{"id":85,"date":"2016-06-05T18:38:18","date_gmt":"2016-06-05T22:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/?p=85"},"modified":"2019-02-10T13:05:22","modified_gmt":"2019-02-10T18:05:22","slug":"snarls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/05\/snarls\/","title":{"rendered":"Snarls"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have finally managed to get my shit together and pick apart Ember<\/em>‘s \u00a0plot snarl. \u00a0 You may wonder why I call it a\u00a0Snarl.<\/p>\n

I think the problem of plot snarls is\u00a0a lot like knitting: you’re continuing merrily along, sometimes with a pattern, sometimes just making a big ol’ scarf, and you get to the end of a line and realize you’re missing a stitch. Or two. Or you have too many stitches. But something is wrong. You look backwards and find that (several; too many) rows ago you made a mistake. Do you continue on? Do you undo all those rows and knit\u00a0them over? Or is it possible to just go back, fix that mistake, and work it up the rows?<\/p>\n

Such as it was with The Snarl. For a week, all my characters sat\u00a0around being mopey, the fight gone out of them, and I couldn’t figure out why (they are the dropped stitches in this metaphor, for those of you playing the home game). I thought it was my fault somehow, that I had (gasp) Writer’s Block, or\u00a0the extra-long Weepies, or that I was a plain-ol’ hack, etc., etc., and I kept trying to move the characters forward but it was like dragging a crying toddler somewhere they didn’t want to go.<\/p>\n

So I chatted for a bit with Marc (he\u00a0was very helpful, in the sense that he let me ramble at him for a longish amount of time while asking questions that made me think about different angles of approach). And the Snarl got a bit looser.<\/p>\n

But it wasn’t until the following\u00a0morning on the subway, listening to music on my headphones, that I realized what the problem was: my characters\u00a0were drooping around exhausted because they had\u00a0<\/em>had the fight drained out of them. I’d passed over\u00a0a couple of novel-days\u00a0a few scenes back; I figured a day or two of nothing interesting that could be inferred in the following scenes. But in doing so I dropped a stitch: there\u00a0was something that should have happened<\/em> in that skipped bit of time. I worked it out on the subway. Came home. Worked my way up through the scarf of manuscript. Wrote the “missing” scenes.<\/p>\n

Lo and behold, the droopiness made sense<\/em>. It worked.\u00a0<\/em>The stitch count was back to where it was supposed to be, and I was off and running again, with the story-scarf once again proceeding at a satisfying pace.<\/p>\n

I’m a big believer in letting characters dictate the shape of the story. The stories I like to read best are the ones that like histories, that don’t wear their structure on their sleeve. They wander, they have loose ends, they have unsatisfactory fates, because history happens like that. (I know many people who read fiction for escapism, and so they want something that will end up tidied away at the end.\u00a0And that’s fine. But I write for readers like me.)<\/p>\n

Being the consummate pantser that I am, I don’t know if I could write to an existing structure even if I wanted to, and for me, the enjoyment in writing is finding out what the characters want and need as I go. And just like people, sometimes they don’t know what they want until it’s too late. But unlike real life, I can go back and fill in the missing bits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think the problem of plot snarls is\u00a0a lot like knitting: you’re continuing merrily along, sometimes with a pattern, sometimes just making a big ol’ scarf, and you get to the end of a line and realize you’re missing a stitch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[94,92,87],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-embers","tag-lifehacks","tag-pantsers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":834,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/834"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}