Finding the Big Picture

Every writer creates a story in a different way. Some create the characters first (or they spring forth from the head fully formed like that Greek goddess). Some start with a plot idea and plan extensively before writing a word. Others write scenes and journals and pages and pages before finally discovering the story. At some point, though, every author needs to nail down that big picture of the main story. That means determining the beginning and the ending, making sure the story actually goes somewhere, ending up with characters changed forever (or not).

This week we’re exploring how we approach that aspect of story-building.

I’m one of those writers that needs to have a good portion of the story written before I can really put the entire thing together. I write pages and pages of character interviews, stream-of-consciousness journaling about characters or plot and many, many scenes. I discover the story in the midst of all those words. I’m always thrilled when I discover another writer who works like me, like Cindy Martinusen Coloma. Last March she wrote a series about what she calls The Puzzle Method and posted it on Randy Ingermansan’s Advanced Fiction Writing blog. If you are like me, you might want to check it out. The first entry starts on March 5, 2008 and the series runs through March 24.

That’s one method for bringing order to the chaos of my initial creativity and guiding me toward completing a project. It’s not the only way, though. (I’m a “P” on the Myers-Briggs personality test and love to explore multiple options. We had a guest who blogged on personality tests, if you want to read that.)

Another way I try to find the story in all my written meanderings is to impose some structure over it. (This is probably the first step for you planners, but it comes in the middle for me.) I have two favorite structures, The Hero’s Journey and, more recently, the “beats” presented in Blake Snyder’s, “Save the Cat.”

After I’ve written a myriad of scenes and know my characters and have a general idea what they are doing and where they need to end, I segue into structuring the plot a little more concretely. (Since I like to keep my options open, nothing is ever really concrete, but at some point, if I want to finish with a story, I have to pin down some specifics.)

I do this by looking at which of my scenes best illustrate the “turning points” or “beats’ of the story. This process can take hours and hours as I play around with various options, but it can also be one of the most rewarding parts of creating a story. This is the time when the character’s story comes into sharper focus, when I see more clearly what defeats and triumphs will best reveal that story and sometimes even when I discover whose story I’m telling.

I keep track of all these scenes and where I want them in the story and any notes or insights I want to include using a great software called yWriter4. I wrote about how I use it and The Hero’s Journey in October. Basically, I create “chapters” for each point in the structure and place the different scenes within those chapters. Because it is so easy to drag and drop scenes from chapter to chapter, add notes and keep track of a myriad of details, this software has fast become my most favorite “toy.”

Whatever the structure you chose and whatever helps (toys) you find to form it, a crucial step in the process of creating a story is getting a clear “big picture” of it. For me that happens in the middle of the process, for you it might be the beginning. However you find or create it, I hope the blogs you read this week will help you refine and perfect the process.