to make friends and allies in the rest of the apartment complex.
5. Because of this . . . The bitchy neighbor, who is a witch, attacks her in increasingly powerful ways, leading up to a third neighbor’s death.
6. Until finally . . . the protagonist is pissed off enough to stop feeling guilty and react in a way that saves herself.
7. For every day . . . I’m not sure what to do with this last, but I’ll wrap the story up with some gesture that shows that her forgiveness of herself is a lasting and life-changing thing.
Okay. That let me start thinking about it in terms of scenes, once I had the overall arc in my head. From there I did start from scratch and write the story from my head. In the process I found myself adding a frame story. Once I finally had that draft I could go through the first version and fold in passages that I wanted to keep. I’m still not happy with the end, but at least I have a complete story now that I can tinker with.
Thanks for pointing to this! For so simple (and obvious) a technique, it was amazingly helpful in clarifying some problems I’ve been having for months with my latest novel; a quick complete-this-sentence exercise (once for each of the two point-of-view characters), and things just fell into place. I guess I was overthinking it and needed a simpler way to look at the thing.
Yeah, I thought it was both easy to use and really handy, which are both good qualities in a writing tool. It really helped me straighten out my story.
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Interviewed by Genevieve Valentine
Cat in the San Juan Islands. Photo by Wayne Rambo.In 2009, Genevieve Valentine did this interview for the press kit included with my collection. I’ve posted it here for posterity.
Genevieve Valentine: Though your stories take place in different worlds and range from the comic to the tragic, a common theme is the intrusion of the fantastic into the everyday (for certain values of “everyday”); do you find it more satisfying, as a reader, when there is conflict between worlds, or cooperation?
Cat Rambo: Well – story inevitably comes about as a result of conflict. Where there is only cooperation, as nice as it sounds, stories become a lot subtler and dreamier and sometimes easy to miss.
To me one of the inevitable things about the intrusion of the fantastic is that it makes us rethink the everyday in a way that may provoke a similar conflict in our souls. The very best stories sock us in the gut and leave us gasping with realization that we almost missed a cathartic moment.
GV: The workshopping process seems close to your heart; in what ways do you feel it’s shaped you as a writer and as a reader? What is your advice for writers who want to find, our found, a writers’ group?
CR: Curiously, I’ve found myself listening less and less to the line by line comments and more to the broad-scale, big-picture level stuff. If I can infuriate my friend Derek Zumsteg, I know I’ve gone far.
It’s possible to get too carried away with workshopping, to end up pulled in too many directions by too many voices. As far as founding a group goes – make sure everyone is at a comparable level, that people communicate with trust and respect, and that you establish the ground rules early on.
GV: Your stories are steeped in folklore, but your retellings seem built on the barest bones of the original tale. What advice would you give for writers who want to make an old fairy tale new again?
CR: When I was a kid, I was working with a somewhat limited library. I ran out of fiction to read, in fact, and they wouldn’t let kids 13 or below check out books from the adult stacks. So I spent a few months one summer working my way through the fairy tale and folklore section, which is where all the bones of fairytales that come glimmering through in my stories, such as “Heart in a Box” or “A Key Decides Its Destiny”, grow from.
It’s hard to do anything new with fairytales anymore because the top layer has been mined so thoroughly. If I’d seen the wealth of mermaid stories that I’ve seen since taking on reading for Fantasy Magazine, I don’t know that I would have been arrogant enough to try a new take on the Little Mermaid or Dick Wellington’s Cat (The Dead Girl’s Wedding March).
GV: What was the particular fact or piece of trivia that determined your course in writing “The Towering Monarch of His Race”?
CR: I was writing an encyclopedia entry on the acquisition of Jumbo the elephant by P.T. Barnum and the story’s details were too good not to go into a story. They are, for the most part, true — Jumbo did die as a result of a collision with a train and it’s true that when Barnum was told that Jumbo had laid down and refused to board the ship to America, he said every day the elephant spent lying down was priceless in terms of publicity. The elephant did refuse to go aboard until his keeper coaxed him onto it, and all of England mourned the elephant’s departure.
GV: Animals make frequent appearances in your stories; what are the challenges of writing around (and sometimes, writing as) an animal?
CR: Well, I have never found this quite as radical an act as some readers seem to have thought it. I know I caught some flak about writing from an elephant’s pov part of the time in The Towering Monarch of His Race, but I didn’t think it too over the top. I researched it and I spent time thinking about what an elephant would notice.
GV: So, what’s your beef with eagles?
CR: I like eagles! I see both golden and bald eagles almost every morning when I go to get my coffee – we have a tree down near the water that they’re nesting in.
GV: What’s something you feel people overlook in your writing?
CR: The muscular nature of my sentences, which I try to pare down as much as possible.
GV: What about your writing makes you roll your eyes sometimes?
CR: Often I get carried away with the intense beauty of my prose.
GV: As an [Overlord for Armageddon, you came to the table well aware of the potential and the peril of an online identity. What online platforms have been of most benefit to you as a writer? What should new writers avoid?
CR: I was, and still am, an Overlord for Armageddon, which is a game I’ve worked with for almost two decades now. I have been a public figure in the game for most of that time, and find being a writer/editor not much different. People are generally kind and patient if you are patient and kind with them, but you should also not be a pushover.
Computers are TERRIBLE TIME SUCKS but sort of unavoidable. Avoid committing too much of your time to an online presence – it does you no good if you don’t have some actual writing to sell.
GV: You’re doing a DIY promotional tour for Eyes Like”¦. In an age where publishing is getting scaled back, writers are becoming their own best publicists. What have you discovered about self-promotion while preparing for this tour? What are you looking forward to? What’s the number one mistake you’re afraid of making?
CR: That it’s incredibly hard, tedious work. I’ve been going through my mail compiling a list of reviewers and bloggers, for example, that I want to make sure get an ARC (advance reading copy of the book). I’m preparing for a 31 day virtual blog tour, as well as a month on the road where I’ll be reading at the KGB bar in NYC as well as venues in Philadelphia, Indiana, Kansas, Colorado, Salt Lake City, and Seattle.
In this I’ve been happy to have my retired mother compiling a lot of the info as well as my incredibly talented friend Kris doing a lot of the graphic work.
I am worried about pushing too hard with this book and alienating people, but at the same time, I’m learning that unless you ask, you can’t find out, sometimes.
GV: The most frustrating part of the writing process is _________.
CR: The slowness. I can’t stand markets that take 6+ months to reply. I think that’s RIDICULOUS. At Fantasy we turn stuff around within a week tops, and that’s processing 400-500 fiction pieces a month. :p
GV: This can be solved by _________ and liberal applications of _________.
Creepy monkey. Creepy, creepy monkey.So I’ve finished up the writing of the first draft of a current project, which ended up about 90k words. By first draft, I mean all of the scenes are at least 75% complete, with most of them completely roughed out. The next stage of the process will follow what I did with the previous two books, which worked fine. Because I am a writer, I am fascinated with process. We all constantly wonder if we’re Getting It Right, a state which I can neither confirm nor deny. Hence this post, which anyone is welcome to skip.
As part of my process, which is perhaps overly paper-intensive, I’m printing out a copy right now, at a line and a half spacing so there’s plenty of room to write on it. I’ll go through that with my colored paper tags, marking the places where there are things to be fixed or done or included, including notes ranging in magnitude from “this needs to be foreshadowed in previous chapter” to “check street name.” I’ll read through the manuscript, tinkering at the paragraph and sentence level while answering each of those tabs so I can remove it from the manuscript.
When they’re all answered, I’ll print out another copy and read that aloud with pen in hand. That may happen more than once.
I’ve polished the prologue and first chapter a couple of times, so I’m running that past one writing group, and will be looking for first readers when I get to the read-aloud stage – if people are interested, please drop me a line in the comments.
Is this the only way to write a novel? A thousand times no! But it’s worked for me, and if there’s any part of it that’s useful to you, seize it freely. The single wisest thing I heard at Clarion West, from Syne Mitchell, was, “Try different things and find out what works for you. Then do that. Lots.”
2 Responses
Thanks for pointing to this! For so simple (and obvious) a technique, it was amazingly helpful in clarifying some problems I’ve been having for months with my latest novel; a quick complete-this-sentence exercise (once for each of the two point-of-view characters), and things just fell into place. I guess I was overthinking it and needed a simpler way to look at the thing.
Yeah, I thought it was both easy to use and really handy, which are both good qualities in a writing tool. It really helped me straighten out my story.