« Telemarketers! | Main | Tinker, Tinker, Putz, Putz »

February 18, 2005

Friday Writer’s Corner

Alesia, from her writing computer...

The Sound and the Fury

Readers and other writers often ask about the plotting. How do you do it? Are you an outline or a ‘pantser’ [a sort of short-hand for one who writes with no plan; by the ‘seat of her pants’ writing]? I’m definitely a plotter. I love the plotting process; it’s one of my favorite parts of writing. I usually get a fresh legal pad [only white; none of that hideous yellow paper I never even liked to use when I was practicing law] and go curl up in my big, comfy chair with my small, comfy puppy and play What If?

My book ideas always start with a character. For example, AMERICAN IDLE was ‘What If a woman who has never held a job for more than two years, and thinks she’s totally incompetent at work and in her personal life, is suddenly thrown into a situation where she’s the sanest one around?’ Then I start weaving in the twists and turns, fleshing out the characters, and getting to know them. This process takes time; kind of a fermenting process. I walk around, doing other things, with my characters rolling around in the back of my busy brain. Secondary characters, love interests, the final destination, and much of the journey go this way.

Finally, I’ll have the book all blocked out. Sometimes my outline is ten pages long. Sometimes it’s twenty. For my first legal thriller, there were so many intricate puzzle pieces, the outline is nearly 75 pages long. [My pantser friends are moaning at the thought.]

The one thing the outlines all have in common? The books never turn out exactly like them. For me, outlines are like life. Their very structure demands fluidity. A character may turn out in a way you don’t expect; demanding to take over more of the page, or demonstrating that his motivation is deeper and darker than you’d imagined when you started writing him. I love when that happens. That’s Magic Time. And Magic Time is the place that births all of the best stories.

So I write, and I revise my outline. And I write and revise some more. Then I get to the place – usually after page 300 or so – that I call the Sound and the Fury. My friend Suz Brockmann calls it being in avalanche mode. Either way, it’s the place where all of the plot threads and the characters and the Story with a capital S come together in such a crashing wave that your fingers can’t keep up with the ideas burning through your brain and up from your gut to the keyboard.

Then I swim up from typing The End and blink like a creature coming into the light; then I do all the things that the Sound and the Fury kept me from; then I rest a little and read other people’s books. But it’s not very long until my fingers are itching for a pen and a fresh legal pad, and I need to call Daisy and climb back in my comfy chair. Because I just had a thought – What If . . .

Hugs and happy weekend,
Alesia

Posted by Alesia at 6:21 PM