Act One: The Big Picture

As has probably become painfully clear, I’m one of those writers who has to see what she’s written to see what she’s writing, the fictional equivalent of “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” This makes the writing process long and convoluted. I have tried to streamline it (I wrote three books with an outline-first Green Beret), and it does not work for me (I think the Green Beret is now in therapy because of those three books). This is how it works for me, and there’s no point in wasting time trying to find a way to not waste so much time.

Which means that more than a year after I said, “I’m not going to write this book,” I’m only about half done and I’m still trying to figure out exactly how this book works. So it’s Big Picture Time.

Bob has this theory that I think explains our different work processes: he has to do spreadsheets because he’s a Big Picture Guy and if he has spreadsheets, he can keep his eye on the details, while I am a Detail Woman so I need collages to keep my eye on the Big Picture. This is the reason my discovery drafts are full of details–she’s psychic! green doughnuts! Dag and Daphne!–that taken together do not fit into a Big Picture. They don’t even fit together. So once I get to a place where I can look at a big chunk of text, I need to pull back and do a Big Picture analysis. And since I think of each of my acts as a story in itself, now that I have Act One in the truck draft stage, I can do that.

The first thing I need is a picture of Act One, so I break out Curio and

1. Make a list of all the scenes in Act One in the order they happen.

2. Move Nita’s (and Button’s) scenes to the left and Nick’s (and Max’s) scenes to the right.

3. Move the scenes that Nita and Nick share to the center.

4. Figure out which scenes are scene sequences and put a blue box under those.

5. Figure out which scenes are parallel and put a yellow box under those.

6. Put in the turning points both soft and hard.

7. Label each scene sequence with an overall description of where the story’s going in that section.

8. Stand back and look at the Big Picture.

Which is this:

The blue boxes, as I said, are scene sequences, scenes that clump together because they’re closely related. They’re stories within the story of the act that is in itself a story in the larger story of the book.

So that next set of three scenes is the Bar Story: once Nita enters the bar, she sets the bar scene sequence in motion. She begins to question Vinnie about Joey’s death, but her attention is really on Nick so it’s Nita vs. Nick. When the phone rings and he walks away, the sequence shifts to him because he’s moved out of the group although he’s still right there in the bar, now it’s Nick vs Belia, also investigating Joey’s death. Then he sees Nita and Rab getting chummy and hangs up to go back to the bar. The termination of the phone call with Belia is a termination of the scene with Belia, but the scene sequence is still running because Nita is talking to Rab and Nick joins them, Nita vs. Nick. Then Nita passes out, which means the scene loses its PoV.

The next scene is the end of that scene sequence and the beginning of another that is Nick vs. Rab and Nick vs. Dag, dealing with a lot of new information and trying to sort it out while dealing with personal revelations about Dag and Rab. Meanwhile Button and Nita are doing the same thing: the new information is that somebody’s trying to kill Nita and the personal info is about Button. The resolution of those two scene sequences throws Nita and Nick back together at breakfast because they each have questions for the other.

Then they split into two scene sequences again, both doing detective work trying to put the puzzle together. Nick’s sequence is broken because his setting changes from the island to Hell, but he’s trying to solve the puzzle all the way through. When Nita and Nick meet again, she’s been looking for him and drags him into her investigation which turns out to be the key to his investigation, and that’s the scene sequence that leads to the climax where Nita has to accept that the supernatural is real.

So diagramming scene sequences is a way of taking a lot of scenes (twenty-one) and organizing them into nine narrative units that make sense as a story.

But not all scenes are part of a scene sequence. Sometimes they’re single scenes that act as transitions. Look at the first two scenes: they’re Nita and then Nick in their stable worlds (kind of) talking to partners/minions and getting ready to attack a problem. Those scenes are transitions from their stables worlds into the story; in each scene they get info that blows up the stability of their world, launching them into the attack in the next scenes in which they’re against each other, and that struggle becomes a scene sequence because it’s all about that same struggle, linked, not just by time and setting, but by goal and intent. Then the next single scene is the breakfast scene which pulls both halves of the narrative back together and motivates Nita and Nick to separate to solve the problem, so the breakfast scene is a transition.

But those first two scenes also have a yellow box because they are related. They’re not a scene sequence, they’re not related to each other by setting or intent, but they are related because they’re parallel. That is, Nita’s scene is about Nita, drunk, dealing with a subordinate who’s getting in her way, Button. And Nick’s scene is about Nick, sober, dealing with a subordinate who’s getting in his way, Rab. The parallelism in the foundation of the scene sets up the conflict–Nita’s a wild card, Nick’s stable and emotionless–while setting up the ways that Nita and Nick will connect–both leaders (they both win their conflicts), both dedicated to their jobs of solving problems, both focused for the moment on the same problem.

The key to making parallel scenes work is to not hit the parallels too hard. You don’t want readers noticing the parallels consciously. This becomes a problem for me in the other set of parallel scenes, the Nick vs. Satan and Max vs. Mammon scenes. Nick is Satan’s fixer just as Max is Mammon’s. Both scenes follow the same rough outline:

1. What the hell am I/are we doing here?

2. You did WHAT?

3. Yells.

4. Gets slapped down, wins anyway.

5. Goes off to fix the screw-up.

That’s too on the nose unless the contents of the scenes are vastly different, and to a certain extent they are. The problems the bosses have created are very different, and the solutions are very different. But I still think they’re too parallel, hitting the reader over the head with “See? See? I’m doing something structurally clever here!” Yeah, I don’t want to do that.

So that’s what I’ve been working on: the parallelism in the first two scenes, fixing the breakfast scene because along with everything else you all pinpointed, it needs to be a better transition, and then trying to fix the Nick/Max parallel pair of scenes. After that it just a rewrite on the last sequence to make it stronger, and I’ve got the first act done, one third of the book.

I love this feeling when I get to the truck draft stage. It means there’s really a book there. Three more acts to go . . .

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