Editing Continued – Story Mapping

In the previously mentioned workshop, I also learn more about plotting and building up suspense to scenes. I think I knew enough about this from all the books I have devoured over the years and of course, TV shows and movies that I instinctively got the basics right, but referring back to the house building metaphor, it was like a house being built by a competent carpenter with no experience. Everything will more or less function as it is supposed to. The roof will keep the rain out. The walls will keep critters out and the door will let people in. However, there will also be a lot of things to overlook and other things to shake your head at. That was my story. Now, I had intended to proceed with editing the whole thing with the current methods before I went back and mapped the story to fix all this stuff, but then I hit that chapter. The crossroads chapter. I was stuck. I felt like I could just keep going and accept that it was an ugly chapter, but I couldn’t go forward knowing it was there like a big hole in the floor of my house to be tipped toed around each time I walked through. I decided to start at the beginning and do some story mapping. Maybe that would help.

            Wow! What an amazing exercise! At first it felt like I was just rewriting the same events I already summarized -  who did what when – like a post-writing outline only on index cards. I was supposed to be looking for scenes and at incidents leading up to scenes. This is how you build tension. It wasn’t really working. Most events went unlabeled/categorized until I had a stack of events with no meaning. Then I started assigning these events to my three main characters. This lead to me ask why the event was important to that character. Sometimes I would write out 2-3 cards for the same event and put one in each characters pile because it was important to each of them for a different reason. Soon I had journey tracks, or at least that is what I call them. Each character has their own journey to make independent of the main story line and this is what I found myself defining and again, Wow!

Have you ever had those moments when you find you have done something that is completely amazing and you are generally shocked that you were able to do that? I have, but usually in art work not writing. (Don’t worry, I won’t get a big head thinking I am brilliant or anything. I’m too insecure for that. Even now, I am afraid to tell you all that I had a moment of brilliance for fear that you will find out someday that what I think is brilliant is just mediocre. Yeah, that’s the way things work inside my head. Sad, I know. Sorry.) Anyway, I had been writing with my attention focused on my POV character, but unconsciously I had written great journey tracks for my two other characters. For example, one of them wants to be the hero so desperately, but is never in the right place at the right time. I called that the ‘not quite the hero’ track. Another character has been a pawn her whole life and just wants to stand on her own, but every time she tries, she is knocked down. She starts to depend on all these crutches to get her independence, but someday, not in this book, she will have let go of those crutches and stand completely on her own. These journey tracks were not consciously planned and are that much amazing because of it.

So when I arrived at the crossroads chapter, I had a much better idea of what was to happen because I knew my characters better…where they were coming from…what they wanted. So I had to change the tone of the whole chapter from discussion to an actual argument. Well, this didn’t make rewriting/editing the chapter any easier since I hate arguing and hate it when my characters argue, but at least I had a goal in mind.

But I found that even though I had accomplished quite a bit with the story mapping, I had completely set aside the idea of scenes and incidents. That discovery process was almost as much fun as the journey tracks, but enough for today. Until next blog…