I have an Encyclopaedia of dates and events published by The English Universities press. It stops in 1950 but it's wonderfully eclectic.

Randomly, in 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba, Schubert wrote his first piano sonata, the Corn Law was passed and Mrs Mary Sherwood wrote the children's book Little Henry and His Bearer. I love that Mrs Mary Shearer warrants inclusion. It brings the year to life.

Cherys, that's wonderful!

Jane, I love the thought of big marker pens. I have tremendous inhibitions about anyone knowing what I'm up to in the WIP - even putting it on the study wall is a bit too visible! I rationalise this as the fact that the spare bed is in my study and I wouldn't want guests to see it, but it isn't that really, as guests usually end up on the sofa bed in the sitting room. It's just neurosis.

Emma

A very natural neurosis though, don't you think? I'm sure birds hate being watched nest building. Not dissimilar. We need to be free to make, and to do that we need to go happily into the wormy, geeky realms of our imagination which are normally tucked out of sight when guests are around.

I also understand writing in pencil until the shape has formed - it goes with preferring longhand, the scrambled mess of it - the loops and arrows that denote it's clearly provisional and up for improvement. Typed text looks too much like an end product.

Thanks to those who've described their parallel plot columns or versions thereof. I have sheets of butchers' paper with the plotlines running over them, and mind maps that spread to pages but hadn't unpicked them chronologically like that, to see how best to layer the plots dramatically, one against the other. Will try that on this draft.

Susannah

I admire your confidence and wish I could bottle it.
I always feel so unsure that I seek re-assurance anywhere. My agent, publisher, writing group friends, husband have all seen my plan. I'm prepared to hand it out to strangers at the bus stop with a questionaire.
Do you find the attached storyline?
a. Very interesting
b. Quite interesting.
c. Adequate or
d. Shite.
HB x

That's interesting. I think your method requires more confidence - touting ideas in raw form and able to absorb so many responses without losing sight of your original impetus. I admire that a lot.

My CW tutor wanted me to bring in an extract from my wip this Thurs. but I bottled out. I'm having so much fun writing it, I don't want her saying 'do it like this; change that' or it's liable to bring on a crisis of confidence, and I don't need that right now. Sure, it may all be shite at the end, but it'll be my shite, and I'll still like it.
Instead we workshopped a sex scene written by a bloke she's mentoring (who's writing a womans fiction novel). Hubby was a little surprised when I got back and announced 'we've been doing sex'.


- NaomiM

Going back for a moment to the original question -

Susannah, with retrospective plotting, how do you stop yourself shoving in too much too early? In a detective story I can see that's relatively easy, because the slow bleeding of information/clues is the whole structure. But I'm finding with this WIP I've put more thought into where the story's going, so I'm having to work more retrospectively than I like, and because I know something I keep thinking the reader needs to know it too. I KNOW he doesn't, but that doesn't seem to stop. Me. Doing. It.

At present I'm working on a clumsy scheme of waiting till I write the scene where my MC finds out what I know, then going back and cutting all my dismal efforts of bleeding it in early - unless, of course, I need the foreshadowing for suspense. It's wretchedly time-consuming, but is so hard to resist. I don't just mean plot, of course, but knowledge about character that will be revealed by that plot, etc etc - all the stuff I want to splurge down right away because it doesn't seem right to keep it to myself.

I'd guess this is simply about learning discipline, and I know it's Amateur City. But did you ever have this problem, and how do you overcome it?

Louise

As a confirmed non-plotter (not out of conviction, but merely because I haven't the first conception how one would plot, and when I have tried, I've been wholly unable to persuade my characters to conform to the outline I've set them after page 17), but one who is also pathologiaclly lacking in confidence, I do what Helen does, except with my opening. I send the set-up (first chapter or so - character sketches, initial situation of conflict) to my agent and editor, asking them to indicate whether they find this beginning:
a. Very interesting
b. Quite interesting.
c. Adequate or
d. Shite.

I am in awe of all you lot with storyboards.

Rosy

What I really need Rosy, is someone who reads every page as I type, saying , 'Yes, yes, marvelous.'
My dream job would be writing scripts in a team.
HB x

someone who reads every page as I type, saying , 'Yes, yes, marvelous.'

How true!!!

R x

Louise, I don't. Wish I could.

I've come across lots of failed scripts that miss because nothing happens for too long, as the author tries mistakenly to withhold info to create suspense, rather than dripfeed it. So I do like to keep showing parts of the backstory map, but piecemeal, so it prevents the whole from being seen too soon.

My biggest problem with the art of retrospective plotting is that all the means by which to do this seem so schematic, so forced. The diary/box of letters/motormouth neighbour/visit to local library to read old newspapers. I yawn as I list them. I just haven't yet acquired the imaginative skill to have the protagonist stumble over necessary info in an interesting way. When I try to be subtle it ends up reading like a smokescreen.

I'm wondering whether to just have the two stories running concurrently. The present day protag doesn't find out what happens - the story just cuts to the past, so the revelation is to the reader. If so, why bother with a present day story? And if THAT's not necessary, why not go straightaway with a forward-led narrative?

I have several drafts of one unworkable novel and one draft of another and don't want to fall at the same hurdle second time round before starting draft two of book 2.

I suppose this is why so many authors have more than one unpublished book in their drawers.

I'm wondering whether to just have the two stories running concurrently. The present day protag doesn't find out what happens - the story just cuts to the past, so the revelation is to the reader.

That's a really interesting and original idea. I suppose it depends on what kind of story it is, but the two in parallel might work brilliantly if the modern one is echoing the old one (ie we're all screaming at the protagonist not to make the mistakes of the past - and maybe she does, and maybe she doesn't...)
Also, if the reader is the one making the connection, it could be the modern story that casts light on the past and helps us understand it, instead of the more usual other way round. In a strange way it feels almost like a ghost story...
Or there's the 'point-zero' approach, as we see both stories heading for collision, and only then do you join them.

Lots of possibilities (says she, who doesn't have to write it). But I know what you mean about diaries, letters, etc. How dare all these other bastards get in first and write all the obvious things before we were even born?

Louise

The present day protag doesn't find out what happens - the story just cuts to the past, so the revelation is to the reader.

Well, anything goes. But I would say that my experience of parallel narratives (I've written - let me see - four, of which two have been published) is that the readers demand connections of plot between the two strands. You can tie up the two
(or more) strands with as many ideas, echoes, images, metaphors, places, people and more, but you have to allow for the fact that no reader will get as many of those as you do. And if you don't connect the two with plot, then an awful lot of readers, conditioned to expect everything in a novel to connect with everything else, will spend the entire novel thinking, 'Well, these are two interesting stories, but why the hell are they in the same book?' And since, in a parallel narrative novel, you're asking quite a lot of the reader - to put together the forward movement of a story which keeps pausing while the other one which they also have to put together cuts in, and simultaneously reading across those two forward movements to put together the links and connections - you'll always risk some readers not getting it, or not bothering. (This is a brief summary of many discussions I had with workshops, tutors, agent, editor, in the writing of TMOL...)

Hence the letters, diaries, historians: the past of the story needs to affect the present of the story in some way. Otherwise why are these two in the same book?

For different ways to do it, try some of the following:

Barry Unsworth/Stone Virgin
Stevie Davies/The Eyrie (Davies says, 'the past is made of paper'
Tobias Hill/The Love of Stones
A S Byatt/Possession
Sebastian Faulks/Birdsong (I gather, I haven't read it)
William Boyd/Restless
Peter Ackroyd/Chatterton
William Faulkner/Absalom (Only started this, it's astounding)

Emma

I have sheets of butchers' paper

Susannah, I use tracing paper, which came about accidentally but I have incorporated it now as part of my method. Different coloured pens too. The tracing paper, in theory, allows me to layer plot strands over one another. I also use different coloured index cards. And I write a chapter by chapter synopsis. I probably use every system there is in fact!

Oh and thanks for looking into my books!

Emma - I understand what you say is true of stories which are separated by a wide time gap (TMOL, Possession, Restless - I haven't read the others yet) as without knitting the plots together there's no evident point in putting them in the same book.

The plotting I'm grappling with is a slightly dfferent as itconcerns the very recent past of one character. Months rather than years. I'm questioning whether the other characters in her life need to find out what happened, or whether I can dovetail the stories - current and recent past without labouring the discovery i.e.whether it's possible (not sure it is) to merely present the events rather than have the girl's family find out what happened to her. There is unity of characters and pretty close unity of time - it's the question, in autumn will X find out what happened to Y in the summer? Even having to clarify the problem on this board helps. Some discovery is going to be necessary - I can feel that as I write. It's just that I find the mechanics of discovery never ring true to me. When I read back over key discovery scenes in draft one, I see someone marching through the scene wearing a sandwich board with the word PLOT on it, writ large with flashing arrows pointing to the word. I so so so don't want to treat the reader as an idiot. Or the characters. I feel uncomfortable pushing them round the page.

It may be that coming from character led short fiction, I haven't yet taken that leap of faith to allow the characters to carry a full length script and am doling out plots to them. And it shows.

Roger, the tracing paper is a lovely idea. I can see how that could be immensely useful. How to you separate it - one sheet per chara or per day/month?


Thanks for discussing this, everyone. It's clearing, gradually. Very helpful.

Susannah