Plotting

A stranger arrives in town. A sudden death galvanizes the story. Things are not as they seem. Small details become incredibly important. Nothing in the text seems as if it is marking time; instead, the paragraphs hurry along, and the story seems to have its own velocity and trajectory which slowly becomes clear to the reader. The reader is hooked from the start, characters appear whom we then come to care about, and then things happen to them and they do things that lead them seemingly inevitably to the shattering climax, and the conclusion is all church bells and the wind in the high meadow. In trying to think about the plotting of a novel, we know we have plotters (who carefully plan ahead) and “pantsers,” who write by the seat of their pants and hope that wonderful plot twists will appear as if delivered Deus ex Machina, lowered in from the stage lights. It seems to me that the best method would be a hybrid of these two. Now, one of the main reasons writers write is to surprise themselves, trusting that their luck and previous experience with dreaming up narratives will be able to produce something completely unexpected and wonderful. Well, yeah, wouldn’t that be great! But in my experience a hybrid method may prove to be the most fruitful, so that would include a large white board with arrows and circles and much scribbling of names and events and dates, and index cards with every character getting as much detail as possible, including other cards for biography and relationship to other characters. Let’s take Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as an example. An American college instructor of Spanish has volunteered to fight against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Naturally he speaks Spanish very well. He sneaks behind enemy lines and hooks up with a small guerrilla group in the hills, clashes with the leader about the job of blowing up a strategic bridge, participates in various partisan activities, falls in love with Maria, a traumatized woman among the guerrillas, finally manages to blow up the bridge at the right time and then is badly injured trying to escape with the survivors and has to send his love away to safety while he stays behind to die fighting against the pursuing Fascists. Great plot, and you don’t see it coming, but the effect is simply shattering and deeply moving and profound. And it seems to be the result of both careful plotting as well as lengthy excursions into side issues of the story—seat of the pant digressions. Great work~~