It's finally cracked!

A craft post on plot

I feel a little disingenuous, telling people (readers, friends, family, my agent, passersby, seatmates on airplanes) that I am “working” on a novel when I am in my current stage of novel writing. I usually describe this stage as “plotting,” and it comes after research, itself an amorphous and overwhelming stage, as I am a writer of predominantly historical fiction. My order of operations typically arcs from “obsession with a given time period” to “obsession with an issue specific to that time period” to “granular exhaustive research into the material culture and society of that time period.” That’s how I now know which Columbia graduating class instituted the wearing of mortarboards for the first time (1883), and what was printed on the signs in the Columbia library when the campus was in midtown (“SILENCE IN THIS ROOM”), and what was on the menu at Sherry’s around 1900 (Poussin sauté a la Marengo, $1.25), and how often Irish immigrant women took Chinese immigrant men as their husbands (more than you’d think). Some of this information will prove necessary. Much of it will prove superfluous.

But then, it’s time to actually decide what’s going to happen. And sometimes, that can take awhile.

If you are a writerly person, or a bookish person, you have probably already encountered the idea that novelists break largely into two competing groups, “Battle of the Network Stars” style: plotters, and pantsers. Pantsers, who write by the seat of their pants, sit down and start writing and trust that their characters will eventually get them someplace interesting. Often, they are correct. My friend who has won the National Book Award is a confirmed pantser. Plotters, on the other hand, need a map.

(I wish Telly Savalas would be Plotter Team captain. Anyone who has been a Bond villain probably knows how to motivate.)

The map can take many forms. When I was ready to try writing The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, I discovered that I had no idea how to begin. Novels are long, as you’ve probably noticed. Sometimes too long. How to spin an idea out until it is the proper scale for a novel without losing control?

I turned, perhaps arbitrarily, to a platform I knew: Excel. I numbered one to twenty across the top. Then I put place, date, twist, and each character down the side. Then I slotted in who was doing when, when, and where. Twenty chapters, I told myself, at twenty pages each, that’s four hundred pages. That’s a novel. Broken down this way, cracked open and spread before me, the problem of the plot no longer felt insurmountable. After all, any languishing grad student worth her salt can write twenty pages. Heck, time was I could write a twenty-page paper in one night. As it happens, the method I invented out of desperation and whole cloth had already been invented by other writers before me. But it’s still the method I use today, six novels later. (My seventh novel, unpublished and permanently in the drawer, was written using a “Post-Its on the wall” method to organize the plot. And, surprise, it reads like a rainbow of Post-Its pasted to a wall.)

(No.)

I have spent the past several months living with a spreadsheet peopled with too much open white space. The rigor of the spreadsheet means that amorphousness cannot hold. I am forced to decide who the brother is really, and also what month it is, and precisely when the Thus and Such Thing happens. The spreadsheet demands commitment, and it will not tolerate waffling. As such, when I tell people - you, say - that I am “working on Bonfire right now,” what I mean is I have been sitting at my desk, fiddling with a squishy shark toy stolen from my son, drinking cranberry juice, and feeling waves of anxiety and panic slosh around my feet while I wait for understanding to smack me in the head. If I stare long enough at this spreadsheet, I will understand. I’ll squeeze this shark and I will get up and I will sit down again and I will ask myself, what if it’s this way? But it won’t be that way. And I will despair.

But then, one day…..it cracks.

Last week, I finally broke it. The plot cracked open. No, it IS this way! And that’s who that person is. And this is where that has to be, and then she can go here, and then this, and then this, and then…. and the end! AH HA! My fingers flew over my keyboard, my letter W keeps sticking, it’s infuriating, I’ll have to write the whole novel without the letter W, but the important thing is, now the novel can be written.

I have broken the plot.

It’s time to start drafting.

At last.

So what’s next?

This week I am going to start giving myself a word count assignment to begin drafting Bonfire. I will discuss this method in a subsequent post (content, friends, I’m supposed to make content now, we are all content), but I finally know where I’m going. I have the map. The feeling of the broken plot is the closest I ever come to shouting “EUREKA!” in my job. Who among us doesn’t secretly wish to be a mad scientist, or a criminal mastermind, or a private investigator? Novelists are usually more dogged than that. But sometimes, like last week, the plot cracks. Eureka!

On November 7 I’m taking my Marymount students through the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at some work that dovetails with our writing class “Reading New York City.” I’m excited for them to see “The Five Points.”

Also coming up, on November 8 I will be Zooming in for the University of East Anglia annual Working with Words career conference, featuring alumni talking about making a living with writing.

Then, on Saturday November 15 I will be back in Cincinnati for Books by the Banks, one of my favorite book festivals. I’ll be in the fiction section with A True Account in paperback, and appearing on the Literary Fiction panel in the afternoon. As I’m off-cycle for book promotion, BBTB will be one of the few chances to connect with me in person this fall. I hope to see some of you there.

If I have a dazed expression, know that it’s because I’m in the drafting stage. The gallop to completion. At last.