Tidbits from CANSCAIP's Packaging Your Imagination 2014

There's nothing like a conference to inspire your writing! Last Saturday I attended the Packaging Your Imagination conference held by the Canadian Society for Authors, Illustrators and Performers. Not only did I get to see my super-amazing MiG Writer friend, Debbie Ridpath Ohi, I met lots of other aspiring writers, illustrators and reconnected with a writer/puppeteer I met last year.  I also got to soak in so much writerly wisdom it will take weeks for me to absorb it all. Some tidbits:




Details: How Little Things Bring Your Writing to Life
Erin Bow, author of Plain Kate and Sorrow's Knot reminded us: "Good details are the heart of good storytelling."

I loved all her strategies for using details to draw the reader's attention to what is important in the story. You can read about how she uses a ladder system to match the level of detail to the emotional intensity of a scene in an interview with Erin for the CANSCAIP blog.

After this session, I decided to add another level to my revision process!



Arc is a Four-Letter Word: Plot Structure for the Architecturally Challenged

Lesley Livingston, author of the Wondrous Strange series, the Never series, and the Starling saga provided another perspective on plotting and how it really all stems from character and setting.

"Make your setting a character. Use that to drive your story and your character's journey through your story."

She highly recommends drawing a map and finding interesting places in your story world to build into the plot.

This was a refreshing approach for many of us who feel overwhelmed by all the pointy triangles in traditional plotting diagrams.





Whose Voice Is It, Anyway?

According to Shelley Tanaka, long time fiction editor of Groundwood Books, one of the biggest distractions when reading children's book submissions is when the narrator steps out of the child's voice. An important question to ask is: "Would a child say or think this?"

She pointed out that adults are often more sentimental than children are and that's one way the adult perspective can intrude into the child's voice.

"Good writing is not random: It involves artistic decisions, big and small, and the decisions you make about voice may be the most important of all."


Lightning Rods, Agents & Book Deals: Building Your Personal Brand

Though I didn't get to attend this session with my writing buddy Debbie Ridpath Ohi, I heard it was very useful! You can catch some of the details on the CANSCAIP blog. Debbie is the illustrator of I'm Bored, Naked! and the author-illustrator of the forthcoming, Where Are My Books? She has also posted her take on the Packaging Your Imagination conference with lots of visuals.




Keynote: Confessions of a Word Nerd

It was so much fun to laugh along with Susin Nielsen, author of the forthcoming We Are All Made of Molecules as well as Word Nerd, Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom and The Reluctant Journal of Henry K. Larsen.

She talked about loving reading, emotional memories and perseverance.

"Everything we write, it only makes us better."

Plotting Tip: Simplify

Novel plots easily become complicated.  First there are all the cool elements that can make the story unique - special objects, amazing talents, surprise connections between characters, an unusual skill or friendship. Then there are the many obstacles needed to create a compelling story: all the threats, break ups with friends, red herrings, things that go missing, thieves or liars -- the list is endless. The trouble is, the more stuff that goes into the novel plot, the more difficult it can be to revise.

I've learned this the hard way.

So my plotting tip for today is to keep the basic plot as simple as possible. It's possible to create a simple storyline but still make the story unique.

Some strategies for keeping it simple:

Keep your character's goal in mind at all times. For my current project, I wrote my main character's wants on an index card and stuck it up by my computer so it's always there to help focus my ideas.

Check to see if obstacles or cool elements fit with the story by asking why. Sometimes I hang onto an obstacle or cool element because I think it makes a story unique, but then struggle to "make it fit" when probably what I should be doing is saving it for another story.

Think about the ending and how it fits with the beginning before plotting out the middle. Once you know where the story is going and what makes sense, then you can figure out how to get there. I find it helpful to work backwards and think about what needs to happen in earlier chapters to set up the ending.

What's your best tip for keeping your plot manageable?

The Other Approach to Plotting a Story

This week, Marcia Hoehne posted some interesting tips on plotting  (To Plot or Not) based on her reading of James Scott Bell. She discusses how it's important to figure out what works for you.

Now that I've made it to Novel #4, I'm finally starting to get a kind of system for plotting. I've always tried to make some kind of outline or summary first. I think it works for me. But it occurs to me that I've never really tried the other approach - the "fly by the seat of your pants" approach.

I have to confess, the whole idea of trying to sustain a story without any kind of outline scares me a little. But I also wonder if I can do it. Then I realized I kind of already am.

As a "warm up" to get myself in a writing mood, I started with just writing whatever comes into my head. But it's turning out to be another story. I have no plot chart, no character chart, no nothing except whatever pops into my head at the moment. And the ideas I record in my notebook as they bubble up at odd moments. I have no idea if it will develop into another novel, but I'm having a lot of fun with it.

Do you outline or not? Have you ever taken a serious stab at using the other approach? 

Plotting (Part 2): Developing an Outline and Synopsis

After I've spent some time collecting ideas for a novel, my next big step is to organize them into an outline. The more novels I write, the more I learn about my writing process. I've learned that I need an outline to keep me on track. The more thinking I can do up front, the better the novel flows when I'm writing. And the easier it is to revise the novel later.

How do I make my outline? I've tried various methods, including The Snowflake method and the Nine-Step method. For my newest project, I'm following the structure I've read about in Blake Snyder's Save the Cat. Here's what I've created:

Visual Storyboard. Using a piece of cardboard and my ideas on sticky notes (or pieces of paper with sticky tack), I can see the general structure for my novel.

Summary of Plot Elements. I made a simple 3-column table in a word document with the headings: Plot Element, Example, My Story.

Plot elements are things like: Opening Image, Thematic Statement, Set Up, Catalyst, Debate, Break into Act II, etc. They're all listed on Blake Synder's beat sheet.

Example helps me remember what I'm trying to do with each plot element. The examples came from Laura Pauling's excellent plot analysis of the movie How to Train Your Dragon. If you want to learn more about plot structure, I highly recommend you read Laura's plotting posts.

My Story is for the events and ideas I'm developing. As I try to figure out how my ideas related to each plot element, I discover how I want to start and end the story, where I have missing pieces, and roughly where key events will go. I don't spell everything out. For example, I have vague sentences like: They do some wilderness stuff, finding water, building a fire, etc. This leaves me with room to discover while I'm writing. At the same time, I have enough direction so that I'll have a coherent story.

Having used several different methods for outlining, I like the "Save the Cat" method the best. Once I figured out all the plot elements, I had everything I needed to write a story synopsis.

Synopsis. This is a key part of my planning process. It gives me a sense of the whole story and motivates me to get writing! I also use it to create my one-sentence pitch and, later, my query letter. When I copy the My Story column from my table as text only, I have the bare bones of the synopsis already done. I just have to make it sound a little better.

Plotting (Part 1): The Early Stages

A while ago, one of my blog followers, Susanna Leonard Hill, asked about how I plot my novels. That’s an interesting question, because I feel like I still have a lot to learn about plotting. It’s definitely not my strength. Sometimes, I think my writing is so much better than any of my plots (except maybe for my most recent story). But I’ll share some of my thoughts on what I've learned so far.

In the early stages, once my mind has been consumed by an exciting idea, there I are few things I do to work on developing a plot:

List possible situations or events. Basically, I just brainstorm different things that could happen in the story and record them in random order. 

Write a one-sentence summary.  I find this really helps to focus my thinking on what the main problem will be in the story. I don't always stick to this summary, and often find I need to re-write after the first draft, but at least it gives me a starting point. As well as some confidence, if I think it sounds good.

Describe the characters. I don't usually do a lot of in depth thinking about my characters. I like to find out more about them as they react to things that happen in the story. But I do like to have an idea of what their role will be in the story, their strengths and weaknesses, and their relationships to other people in the story. I also really need to know their names. For some reason, that tells me something about their personalities.

Focus on the main character. I spend more time thinking about the main character than any of the others. After reading about plot from The Plot Whisperer and Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, I see how essential it is to make the main character's goal something really important to them. This needs to come through in the writing early in the story. So, I spend a lot of time thinking about what my main character wants and how to bring that out in the story.

Talk to my kids about my ideas. Since I'm always trying to write stories that my kids will want to read, I find it helpful to get their take on my great idea. Hopefully they don't say, "That's lame." If they do, they often make suggestions that turn out to be helpful in shaping the direction of the story.

What things do you do in the process of developing a plot?