Metaphor by Metaphor

This PDF is a dramatic oversimplification, but it outlines an approach to plotting that is essential in some genres. Variations on it can be especially interesting.

From John Dufresne’s The Lie That Tells a Truth, here are some more writing commandments.

And, from Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing, an additional set.

Finally, Kurt Vonnegut’s eight guidelines for writing a story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Talk with at least one other person in the room about these questions:

• What large (global, chapter-level) changes do you need to make first? Second?
• What worries you about your opening? Your middle? Your conclusion?
• How can you increase the reader’s engagement in the narrative?
• Which scenes might you summarize? Which summaries need to become scenes?
• How do you plan to show change in characters in the next draft?

At home, do at least one of the following:

• Read the draft in one sitting without changing anything. Note changes you’d like to make.
• Make an outline of what you’ve already written.
• Write a one-page summary of the entire rough draft
• Chart increasing and decreasing tension in the rough draft
• Try the “shrunken draft” exercise.

Make a revision plan or at least a list of several “next drafts.”

• Give each draft a specific purpose. For example
  • Does altering the order of events increases drama?
  • Does altering the order of events make power shifts more obvious?
  • Which scenes can be added to increase characterization?
  • Which summaries ought to be scenes?
  • What can I cut?
  • Which scenes need to be rewritten?
  • Which is the most boring moment and how can that be changed?
  • Where might chapters be important? Where might you divide the manuscript so that revising each draft can consist of a series of smaller, less overwhelming tasks?
  • Save sentence-level/grammar issues for the summer.

From Elizabeth George’s Write Away: “You can begin the story just before the beginning; you can begin it right at the beginning; or you can begin it after the beginning” (65).

• What are some other ways to start?
• How is it possible to start before the beginning? After?
• What are the benefits of each of these three strategies? Disadvantages?
• Which of these strategies do you think you might use and why?

Let’s look at a few pages from Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence.

From The 3AM Epiphany by Brian Kiteley, this exercise is called “Outrunning the Critic.” I’ve summarized it here:

• Write one hundred short sentences about a character in a piece of your fiction.
• Don’t lift your fingers from your keyboard for all one hundred sentences (then go back and revise tomorrow).
• The sentences should not connect, nor need they follow one another logically.
• Be careful not to use the name of your character or a pronoun to start each sentence; the key to this exercise is to relax and let your mind find new material and detail.