This week I’m writing a series of blog posts about how I wrote my novels and how I came to an understanding of narrative structure for myself. I’m celebrating my book on novel writing being 99p for a few days. Here’s part three.
When you’re stuck on something – like I was with narrative structure and story – it’s often better to stand on your head and look at the whole thing in a different way. It turns out that the answer, for me, came from asking myself questions. If in doubt, as yourself questions.
I finished The Water’s Edge in 2001, while I was doing my MA, and started the second one shortly afterwards. Again, the ‘structure’ came from historical research, again based on a building – this time a home for unmarried mothers in Ely. For me, it was the tendrils that reach backwards and forwards through history that gave the book a structure.
I tried to give the book a plot, using a troubled modern-day character called Erica – I think I managed a thread rather than a plot. I also wanted the book to be haunted by a ghost called Almost Brown – that was another thread rather than a plot. There were various others: magic, baking, scrummage, motherhood. If these turned into narrative arcs (which at the time I confused with intergenerational history, I think) then it was an accident.
The eight-point story arc
When I started teaching fiction writing full-time in 2005, fellow writer and teacher Leone Ross introduced me to the eight-point story arc. (Thanks Leone.) Believe me, you can’t understand the brilliance of this constraint until you actually use it for your specific project and make it your own. The best students resisted it and resisted it, and then used it anyway, in a subtle, sophisticated way. I learnt how to use it in the same way.
It wasn’t until I figured out a way to teach the narrative structure to myself (this is a work in progress) that I started to get it. Using a particular form of narrative structure isn’t formulaic if you re-purpose it for yourself. Any description of it is necessarily general – your job is to make it specific.
Writing my PhD introduced me to the power of questions. I don’t think I could have put it together without using questions as subtitles. Try it: write out a series of questions about whatever you are writing right now. Keep going. Fill up a page. Add some ‘what ifs’ as answers. What if character X did this? Questions are powerful. I eventually planned the novel I’m writing now, and created my scene sheets, using tonnes and tonnes of questions.
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