Plotting the Finfarran Novels
Years ago, when I was writing for tv
drama series, I learned to carry a very small notebook indeed. This was back in
the days before notebooks were digital, when writers still suffered from
stationary-envy and every meeting began with covert glances at other people’s
desirable A4 Filolfaxes. Actually, back in those days, large-format notebooks
had much to do with power games. The subliminal message of a really big
leather-bound tome and a flashy Parker pen was that your
agent had bumped up your fee for the series, or that your last show had
just been sold as a franchise in the US.
My own titchy little notebooks had
nothing to do with poverty, or even reverse psychology. They were a cunning way
of controlling an impulse to express my emerging ideas in diagrams rather than
words.
At development meetings attended by a
producer and several other, highly articulate, writers, bits of paper covered
with arrows and interlocking circles weren’t approved of. Hence the voluntary
strait-jacket of a notebook so small that it fitted into the pocket of my
jeans. But now, sitting at home in my PJs, preparing to start on a novel, I can
indulge in what, to me, is a vital part of plotting a work.
Visuals are particularly useful if
you’re working on a series of novels. With the Finfarran books I began by
sketching a map of a fictional peninsula before creating my characters,
some of whom were peripheral in the first book, led by my librarian
protagonist, Hanna Casey. Working from the map, I located each in
terms of where they lived and/or worked: and knowing where they came from in
this literal sense fed into their development. Hitherto shadowy characters
often come forward in subsequent books, so I still review the map whenever I’m
planning the next book. But, as each novel stands alone as well as being part of
the series, each has its own chart.
Beginning with a draft in a
squared copy book and moving on to a wall chart, drawn up on A3 paper, I
can plot the shape and flow of a book in purely visual terms. The starting
point is my 90k word count. Rounding it up to 100k, to make the maths easier, I
divide it into chapters of a notional two and a half thousand words. Then,
using a pencil and a ruler, I allot a box to each chapter, and number them.
The narrative thrust of the Finfarran
novels has so far been largely carried through internal monologues, and
dialogue. This contributes to the readers’ sense of involvement in, and being
part of, a fictional community. In structuring, I generally attribute a chapter to each
of the principal characters and, by mapping these across the chart, ensure the characters’
presence is evenly balanced across the book.
Then, having established A, B
and C story arcs which will span the
entire novel, I plot them across the chart, indicating where they’ll begin and
end. Each story arc will belong to one or two principal characters or families.
The A story - which in The Library at the Edge of the World and
Summer at the Garden Café was Hanna
Casey and her family’s, and in The Mistletoe Matchmaker was Cassie Fitzgerald’s - will span the whole book
from Chapter One. The B and C stories will begin later and end somewhere
in the last few chapters, with B
continuing longest. Both of these are always wrapped up before the final
dénouement.
Each character has a colour,
indicated on the chart with a hi-viz sticky dot, square or triangle. The beats
in each storyline are indicated by symbols. Then the passage of fictional time across
the book is marked – weeks or months, for example; or seasons when the
landscape will change; or the occurrence of calendar-related events like Easter
or Ramadan. And there are other specifics: for example, in The Month of Borrowed Dreams, the latest in the series, I also needed to indicate each character's process in reading the book my fictional library film club was discussing.
Though the initial process might seem
prescriptive, in practice the way I use the chart is fluid. It hangs by my desk and, to begin with, tends
to be fairly neat. Over the months of writing, it gets increasingly messy, with
the chapter boxes filling up with notes and scribbled memos, and arrows and
crossings-out indicating changes of mind. The coloured character dots are
sticky because I often find I need to move them. In writing the story, certain
characters take over, jostling others out of their place in my scheme: but by
moving the dots I can see at a glance if the book has lost its rhythm, which can
happen if particular voices are present or absent too long.
Sometimes the evolving storylines
require structural changes. In Summer at the Garden Café, for example, my editor pointed out that it was Jazz, not
Hanna, who really had the A story
and, to make this work, I introduced Jazz earlier in the book. This involved
moving chapters which, on the chart, had appeared later – which, inevitably,
meant other adjustments too. But with the chart at my elbow, I could see at a
glance not just how I’d affected the narrative but what the knock-on effect
would be on three interwoven storylines, each of which exposed and advanced the
book’s underlying themes.
Themes and characters’ personal
relationships can’t be contained in squares or circles, or held in place with
arrows. They emerge from the writer’s unconscious in the telling of a story, with
the same thrill of discovery that drives an author to write and compels a
reader to read. For that to happen, I find I need a safe space for freefall. And
before taking that leap, I need to create a reliable structure - firm enough to
act as a template but supple enough to bend in the creative process without
breaking.
Maybe that’s why I created a protagonist
whose dream was to work in an art library, and whose first experience of books
arose from a love of colour and shape.
A version of this piece first appeared on the Irish writers' website Writing.ie
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