Falldog

Ah, the joys of storylining.

Actual work on writing the novel hasn’t been going so well the last couple of weeks: holiday, house-movey business and a feature for DWM have rather taken away the chance to sit down and have a good old bash at it. But the last couple of days, I have been trying to finalise the actual storyline, feeding it all through the lovely Scrivener and enjoying it taking shape. If there’s any part of writing that really can be considered “making it up as you go along”, this is it.

I don’t mean that I don’t know what my story is; I do. I know what the beginning is, I know what happens in the middle, and I know how it ends. (Perhaps it’s better to say at this stage I know why it ends; the how will follow as I complete the storyline. And then it will probably change again as I actually get to the writing of it.) What I have been doing, though, is taking the chance to break it down into beats, figuring out what should happen where and when, trimming out the flabby bits, and – and here’s where the “as you go along” bit comes in – throwing in the little twists and turns of incident that actually make the story flow and move forward.

Case in point: I have two characters undertaking a perilous journey across a deadly mountain range. (The reasons for its deadliness are specific to the world of the story. It’s not monsters or anything like that. It’s what the mountains are made of.) This journey takes up the middle third of the novel, and is important for one of the characters, as she learns both important plot points and one or two things about herself as she goes. As I was typing away, putting the journey down, I thought, “Yawn. This is all very well, but… It’s not that gripping.

So, I sent in the bad guys, who ambush them and take them prisoner. Now, I have the two characters stuck in the bad guys’ prison camp, desperately trying to find a way out, while also learning (with better cause than just stumbling across it) some of that information I mentioned before.

That’s what’s so much bloody fun about storylining. In many ways, here is where you have to make the big mistakes with something as large as a novel – here, where it only takes a few moments to retype a paragraph or reorder a sequence of index cards, you can just play God and decide to make things tougher for your characters. You can throw anything at them, and see if they can get out of it. It’s brilliant.

As I type, of course, I’m not certain how they are going to get out of it. One of the characters is ill, close to death – but the bad guys aren’t the kind of… creatures who would give two hoots about that, so the traditional “My friend is sick! Please, Mr Prison Guard, come inside and look at him (so I can knock you out and escape)” isn’t going to work. But, brilliantly, inside that prison cell, my main character is going to learn some truly devastating stuff – not the least of which is the fact that her new friend is dying – so it will make her desperation to escape all the more meaningful. I hope, anyway.

Earlier in the storylining process, too, I added a new character, and a whole new plot strand for the main antagonist. Creepy stuff, I hope, and a bigger sense of mystery, which I had thought was lacking. Playing around with scenes and movements gives you a chance to see if stuff like this is lacking – or extraneous. I don’t wholly enjoy sticking to a rigid storyline, nor will I make myself if something better comes along during the actual writing, but in its opportunity to crystallise all the floaty plot ideas you’ve got, it’s invaluable.

It’s also useful as a way to get me excited about what I’m working on. When I come up with a little twist like “they get captured”, I can instantly feel how thrilling that bit will be, considering the build-up I’ve given the bad guys and their awful plan by this point. It makes me want to get straight to that chunk and get writing it, see it through the characters’ eyes, root for them as I hope any potential readers will do.

Now all I need is the house-move to be sorted, so I can have a bit of stability and a bit of physical space in which to get on with things! (I shall have a special writing hutch at the foot of the garden. So very Dahl.)