The Bag of Tricks

By Bethany Maines

On my last blog I discussed how I
keep the fictional worlds of my books organized (answer: spreadsheets and
lists!), but recently I gave a talk on writing to a local high-school and they
wanted to know the more nitty-gritty details. Since they are at the start of
their writer journey they have yet to discover that many of the struggles of
writing are shared by all writers. 
What’s that? You have two great scenes, but you’re not sure how to
connect them?  You have half a novel
written, but you don’t know who the bad guy is yet? You really need the hot guy
to land in the heroine’s life, but you don’t know how he gets there?  These are all questions with many possible
answers, and like common core math, many possible ways of getting to the answer.

I thought Kimberly Jayne’s recent
post about Mindful Daydreaming was a great way to answer many writing
questions.  And yesterday’s post from Sally
Berneathy’s post about “pantsing” vs. plotting a novel showed how she dives and
discovers her book as she goes along.  I
have discovered that being a plotter is usually a faster more efficient way for
me to write.  When I have all the answers
before I start writing, I can write even when I’m not feeling very creative or
if I only have five minutes.  But
recently, I found myself stuck on the outline. 
I stared.  I hammered.  I picked. 
I ignored it.  Nothing
happened.  And at some point I decided to
start writing because you know what happens when you don’t write? Nothing.  So I wrote all the way to where I had
outlined and I was just as stuck as I was on the outline.  I was back to being a high-schooler – how do
I connect those two scenes? How do I get the hero from point A to point B? Dear
God, what happens nexxxxxxxt????

Which is when I decided to take my
own advice.  I grabbed a notebook and a
pen. Changing the medium can sometimes change my perspective.  I wrote a synopsis of the story from the
villain’s point of view.  I wrote a
synopsis from the love interests view point. I drew little diagrams about how the
storylines connect. I wrote a few paragraphs about the villain’s history and
motivation, really diving into what he thinks about the events of the story.  It’s an old saying that each of us is the
hero in our own story, and that goes for villains too (see the great post from
Jennae Phillippe about A Villain’s Voice). 
How does a villain think that his actions are justified? As I answered
that question, I discovered more and more about how my story moved
forward.  Which is when I put down the
pen and typed up my scrawling notes. 

Organizing a novel isn’t just
about filing systems; it’s about herding all your characters and ideas into a
coherent plot and making sure that everyone gets to the end (or the right end
if they happen to be the designated dead body) in a satisfying manner.  But sometimes a writer needs to reach into
her bag of tricks and try more than one technique to get the job done.  As I told my room full of high-schoolers, when
in doubt…  try, try something else.

***