Describe the world of your story in a sentence.
Describe the scope of your novel.
Describe the “rules” of your story world.
Exercises
Think of other things about setting that aren’t place: the music that plays in the story’s background; news of the world and the community; the change in light as a season changes.
Think, too, of using specific terms instead of general ones: geraniums, not big flowers; loafers, not just shoes. Specific identification (not overdone) increases the believability, the authority, of the text, and can sometimes carry notes of character—a man who lives alone and has a French press versus a more ordinary coffeepot.
Think of the senses. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith is filled with smells. One of the characters is a painting restorer, and her beautifully described apartment is redolent of rabbit glue and spirits. The novel is also remarkable for its descriptions of New York City auction houses, jazz clubs, and even squash ball courts in two different eras.
Be deliberate in choosing the season(s) in which your story takes place, and take advantage of what each suggests, whether it is the gray damp melancholy of a winter rain, or the promise of budding trees in spring.
Think of novels you have liked for their settings. List the sites in which major scenes take place. How does the story come out of those settings? Or how does the setting reinforce action and emotion? If you can, be specific about actions that occur because of where the characters are.
Play with ideas for changing aspects of setting in your novel. Consider what else would have to change in the story. Start with a single chapter: List every setting. Think how you could make the story more interesting or more dramatic in different settings.
Skim your text for the objects you mention. Is it possible to be more specific? To use a more exact word? To describe it more succinctly? To mention color? To use the object?
Go through the manuscript and write a tally of times of day when scenes take place. Do you exploit the changes in light? The background movement of people going off to work versus children on bicycles after school?
6. Create timelines for foreground and backstory chronology.
Timelines will be invaluable to you in sorting events and staying on track in the present time of the novel. Make two separate timelines, for “now” and “then.” Concern yourself with your protagonist and the major line of the plot. (Consult your statement of aboutness and see how it is demonstrated in the novel’s events.)
Now, I realize that you’ve already written a draft. You already have a foreground and background. You already put the past in there like ferns behind the flowers. So what are you to do?
Given that you have done a draft and know your story better than you did when you started it, try doing these timelines without referring to the draft. In other words, use your best judgment from this point in time and in your thinking to identify the most important elements of the novel. Don’t be shy about making changes. Your job right now is to describe the story as you know it; you may already be revising. You can check your draft after you make your timelines. If you do this and you recognize that your “best story now” is somewhat different from what you wrote in the first draft, you’ll know that, before you do any rewriting, you’ll need to identify new scenes to write and old ones to amend or discard. Write yourself notes on those blank pages in your bound manuscript. Do not trust that you will remember.
If you do the timelines from what you are thinking now, you should also do a representation of the timelines in your present draft. If there is a difference between the two, you’ll see possibilities for revision.
Then, if you want to do it now, go through the draft and find the places where you brought in backstory. Visually block out the backstory with boxes or squiggles. You don’t have to deal with the misalignment you see now. Make notes or write questions to yourself on the manuscript’s blank pages. Keep going. Don’t spend too much time on this, since the scenes may change anyway, but it is a good practice to review how you have used the past.
And by the way, for a quick look at masterful handling of present, near past, middle past, and distant past, see Ethan Canin’s short story “The Year of Getting to Know Us,” in Emperor of the Air. A commitment-phobic man goes to see his dying father and has to deal with his present relationship and the memory of his childhood. A story is a quicker study than a model novel, and yet there is a lot to learn in this one. You could actually use it as a template for a novel design; it isn’t sophisticated, but it is elegant. It lends itself wonderfully to storyboarding. So make a copy of it and get your pens out.
USING THE FOREGROUND TIMELINE
When you look at the progression of events on your foreground timeline from the place where you open the novel, look for problems of repetition, such as similarity of events. (You should be focusing on the thread of events concerning the protagonist, at this stage.) You could do a run-through of the scenes, noting settings, for example. If the same conflict comes up over and over, you want to think about why that is so, and how the nature of the battle is shifting, if it is, and whether the stakes are getting higher, the fire hotter.
See what sequences emerge (the connections between events). You will look at these considerations in detail later, when you write a tagline for each chapter, and again when you develop a list of core scenes.
And oh yes—if you are writing a novel with multiple plotlines, you need both kinds of timelines for each plot and each subplot. Every plotline has to have its own tension and plot points, yet there has to be a kind of echo among the lines, places where the events converge. (They might converge in the past.) Creating a visual representation of the plot threads is helpful when you are trying to hold the whole thing in your head at one time. You can draw lines linking events, aligning chronology, and so on. The best way to understand how this works is to deconstruct a novel you admire.
If you are wondering how many events should appear on your timeline, you have to consider the scope of your novel. I suggest you start by spacing out six to ten major events (in pencil or with sticky notes) that comprise a general outline of the manuscript. Do they capture the general thrust of the story? Is something important left out? Play with the line. Think about what it takes to get from Event 1 to 2, from 2 to 3, and so on.
Post your timeline where you see it every day. Make it large enough to make notes on. (Post-it Notes are great because it’s easy to make changes.) Before and after a chapter, check it against your timeline. Is one or the other askew? What needs to be adjusted?
BACKSTORY
With the past timeline, I wouldn’t try to be so picky or detailed. Get down the main events in the protagonist’s past, the things that have come up in your draft so far. Look for events or time frames that resulted in lasting fear or shame or resentment; anything that pushes conflict onto the present stage. You will come back to them after you work with the “present” timeline. One or two scenes will become important and you will make them hover over present events. Some events will simply fall away as irrelevant. You may be able to combine what happens in one event with another, and if you can, you probably should. Generally, less is more. Don’t crowd the story with events that took place before it began. Seldom do you need to fill in the interim scene sequences; rather, you will want to note outcomes, reverberations of the major events, those things that still matter ten or fifty years later.
Sometimes, of course, the “past” of the novel is recent. In The Arrivals by Meg Mitchell Moore, everyone is thinking about something that happened last week or even yesterday; there’s lots of anxiety and resentment, and so everything gets worked over in character thoughts. Very little is in the past: one character’s husband had a one-night stand; another character’s boyfriend left her. Otherwise, life is going on on the page, dragging the accruing baggage with it. As you are writing your story, you may d
iscover that an event on the foreground timeline becomes something that carries on in the plot. “Now” becomes “just happened” and leads to the coming events. That’s called complication, and it’s good plotting.
Think of your “known story” as a continuum that began with “past events” (before the “now” of the story). There are novels that do not need a concrete past, that are entirely composed of present action. Sometimes the past is simply a catalyst, pushing the story into being, such as the death of a Texas boy’s rancher grandfather in All the Pretty Horses. The past is done with quickly. Most novels have characters with baggage from prior life experience, and the known story becomes part of the present story. In Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements, the protagonist is heavily burdened by a secret in his past, something that keeps him from ever feeling truly a part of the world he lives in. There are others who know his past, too, increasing his anxiety, rightly so. (The woes of not quite fitting in with old money! I never thought I would care, but I grew to like the protagonist.) What I like about this novel is the way the past presses against the protagonist, shapes his decisions and behaviors, without needing to blow up in some obvious revelation. Rather, the insistent pressure of the character’s shame and fear (he never did anything wrong except come from the “wrong” people) push him to some really bad choices. Seating Arrangements would be a good novel to study if your story has a similarly cloudy backstory that a character can’t escape. There is actually very little event in the past, but there is a lot of resonance from it in the present.
OLD NEWS
What often happens in novel drafts is that writers get ideas about the past while they are writing the ongoing present, and they get bogged down trying to invent, integrate, and balance these elements—making all of it up at the same time. They end up suffocating action with backstory. They lose the thread and the tension of now. This isn’t fatal to a first draft; you can easily go through it and identify the elements of backstory that matter, pull them out and organize them, and then decide where and when you will introduce them in the revised version for greater effect. But you have to be able and willing to identify “then” and “now” and consider excising the past. This seems to be hardest to do in the beginning, when there is some primary urge to shove in history as a scaffold for the opening action of the story.
Finding the right time to bring up old news is a big part of the talent and the skill it takes to write a novel. The past love affair of Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby is the very heart of The Great Gatsby, but we don’t really hear about it until we are deep into the novel (chapter 4), when Daisy’s friend Jordan tells the narrator, Nick. Gatsby’s passion to regain Daisy’s love springs from their relationship long ago, but the novel is very much about what is happening now. I remind you that the placement of that backstory late instead of early was a revision decision for Fitzgerald, based on his editor Maxwell Perkins’s suggestion. He did not write the novel quickly—or only once.
INTERIM SEQUENCES: An example
Think in terms of major incident or event, as in the following hypothetical story about the breakup of a marriage and the subsequent death of a couple’s child: the first part of the novel establishes big changes in Ellen’s life. (I am talking only about the opening movement of my hypothetical novel.) Let’s define three major events that launch and complicate (but do not yet resolve) the story:
Tom leaves Ellen.
Son Jimmy’s leukemia is diagnosed.
Ellen moves in with Mother.
Every scene does not appear on your timeline, but every major event should, and those will occur in scenes. You are putting down what must happen in the story. Other scenes and summaries will provide the sequences that link the major scenes. So, between our first and third events from above (Tom leaves Ellen and Ellen moves in with Mother), you might have scenes that can be grouped into three sets or scene sequences:
Event 1: Tom leaves Ellen
Sequence 1: Between Event 1 and Event 2
Ellen is packing, crying, and throwing out Tom’s left belongings in big garbage sacks.
She goes through a mortifying search for a cheaper place to live (possibly compressed in summary with scene fragments).
Tom moves in with another woman.
Jimmy reacts badly to his father’s absence.
and
Sequence 2: Between Event 1 and Event 2
Jimmy has what seems like a bout of flu, with bruising, and doesn’t shake it.
A school nurse suspects child neglect, which leads to a social worker’s visit to Ellen’s apartment.
Tom shows up to confront Ellen and try to take Jimmy.
and
Sequence 3: Includes Event 2
A first visit at the pediatrician’s, followed by meetings with specialists and tests (here is a good place for narrative summary!).
Tom’s hostile accusations; a moment of parental reciprocal sympathy when leukemia is diagnosed.
and
Event 3
Ellen’s mother appears at Ellen’s house with a van and moves Ellen and Jimmy to her house.
In the middle of the night, in the bathroom, Ellen breaks down and sobs.
The next event, which is the first complication in the middle section of the story, is Ellen being served with divorce papers and Tom’s demand for custody of their son.
As you look over the series of scene captions you can imagine sitting down to write them, one after another. The captions do not necessarily represent scenes of equal length; some of the action could be presented as narrative summary. But you can see where the bigger moments are, and you can see how to get from one to the next.
These phrases represent a set of scene sequences: One scene leads to the next logically and moves the plot in arcs of story line. The sequence is like a little story. Reducing sections of your own manuscript to a scheme like this is a very good litmus test of its logic and coherence. You’ll discover quickly if something is missing. It also can serve as an outline for rewriting.
So, after you have made the “broad strokes” timeline, and after you have done further evaluation of your draft, you can take each “set” on the timeline (two events) and establish the beats of scenes that come between, moving the plot from one situation to the next one. This is how you develop scene sequences, such as those suggested above with Ellen’s story. You decide how to group them into chapters. If you work on the floor or wall or a big board, you can make vertical scene captions that come between the major scenes on the horizontal timeline. The story starts to have a visual shape, which, I promise you, helps you hold it in your mind.
Right now you are learning tools for evaluating and writing, and you may want to be sure of your major events before you worry about scene sequences, but it won’t hurt to take a look at a chapter with this scheme in mind. It is also valuable practice to create scene sequences for chapters of a model novel.
EXERCISES
Identify three major events in your model novel and observe how far apart they are in time. Now do that for your own novel. Is it possible to compress the time? What would be the effect? Or does enough necessary action happen in between the events to take up the space?
Make a visual scheme (something like I did with Ellen’s story) of a section from your model book. You want to go from one situation to a changed situation, identifying the steps in between. (This is the basic idea of storyboarding.) The more you do, the more you will learn. I recommend you work with at least three chapters. Don’t get bogged down in the interim action; focus on the major events. Lay out the broad action of the three chapters.
Now you can enter the interim actions that take you from event to event.
Describe the pattern of the chapters.
7. Identify the most important backstory events.
By now you should know what memories hang over the story you are tel
ling. Put them on a timeline as events: the time that such and such happened. Evaluate them, one by one, to be sure that you want them to show up in the novel. If you are going to tell a story in which you bring in whole chapters of backstory, well, in my opinion, those events are part of the foreground. You are starting back there even if you don’t do so in the first chapter. Remember that although chronology is your best friend (you want to know things in sequence), you may not necessarily tell the story chronologically. What you do want to know is where your story really starts. What you relegate to the past should be winnowed down to a few major events. (You might leave more on the timeline than you will actually use in the novel, if knowing a denser past helps you.)
You have the rest of the timeline, of course, that starts with page 1, so you can consider where it is best to reveal what George did to Sarah in 1977, or why Mother, long dead, always favored her son over her daughter. As a general rule, it means more to the reader to learn about the past later rather than earlier. She has to be engaged with the protagonist’s situation and needs before she cares about history. You have to resist your impulse to spill it up front. If you think history is more interesting and more important, maybe that’s where you should begin the story. Maybe that is the story.
A little anecdote: A long time ago I served on a panel for the National Endowment for the Arts’ creative writing prose fellowships. I read several hundred manuscripts. After about forty of them, I began a tabulation of how many introduced backstory before page 3. It was astounding. Fully two-thirds of these accomplished writers stopped action to fill in information, right at the beginning, usually on the first page or two. I thought the strategy was appropriate in about a dozen manuscripts. I tell you this to say, you have a lot of company. I would go so far as to say it is a stage of maturing as a writer to be able to wait. Just keep in mind that your first chapter is about captivating the reader in the story that is unfolding; be very wary of interrupting it to explain the past.
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