The Last Draft

by Sandra Scofield

  The only real rule in writing a novel is to keep the reader engaged.

  EXERCISES

  Choose a novel that uses the point of view you are using. Study the first chapter, looking at how that point of view is established, and how it works. Consider another way the story could have been told. (Could something be told that can’t in the present perspective? What would be lost?)

  The more novels you study, the more comfortable you will be in making choices about your own writing.

  Describe your point of view in these terms:

  Whose consciousness are we in? Are the thoughts of the character revealed as they are being thought by the character? Or are they “observed” by the narration?

  How close are we to the story? Did it take place a long time ago? Is it taking place “as we read it”? Is there a tone of looking back, or looking on?

  Does the narration comment on the action, other than what the character is thinking?

  2. Describe the structure of your novel.

  Plot is the arrangement of events in a logical pattern that shapes the events of a story. It is usually thought of as having a “mainline” stream of events (the plot) and secondary lines (subplots).

  Let’s clarify what the difference is between a plot and a subplot. The plot is the stream of action we care most about, the one with the question that must be answered. It is about the protagonist. If that’s all you have, you have a very thin novel. You need subplots to complement and complicate the plot and to make the story world rich and intriguing.

  Subplots are plots of their own—each one also has a question to answer, and a sequence of actions leading to some kind of satisfaction of the question. It’s possible to have a protagonist-centered subplot (something else going on), but often they center around other characters. Subplots don’t matter as much as the plot; they don’t take up as much space on the page; they aren’t as complicated—but you need them. In fact, subplots should complicate the main plot, feed it, intersect with it, and be resolved in a way that also resolves aspects of the main story. A subplot usually starts later than the main plot, but often ends at about the same time, though it can be resolved sooner. The more your multiple resolutions relate to one another, though, the better.

  Some subplots may involve people and questions not related to the main plot. They keep the novel from moving like a runaway train. They make the protagonist’s life more “real.” They provide sidebar information, action, and relationships. You don’t want them to be neat lines of action that could be deleted without affecting the main story, however. Plot and subplot have to intersect in some ways, if only by the protagonist being in both. I think it’s easy to grasp the idea of subplots if you think of TV shows that switch around among characters and events. So let’s take Blue Bloods, with Tom Selleck as Frank Reagan, New York City’s police commissioner. He always has some kind of ethical issue he has to work out (subplot). Two of his sons are cops and his daughter is a prosecutor. Each of them always has a story, too, and one has to deal with the primary question of the episode—how will they catch the criminal? (plot)—while the other two deal with problems that may be related to the main story or may be separate, less complicated concerns (subplots). The whole family comes together for dinner near the end of the show, and much of what has happened is hashed out. This all sounds simplistic, and it is, because it’s a formula. In a novel, you want to create your own formula, and you have time to make it resonate more deeply, and to make the complications take longer to be resolved. But the idea of Plot A going on, while B, C, and D intersect or parallel it, is the most familiar recipe for story we have in commercial novels. Good novels don’t put it on a plate so simply, of course. But if you are having problems with your plot, try reducing the elements as much as possible and then building on the simple structure. I have students invent stories like these in short workshop sessions and toss them out to one another like balls on the playground.

  The best way to keep control of your subplots is to make lists of the steps in each one—a list of scenes that belong to that line of the story. When does it start? When does it end? How does it intersect, shadow, or illuminate the main plotline? Do the same work for your subplots that you do for your central plotline: Assess their aboutness (in relation to the main story, of course). Create sequences that have rising action, moments of pressure and release, and so on.

  I’m not going to discuss craft issues associated with multiple-main-plotline novels, except to say that they are hard to control. Approaches that alternate voices or plots can be annoying instead of intriguing. The connections can be too arbitrary. Yet these multiple-plotline novels are popular. If your idea is to write a book that is set in different eras, or concerns people in entirely different settings, I assume you have a very good idea that demands the parallel structure. I advise you to study novels you admire that use the structure you want to use. Describe the ways that lines of action and characters are connected and intersected; the ways that transitions are made; and, most of all, the themes that tie the plotlines together. You will need to think about all the issues I raise for each thread of the story and for the overall story. I realize that some very good writers use the multiple-story model successfully. Try to figure out why their books work. What you don’t want to write is a book in which a reader gets bored with Plot B and skips ahead to see what’s happening with the character she cares about in Plot A.

  Now we can talk about how you organize plot, and how you organize the novel that develops it. Think of it as what you have in your head to guide you, and then how you put it on the pages.

  ORGANIZING A STORY

  The most common way to organize a story is chronologically. You start the story and continue until you reach the end. I venture to say that’s the default for most apprentice writers. Basically, we expect stories to be told like that, from start to finish. The problem with this construct is that the story can be too loose. Find a way to frame the chronology. Give it an arrow to pull the reader through.

  There are other ways to see a story. Perhaps your story takes place on two continents, and that gives you a natural organizer. Or the story covers a season (Summer of My German Soldier), a lifetime (The World According to Garp), or years of adolescence (The Catcher in the Rye). It could be an adventure—going out and making it back home, or not (The Road). Many stories are sagas (Cold Mountain) or epics (American Pastoral) that reflect the larger story of a time in history, or journeys that involve dramatic challenges (The Bean Trees), or an odyssey, like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.

  A story could take place while a house is being built or a sick person is dying (Benediction; Evening). Organizers of time are probably the most common ways to get a handle on plot, but they certainly are not the only ones.

  In The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler used the once-a-month meetings of five women and the themes of Austen’s novels to create a shape for the book. Amy Tan used the regular meetings of Chinese women to play mahjong as a way to tell their stories in The Joy Luck Club. Annie Proulx used maritime themes to emphasize the role of landscape in The Shipping News. The Grapes of Wrath is a journey. The Stranger is a man preparing to die. Many novels are basically fictional biographies (Madame Bovary; Martin Eden; Angle of Repose).

  Many of my students want to start with a prologue. Sometimes I am able to help them instead develop a frame for the novel, opening it with a character who is old and looking back or young and looking forward. Truthfully, though, I discourage this approach because it is so hard to avoid clichés and confusion.

  Once you start looking for organizers you will recognize them in everything you read. What you want to do is stand back from your own manuscript and “see it whole” as a shape or a theme, a reduction like the aboutness statement you worked on earlier. You are looking for a canopy, or perhaps a spine, something that feels complete as a unit.

  It doesn’t have to
be complicated to be useful. When I wrote Opal on Dry Ground, about a mother who thinks it’s her job to “save” her divorced daughters from their unhappiness, my organizer was very simple: The girls move in. The girls move out. The story is what happens in between, to nudge them along. In the first third of the book I was dealing with the women’s unhappy stasis and the ways they kidded themselves about how they were living; then the novel shifted in the direction of its ending, as their lives began to open to new experiences and people and, inevitably, their independence.

  In Plain Seeing, I covered a lot of years, but I saw them in blocks. The novel has two parts. The first is the story of Laura, the mother, from adolescence to her pregnancy with her daughter; the second is the story of her daughter, from her adolescence to her divorce and separation from her daughter. Just to liven that up a little (for me, as I was writing), I saw the mother’s story as either what really happened to her, which her daughter can never know, or what the daughter invented because she had to have a story. Walking Dunes takes place over a school year and follows David’s development into a young man, challenge by challenge, starting with a tennis game. Beyond Deserving is chronological, taking place over the summer of the Fisher boys’ birthdays and their parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.

  To get this concept, just talk through novel after novel to yourself or with a friend. The light will come on. Look for the ways that chronology is handled; the themes that act as glue; the myths and cultural motifs that appear.

  ORGANIZING A BOOK

  The second organizer that I am talking about is how you construct your book as something that has a shape and parts.

  Is it composed primarily of scenes, or does it have a lot of narrative summary in it? Many popular novels open each new chapter with a new scene that follows from the chapter before. The chapter is usually not a single scene, but a sequence of scenes. It leaves the story at a new place at the chapter end, and—voilà!—the next chapter picks it up with a new scene, perhaps opening with a bit of summary or commentary or description.

  Others vary the chapter openings (my preference): sometimes a scene, sometimes some backstory, sometimes a description, or a summary that bridges time, and so on. Look over some novels and think of what you prefer, what draws you in to chapters. And think about what your idea of a chapter is.

  One of your decisions is whether you want to end a chapter in a way that leaves the reader wondering what’s coming next, or if you want to round off an event so that it is now part of the story history and you can move to something new. Probably you should vary endings. Obviously, how you end a chapter is important, because you establish an expectation and pattern in the reader’s mind. Readers are more likely to set the book down at the end of a chapter (as opposed to stopping in the middle), and they can rightly expect either to wonder about the coming story or to feel satisfaction about something that just got settled. I can’t see how anything can be right or wrong here, except that you want to establish a rhythm and expectation in the reader. For this same reason, I recommend your chapters be of similar lengths.

  How many chapters should there be? I spent an hour in a bookstore with this question in mind, and I was surprised to see that every book I looked at had from thirty to forty-five chapters. It didn’t even seem to matter whether the book was long or short, because the chapters were relatively long and short as well. I don’t think that constitutes a rule, but it gives you a start in thinking about your structure. Note, too, that authors sometimes break the novel into parts, calling them Part One, Part Two, etc., or Book One, Book Two. Sometimes the sections are titled: Eva’s Book, Miranda’s Book. Or they might be titled with dates, like Winter 1970. If the author uses multiple viewpoints, she might alternate them with chapter breaks, or use sections within the chapters. One thing I’d be careful about, though, is titling chapters or sections with dates, places, or people’s names, without carefully considering how the text itself moves the reader to a new situation. Big shifts in context can be disorienting to the reader, and you want to create a transition that keeps the reader engaged and situated without having to glance back at the chapter title.

  When I wrote my second novel I decided to be deliberate about how I would use chapters, and I considered my POV carefully. I ended up with some alternation of viewpoint, and I worked a long time to develop a timeline or “beat sheet” that gave me an outline of event steps through the story. Then I got a pack of five-by-seven-inch index cards, green and pink ones, and began dividing the story into chapters, one to a card. I gave Katie the green and Ursula the pink, so I could easily see the balance of my alternating POV. I worked on this for weeks, and I loved the ease with which I could switch things around, look back and forth, add notes, and lay out sequences. Once I had settled on chapters, I took each large card and a stack of smaller cards, wrote out scene summaries to capture the sequences within each chapter, and paper-clipped them together.

  Once I was ready to rewrite, I worked from one card to the next. If, as I wrote, I realized I should have laid some groundwork earlier, I went back to a card and made a note in colored ink. Once I had a complete manuscript, I could fuss with the additional adjustments I had identified. After this experience I have used some version of the approach with every book, except with Walking Dunes, where I wrote long scenarios of sections before I began writing them. You’ll see, in later exercises, the effect this has had on my view of the revision process. I have to say that I’ve never seen a way to approximate this process on the computer. The ease of the shuffle and the physical handling of the cards are integral to the process. I did add a wrinkle. Someone gave me some large sheets of cardstock paper and I liked laying my novel out on those, working from my cards to transpose major plot points. Then I could draw loops and lines and arrows and whatever else helped me see my connections and transitions in the plot. I could add questions and notes right on the large sheet, keeping the picture of the whole novel in front of me. I could put chapters across the top of the sheets, like headings, and list plot points beneath them, creating a visual map that I could take in with a single look. (It’s important to remember, always, as you work with the bits and pieces of the manuscript, that you are constructing one thing: the novel.) Jane Smiley has written that she also makes charts to manage the many characters and events in her big novels. She uses intersecting columns.

  I always tell writers to bring index cards to my workshops, and without any direction at all about how to use them, I notice that by the end of the second day they already have started stacks.

  —

  THERE’S ANOTHER, ENTIRELY different way to think about laying out and examining your novel’s structure, and it is visual. Randy Ingermanson lays out a strategy he calls The Snowflake Method (http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com) that is a cohesive, practical design strategy. Likewise, I can imagine organizing a story as a tree with a trunk and several branches; a house of rooms; overlapping circles. Or you could give each viewpoint character a Lego color, and stack Lego bricks in a pleasing design, then see what happens when you transfer that to telling “Blue’s” story and “Green’s” story. You could have a colored Lego brick for each chapter, and stack them up to see your distribution. Braiding is a popular concept for planning, too; it’s a variation on the alternating chapters idea, but it emphasizes the connections and interface of characters, and for that I think it is a useful idea. Timelines are a great place to start. For me, index cards have remained supreme: You can pick different colors for strands of the story; it’s easy to move them around and test out organizational ideas; you can transfer summaries to large charts; and then you can make a neat little pile and get to work. Ultimately, of course, you have to move from the structure of your plan to the structure of your book.

  Another approach to structure is to begin with three sentences and then expand them:

  Opal’s divorced daughters move in with her.

  Opal tries to motiv
ate them, but they stumble on their own new life turns.

  Clancy has a baby; Joy moves to another state.

  Those three statements encapsulate a novel, but also suggest the direction of events that it takes to develop the plot.

  I’ve already talked a lot about writing sequences as links from event to event. You can see that if you start with a three-sentence summary, you can take each sentence and write such a sequence to get the characters from one step to the next.

  Christopher sets out to solve the murder of a dog.

  He discovers his mother is still alive and goes to look for her.

  He ends up with two parents and two homes.

  You may have done something like this in your original planning; now you can see if your initial idea provided a workable through line for the draft. Now is the time to amend it, or start from scratch and use the three-sentence summary to assess the sequence and proportions of your chapters.

  Breaks

  How long is your novel? A big novel has to have a density that a shorter novel may not have. It has to engage the reader intellectually and emotionally enough to keep her reading, whereas a shorter novel may rely on plot progression to pull the reader along. Breaks are especially significant in long works. (If you want to see how a good writer manages a big plot with many characters, read a Richard Russo novel. He moves around in point of view, in a tumble of cross-purposes and alliances. His scenes are often riotous and always fully developed. You don’t so much read as go along for the ride. I recommend an old novel, Nobody’s Fool (1994), followed immediately by its sequel, Everybody’s Fool (2016). (Maybe watch the movie of the first one in between!)