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Notes from a Story Editor - Structure

This article was first published on the Indie Exchange website


What is a story?
Every story we tell is an adaptation. There is a great deal of discussion and several books on the subject of how many basic plots there. Suffice it to say there are a limited number to choose from. For my novel the Mother of Wolves I chose the revenge story form. But every story will be unique because we make choices in telling it – which characters to use, which events to come out of the underlying story world. But even these are adaptations.

The underlying story world
The underlying story world contains the context of your story – its past, present, and future. It also contains the seed(s) of that world’s potential destruction. The main character reflects this world and indeed has within her the seed(s) of her own potential destruction.

This seed, (which is often a lack), upsets the equilibrium of the world and the central character and in so doing initiates and drives the story. As an author I need knowledge both of my character and her world and of the why – why this story, why told by me, why now,  i.e. I must plant a seed of potential self-destruction in the story world. I need to know the best way of testing the main character(s) so that I can develop the why.

For example for my novel Mother of Wolves although it is a story about revenge, I was interested in the choices one makes and their consequences.

We need to examine the physical and emotional world of the story – the home of the story.
For this we need to choose the main character(s), and their goal(s), the place, the period, the society, the main source of conflict and opposition. To this we add secondary characters and their goals, secondary sources of conflict and so on, until we have people the world.
For example in Mother of Wolves I chose:
1)      to make Lupa, the wife of the King of the Roads, the central character and tell her story
2)      to make the story Lupa’s search for revenge and safety for her and her sons
3)      to place it in a fantasy landscape along a great river bordered by a forest
4)      to set it at in a historical time
5)      to create two societies – the tribal world of the People of the Roads and the settled world of the Others
6)      to make both societies patriarchal and prone to politicking and betrayal, additionally Lupa’s People are subject to persecution by the Others
7)      Lupa’s enemies are her husband’s uncle, who plotted his murder, the Newharbour Guards who carried it out and lastly the Rebel general and his army.

N.B. There is a whole blog post to come about the issue of the flaw/lack in the home world and the central character when I write about the protagonist/antagonist relationship, but for the time being we’ll stick with story structure.

The Timeline
We unfold what we have developed on to a time-line. This is what Hannah referred to as the “Ur Story”. This normally breaks down naturally in to a three-part structure (more of that in another post).
So for Mother of Wolves I decided to start the story with the murder of Lupa’s husband and end it with the defeat of the rebel army. The three parts are:
Lupa’s pursuit of revenge against the guards and Uncle and their attempts to kill herLupa’s pursuit of Jo and the decision whether to kill himThe consequences of that decision with the fight against the rebel army.There are two important things to note. Firstly as writers we do not need to follow the Ur story timeline when we structure our book or film, we can jump around, move backwards and forwards, whatever is best for the narrative, but the underneath it is the Ur story. And secondly the Ur story, whilst being limited by the timeframe, also can contain relevant history and even future.

I find these concepts of establishing the underlying story world and the Ur story extremely useful when approaching a novel. As a result of working with Hannah, I find that I have a novel’s structure in my head before I ever set pen to paper or rather finger to keyboard. As a general rule I don’t find I need to do major structural reworking at second draft.

Prelaunch Copies of Love of Shadows

It's getting very exciting - Love of Shadows the follow-up to Girl in the Glass will be published in a month or so.

I am offering five free prelaunch copies of Love of Shadows to the first five people to contact me on zoe.brooks@googlemail.com

The book doesn't have a cover yet and has not gone through its final proofread, so you are warned. In return for the copy I ask for feedback including telling me about any errors you find.

The Next Big Thing Week 9

Thanks to A K Taylor who tagged me in her blog Backwoods Author to take part in The Next Big Thing.
Remember how when you were a kid if you were tagged in the playground you might have to do a forfeit and then tag someone else? Well that's what happens in The Next Big Thing. Only my forfeit is to answer ten interview questions about my next book on this blog before tagging five other authors to take part.
My answers to the questions:What is the working title of your book?
Love of Shadows
Where did the idea come from for the book?
The book is the second in the Shadows Trilogy and picks up Anya/Judith’s story from the end of Girl in the Glass . In this book we follow Judith as she becomes a healer and as her mentor Elma had foretold gets in to trouble with the authorities. I was influenced by the history of the persecution of women. As the title gives away we learn more about the beings known as Shadows. Oh and Judith falls in love.
What genre does your book fall under?
Fantasy (magic realism), women’s fiction.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Judith – a young Angelina JolieThe Rottweiler – Ralph FiennesSarah – Saoirse Ronan Bruno – a sensitive strong man with a bass voice and open face, any ideas welcome
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Woman-healer defies persecution and finds love
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Self-published, first as an e-book and later as a paperback.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Three months (but that included Christmas and New Year)
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Would it be a cheat to say Girl in the Glass? I genuinely am having problems answering this. I have set myself the challenge of reading a magic realism book a week to make myself more aware of the genre and other writers in it. I didn’t know it was my genre, until someone reviewed my book and told me so. You can find out about my challenge on http://www.magic-realism.net.
In the wider context I would probably compare it to Ursula Le Guin’s Earthseabecause she so influenced how I combine reality and fantasy plus it’s about a young person realising her potential and the cost of that. From a woman’s fiction angle I suppose Jane Eyre – again very different from my book, but it’s about an undervalued young woman denied love when young finding her place in the world, plus it uses the first person narrative.
Who or What inspired you to write this book?
The character of Judith is influenced by a lot of different women. I worked with disadvantaged women (asylum seekers, homeless, abused women) for many years and their tales of endurance and survival have inspired the whole trilogy. There are two people close to me who have impacted on the story – both women for a variety of reasons have undervalued themselves even though they were wonderful, generous and talented.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Judith is one hell of a girl: headstrong, beautiful, flawed and loveable.Now it's my turn to tag people: 
Deborah BattermanFiona Phillips Margaret Wacker Judith van PraagJudith Newton
Please visit their blogs. They will be publishing their answers to the questions in week 10 (between the 27th October and 3rd September)
Message for the tagged authors and interested others:
Rules of The Next Big Thing***Use this format for your post
***Answer the ten questions about your current WIP (Work In Progress)
***Tag five other writers/bloggers and add their links so we can hop over and meet them.Ten Interview Questions for The Next Big Thing:
What is the working title of your book?Where did the idea come from for the book?What genre does your book fall under?Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?Who or What inspired you to write this book?What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged. 
Piece of advice from Zoe: Line up your five people in advance.

Creating the Women's Fiction Newspaper

About a month ago I created an online newspaper using the paper.li website. It's called Women's Fiction  and is dedicated to books by and for women, which gives me quite a large brief. It has the web address of http://www.womens-fiction.net. My aim with the newspaper is to gather together some of the best articles on the subject.

A paper.li newspaper is effectively a pinterest board of articles, the reader gets the opening paragraph of the article plus the link to the main source. There are quite a few paper.li newspapers springing up and most of them while having some good content also contain a lot of links unrelated to the subject. This is because of the way paper.li works. You choose a number of sources for your articles and they automatically feed in to the newspaper. The newspaper creator can set the frequency of the newspaper (daily or weekly) and sit back while each edition of the newspaper is generated automatically. This is great when there are obvious directly related websites whose feeds you can sign up to, but you do get all the feeds relevant or not, with the result that if you're not careful you get a load of junk.

With women's fiction I found that the automatic route did not work for me. So I chose an alternative way of creating content. I created a dedicated twitter account (http://www.twitter/ZoeBrooks15) and set up my newspaper to publish links contained in tweets from that account. That way I have complete curatorial (not editorial) control on the newspaper's content. I then identified the best sources of content on twitter, followed those and retweet relevant articles. The result, I think, is a really good newspaper, but it takes some work.

The current newspaper includes writers as diverse as Anais Nin, Zadie Smith, Amanda Hocking, JK Rowling, and Maeve Binchy, as well as articles about women's fiction more generally. I would like to have a section in the newspaper featuring less well-known women writers and independents but I haven't quite worked out how to do that yet without being overwhelmed. Any ideas welcome.

By the way you can also use paper.li as a way to produce a personal newspaper, pulling together in one place the feeds from all your favourite blogs and websites. That of course does not need any work by you other than the set-up and it's really enjoyable. 

New Facebook Pages

I have just created two Facebook pages, one for each of my novels. They are on:

For Girl in the Glass   http://www.facebook.com/pages/Girl-In-The-Glass/342811249140810
and
For Mother of Wolves   http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mother-of-Wolves/443290679049438

I need 25 people to sign up as fans, before I can get shorter urls. So, dear reader, please help me out by popping along and signing up.

Thanks.

Mother of Wolves Free on Amazon

My historical fantasy novel Mother Of Wolves is free for a limited time: 5th August - 9th August.

You can download it here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0082BT6G8 and http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0082BT6G8 (for British readers).

Lupa - the woman leader, lessons from history

Lupa, the central character of Mother of Wolves, was originally a minor character in a children's book I wrote (and abandonned). However she had made such an impression on one of my beta-readers that he suggested I write a book about her. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it a good idea, but the book was definitely not a book for children.

In a previous post I wrote about how I was inspired by three Czech 18th century folk paintings of the persecution of the Roma to write Mother of Wolves. As those of you who have read Girl in the Glass will know, I am interested in women overcoming prejudice and discrimination. As a historian I am also fascinated by great women leaders: women who, despite living and ruling in a male-dominated society, commanded the love and/or respect of their people. I first came to the attention of my mentor and junior school poetry teacher with a poem about Boudicea at the age of 8. My first major piece of writing (at 13) was a verse-play about Joan of Arc. Of all my historical heroines Elizabeth I is perhaps the most influential on the character of Lupa.

The book allowed me to explore what makes a successful female leader and what might trigger such a leader to step forward. In Lupa's case the trigger is the betrayal and murder of her husband and the need to protect her children, but once on the road Lupa becomes the leader her people need in the face of the threat of genocide.

So what are the traits that Lupa shares with historic women leaders? Like Boudica Lupa is spurred into action by a desire for revenge, like Elizabeth I she has a genuine love of her people, like Joan of Arc she has self belief. Like Boudica she pulls together disparate tribes, like Joan of Arc she leads her troops into battle, and like Elizabeth I she surrounds herself with good counsellors. She is both charming and ruthless.

When I was younger some people suggested that as an up-and-coming poet I should study English Literature at university, instead I studied history. I have never regretted it.


NOTE: Mother of Wolves will be free between the 5th and 7th August on http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0082BT6G8 and http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0082BT6G8

Lessons of history - suppression of the women healers Part 2

The main character of my trilogy (Girl in the Glass, Love of Shadows, Fear of Falling) is a woman healer. My books are fantasy/magic realism, nevertheless I am by training a historian and the lessons of history inform my writing and themes, so I began to research the story of the women healers. 

Having destroyed the educated women healers (see previous post) by the end of the 14th century the authorities turned their attentions to the lower class women healers. As with the educated women healers the wise-women were faced with an alliance between the church and the new university educated (and therefore male) medical profession. The alliance's motives were financial self-interest, misogyny and social control.

The majority of the population had no access to any form of medicine other than that provided by the local wise-woman. Even if they had, the medicine taught in universities was closer to magic than the empirical approach of the wise-woman. But whether the wise-women were healing their patients was not a consideration, the very act of healing was a crime and that crime was witchcraft. As one English witch-hunter said:

For this must always be remembered, as a conclusion, that by witches we understand not only those which kill and torment, but all Diviners Charmers, Jugglers, all Wizards, commonly called wise men and wise women...and in the same number we reckon all good Witches, which do no hurt but good, which do not spoil and destroy, but save and deliver...It were a thousand times better for the land if all Witches, but especially the blessing Witch, might suffer death.

The witch-hunts were not a case of mass hysteria, but organised state persecution. At the heart of it was the book Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), which guided the witch-hunters. At the beginning of the hunt a notice was posted in the village commanding that if anyone knew or suspected a witch they should report her to the authorities, failure to do so was itself a punishable. If this resulted in the identification of a witch, she would be tortured to reveal more witches in the community. That torture is detailed in Malleus Maleficarum . The "witch" was stripped and shaved of all her body hair, and inspected for signs of the devil such as moles and marks, although not having such signs was simply seen as an indication that the witch had hidden them. Beatings, thumb screws and the rack, bone-crushing boots, and starvation followed. Soon other "witches" would be identified and so on. On continental Europe these witch-hunts resulted in many thousand executions usually by burning. At Toulouse 400 were killed in one day, 1000 died in one year in the Como area, whilst in 1585 two villages in the Bishopric of Trier were left with only on female inhabitant each. 

Women healers were not alone (there were also some male healers although they make up approximately on 15% of the numbers killed), it is hard to credit now but midwives were also under attack:  
Midwives cause the greatest damage. Either killing children or sacrilegiously offering them to devils. . . . The greatest injury to the Faith are done by midwives, and this is made clearer than daylight itself in the confessions of some of those who are afterwards burned.

The witch-hunts lasted from the 14th to the 17th century. By the time they finished possibly over a million women had died, much of the knowledge that had been acquired by generations of women healers had been lost and women's roles in healing had been so denigrated that women had to fight even to be nurses. 

Notes From A Storyeditor - Where to start

The first in my series of notes about what I learned from my friend and professional story editor Hannah Kodicek. This was first published on the Indie Exchange website. 
The starting point for any story-making is the relationship with the audience. Although we writers may be sitting alone in front of our computer in a garret somewhere, the story exists only in that relationship, otherwise you're not telling anything.
We start by understanding what we all have in common (audience and writer):
Curiosity - this is inherent to human nature, it's the reason we do so many things, one being picking up a book. The need to find context - what is it like, how does it fit with what I know/feel, how does it feel like to be someone else Need for pattern - again part of our nature, we will look for patterns and order even if they are not there, and there are a load of patterns which we will expect in storiesNeed for balance (equilibrium) - we feel disturbed if things aren't fair, we want to put it right. And conversely the need to upset equilibrium - the need for the unknown, the thrill of risk.The need to think ahead causally - this is an extension of our need for pattern, But there is also the thrill of the unknown.Common cultural context - myths, history, fairytales, belief-systems etc. Archetypes - which Hannah described as "deep subconscious forces shared by all" and which are the subjects of numerous booksThe need to relate to others, which for me is the most important.
These commonalities are what we as writers build our stories on, for example every story starts with an imbalance which propels the story forward. We may play with them e.g. encouraging the reader to detect a pattern that isn't there and so think ahead incorrectly. But the single most important thing is to access people's emotions. Everything we write will stir some sort of emotional response in the reader. They will be gratified if their curiosity is satisfied or they feel they see a pattern or context. They will be thrilled and scared when we take them to somewhere unknown. But they will be dissatisfied if we promise and do not deliver.
Which brings me to us the writers. There are a number of questions we need to ask ourselves as we approach a story:Why am I telling this story? - Why me? Why now? Why do I care? (If you don't the reader certainly won't).How does the story fit with or challenge the context familiar to my reader?What is the emotional key to the story? What touches me most deeply? How will it resonate with the reader? What will I and the reader take from the story? What tools do I have to do the job?
These then are the fundamentals from which all storytelling flows and I always go back to them when I am working on a story. I find them particularly useful when I am working on the second draft.