writing the heart of your story (23 page)

A trip taken without enough advanced preparation foments too much undue stress—stress that could have been avoided if some time had been taken to plan it out better. Travelers embarking on such an unclear journey face one unexpected problem after another as they try to get to where they wanted to go. The journey becomes a big hassle and not a whole lot of fun. I don’t want to be stressed out when I’m taking my coveted vacation. I aim to relax and have fun. What about you?

Planning Does Leave Room for Spontaneity

If you want to write a novel that is going to “visit” certain “places” and eventually gets to a final destination, you’re going to have more success and less stress if you take some time (days, weeks) to plan it out in advance. I don’t like to use the word plot because it implies putting a novel together is all about plot, and it’s not. You can use the word if you like; I’m not stopping you.

I would like you to imagine for a moment that this journey you want to take, which you hope will be memorable and wonderful—a journey of the heart—is like a well-planned trip. If you work out the major details, such as itinerary and flights and sights you want to see, you can still leave plenty of room for variation and exploration.

When my husband and I went to London a few years ago for three weeks, we had a lot of places we wanted to see around the country. But we wanted to be spontaneous too, so we booked a flat in London for the first week, to get us there. We knew a week would give us time to see all the museums and sights on our list. Once we were there, we kicked around ideas of where to go next, but before the week was out, we had the next week sketched in. We decided to head over to Bath (a city I love but one Lee had never been to) for a few days. Once there, we explored the surrounding region, then booked a room in an inn up in York and spent most of a week there. We had hoped to get to many other places, but we found there wasn’t enough time to thoroughly enjoy our trip if we just whizzed through each town without spending some time in each place. We decided those other destinations would have to be visited during another trip to England. (And yes, we took our little garden gnome with us so we could give him a vacation too and take photos of him—just like in
Amélie
.)

Planning Keeps You (Mostly) on Course

Sometimes when we write a novel—whether we’re winging it off the top of our heads or following an outline—we tend to get distracted and veer off in another direction. Our characters like to take over and insist on doing things we didn’t plan. Sometimes that works great—it’s often your intuition and creativity leading you in a better direction than the one you first had. Much like arriving in a town you thought you’d stay in for days, but when you take a side trip you find this new town an even better place to visit, so you change your reservations and head out.

But when you have a solid framework for your novel, knowing your objectives, goals, themes, plot and character arcs (don’t get me started again on the arc thing), you won’t veer far off course. In fact, if you do start wandering down a dark alley, you’ll stop and go back because you know right away it’s not fitting in with the kind of trip you had in mind. On the other hand, if you’re just writing “by the seat of your pants,” and you veer off in some odd direction (which will happen most of the time you’re writing because you really have no idea where you want to go or what you want to do at all on this trip other than “have fun” or “experience life” or something vague like that), your trip is going to be a real mess and a disappointment (to you and everyone else you’ve dragged along with you) .

Enough said? I don’t want to be so brash as to say that a lot of writers don’t plan their books ahead because they’re lazy or they’re afraid planning will take away from the joy of being spontaneously creative. I can’t speak to the first part of that statement; only you know why you won’t take the time to plan your novel in advance. But I can speak to the second part, as I hope I’ve conveyed above. You don’t squelch your creativity by constructing a detailed framework in which to tell your story. You actually set up a place for your creativity to explode in greatness. A piano has only eighty-eight keys—that’s the framework in which a composer has to create a piano piece. And yet untold numbers of amazing musical compositions have been written within that framework.

Winging It with a Prayer

I will simply summarize by saying I really don’t believe you can write a great novel by winging it. I know I probably offended a bunch of you seat-of-the-pants writers out there, but I have to say this. Maybe you have a gift and can throw things out from the top of your head and they’ll land in perfect positioning in your novel. No? The answer I usually get from “pantsers” is that they have to spend months rewriting, revising, reworking again and again until some beauty comes from the ashes.

I mentioned this in the beginning of this book—how many authors will throw out draft after draft until they figure out their story. A lot of famous authors like Stephen King will swear that all first drafts are terrible. King would say this, because he’s not a plotter. But who I am to argue with any method Stephen King touts? And it’s safe to assume he’s written enough novels that he has basic structure ingrained in his brain and does much of that planning automatically.

Still, I am going to go against the grain here and beg to differ and offer you another way. And really, it’s fine if you disagree with me. I would just like to encourage you to consider it.

The main reason I advocate serious planning before writing a novel is for efficiency of time. Frankly, I don’t have months to waste rewriting and rewriting. I have way too many things to do in my life, and I usually have two novels I want to write a year (while working full-time as a copyeditor and writing coach), so I don’t have time to mess around with going from really raw material to polish. I truly believe you can write a really good first draft of your entire novel that will only require a tiny bit of reworking or polishing when done.

I’m a bit like Dean Koontz, who revises and edits as he goes along so that when he finishes his last chapter, he’s pretty much done. I’m that way with all my novels. I almost never rewrite, delete or add a scene, or do much other than copyedit and proofread. On occasion my test readers will point out some dufus plot hole I missed or note a passage that needs work and I’ll attend to those. But when I’m done writing my novel in two, three, four months, and I write “the end,” I pretty much mean “the end.” I’m done.

I’m No One Special

You may think I’m unusual and you could never do that. But I disagree. I think a lot of writers shy away from putting in the work needed before starting a novel. But again, I’m looking at the big picture—the amount of time that you’re going to put into your novel from start to polished finish. So think about it—you can spend a few weeks really plotting out your novel, developing rich characters, honing your themes, motifs, and heart of the story before you jump in and write. Or you can spend many months agonizing over numerous rewrites in a cloud of confusion.

Personally, I’d rather work out all the rough spots and challenging aspects first so they don’t get in the way. So I can enjoy writing and know the story is working already as I put the words down. Folks, I just don’t have time to waste, nor do I want to subject myself to that kind of frustrating, disappointing, depressing method of writing. I am sure I would just quit writing with that kind of grief. I’m not a masochist, although I suspect some writers are. I would think most writers would feel the same way I do, though. It’s no fun winging it with a prayer that your book might actually hold together when you’re done.

Don’t Knock It if You Haven’t Tried It

If your time is valuable and you’d like to save a few months of your time for other things, like being with your family (remember them?), maybe you’ll reconsider and change your attitude about planning your book in advance. I read how Toni Morrison says that by the time she sits at her computer to write, she’s already done all the hard work—thinking, musing, figuring out the story she wants to tell. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. There are many other reasons for planning in advance, aside from the time component, such as you really do end up with a tighter, better written book (okay, that’s my opinion, for what it’s worth), but planning shows. It does. And it just makes your writing life a whole lot easier. Trust me—you are not squelching your creativity or denying yourself a measure of spontaneity by planning in advance

Think about
. . . the novel you’re just getting started on. Don’t rush to jump in and start writing. Spend some time thinking about the big elements you want in your book. Spend some days writing about your characters, even freewriting in their voice to let them speak to you. Try taking a walk, talking out loud or mulling over the story and why you’re writing it, what you want to say, and how you want to say it. (A good tip is to keep a tiny notebook and pen in your pocket, or use the notes app or voice memo program, as I do, on my iPhone, so as I get ideas, I can jot them down or record them when driving or walking.) Resist the urge to write from the top of your head, and let those ideas first simmer and boil down into something concise and clear. You may find you like this!

Epilogue: Looking Back over the Journey to the Heart

“The idea is to write so that people hear it, and it slides through the brain

and goes straight to the heart.”

~Maya Angelou

We’ve taken a long journey from the entrance to the mine to the heart of your story, where the mother lode of gold is hidden. The objective? To create an unforgettable, great novel that speaks to the heart of the reader—hopefully transcending the restrictions of time and place. By aiming for the heart with universal themes, rich characters, and carefully constructed scenes, you might just produce a novel that will live in the hearts of readers for generations—a novel we might call timeless.

When we think of Shakespeare’s plays, written hundreds of years ago, so widely loved and praised, what are the elements that resonate with us? Wouldn’t you say they are his universal themes that apply to everyone in every time period? What about his engaging, complex, believable characters who are rich with history, full of needs and dreams, believing lies they’ve been told? We wouldn’t leave out his biting humor or witty turn of a phrase, and not everyone is a master wordsmith. But literary works that have stood the test of time can teach us much about getting to the heart of our story.

Read, Read, Read

One bit of great advice I’ve heard throughout my years as a writer is the need to read—widely and deeply. Read the classics, the best of various genres, books that are still being reprinted after a hundred years. Stretch yourself by reading some books in genres you wouldn’t think to read. Maybe you’ve never read a Western or a Jane Austen novel. I’m not saying you have to love every book that has sold over a million copies at some point in time. But with your eyes trained now to know how to reach the heart of a story, you can read these novels with a keen awareness, studying how the scenes are built, how the characters are portrayed and how they interact with their world, how the setting is painted. You can tear apart the first scene, see how many elements in that scene match up with the First-Page Checklist. You can look at the tone and the voice of the characters, see what motifs are brought out, and how the quality of time is handled.

So much can be learned by studying the craft of great writers. That’s not to say you want to copy what they do so precisely that you are solely derivative or plagiarizing. However, if you take the time and deconstruct or break down great novels, you can learn much from those who have mined to the heart of their stories with great success.

Sometimes we writers feel like our well of creativity has run dry. The best way I know to fill it back up again is to read great novels, plays, poetry, and short stories. When I read a terrific passage in a novel, I feel uplifted and energized. As I mentioned in the first chapter, books that are beautifully written, that speak to our hearts, are gems in a mine full of dull rocks. A great book feeds our soul and nourishes our spirit in a way nothing else can.

And now that you know the way to the heart of your story, my hope is that you will create gems of your own—novels that will stand the test of time by speaking to the heart. As William Wordsworth encouraged: “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”

Shore up that entrance to your mine with careful planning, then be the light showing the way through the dark, winding tunnel to the mother lode. And don’t forget to enjoy the journey—with all its bumps and pitfalls. Remember, starting is better than finishing. But I will now add this: Finishing can be just as great at starting—if the end of your story ends at the heart.

About the Author

C. S. Lakin is a multipublished award-winning novelist and writing coach who loves to help writers find joy and success in their novel-writing journey. She works full-time as a copyeditor (fiction and nonfiction) and critiques about two hundred manuscripts a year. She teaches writing workshops around the country and gives instruction on her award-winning blog Live Write Thrive (www.livewritethrive.com).

Her grammar book—
Say What? The Fiction Writer’s Handy Guide to Grammar, Punctuation, and Word Usage
—is designed to help writers get a painless grasp on grammar. You can buy it
in print
or as
an ebook
.