This is just following on from the re-working one strand thread. I just realised I don't really know what a strand is. What are examples of strands from the novels you've written/are writing?

Erm, that's a good question! I thought of it as a sub-plot, only in a themey sort of way. A sort of on-going theme or story or event? Which is woven amongst the main events of the story and keeps reappearing?
Hmm.
Susiex

Each character has their own strand in a story, which is woven into the main plot, or forms a subplot to pad out the main plot. Also some plot devices may have their own strands. Continuity is the important point, to avoid coincidence of someone just happening to be in the right place at the right time.
Thinking about a crime novel I'm reading at the moment, the author needs to have a defensive weapon to hand in the final denoument, so that has to be set up early in the narrative, ie, the MC's cutting lawns, his mower breaks, so he takes the blade out and takes it into the house to be sharpened later. 2 weeks later and towards the end of the novel, it's still there when the baddie comes round.


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oops, ...avoid coincidence of someone or something...

woven amongst the main events of the story and keeps reappearing

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Sorry. ww blip.

I use the word a lot, but I'm not sure how I'd define it...

Yes, a sub-plot or something that has its own coherence (not just a couple of characters who pop up now and again).

In my stuff it's usually one narrator's sections in a multi-narrator novel. Sometimes they have events in common with other narrators's strands, but sometimes not.

But also perhaps something like the series of STephen's nightmares at the end of each chapter of TMOL. They aren't connected in a plot way, just little vignettes, and they're not strictly Stephen's voice - they're third-person narrated in present tense, whereas Stephen's strand proper is first-person-past. So in a way they're a narrative strand of their own. Indeed, I wrote them all in a weekend at the end of the first draft - it made it much easier to keep the tone and voice consistent, and to experience them as a strand, not just a bit chucked in every now and again.

Emma

woven amongst the main events of the story and keeps reappearing

Yup.
Another one from the crime novel is a character who always walks in unnannounced. It's part of his characterisation (ie, an arrogant sod) but it's used to very good effect in the denoument.

woven amongst the main events of the story and keeps reappearing

Agreed. It needs to be a thread that persists throughout a good part of the story. Perhaps the test of a 'strand' might be that, if as an exercise you isolated all of the text of the thread's appearances from the main story, the separated thread (strand) could stand on its own as a coherent narrative - even if not a very satisfying one.

Also, it must exhibit continuity, rather than being disconnected episodes or diversions from the main narrative.

That's my take on it.

Chris

I wouldn't limit it to a sub-plot. I'd call it joining the dots. Lining up your characters and the main plot devices and making sure the continuity is correct, so there's no-one just popping up, and there are no objects that 'just happen to be there'.

A classic mistake I see in synopses are antagonists that pop-up in the closing chapters and then have to explain their plans, backstory, & motivations because it hasn't been set up in the rest of the novel.

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...or the awful: based purely on a gut feeling, character A goes to Character B's house/shed/car and finds incriminating evidence. *shudder*

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Another mistake is creating new characters as & when the writer needs them, rather than loooking back through the narrative to see if you can re-use someone that's already been introduced to the reader.

Hmm. Well, I have an omniscient narrator, but I have three main characters and the book moves between them. There is only one story but all 3 work together in the story: one is very knowledgeable and does all the elements of the plot that involve brain work, two is sporty and does the action, and three is intuitive and her sections are a bit, I don't know, mystical. Is each character then a strand? There are other characters too, but those are the POV ones.

Leila, by strand I mean anything - a sub plot or a character, or a relationship between characters - which runs like a thread through the book. So if you change one section it has a knock on effect right through the novel. I've been changing one character's attitude to another and it's amazing how many tiny moments crop up which don't work once the changes are made. It's the quality of needing to be reworked throughout the novel, rather than just changing one scene or two, that makes it a strand, IMO. But there may be lots more definitions.

Another one from the crime novel is a character who always walks in unnannounced. It's part of his characterisation (ie, an arrogant sod) but it's used to very good effect in the denoument.

Ooh, intriguing. Can you give an example, Naomi?

Hmm, still all a bit unclear! Never mind, I'm sure I'll work it out eventually.

So, if it helps, I'd say the strands in Ways to Live Forever are:

Sam's list of things to do and how he does them
Sam's list of questions to answer and how he answers them
Sam's relationship with his father and his father's understanding of Sam's illness
Ditto his mother
Ditto his sister
The progression of Sam's illness
The Felix storyline
Sam's feelings towards and understanding of his illness and impending death

Of course, all those things are related to each other, but all the time they are running alongside each other - so when something happens to Sam I need to think 'how does this affect X, or Y?' And some strands are quite literally added or removed wholesale as I write - I added the list of things to do about a month into the writing process. And I can remember the moment when I thought "he can have a friend!" and trying to work out how that story would fit in with the existing time line.

Pretty much every scene in the book is doing something to progress one or more of those strands though. If it wasn't, it got cut.

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'Season of Secrets' was very consciously built around

Molly's relationship with the Green Man
Molly's relationship with her father
Molly's grief and attendant happiness
The turn of the seasons

There are other strands, such as the school story and her sister's story, but they all stem from those four different but linked plot strands.

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I'd say the important strands in the first Bathsheba book are:

Bathsheba's relationship with her father
Bathsheba's relationship with Keisha (and to a lesser extent Natasha)
Bathsheba's understanding of and relationship with the Bathsheba of her mother's books
Bathsheba's relationship with her mother
The unfolding events of her mother's film deal and attendant moments of comedy/crisis/dramatic reveals
Bathsheba's growing sense of self and her attempts to deal with (or not deal with) her loneliness and insecurity
Bathsheba's dramatic ambitions

So, some of those threads are critical to the book and some could be missed out or altered - if your editor didn't want Bathsheba to be an actress, for example, you could make her pony-mad instead. And you could probably make a coherent book without Keisha, although it wouldn't be as good. But the book would collapse without Bathsheba's insecurity and loneliness.

And equally, you could take one thread - her relationship with Natasha, say, and build on it - make Natasha more important, add more scenes with the two of them etc. And this would affect the other threads - perhaps Bathsheba's mother would be less important if Natasha was more so. Similarly, if your editor said "I hate the Avocado character, can we cut her", you would need to find some way of giving Bathsheba the learning that Avocado gives her to the insecurity thread and the comedy/humiliation that Avocado gives to the film deal thread.

In a recent crit I did on a thriller synopsis I queried the writer's decision to kill off one of the characters early - just to make the point that the bad guys were capable of murdering anyone in their way (a point that was repeated several times elsewhere). That character proved to be an important, and missing, strand in the main plot, and the writer was having to use other, minor character in his place, which raised all sorts of unnecessary questions about how they knew such-and-such, what were their motives, how come other characters didn't know what they were up to, etc.
Reinstating this character (this strand) - who was investigating the mc before being pulled off the case by his boss, had an already established grudge against the mc which meant he would be the sort to carry on the investigation in private despite the risks to himself and away from the moles in the company - filled a lot of holes in the second half of the mss.