How To Write Killer Fiction Part 8

Neither way is wrong or right. Some writers begin in blank page and then outline when they hit page 100 or so; others draft outlines as rough guides and then throw them away when they get into the Zone. The key is to discover which basic process works for you and modify it as needed.

Expansion and Contraction_ Writing a novel involves cycles of expansion and contraction. At the beginning, both Outliners and Blank-pagers are likely to be in the expansive mode, casting their nets wide for inspiration. Could the murdered man have been a blackmailer? Why not? Or was he just someone who knew too much? Let's try that on for size. Or perhaps it wasn't Harry who was murdered after all; his wife, Betty, would make an even better corpse. Or, no, not Betty-how about Melanie, the mistress?

What mistress? Harry didn't have a mistress when I started this novel.

But it would be so much more interesting if he did.

And it would be even more interesting if Betty opened the door to the bedroom she shares with Harry only to find her rival's body, clad in a silk slip, lying dead on the chenille.

At this stage, the writer is open to possibility. Whether she is jotting her ideas on index cards or scribbling prose onto the page, she is letting her muse take her where it will. She is expanding.

At some point in the writing process, the wide net of expansion must give way to the focus of contraction. The Outliner organizes his material in advance of writing; he makes connections between characters before putting them on the page. This process is contractive; it leaves out anything that doesn't serve to move the story as a whole. Everything that's left is either part of the main plot, a subplot, or a red herring.

Wheat's Law of the Conservation of Plot Points Somewhere in this process, the stolen diamond necklace that started the story may drop by the wayside. Or it may become a subplot, a clue, a red herring. According to Wheat's Law of the Conservation of Plot Points, nothing's wasted. If a mystery writer creates four solid suspects for the crime, and in the course of letting the vision change she decides to go with Number Three instead of One as the real killer, she hasn't wasted her time working up a straight-line narrative for One, because that will make a splendid red herring. How can the reader help but be convinced that One is the real killer, when the writer herself believed it for a while? The clue packages that point the reader toward One will make for a stronger red herring than the writer would have had if she'd stuck to her original plan. And Three as the killer will come as just the kind of surprise she had in mind in the first place.

Some writers follow Raymond Chandler's advice that when things go slack, introduce a man with a gun. Don't bother explaining who he is, or connecting him to anything right away-just send him through the door and let the characters react to him. Other writers suggest, "Deliver a package." What's in the package? Anything from a severed hand to a bomb-just so it's exciting and leads to more action on the page.

The conservation-of-plot-points part comes when the writer needs to connect that severed hand to the rest of the story. How can can it connect when the writer had no idea it was going to happen until it appeared, as if by magic, on the P.I.'s battered oak desk? it connect when the writer had no idea it was going to happen until it appeared, as if by magic, on the P.I.'s battered oak desk?

Have a look at Lawrence Block's novel The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams. The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams. Stolen baseball cards, valuable ones, are at the center of the story. It seems that everyone Bernie Rhodenbarr comes in contact with knows about these cards, even though there is no apparent reason they should know. What appears to be the kind of coincidence writing teachers warn you about turns out to be no coincidence when Block later reveals the connections among these seemingly unrelated characters. Stolen baseball cards, valuable ones, are at the center of the story. It seems that everyone Bernie Rhodenbarr comes in contact with knows about these cards, even though there is no apparent reason they should know. What appears to be the kind of coincidence writing teachers warn you about turns out to be no coincidence when Block later reveals the connections among these seemingly unrelated characters.

Hidden connections between seemingly unrelated people and things conserve your favorite characters and clues by integrating them fully into the story. They're no longer irrelevant wanderings away from the main point; they take us right back to that point, even if they get there by a circular path. That wonderfully quirky old antique dealer you can't bear to leave on the cutting-room floor can stay in the story if he turns out to be the grandfather of the client's girlfriend. It won't be a coincidence if the girlfriend suggested him as the expert the P.I. ought to see about those stolen Ming vases.

The Outliner's Process_ There's an upside and a downside to both processes. If you're an Outliner, you can spend a huge amount of time making ready to write without actually writing. Some outliners make themselves crazy with pre-planning. Every character has a history, every location is detailed with precision, whether it matters to the story or not. Research eats up an enormous amount of time for some Outliners, who may compound their mistake by trying to cram as much of it into their books as possible.

If preparation enhances the final product, it's time well spent; if it doesn't, it's vamping.

Vamping till ready: the piano player knocks out a jaunty little tune while he's waiting for the performer to step onto the stage. If the performer's a little late, the piano player repeats the vamp. He keeps on repeating it until it's time to go into the actual number. If he vamps for too long a time, the audience begins to clamor for the performer. The same is true of outlining-at some point you must begin the actual prose. You must write chapter one on a piece of paper and spill some lifeblood on the page just like every other writer on the planet.

The Outliner needs to be aware that the tendency to want everything to be perfect before chapter one hits the page is a fantasy. No matter how hard he works to get everything in place, chapter one is a draft. It will change. There is no such thing as perfect. There comes a time when the Outliner has to let go of the preparation mode and get into writing mode. He's got to stop vamping and start writing.

The Changing Vision The first step is to realize that while a writer begins a book with a vision, that vision is bound to change as the book takes shape. The Outliner thinks she sees the book as a whole, sitting like a pot of gold at the end of the writing rainbow. The operative words here are "she thinks." In truth, the Outliner can't see the finished book as clearly as she believes she does; there will be changes she can't imagine at the beginning, and if she's writing a living novel instead of a cla.s.sroom exercise, she'd better let them happen.

Novels are big. They take a long time to write. And in the course of that writing, things change. Pieces of the Outliner's vision stubbornly refuse to fall into place; what seemed inevitable now seems contrived and must be rethought. You look back at chapter one from the vantage point of chapter seven and long to rip it up and start over.

What's going on?

The vision changes. The vision grows and alters as the writer works herself deeper into the story. The best writers let this happen. They open themselves to a new vision; they permit the book to grow and shape itself according to an altered perception.

The Outliner's Toolbox The process of pre-planning can occur in a number of ways. Rick Boyer, who won an Edgar award for Billingsgate Shoal, Billingsgate Shoal, gets one of those marbled hardcover essay notebooks and fills it with a scenario of the story. His scenario may include maps and drawings, and sums up the entire action. He handwrites it, although he uses a word processor when it comes to the actual prose. It's one way of gaining overview, of managing the tremendous amount of information a writer needs to carry in his head in order to write an entire novel. gets one of those marbled hardcover essay notebooks and fills it with a scenario of the story. His scenario may include maps and drawings, and sums up the entire action. He handwrites it, although he uses a word processor when it comes to the actual prose. It's one way of gaining overview, of managing the tremendous amount of information a writer needs to carry in his head in order to write an entire novel.

Margaret Maron, on the other hand, fills folders with material for each chapter; when it comes time to write, say, chapter three, she'll have notes and pictures cut from magazines and articles about the topic and anecdotes she heard from a local wise woman. That folder is a kind of outline, even though it is used to stimulate the filling of a blank page.

Maron has also created a detailed family tree for her main character, Judge Deborah Knott (who has ten brothers, so it's quite a tree), as well as a map of her fictional Colleton County, North Carolina. Particularly if you're developing a series, having visual aids to help you keep things consistent will pay off in the long run.

Some really experienced writers-Lawrence Block and Robert B. Parker come to mind-do it all in their heads. Block "blocks out" his story (okay, take me out and shoot me) and when he has it fairly well set in his mind, he checks into a motel, plugs in his laptop, and bangs the script out in a week or two. The speed of his writing is made possible by the months of thinking work he did before the check-in.

While it's hard to call that outlining, it is a way of pre-planning what's going to he written down. It is not the free-floating style of the true Blank-pager; the in-the-head writer is culling and editing as he goes, tossing out what doesn't work before it has the chance to clutter up the disk or the page.

The essence of outlining is throwing away. The Blank-pager spills all her ideas onto a page and culls later; the Outliner narrows the focus, consolidates characters, drops subplots before committing himself to prose.

What do you do with the stuff that's left over? Some writers make a file of out-takes, material that isn't useful for this book but might be recycled into the next novel or into a short story. The truth is that most of the stuff that hits the cutting-room floor never gets recycled, but that's not what's important; what's important is that it doesn't go into this this book. A writer in the contractive stage has to be willing to let go of anything that isn't moving the central storyline. book. A writer in the contractive stage has to be willing to let go of anything that isn't moving the central storyline.

One of the benefits of outlining is that the culling process happens before the writer has committed himself to actual prose. It's a lot easier to lay aside a few index cards than to excise whole scenes involving a character you no longer want in the story.

Opening Up the Story Sometimes a writer must move from a contraction phase back into expansion. This can happen to an Outliner whose preplanned scenes don't work on the page the way he hoped they would while in outline form.

I had a clue once, a really brilliant and wonderful clue given to me by my local Brooklyn pizza parlor. They made specialty pizzas, and one of my favorites was rosemary chicken. Long spikes of rosemary on top of white-meat chicken spread out on a crisp pizza crust-tasty and unusual. So I decided the victim in my book would have eaten that pizza before she died; it would be in her stomach, and would point to the fact that she'd eaten at a certain pizza parlor that served this unusual dish. I used to go and eat "clue pizza" and enjoy it even more knowing how I was going to use it in my book.

The trouble was that when I went to write the scene, I realized that the victim had no reason to go to this particular pizza parlor, which was nowhere near the scene of her death, except to eat this pizza and give my detective a clue. What had looked so terrific in outline had become contrived and illogical in the context of the story. of the story.

If you read the finished book (Fresh Kills), you will find no reference to rosemary chicken pizza. I still mourn my pizza clue, but the good of the book as a whole demanded that I deviate from the outline and open up to a new way of finding Amber's killer. you will find no reference to rosemary chicken pizza. I still mourn my pizza clue, but the good of the book as a whole demanded that I deviate from the outline and open up to a new way of finding Amber's killer.

I had to move from the contraction phase of writing according to the outline, and go back into expansion in order to find new clues to replace my lost pizza clue. I had to brainstorm, to cast my net wide, to open myself up to a new set of what-ifs in order to solve a problem I thought I had already solved.

Outliners can also move back into expansion by means of freewriting. This is writing without a plan, writing off the record. I've done it for different reasons at different stages of the writing process. Once I freewrote a scene between a father and daughter on the daughter's tenth birthday. This scene wasn't in the book because the daughter was fourteen when the action of the novel took place, but by letting myself see a glimpse of the father-daughter relations.h.i.+p at an earlier stage, I added depth to the portraits that did end up between the covers of the book. I've also written my way into certain characters by freewriting about them in their own voices, even though they will only be seen in the finished book through the eyes of my first-person main character. Both methods involve a foray into expansion during the contractive phase of writing-to-outline.

Do the Opposite Does this sound like I'm telling you to do the opposite of what you've been doing?

If so, you're getting the point. When you find yourself blocked, what you've been doing is taking you down a path that leads to frustration, so trying the opposite ought to end the frustration. The trouble is, it also makes you nervous because it's alien to your instinctive nature as a writer.

The Outliner hates giving up that tightly knit structure, yet opening up and adding a new character, a new subplot, another clue package, is just what the book needs. Micromanaging your characters even more than you already have leads to dry, dull characters without a spontaneous thought in their heads.

Trust is the key here. Trust in yourself and trust in your overriding vision. Trust that you won't be losing golden words and startling plot developments; you'll be gaining richer characters and even better twists and turns. Trust that there's more where the old stuff came from, that you have the talent and depth to take your material to the max and you don't have to settle lor something your heart tells you isn't working.

The Blank-Pager's Toolbox_ Suspense writers are more likely than mystery people to be Blank-pagers. The suspense writer likes writing her character into a corner and then extricating her by sheer wit. For a wonderful example of how this process works, try reading Stephen King's Misery, Misery, in which a writer is forced to create his story by the blank-page method. Blank-pagers are wonderful at starting books, at creating gripping situations that bring the reader into the story. in which a writer is forced to create his story by the blank-page method. Blank-pagers are wonderful at starting books, at creating gripping situations that bring the reader into the story.

The crunch comes when the story has to go somewhere. Blank-pagers often come into my cla.s.ses complaining that they've written one hundred pages of a novel and stopped because they had no central plotline. Great scenes, but no payoff. Several threads of story that never wove themselves into a coherent whole. The downside of spontaneity is that a novel needs a spine, and the Blank-pager may not understand how to give it one.

How can Blank-pagers pull their stories together without losing the spark of spontaneity?

Blank-pagers go through a contraction process, too. Some don't do it until they've finished an entire first draft. They want to work their way through the story step by step, then set the ma.n.u.script aside for a bit and go back in with a hacksaw. They can't decide what to leave out and what to emphasize in chapter one until they've seen how the final chapter plays out.

But some Blank-pagers don't want to wait until the end. They are the ones who come into cla.s.s with ten chapters of a book that, when looked at correctly, will emerge as three or four stories piled on top of one another. There's the storyline about the stolen diamond necklace; there's the mysterious package delivered to the house; there's Harry and his mistress meeting for the last time at a seedy bar near the bus station; there's a man at the bus station asking for directions and saying something about "paying back Melanie." How does it all hang together? And who is that man at the bus station?

The first thing the Blank-pager in this situation must do is stop writing. The natural tendency of the Blank-pager is to solve all writing problems by scaring up a new storyline; all this does is add another wing to an already sprawling house. (If you've ever been to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, you'll see the architectural equivalent of this process. Sarah Winchester, widow of the inventor of the Winchester rifle, was told she'd die when she finished building her house, so-she never finished! She built stairways to nowhere, rooms too tiny to stand up in, and innumerable windows peering into blank walls. Not a house you'd want to live in-and not a book you'd want to read.) The second thing the writer must do is reread what she already has and ask herself which of her storylines excites her the most. Is it the diamond necklace? Is it the relations.h.i.+p between Melanie, the mistress, and her mother? Is it that scene where Betty broke down in tears as she confessed that she'd known about Harry's mistress for years but never said anything?

One of the storylines is going to be more interesting to you than the others. Maybe it's the last one to enter the mix-, maybe it's the one that's gotten the most ink. Whatever the reason for choosing one, the important thing is to decide which storyline will dominate the book.

Now comes the hard part. Out come the scissors and paste. Everything that doesn't relate to the newly chosen main story goes. goes. You may open an out-takes file and put all the nonusable prose into it in hopes that it will form the germ of a second book or a short story, but the important thing now is to get it out of the novel. Only the scenes that move the main story will remain-and the ten chapters you started with may boil down to three and a half. You may open an out-takes file and put all the nonusable prose into it in hopes that it will form the germ of a second book or a short story, but the important thing now is to get it out of the novel. Only the scenes that move the main story will remain-and the ten chapters you started with may boil down to three and a half.

Don't worry. Your three and a half chapters will form the nucleus of a book you have a chance of actually finis.h.i.+ng.

Give Your Characters Jobs After a writer in the contractive stage has identified a main story and culled out any storylines that don't move that main story, she can begin to focus on character. Are all the characters employed? Do they have jobs to do, and are they doing them?

By "jobs" I don't mean what they do when they leave their fictional houses; I mean what is their role in the story? How do they move the plot, develop character, act as ally or opponent to the main character? If the book is a mystery, the major characters will be suspects, and as such, they must act suspicious. They must lie, they must refuse to answer questions, they must possess motive and means and opportunity. A party scene filled with fascinating characters speaking witty dialogue is not an a.s.set to the mystery unless that dialogue is being spoken by suspects acting suspicious. As mere window dressing, it goes.

In the same vein, incidents, objects, and settings should be examined to see whether they could produce clues for the detective. The Outliner will already have her clue packages ready to slip into the scenes; the Blank-pager may wish to reread her prose and highlight anything that might become a clue with a little reshaping. The Blank-pager might want to use a few Outliner tools like maps and timelines to help focus what he's already written.

Connections between characters can also help focus the story; the Outliner undoubtedly knows that Ted is really Sarah's former lover, but this may come as a shock to the Blank-pager, who has just discovered this fact through writing a scene in which Ted suddenly confessed this. .h.i.therto unknown connection. The Blank-pager will want to reread former chapters involving both Ted and Sarah and make notes for revision to enhance the relations.h.i.+p, which will tighten the story considerably.

Suspense characters have jobs, too. In the early stages of the story, characters may be shown to be supportive of the hero-which will make their later betrayal and abandonment of her all the more poignant. The Blank-pager may reread her material and highlight characters to be developed into allies or obstacles in revision.

Writers are gardeners of words. We plant, weed, fertilize, trim, and hoe only to receive as the highest compliment the praise that "it looks so natural." Making your writing read as if it flowed effortlessly from your keyboard takes hard work.

Weeding Blank-pagers write their way into the story. When introducing a new character, they're likely to write five pages of backstory because they're learning it as they write. This leaves them with a lot of unusable prose, which is no sin in a first draft, but that unusable prose has no business surviving to a second draft. It has to go. Pulling it out and leaving the good stuff is one basic task all Blank-pagers have to learn.

Scissors and paste are necessary tools of the writer's trade even in the cyber-age, mainly because you simply can't see enough on the screen. You need to do big-picture revision by making piles on the floor or table-one for each arc, to begin with. All that backstory, all those flashbacks you loaded into your first draft Arc One need to be moved to the second and third piles, to become integrated into your second draft Arcs Two and Three.

Once you've done this at the arc level, it's time to revise each and every scene.

Pull out everything that doesn't work. Strip your ma.n.u.script of all extraneous material, be it subplot or information or description. If it isn't moving the story in some way, it goes. Whole paragraphs, pages, chapters may litter the floor; that doesn't matter so long as your plants have room to grow.

Once you've done that preliminary work, it's time to look at what's left.

Nurturing the Seedlings Even some of the good stuff may have to go. Two characters who play essentially the same role in the hero's life = one too many.

Any character without a job needs to either get one or leave the story. Play them or trade them-but don't let them take up s.p.a.ce without contributing to the overall story.

Sharpen the scenes by cutting as much filler as you can. We don't usually need to follow the detective as he gets from here to there; just take us to where the scene begins and start there. Cut those little "and then I went home" tails off the scenes and give them zippier closing lines. Cut long descriptions of people or places and telescope the action into as concise and punchy a format as possible. Watch out for walk-on characters that dissipate the tension between the important characters.

Check the subplots for relevance to the through line. If a subplot seems unconnected with the main story, then you have two choices: connect it or lose it. Since you didn't lose it in the weeding process, you've decided to connect it. Now's the time-how can that greedy brother-in-law who stole from the family business possibly relate to the larger tale?

Maybe the entire story is about greed and what it does to people, so the brother-in-law subplot acts as a low-rent counterpoint to the world-cla.s.s greed of the big villain. And the brother-in-law's gambling problem, which led him to embezzle, makes him the perfect p.a.w.n for Mr. Big Bad Guy, so he's he's the one who sent our hero that dead fish and warned him to stay away from Mr. Big. the one who sent our hero that dead fish and warned him to stay away from Mr. Big.

One subplot saved.

I know-you're getting worried that all this cutting will leave you with a 125-page book, and you know that's not enough.

Relax. Thinning die seedlings is only the first part of the exercise.

Fertilizing Now that you have less prose to work with, it's time to strengthen that prose as much as possible. Go back to the storyboard and re-ask some of the same questions: -Have I used enough sensory language in my description?

-Does my description of place adequately reflect the inherent dangers that are going to become overwhelmingly important in Arc Four?

-Does my description include my viewpoint character's emotional response to this place?

-Have I left out any logistical setup information the reader has to know in order to make the hero's victory over evil in this place believable?

-Have I used absolutely every interesting aspect of this place somewhere in the story?

-What things are in this place that can or will be used later on? (We don't don't suddenly discover that there's a nice cache of weapons hidden in the old cave in chapter twenty; we'd better know it's there a lot earlier than that if we don't want our reader throwing the book against the wall.) suddenly discover that there's a nice cache of weapons hidden in the old cave in chapter twenty; we'd better know it's there a lot earlier than that if we don't want our reader throwing the book against the wall.) -Are there any a.s.sociations, or memories a.s.sociated with the place, that could give rise to some nice secrets or emotional resonance later on?

Do the same with character. If my villain is going to turn out to be a greedy man killing and betraying people for money, let's see some of that hunger for material goods early on. It may be a subtle reference to always flying first cla.s.s or a silk s.h.i.+rt or a flashy car, but it needs to be planted early for us to get the full flavor.

Revision _ Revision: some writers hate it, others embrace it like a lover. Either way, it's a flat-out necessity if a writer wants to move from the amateur "I love to write but when it gets too hard I just start another project" stage to the "I'm going to make this book as good as I possibly can no matter how much work it takes" determination that separates the pros from the wannabes.

How much revision does the average writer do? How many drafts does it take to go from rotten first draft (and it's important to realize that all all first drafts are rotten) to award-winning, critically acclaimed bestseller? first drafts are rotten) to award-winning, critically acclaimed bestseller?

It depends. The only thing one can say for certain is that producing a publishable novel is a long-haul proposition and that you have to revise until the book is as close as you can bring it to absolutely, totally perfect.

I agree with Jack Nicholson, whose motto is "Everything counts." That's what he said when he was awarded the American Film Inst.i.tute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and it applies to writing as well as to acting. Everything, from characters to commas, from whether or not New York's Fifth Avenue is one-way going south or north to the exact properties of atropine, counts.

Why?

Because one little mistake can kick the reader out of the story. Suddenly she's not lost in a dream, she's reading a book and the characters aren't real anymore, they're just funny little black marks on a white page and you've lost her.

The Good-Enough Chapter One Premature revision is a major cause of difficulties among beginning writers. They work chapter one to the point of exhaustion, trying to make it as perfect as possible, and then they wonder why their stamina fails by the time they reach chapter four.

The leading cause of premature revision among writers is writing teachers.

I know because I am one. My students submit a perfectly dreadful draft they call chapter one. I read it and make extensive comments on it. They rewrite it and resubmit it. I make more comments. They rewrite it again, I make more comments, and- Well, you see the problem. The student wants a nice big gold star on her paper and I want to earn my princely salary as a teacher, so we play this little game, both of us pretending that if I give enough feedback the student can achieve perfect chapter one-ness.

She can't.

And I can't help her do it, because neither of us, at this stage of the process, has the slightest idea what the perfect chapter one for this book looks like. All she can do is write the good-enough chapter one, and all I can do for her is recognize that good-enough chapter one when I see it.

The good-enough chapter one allows the writer to keep moving, which is all she needs at this point in time. It sets up enough of the story to be going on with, it introduces the characters in such a way that we care enough to keep reading. It may well be that when the writer reaches Plot Point One, she can look back and realize that the story didn't really start until chapter three. She can then lop off her early chapters and recognize the former chapter three as the new, improved chapter one, but there was no way on G.o.d's earth she could have done that before she actually wrote chapter three.

The Non-Revision Revision I once had a book whose first chapter I revised to the point where my computer files contained C1a, C1b, C1c, all the way to, I swear to G.o.d, C1m. That's over half the alphabet, meaning I had thirteen, count them, 13, different versions of that chapter one bouncing around on my floppy disks.

I don't recommend this method of revision.

I also don't recommend the method used by a friend, who felt that every single change in the plot or characters mandated a thorough rewrite of every chapter that went before, so that a change in chapter eighteen had her rewriting chapter one on up.

My solution: the non-revision revision, or Notes for Revision.

You've just finished chapter three and it's wonderful, the best thing you've ever written, how could you be more clever, only the problem is that the new chapter three doesn't fit with your old chapter one. Your fingers itch with the deep desire to go in and rewrite chapter one.

Try not to. Instead, take a blank piece of paper and write at the top: Notes for Revision, C1. Then jot down all the things you'd do to chapter one if you were revising, which you're not, you're just making notes. Try to keep doing this with your early chapters until you reach Plot Point One, otherwise known as the end of Arc One.

Once you've reached the end of your first arc, you're in a much better position to revise, because you can a.s.sess all that you've put on the page in terms of that arc goal. You can see which sections move the characters toward the climax and which are just filler. You can sharpen the conflicts and define the characters in terms of their relations.h.i.+p to that arc goal.

Sometimes you just can't wait to revise. If your chapter one wasn't really good enough, you have to revise until it is. If you need a new scene that isn't on the page, write it and insert it between the existing scenes, but resist the urge to revise the already written material.

Writing Is Rewriting Whether you're an Outliner or a Blank-pager, whether you prefer the expansive or the contractive phase of the process, whether you revise as you go or dash off a complete draft before you return to the scene of the crime, you must revise. Revision is the heart of the process; it's what separates the pros from those who "always wanted to write if only they had the time." Only after you're sure you've written the best book you possibly can will you be able to write the magic words the end.

The Writing Process: Tools to Help You Finish Two Competing Forces: Expansion and Contraction Expansion -"what if?"

-casting the net wide -brainstorming -letting characters have their way with the story Contraction -picking and choosing -making connections -giving each character a fiction "job"

-letting go of material that doesn't fit overall story Two Kinds of Writers: Outliners and Blank-pagers Outliners -prepare for writing -make connections before starting -focus material before starting to write -cut extraneous plots and characters before starting -create materials that won't be in finished book (maps, dossiers, calendars) Blank-pagers -fall in love with an empty white page -go where it takes them -let characters do what they want -use the edge that uncertainty brings -write characters into corners and then write them out again -save the contractive stage for revision and revise extensively What they each have to learn: -Outliners have to learn that there's no subst.i.tute for actual writing, that they can't control the process to the point of writing a perfect first draft, and that they have to allow for spontaneity during the writing.

-Blank-pagers have to learn to love revision, because they have so much of it to do. They also have to learn to let go of plotlines and characters that don't advance the book as a whole.

The expansive stage is easy and fun; it's the contractive stage that's work. So...

-focus on what turns you on right now, right now, no matter what you loved before no matter what you loved before -cut as much backstory as possible and see what's left -consider putting two characters together to make one stronger character -drop any character who doesn't have a "job" to do in the story -drop all subplots that don't relate in some way to main story, or, make make those characters and subplots related somehow those characters and subplots related somehow -focus on conflict and opposition to strengthen the plot; raise the stakes -work the arcs -think in scenes Middlebook and how to survive it: -increase tension by setting the stopwatch or planting the bomb- or both -let the pendulum swing between safety and danger, trust and mistrust, in ever-increasing arcs -build to the climax by raising stakes and closing off options until main character is forced forced to final confrontation to final confrontation -"turn all the rats loose"-but tie up all subplots before Arc Four -use mini-arcs and subplot arcs to heighten tension within big plot -make sure every scene serves more than one purpose -build to strong climax and then give that climax its full value and then give that climax its full value Revision-love it or leave the business.