Notes on Nonlinear Narratives

So earlier this afternoon, my phone informed me that there was a conversation going on 'round Twitter, and my name had been mentioned (and that's @JenniferBWhite for those of you who aren't already following for my super quality, if sporadic, ramblings). @CareyTorg was on the hunt for tips about organizing and writing nonlinear stories, and my best good pal @MireyahWolfe (who you really should follow if you want 90% of my tweets to make sense) recommended me.

So, @CareyTorg, here are those thoughts I promised:

My ideas on this one go for stories that are written out of order and pieced together later, stories whose events take place out of chronological order, and stories that just have a lot of "meanwhile, back at the ranch" events brought about by multiple points of view. So here goes:

I'm an outline and notes kind of person with pretty much everything I write, but if I've got a lot of subplots and storylines, or I have anything that's going on in a nonlinear fashion, my notes get ten times more meticulous. I write down notes and thoughts, and then I organize everything into a solid, chronological timeline. Doesn't matter what order things are going to be happening in the course of the story or what order I ultimately write them in, if it happens first on a timeline, it gets listed first. It helps me keep my head straight, and gives me a solid frame of reference. If anything's happening concurrently, I'll either list those events together under one entry, or organize them side-by-side as a visual reminder to myself that they're happening at the same time but are occurring in different sections of the story/different points of view.

I've known plenty of people who write down every major story event on a separate index card or sticky note, add a few notes, and pin them up in a timeline fashion. It lets them move things around easily, in case they want to change things up, and still gives them a solid frame to look back at and make sure they haven't forgotten anything or left it out.

If the events of my story are taking place out of chronological order, I wind up with two timelines: one of things listed out in chronological order, and one where the same events are listed in the order I want them to occur in the narrative. The first timeline helps ground everything for me, so I know when the hell Event A happened in relation to Event 7. The second timeline helps me keep track of what I've already done and what I still need to do.

A lot of my toolbox for this one is derived from my preference for taking notes and organizing thoughts on paper where I can see them. It's always very important for me that I get everything laid out from beginning to end, and I know exactly what I'm going to be working on. Everyone does things their own way, so there are a lot of different opinions and tips, but mine all ultimately go back to keeping good notes and solid timelines.

I went looking for some other advice around the Internet, and I turned up this article, which I thought had good points. I'm always going to recommend notes and outlines on this kind of thing, but if that's not your schtick, or you've tried that and it's not working for you, I'd try searching around and seeing what other writers have to say. All advice should naturally come with a grain of salt or two, but I've always found with trickier stuff like this, it's a good idea to seek out opinions and tips from a pretty wide variety of folks if it's not something you've ever done before.

In any case, I've got a lot of writing of my own to do. I hope my thoughts helped in some small way, and I hope to see y'all around on Twitter.

Cheers, and 'til next time,
J.

Bounce House

Being sick is such a drag. I've spent the past week or so curled up in bed with a stack of books, napping off-and-on and hoping the constant supply of cough drops and cold medicine will be enough to exorcise the snot demon in my chest.

I'm feeling loads better today, though, so that's good.

In the writing-o-sphere, between enjoying well-crafted tales from others, my brain's been doing a lot of thinking about the final third of my own WiP. I'm still mired in the beginning of chapter four, but I've been itching to bounce around out of order, which is something I've never done before. Yesterday I sat down and churned out over a thousand words for a scene that I haven't even gotten set up yet in the main document. It's toward the end. It's not anything I have many notes about. It just...happened.

And I have to say, it was a lot of fun.

I've always been the type of writer who keeps copious notes, reference images, scribbles, and timelines. It's how I keep my thoughts organized long enough to get them down in what sometimes resembles a cohesive story format. I've never, however, used those notes to write my scenes out of their proper order. It's always been a possibility, since I'm usually so organized with my writing thoughts, but not anything I've ever played around with. I've actually gone out of my way to avoid bouncing around, because the thought of going out of order has always made me feel awkward. Stories go in order, and writing them out of order is weird, or so my brain has always insisted.

Thing is, now that I've written some scenes out of order, I can't say I'm so against it anymore. I've got the notes to keep everything straight, and forcing myself into writing the next scene in chapter four hasn't panned out very well thus far. Playing around with the later political intrigue, arranged marriage, and bloody battles has been more entertaining and productive than plowing through the task of getting my main characters from the safety of their home and into the strange new place.

Slowly but surely, I'm letting myself write what feels natural and fun rather than forcing myself to stick to the rigidity of the linear timeline. It's getting me writing more often than one a week or so, and that can only be a good thing, yeah?

'Til next time,
J.

Let it Grow, Let it Grow

So lately I've been having a lot of late-night hang-out sessions with my best-friend, writer-buddy, downstairs-neighbor Mires, and the two of us have done a bit of joint brainstorming. We've tried to prod each other into taking down notes and actually writing, and in the process we've both learned some new things about our stories and our characters. With Mires' help, I've sat down and had a long think about the direction my own current WiP is going, and the direction it's since taken has actually kind of startled me.

I've had these characters in my head for a good five years now, and the first incarnation of their story came out of my very first year participating in NaNoWriMo, back in 2010. I abandoned the project after getting kind of muddy in my first attempts at entering the world of publishing, but it grabbed on and didn't let go until I finally came back to it. I've gone through so many different ideas with this story that what it is now is similar but definitely not the same. It's grown. It's grown a lot. Just when I didn't think it could grow in scope any more than it already has, Mires and I had one of those brainstorming sessions.

The ideas we both presented got my thoughts spinning in new directions, and now that I'm faced with the necessity to write all of this down and consider it, it's daunting. I had a solid direction with this story for years, even if it's taken me a while to come back to it, but now I'm faced with adding in all these new, fresh ideas that I've fallen in love with. It's kind of scary. It's so tempting to take those cool new ideas and lock them in a box, because rewriting the same old story is comfortable.

I can't let myself do that, though. I have to let this story grow, because if I try to stifle it, it's not going to go anywhere. It's going to get caught in an infinite loop of rewriting the same story and never being satisfied, because I'll deny it the fresh air it needs to grow into something strong and powerful.

So.

It's not back to the drawing board, per se, but I've got a lot of notetaking in front of me. Timelines, history notes, character profiles, subtle political tones, all of that has got to be documented before I can take it and play with it on cards and white boards and eventually the manuscript.

It's daunting, but I can't deny my excitement.

Revisions never bothered me anyway...

'Til next time,
J.

A Whole New Style

Oh, hey, it's Monday again.

In my continued adventures with getting back into the writing and publishing world, I've noticed an extreme shift in my approach to things. My plotting style is very similar to how it used to be, but I've incorporated a lot of new things. My note-taking has become simultaneously more and less complex, depending on what I'm taking notes about. Lots of little things have changed, and while I don't regret this, there's one major change that has involved a big learning curve.

I used to be very much focused on "write first, get it right later." I'd finish an entire book very quickly and spend ages going back to tweak, edit, revise, and change. I would refuse to let myself read back over anything I'd written, unless it was to get myself back into a scene I'd left halfway through. Produce crap, shine it up later--that was my policy.

Now, though? Now there's a lot less of that. The WiP I've been working on today was resurrected at the beginning of January, and I've been working on it a fair bit since then. I'm only a paragraph into chapter two, and I'm not planning on writing any further for a while.

Why? Because I'm trying so hard to get the previous chapters up to speed. I'm not trying to make them ready to print, of course, but I want them to be solid before I keep going. When I type out "the end," I want to go back to a story that is solid and doesn't leave me with something that needs to be rewritten and rewritten and rewritten to make it legible. I'm very much a person to say "let yourself write crap," but instead of going back to shine up the entire manuscript, I've been taking it a chapter at a time.

Honestly, I prefer this new method.

It may be just for this project; I'm not sure. This story has given me trouble in the past, and was subject to a great number of revisions and chapters-inserted-later that kind of bogged the original story down into a convoluted mess. Shining up each chapter so the details are clear and concise has helped me focus on getting everything going in the direction it needs to go. Much like plotting gives me a general map to my destination, this method of writing helps me enjoy each step of the journey instead of getting lost in the race to finish.

Obviously neither method is wrong, but I think, for this project at the very least, some perfectionism and lingering has helped me make something that keeps me from dreading each new day at the keyboard.

'Til next time,
J.

The Index Cards Cometh

First off: whew, it's been a little while since I posted on schedule. Things have been a bit busy, and my birthday was Monday so my plans involved naps and cake. Now, though, things have quieted down and I'm back on track schedule-wise, so here we go with today's post:

Index cards. A common tool of the writer. Some people use them for jotting notes, some people use them for organizing scenes. Some use them for the basic stuff, some find them vital to their craft. Some don't use them at all, and until yesterday I counted myself among that crowd.

The lovely Mireyah Wolfe and I have been talking a lot about plotting lately. I'm a lifelong plotter, while she's never had a lot of experience with sitting down and planning out where her story is going to go. I suggested a few of my preferred techniques and recommended a book or two, and the next time I went over to her place to hang out, her dining room wall was plastered with ginormous index cards covered with notes. I admit, it made me smile to have made a convert to the world of plot, but I digress. It was those index cards that caught my eye. They were big enough to fit plenty of information, but small enough that they could be easily organized and moved around. In short, they were exactly what I'd been looking for over the past several weeks, and I was determined to get my hands on some.

Mires told me where to get some giant index cards of my very own, and so we made the trek to the local drugstore. Five bucks later, I had two packs of my very own, and I've since started to take down character profile notes and brief chapter outlines. I've never used index cards before now, but I'm finding more and more that they're a cheap, convenient way to organize mountains of information into an easily-accessible fingertip database.

It may seem silly to some to gush over index cards, but these things are really, really nifty. I've got organized, accessible, physical copies of my notes, and I can flip through everything without ever having to tab out of my main manuscript file.

I may have converted Mires to the ways of the plotter, but she's accidentally converted me to the cult of the card.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some more giant index cards to shuffle around on my plot board.
'Til next time,
J.

Juggling Act

I have always been the kind of writer who prefers to work on one thing at a time, as well as the kind of writer who prefers to write in order and never skip from scene to scene. It's linear, it's straightforward, and it gives some stability to a process that can be anything but.

"But wait!" some of you observant readers are saying, "You have three word count meters on your sidebar, not one! Three!"

You're quite right, observant readers. There are three word count meters on my sidebar. Because, despite the fact that I vastly prefer working on one thing at a time, I find my loyalties currently divided between three stories. Two are old projects being overhauled, one is new, and all three are pestering me to give them more attention than the other two. Some days it's pretty tiring, and some nights I can't sleep for wondering what character A is going to do in story 3 while character Q does X in story 1. Keeping it all straight is, to put it bluntly, really damn difficult. I've got a lot of respect for writers who can do this on a regular basis, because bouncing around between stories has got my head spinning.

I try not to bounce between projects in one day, because that's a bit much, but sometimes I find that while working on story 1, story 3 wants me to clean up scene M. Story 2 creeps in and demands attention for character delta, and then they all get whiny as I take a step back to take a breather. It's bizarre, it's not my typical writing style, and, to be honest, despite the frustration of trying to juggle everything, I find I like the challenge.

Today I'm working on one of the older stories that's getting an overhaul, but who knows what I'll be working on tomorrow? I certainly don't. That would have terrified me once, but where I am now in my writing career...well, it's kind of fun to wing it from time to time.

Though I'm still not a pantser. No matter how much I bounce around, I don't think I'm ever gonna be very good at winging a story. It's all plotting, all the time. But that's another post for another day.

'Til next time,
J.