Piecing it All Together

Some books want to be linear. You get a nice, neat formula that takes you from point A to point B, you may find you have to detour at point C, but whatever. You mostly get to The End without a hitch.

The has never happened to me. My books are archeological digs with millions of bone shards that I have to put together a single piece at a time only to find out that psych! That piece doesn't really go here, it goes way over there.

Here's what I can say about the process, though.

I always have a general idea of the thing I'm digging up. I know the ending. I may not know how I'm going to get there or how I'm going to reconcile beginning to end, but the ending of the book is my starting point. I know where my characters must end up. Then I look for a beginning based on the characters' flaws and/or weaknesses. Some books can be written beginning to end. They are rare for me. Far more often, I write scenes from all over the place. I'm firmly of the opinion that if I don't know what happens next in a story, I move on to where ever I DO know what happens. This is wasteful. I do write scenes I end up not being able to use. One some books, it means overwriting the book to the point that I have two of the thing. It's useful in that I gain insight into what the core conflict of the book is. Eventually. The day comes, however, when I have to take my collection of disparate and oddly jointed scenes, pin them together into a skeleton, sculpt some flesh and features and see what looks back at me.

That's the easy part. Getting the original bones out of the ground, that's hard. Once I have a collection of scenes, I can pin those together with transitional scenes and a the glue of a few sentences about POV character drives. The initial revision pass polishes up the structure, and adds the flesh. It's the developmental editor who really gets me to put the features on the critter. We glue in the glass eyeballs so they stare into you no matter where you go. The copy editor does the airbrushing to make it look like it could move at any second.

Yeah. I far prefer the archeology metaphor to knitting or weaving. Cause, dinosaurs! and I guess I'm still twelve.

Knitting Scenes into Stories: Nah, I'm Way Too Rigid

Knitting in writing. Do I? Have I? Should I?

~slaps knee~

Oh, dear Readers, I have attempted the great "write scenes as they come to you, then knit them together into a cohesive story."

Such. A. Disastrophy.

My analytical brain had apoplexy. It shrieked. It flailed. It gave me a two-week migraine to ensure I never, ever, ever pulled a stunt like that again. The time it took to write that story was years longer than it should've been. The isolated scenes I'd written never made it into the final story. Worst of all, the plot and pacing of the book never recovered from trying to incorporate those pre-written islands. That is a 300k under-the-bed book that will never see the light of day.

The pole up my butt is way too stiff to let me do patchwork story writing. I am too much a girl of process and flow. A, then B, then C. My clunkiest stories are ones I didn't plot. Trying to warp a plot around pre-written scenes is 10x worse for me and the reader because it's obvious I'm trying too hard to make Fetch happen. You might think having a plot then writing the isolated scenes would make them easier to incorporate. Dear Reader, you'd be wrong. 

My method of writing requires Ch 2 to build off Ch1 and to set up Ch 3. Ch3 builds off Ch 2 and sets up Ch 4. Rando chapter out there, holding up a boombox playing "Don't You Want Me, Baby" will never fit. It'd be like a tangle of dog hair laundered into your sweater. It's not the right texture or color. It's got strands that waggle beyond the warp and weft; it's a total distraction....that gets removed.

What about developmental edits that ask me to move pieces around?

~scratches blossoming rash~

That--that's a rewrite of the whole fucking book. Knit one, purl two. If you purl one, knit two in the middle of the back piece you've got to undo everything that came after and re-knit. Or you live with the glaring flaw. Thems your options. 

Admittedly, there are many successful authors who can and do beautifully knit scenes into great stories. I'm not saying you shouldn't; I'm saying I can't. So, do I knit? Not literally. Not figuratively. 

Do You Knit... or WEAVE?

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is... knitting? Did our calendar guru pick this for Mother's Day week, or is it a coincidence?

Anyway, it's not the knitting you think. (Or not the knitting *I* thought.) We're asking each other if we write scenes piece by piece and knit them together, or if we have ever had to knit-in scenes?

I am not a knitter. If I go for a textile metaphor, I'd say I'm a weaver. I line up all the threads, begin at one end with nothing but a lot of colors and textures, and then I weave them gradually into a tapestry. That said, I've occasionally had to weave scenes, themes, and clues into the finished story - which is probably what the topic poser is getting at here.

It just doesn't feel like knitting to me.

For example, for developmental edits on THE FIERY CROWN (out in only two weeks!! preorder now!! Eeee!!!), my editor Jennie Conway asked me to add in some scenes early in the book. She wanted to see some of the secondary characters sooner. She also wanted discussion of a later issue to happen sooner. So I ended up adding two scenes and fleshing out a couple of others.

The thing is, this isn't like patching a tire or splicing a soundbite into a podcast (which I've learned to do!). Nor is it like reworking some part of a painting. That's why I think of it as weaving. In order to add scenes and characters to an earlier point in the tapestry, I have to adjust the warp and weft before that to accommodate them. Then I have to alter the pattern of the threads thereafter, to keep the texture even and the pattern tight.

It was all for good reasons - and made for a better book - but yeah... I don't knit. Either in my writing or in real life!

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