Last post, I floated the idea of writing Grave Oversight 2 as an antidote to my creative malaise.
The following day, I dusted off John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story, my favorite dense, demanding craft book. I came to it after perhaps 18 years of being a published writer and absolutely do not recommend it as a starting point in a writing journey, but if you feel like you haven’t learned anything new in years and you yearn to construct a story from the guts outward, it’s worth working through page by page.
PLEASE NOTE: I am not mindlessly devoted to this or any other writing methodology. Even Truby includes examples of “master storytelling” that deviate from his guidelines, and it’s fine! These are things to think about, not edicts, as is the case for all writing guidance.
I started knowing only two plot points: the first and the last. By the time I got to Chapter 8, when Truby’s attention first turns specifically to plot, I had already filled in most of the story events based on the necessities of premise, weakness and need, desire, character web, character change, and moral choice/theme that took up the first more-than-half of the book. When I reached the designated plotting area, I was not scrambling for things for my characters to do but rather figuring out how the things they must do relate to one another when characters are on seemingly different paths.
Figuring things out is the only activity that produces enough dopamine for me to feel it. If I could inject scene weaving directly into my veins, I’d be an effervescent ray of sunshine rather than a lich.
Before I got into the detailed scene outline, I read Grave Oversight to refresh my memory about a story I haven’t glanced at in 3 years. Have to get names, dates, and descriptions right. See if there are any recyclable quotes. Make sure I’m not currently contradicting any overarching plot I set up. (Though so few people read that book, I could revise it into compliance with Book 2 and no one would know or care.)
It was surprisingly okay? It was written under very different circumstances: starting as a commission, rising from those ashes as an opportunistic serial, and only then getting molded into book form. It was the closest I’ve gotten to pantsing since my content mill days, but it had the benefit of decades of experience and had good bones despite the lack of careful planning. Apart from 2 stealth typos and some clarity nitpicks (e.g., should have specified which “he” I was referring to when there were multiple options), I didn’t feel a need to change anything substantial. I’d actually done a better job with the overarching plot than I expected (very exciting to come across a throwaway line that’s actually the spine of the new story) and can add that to my Book 2 plans rather than diminishing.
(The biggest, most hilarious flaw of GO1 was that I had a preview chapter of the fantasy romance in the back that promised “coming in 2022.” What a bright-eyed optimist I was! Needless to say, that will be getting replaced with a teaser for GO2 in the update.)
Fortified with all the notes I needed and my stack of single-sentence plot point notecards organized so 3 lines of action fill in each other’s lulls and converge at the same crisis point, I’m now ready to tackle outlining the scenes as mini stories to see how this morbid beast holds together as it grows.
It’s not a book yet, but it’s a lot more progress toward that end in 3 weeks than I’ve been able to claim in years, which is a significant improvement over the other still not a book yet.