No, this isn’t about backing up your work on another device or keeping a printout.\u00a0\u00a0 (Though that kind of backup is vital if you work on a computer.)\u00a0\u00a0 This is about one way to diagnose and fix a problem you have while writing, and it’s related (no surprise) to the problem you might have untangling yarn.<\/p>\n
When your yarn (or story) has gotten itself in a tangle, you can either keep pulling forward, on the grounds that it will sort itself out (and sometimes it does, when you’re pulling yarn from the inside of a ball–the entire guts of the ball may come out, or just a small bit that the yarn has looped around)\u00a0 or you can work backwards from the tangle to find that loop or knot and pick it loose.\u00a0 This post is about the backing-up kind of fix.<\/p>\n
It’s not my favorite way to deal with a stuck story.\u00a0\u00a0 I will almost always try forging ahead first, in the hopes that what appears to be a tangle is actually not, just a lot of new material that needs to be laid out in order, and the tension of moving the story forward will pull it into line.\u00a0\u00a0 That works often enough to keep me using it as a first choice.<\/p>\n
Second choice is the simpler “backing up” approach, which is to go back and read the story from the first, looking for the place where the trouble started.\u00a0\u00a0 But stories, like yarn and tree branches, have a grain–a direction in which they flow smoothly and can slide the reader right past the start of trouble, and a direction in which they resist that slide.\u00a0\u00a0 So unless the problem’s start is really obvious (suddenly the feel of the story changes a lot) this method doesn’t help as much as I want it to.\u00a0 I do it because if it does work, it’s easier and faster than the real<\/em> backing up method.<\/p>\n Backing up is time-consuming and difficult precisely because the story does not want to be read backwards.\u00a0\u00a0 But like turning a picture upside down to see exactly where it doesn’t work (wonder why that arm looks just a little wonky?\u00a0 Turn it upside down and it’s obvious),\u00a0 working backward through the story reliably locates the start of the problem area, even if you wrote pages and pages beyond it before being yanked to a halt.<\/p>\n To do this, it does help to have done the easy thing first.\u00a0 Say you have 250 pages of\u00a0 your new book.\u00a0\u00a0 It was going along briskly until somewhere over page 200, when it began to feel slow and “thick.”\u00a0\u00a0 You kept going, hoping it would straighten itself out, but instead it went slower, and slower, and now–after several days of staring at it and struggling with it, you can’t go forward.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You then went back to the beginning, paying attention to how you felt writing it.\u00a0 You remember now that the slow-down began around page 225, but you can’t see anything wrong with that, or subsequent pages, until 245, where you were clearly feeling annoyed with it.<\/p>\n So you have to do the full backward thing.\u00a0 For safety’s sake, go back to 220 (if you’re confident of your perception that it began to slow down at about 225)\u00a0 or even as far back as 200, when you’re sure it was still chugging along happily.\u00a0\u00a0 Now you will concentrate on the problem area…backwards.<\/p>\n But what are you looking for?\u00a0\u00a0 Not anything you learned in high school English: the problem is not a typo, a misspelled word, a punctuation error,\u00a0 a run-on sentence.\u00a0 The problem is structural, either at the level of design (if you outline, it’s a problem in the outline) or construction.\u00a0\u00a0 If your book is a house, then it’s a house with no foundation under one end, no way to get into one or more rooms, or a stairway that doesn’t reach the next floor…that kind of problem.<\/p>\n So what do<\/em> you look for?\u00a0\u00a0 In fiction terms, design problems often turn out to be errors in conceiving a character, so that the character’s behavior is not grounded (has no foundation) in motivation.\u00a0\u00a0 Just as stairways that go up to a ceiling and stop there make no sense in a house, actions that have no cause make no sense in a book.<\/p>\n You might think outlining would prevent such errors, but not necessarily.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s all too easy to outline a story based on what you want to have happen–a neat idea–and not on the characters’ motivations for the actions. \u00a0 If you outline, you can save yourself grief by explicitly stating why the character did such-and-so,\u00a0 ensuring from the outline level that the story makes psychological sense.<\/p>\n If you write without an outline, the likeliest causes of a design problem partway through are losing your own focus on the point-of-view character (so that you are not letting the character’s internal motivation drive the story),\u00a0 pushing for daily word-count (so that you rush past your awareness of the character, and are winging it),\u00a0 and following a brand-new, bright shiny idea right off the track.<\/p>\n So you’re looking for places where the connection between character and motivation as causes of action aren’t clear or don’t make sense, and a Shiny\u00a0 Idea that might have dragged you off the character and onto a false trail.<\/p>\n Read the last five pages backward (and forward, if you need to).\u00a0\u00a0 Or you can work scene by scene, however many pages the scene is.\u00a0\u00a0 Jot down the character’s motivation for each action.\u00a0\u00a0 Does it make sense?\u00a0\u00a0 Would that character do that, and why?\u00a0 And are the consequences of the action believable, in the terms of reality you set for this book?\u00a0 No problems?\u00a0 Move on to the next five pages (or scene.)<\/p>\n Why, you may wonder, start at the end, far from where you now think the problem started?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One reason is to find out if the problem was time-limited (it had a defined beginning in one working session and from there on out your construction was sound–though you were now building a different structure) or whether something internal was blurring your creative vision for all the days from problem inception to the present.\u00a0\u00a0 That’s important to know, once you’ve diagnosed the problem and begin to correct it.<\/p>\n In the simplest case, as you work back you find that you know why the characters did A, and you see that the results of A were believable.\u00a0\u00a0 Causes preceded result.\u00a0 Then, as you near page 225,\u00a0 you see it.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps it’s a Shiny Idea (“What if John isn’t really John Anderson, but was adopted and never knew it, and he gets a letter telling him he’s really Marcus Ivanovishky and his father was an international terrorist 30 years ago…?”)\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps it’s a failure of connection to your POV character on the day the phone rang and you got important news about something else (or even that book as in\u00a0 “If you can get the book in by X, your editor says they can make it a lead title…there’s a hole in the schedule.”)\u00a0\u00a0 You got excited, distracted, and charged into the next chapter full of glee or fear or whatever…and because you weren’t focused on the character, you have the character do something that makes no sense for him (for the movie, maybe), or the consequences are unbelievable.<\/p>\n You realize that the character wouldn’t do that, or if the character did, the consequences would be different, and…there’s your tangle.\u00a0\u00a0 Now you know where you went wrong, and if you’re really at the heart of the problem, you will know how to fix it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What does John Anderson really being the adopted son of a terrorist add to the story you were telling?\u00a0\u00a0 Nothing.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a red herring so big it warps the whole story.\u00a0\u00a0 Sure, you could write that other story, but it would be a different story in the first 200 pages, and you’d need to rewrite them with this as a major plot driver.\u00a0\u00a0 Pick your story, and do what’s necessary to make it one story.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If the problem is the character doing something that makes no sense for him…can you find a way to make it make sense?\u00a0\u00a0 If not, have him do what he would do, and then work forward, straightening it out one paragraph at a time.\u00a0\u00a0 If there’s a part of his character you haven’t shown yet, that would make it plausible, then figure out how you’re going to reveal that possibility, and then his motivation at the moment of the previously uncharacteristic action.<\/p>\n But in the more complicated form,\u00a0 something clouded your vision for days at a time…as you worked backwards, you found place after place where effects came before their cause, where the characters’ actions made no sense, where they ignored what they wouldn’t have ignored, etc.\u00a0 The whole thing, from, say, page 220 on, has an increasingly spiritless feel to it…it’s as if the whole limb of a tree had been replaced by a plastic limb.\u00a0\u00a0 Finally you remember that when you were writing page 220, you had a distraction that occupied part of your thinking from then to now.\u00a0\u00a0 It could have been bad news–a favorite uncle died and you keep remembering times you were together, and how much you loved him.\u00a0 It could have been good news–that chance to be a lead title for your publisher if you could just push the book along faster–but it was a distraction that persisted, without your being aware that it was damaging the book.<\/p>\n Now that you know about it, you can (probably, if it’s not too great) force yourself to put it out of mind long enough to work on the book.\u00a0\u00a0 Once you know what caused the problem, you can say, for instance:\u00a0 “I will not think about Uncle Ted for the next hour,” set the alarm, write, and then (when the alarm goes off) deliberately remember Uncle Ted and that fishing trip or that family picnic for a few minutes.\u00a0\u00a0 You can also be more alert to the connection between character and plot, the motivation within the character that causes action, the effect of action on others, the consequences…and make sure these things work.<\/p>\n So backing up–being able to work backwards to analyze\u00a0 what went wrong in a story or book–is a valuable tool in the writer’s tool-kit.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No, this isn’t about backing up your work on another device or keeping a printout.\u00a0\u00a0 (Though that kind of backup is vital if you work on a computer.)\u00a0\u00a0 This is about one way to diagnose and fix a problem you have while writing, and it’s related (no surprise) to the problem you might have untangling 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