This week, your big NaNoWriMo prewriting assignment is to develop a long synopsis, or scene list.  I’ve talked before about writing a plot synopsis (and all its various forms), and tucked in there is a brief description of a scene list:

A scene list is primarily useful as a prewriting or editing tool. It forces you to map out the actual structure of your story, down to the very building blocks, and then gives you an easy place to spot errors or weak points, to tinker and rearrange.

To make a scene list, you start at the very beginning of your story, and write one to two paragraphs describing what happens in every scene. When you’re finished, you’ll have your entire plot down on paper — every twist and every turn — without all that messy set design, characterization, and description.

That’s certainly how we’re using it this week. Today I want to go into a little more detail than those two short paragraphs give.

The Building Blocks

When you do the assignment tomorrow, you’re going to build your story. You’ve already scoped it out, with the Conflict Resolution Cycle Worksheet. You’ve laid a path of stepping stones with your mock Table of Contents.

And you’ve grasped at the heart of it with your short synopsis. That’s something you’re going to need when you try to sell your story (as I mentioned in that older article). It’s a great starting place, when you think about your story, but to really figure out what your novel needs, you’ve got make a scene list.

We’ve talked about scenes, and I suggested every chapter should contain one or two scenes. In my work, I almost always do two scenes per chapter – one establishing a conflict, and the other overcoming it. I like my scenes to blend dialogue with action and, wherever possible, to alternate between the dialogue-heavy ones and the action-heavy ones. Just to keep things moving.

Ultimately, though, your story will tell you what content a given scene will have. You might set out to write a lengthy philosophical discourse on the social implications of unrestrained speech on conservative talk radio, and find your characters’ discussion interrupted when a cop jumps out of his patrol car to ask them why they’re out walking so late at night. That happened to me. I never did get around to the conclusion of that conversation.

Your story will evolve, your story will exert independence and try to self-differentiate and do all the other things teenagers do to frustrate their parents. That’s a good thing (in teenagers and in novels), but your job as the writer is to make sure your story gets from its beginning to its end, no matter what crazy style choices it expresses along the way.

Your Plan of Action

And, just like the parent of a teenager, if you walk into that process blindly — unprepared, without a plan — you’re going to have some real trouble. I don’t recommend it. This week’s assignment is all about having a plan.

You’re going to build a map out of some of the concepts you first encountered in the Table of Contents, and then more explicitly in the Worksheet. You’re going to decide what happens in every scene of your novel.

If you did the short synopsis, you’ve already done all the work of boiling it down to one page, so you might expect some difficulty breaking that back out into a longer list. That’s not really the best way to do this anyway, though.

What you want to find for your scene list isn’t an overview of the story, but a detailed look at each of the discrete events that takes place in the story. Think of this not as expanding your short synopsis, but as expanding your Table of Contents.

What Happens Next

This assignment will probably be a lot of work. It’ll probably take 5-10 pages, and that’s if you keep things brief and leave out all the flowery language that makes writing fun. But let me tell you why it’s worth it: once you’re done with this, you’ll walk into November knowing what happens next.

On November 1, that’s the first scene. That’s easy. You’ve probably been building the first scene (and the first page, and the first line) since you first decided you were going to write a novel.

But when you get to the end of that first scene, you’ll have to decide what comes next. Sometimes it flows organically, but a lot of the time you have to make your story get on to the next major plot point.

That’s not so hard on November 2, but come the middle of the month, you’ll find yourself sitting at your computer, a paragraph away from finishing scene 16 and agonizing over exactly how to do that, because your next paragraph needs to transition somehow to where the protagonist will end up next. And the cursor will just blink at you, impatiently demanding over and over again, “What’s next?”

I’ve been there all too often, and that’s the question that has, more than anything, driven me to close my book and give up on my word count for the day. If you don’t have a plan, every paragraph can trap you in that indecision. If you have a vague idea where you want to end up, that can be even more frustrating because you feel the burden of making up something that will actually get you closer to your goal (without actually knowing whether it will).

When you have your long synopsis, though, there is no question. You know what’s next. It’s the next scene in your list. It’s the next paragraph on your page.

Oh, there’s still work to do. You still have to actually write it. But that’s what November is about. Writing your story. My goal for these prewriting exercises is to make sure you can dedicate the whole month of November to writing it.

So figure it out now, make it up, play with the building blocks of your story and move them around until they make something beautiful. Put it down on paper, and you’ll know exactly where to go when you’re wrapping up the scene at the diner, the scene at the chemicals plant, the scene at the Vatican. You go to the next paragraph in your synopsis, and get to work.

As my sister so kindly pointed out, I’ve fallen a bit behind on the blog posts lately. And that’s after cutting my weekly commitment by half. I still mostly blame schoolwork, but that’s really just my temporary excuse. Give me a week, and I’ll be able to blame NaNoWriMo for a full month.

After that…well, I’ll have to make something up. I’m going to spend all of November making somethings up (50-190 thousand somethings, to be precise), so how hard could that be?

Honestly, this summer was crazy and fall is looking worse. I have no idea how I’m going to handle November with everything on my plate. And if those words sound familiar, then you were probably reading my blog around this time last year.

That’s…well, that’s a different blog. This time last year, I didn’t have Unstressed Syllables to worry about. I also didn’t have a rigorous publication schedule looming, marketing demands for my newly published book, a burgeoning arthouse to build, coursework for a master’s degree, or a growing clamor from my fans for more books in their hands.

That last one I’m not complaining about.

Actually, I’m not complaining about any of it. That list makes me incredibly proud of everything I’ve done over the last year, and excited about everything I plan to do in the next. It certainly keeps me busy, though.

Last Friday, I realized with a start that it was nearly November, and that I had two big homework assignments coming due, and that I hadn’t yet written any blog posts for this week. Luckily, I was looking forward to a weekend which meant some free time (right?), so I sat down to figure out my schedule.

• Saturday morning, I needed to do some shopping for Sunday’s plans (see below). I was also supposed to take AB along with me. No problem.
• Saturday afternoon, I needed to help Trish pack the car for her afternoon plans (she had a scrapbooking party to attend from 3 PM to midnight). I also needed to watch the kids for several hours before the babysitter was available.
• Saturday evening, while the kids were at the babysitter’s, I needed to watch the OU game, find myself some dinner, and get a lot of reading done for my homework assignment.
• Saturday night, nine-ish, I needed to pick the kids up from the babysitter’s, get them ready for bed and put to sleep, and then finish the OU game and get more reading done.
• Sunday morning, I needed to wake up in time to make it to church. (Just made it.)
• Sunday afternoon, I got to spend time with Carlos and Julie, in town visiting, and needed (during that visit) to get us all caught up to speed on each other’s ongoing projects.
• Sunday evening, I needed to host a huge party for all of our current Consortium members. There were a lot of people working together (whether they knew it or not), and mostly through me as an intermediary, and this was our first chance to get everyone in the same room and put faces with names. (It was a huge success.)
• Sunday night…well, the party lasted late. And then I went to bed.
• Monday morning, I needed to go to work and get a lot of stuff ready for a little leave of absence. (Didn’t end up happening.)
• Monday afternoon, I needed to meet with Shawn and some of his in-laws for a drive down to Dallas.
• Monday evening, I needed to wait in line at the unbelievably awesome new Dallas Cowboys stadium, because we somehow got there an hour too early. I got a picture of me standing under the Landry statue, though, so that’s something.
• Monday night, I needed to watch the Cowboys snatch victory from defeat, trounce a division opponent, and launch their meteoric rise toward their most phenomenal football season in my lifetime. (Didn’t end up happening.)
• Monday late, late, late night, I needed to get some more reading done for my homework project on the drive home.
• Tuesday morning, I needed to wake up early (in spite of the late, late, late night), and go to work.
• Tuesday afternoon, I needed to put together a short report on the book I’d just barely finished reading for class, meet Toby for our regular weekly lunch/program development meeting, and then attend class at OU, before driving back to work for another two hours.
• Tuesday evening, I needed to watch the kids while Trish went to book club.
• Tuesday night, I needed to sleep like you would not believe.

And, surprisingly enough, I got most of that done. Forgot to work in the blog post, and I hated seeing Romo broken on the field, but it’s still a pretty impressive scene list.

Oh yeah. Scene lists. Let’s get to that.

This month we’re reviewing all the parts and processes that go into developing a story. Our goal is to put together a complete prewriting package to do some of the heavy lifting for you when it comes time to write a novel in November.

So far, if you’ve been following along, you have Characters, you have the elements of a Plot, presumably you know your Setting, but we still have to discuss how you actually write the story. What do you do to convert that story idea we have so well documented into an actual story?

Thinking in Scenes

The answer is writing scenes. Scenes are the building blocks of any story. Whether it’s a poem, a bit of interpretive dance, a Great American Novel, or a major motion picture, a story is told in scenes. A story told without clearly defined scenes is, essentially, a synopsis. This is how we separate storytelling from summary.

No matter what time frame you’ve chosen for your story, it probably contains the potential for an infinite number of scenes. You could use flashbacks and flashfowards to give the story context, you could have a play-within-a-play, or dreams or hallucinations – you could write a thousand scenes into a narrative that only actually takes place within a single room, over a span of a couple minutes. It would probably be dreadful, but it could be done.

The point is, the story idea that you have already developed contains within it a boundless sea of scenes. A few of them are gripping, immersive. Some of them leap out at you, defining moments in the path from the Big Event to the stunning Climax. Most of them are irrelevant.

Choosing the Scenes

Your job, as the storyteller, is to choose which scenes you are going to include in your story. That’s it. Once you have a character list and a premise, most of the scenes can be extrapolated from there, but it’s up to you to choose which scenes to present to your audience.

For an excellent example of that, just consider the Harry Potter books. He’s in school the entire time, right? For the first five books, at least, he’s spending most of his time in classes, presumably, but how many scenes can you remember where he was in a classroom? They are far fewer than the scenes in the dining hall or the common room, scenes on the Quidditch field or (most common) skulking down shadowy corridors.

Of course, there are scenes that take place in the classroom – often highly dramatic scenes that jump immediately to mind – and that’s precisely the point. She could have included thousands of classroom scenes, but instead she chose just the ones that served the story best, and implied all the hours spent bent over a textbook or scribbling down notes.

When it comes time for you to convert your story idea into a story, there is just one rule you must remember: every single scene must move your story forward.

Believe me, you will write scenes that you absolutely fall in love with but that don’t measure up to that one rule. And, painful as it will be, you’ll have to cut them out of the story. That is the price writers pay. Apart from the rejection letters, it’s really the only one — having to remove something so beautifully crafted from your masterpiece. It’s necessary, though.

Writing the Scene

Before you can start cutting anything, though, you’ve got to get it written. We’ll start on that with this week’s big writing assignment.

Come back tomorrow, and we’ll move you a big step closer to your NaNoWriMo novel with a little bit of practice writing.

I’m not at all sure it’s a good idea to tell this story. No one’s ever called me “discerning,” though. So I’m going to tell it anyway.

I’ve spent most of my life trying (successfully, for the most part) to win the love of the woman who most loves Gods Tomorrow. That’s a writer’s fairytale, right there.

Still, I haven’t always been with Trish. I dated a couple other girls, while I was still a stupid high school kid, and as is probably to be expected, both relationships ended in dramatic conflagration. In other words, they ended in good stories. And the better story (which is to say, the one that makes me look far worse), is Lindsay’s.

We dated for seven months — most of my junior year in high school — and the story of how we got together could be a really sweet one, if it weren’t so overshadowed by the ending. The ending, though….

There came a point when, for whatever stupid high school reason, I became convinced the relationship needed to be over. It wasn’t really any shortcoming of hers, or really anything specific. I was just a deeply romantic sort of person back then, and I didn’t feel like the relationship lived up to my expectations anymore. There was insufficient magic.

And once I’d come to that conclusion, it was over. The tragedy, though, was that I came to that conclusion on February 10th. Romantic that I was, the imminence of Valentine’s Day did not escape me, and that presented a huge problem.

See…I was concerned that, if I broke up with her before Valentine’s Day, we’d live the rest of our lives wondering if a successful holiday date might have been just the magic needed to save the relationship. And, of course, I had some concern she might feel…I dunno, ripped off, that she didn’t get to have a Valentine’s Day. I mean, how sad is that, to be newly-dumped on the most romantic of all holidays?

On the other hand, if we did stay together through Valentine’s Day, and then I broke up with her afterward…well, that would just undermine the whole value of the magical memory. Right? She’d know those happy hours for the sham they were, and probably hate me more for it.

I’ve since been told, often and fervently, that I was a moron for thinking this was a difficult decision. To me, though, it was a puzzle I couldn’t solve.

So…well, Valentine’s Day rolled around, and I still hadn’t decided, so I stuck with the plans we’d already made. I went to pick her up, dressed up all fancy, and found her completely stunning. We went out to an extravagant dinner, made pleasant conversation over our Big Macs, and then I drove her out to a romantic overlook out by the lake.

I spread a blanket, and we stretched out side-by-side to stare up at the brilliant sky all full of stars, and for a long time we just lay there enjoying the beauty of it. Then she poked me gently in the ribs and said, “You’re awful quiet.”

I probably grunted in response, unsure what to say, and she said, “Whatcha thinkin’ about?”

I looked over at her, held her eyes for a moment, but I couldn’t keep it up. I looked back up at the stars and said, “Well…there’s something I need to discuss with you, but I don’t know if we should discuss it now, or later. It’s…well, it’s not very happy.”

She surprised me with a big smile, and rested her head on my shoulder. “Later,” she said. “If it’s not happy, save it for later, because this is just too perfect.” She sighed deeply, and then said with a chuckle, “I mean, unless you’re going to break up with me or something.”

I bit my lip, and then said quietly, “So…we should discuss it now.”

Earlier this week I told a story. It was one I had to tell, under the circumstances. On the day I launched Gods Tomorrow to the public, you’d better bet I was going to talk about my novel.

It works well as an illustration for the writing principles I want to talk about this week, though. Any good story does — or, I should say, any story that’s well-told — so I chose the one that killed the most birds with the fewest stones.

The most important parts of the narrative were:

• The establishing intro, in which I conveyed who I was and what I would be talking about, which is to say the proof copies of my novel
• The big event (receiving the first proof copy of my novel) which shook up my life and introduced conflict (it was beautiful but flawed)
• The obstacles to my happiness (those would be the actual flaws in the book), and the things I did to overcome those obstacles
• The climax (it was an admittedly weak one, but that’s because Amazon has such a convenient system in place for self-publishing)
• And the resolution, in which I now have a perfectly beautiful book for sale on Amazon.

What I like, for the careful reader, is that in the conclusion it ties this one small scene, this one circuit through the CRC, into the larger conflict story I’ve been spinning here on my blog, of the difficulties I’ve faced with traditional publishers over the last decade. That’s a nice touch.

Designer Storytelling

I throw around a lot of synonyms sometimes, counting on you to catch the subtle differences in usage. Just as an example, I sometimes talk about writing, sometimes about creative writing, sometimes about storytelling, and sometimes about narrative.

This week’s series is all about narrative, and when I use that word, I really mean something along the lines of “designer storytelling.” Or maybe “deliberate storytelling.” “Narrative” is the stuff you’re doing while telling a story.

And the Conflict Resolution Cycle is the basic structure of narrative. It’s the foundation on which you’ll build your narrative elements (your scenes and settings and character interactions), and then you’ll wrap that narrative with the sopping papier mache strips that make up a “story,” and pop the narrative balloon inside so it looks to a casual reader like this elegant tale sprang fully formed from your creative genius.

We know the secret, though. The secret is: storytelling is a craft.

Narrative Tension

One of the most important elements of that craft is narrative tension. That’s the questions in your readers’ minds that make them turn the page. A good story has to have some sort of narrative tension going for every single page, but maintaining that is a real challenge.

The Conflict Resolution Cycle is part of the answer to that challenge. Instead of trying to force a single question to carry the full weight of the story, and hold up for page after page after page, we structure a story in scenes, that successively answer little questions and replace them with new ones, always overlapping, and always–very gradually–pushing toward an answer to the great Story Question that drives the narrative arc.

A good book runs like clockwork.

When you think about the Conflict Resolution Cycle, when you look over the worksheet tomorrow, imagine a cogwheel spinning in circles, driving a gear with question after question after question. Each one grabs your readers for a moment (or a page), spins them a little further along, and then lets them go to be replaced by the next.

Narrative Pacing

The speed of your little cogwheel represents another major element in designer storytelling: narrative pacing. That refers to the speed at which you move the story along, the rate at which Things Happen, from page to page.

There’s not a single perfect target. It varies from genre to genre and, honestly, from reader to reader. By and large, though, the trend of the last several decades has been toward faster and faster pacing.

That’s a big part of the drive behind the explosion in Young Adult literature (particularly among non-young-adult readers). It’s also started a trend toward first-person present-tense narrative, in an artificial bid to make the narrative seem faster and more immediate. I’m not a fan.

The alternative, though, is to actually manage your story’s pacing, and that’s a lot harder than throwing gimmicks at it. But with a little effort and a little insight, it’s certainly doable.

The trick is to understand where your pacing comes from. And, in context, I’m certain you already know the answer.

The Conflict Resolution Cycle.

Your story’s pace is determined by the rate at which you introduce new obstacles and resolve old ones — and then by the amount of time you spend between scenes letting your character consider just how they feel about that new obstacle they just encountered, or how they plan to resolve it in the following chapter.

That last bit is described as “scene and sequel,” and it’s a concept I’m just now studying for the first time. I promise a more detailed post on it in the future, but for now it’s enough to know that it’s there…and that every time you drop into one of those introspective “sequels,” you’ve just backed off the throttle on your narrative.

Sometimes that’s a good thing. The trick is to know just how fast you’re going, at every milestone along the way, and manage your scenes to maintain the speed you want, right through to the resolution.

Come back tomorrow, and I’ll give you the worksheet I designed to help with that.