The Juice and the Glass On the Table in Word

I'm trying to figure out where I ran off the road with my writing. Lani and I talked about focus last night after watching Laura for PopD (podcast goes up Monday), discussing it first in the podcast where the screenwriters ran off the road with Laura, and then after the podcast was over, segueing into where I took a wrong turn. I told her when I started writing, it was all juice–excitement, flow, voices talking in my head–and no craft. Then I started studying craft and about ten years ago I hit the center of the bell curve, equal juice and craft. And since then, I've been losing juice and relying on craft, which is not a good thing. I said, "If you have to choose between luck and skill, pick luck; if you have to choose between juice and craft, pick juice. And I'm out of juice." Lani said that was crap, but she's wrong. Somewhere along the line, I got a juice leak and tried to plug it with really tight craft. I don't think it's working.

But here's the thing. Just juice can make for a really awful book, one that goes all over the place. I read an interview with three screenwriters once who were decrying the three-act-structure, saying that there were so many dull, conventional screenplays out there written by plugging story into the three act diagram. And my thought was, Yeah, but without the three-act structure you'd have had a conventional story that was all over the place. Craft is not the enemy. Craft doesn't kill juice. Craft shapes juice. It's the glass that holds the juice, transparent so you can see all the fruity goodness but hard and strong to hold in the stuff that would otherwise be making a sticky mess on the page.

I may have gone too far with that metaphor.

So I'm looking at the mass of words that is Lavender's Blue. I have at least a dozen different drafts of some scenes. Pieces of dialogue, fragments of action. Entire files labeled by act, many of them different drafts of the same act. I'd say I spilled the juice, but in fact, I never had it in a glass. I tried outlining a glass but it didn't work. I hate this metaphor. Where was I? Right, I had a word salad the size of the Grand Canyon. (Yes, I am on a restricted diet, why do you ask?)

So I've been spending the last week trying to sort things out. Gathering up every word I ever wrote about or for Lavender's Blue. Sorting them into files, getting rid of obvious duplicates, putting all fragments into a folder . . . bleah. And then I looked at my plots.

There's the main plot which should be the murder but because I took a left turn somewhere, it's a woman's fiction/women's journey plot. That's okay, Jen saw the first chunk of the novel two years ago and said, "Oh. This isn't what I thought it was going to be, but I like this, too. Go for it." I love my editor. So first, Liz's journey. But Liz's journey is really an emotional/internal plot, so I need an external plot, the kind where events happen and things blow up. (I miss writing with Bob; he did all the plotting.)

So the external plot is the murder mystery, which is difficult for me, but too bad, it's a mystery series and that's the main external plot.

Then there's the romance plot. It was going to be the main plot of the four-book series, each book an act, but it's not unspooling that way which is fine by me. It's a good subplot for the mystery and the women's journey, and that's all I care about.

You'd think that would be enough, but evidently at some point I decided I wanted to be Dickens, and there are six more.

There's the Mom plot: Liz is coming back home after fifteen years (she sees her mom once a year at Christmas) and there are things they need to talk about which they end up talking about because of the events of first three plots. But I still have to trace the arc of this plot separately to make sure I don't lose it, so it gets its own plotline analysis.

There's the Best Friend plot, also with unresolved issues that get resolved because of the main three plots. And again, it needs its own plot arc and analysis.

Then there's the Little Kid plot. This one wasn't supposed to be in there, but she showed up, and she's such a doppelganger for Liz as a kid, and their interactions change Liz, so yep, it needs an arc and an analysis.

And since Liz has a job, there's the Boss plot, the woman she's ghostwriting a memoir for keeps calling her, putting on the pressure. So she has to call, but as always, we need to get that bag a day job, so her calls have to change the story, which they do, which means they have to arc, which they do, and hello, another plot analysis.

And there's the dog. The dog kind of snuck in and looked at me with those eyes and then I realized what happened with it was integral to the main journey plot and even interacted with the other two, so I had to get a dog arc.

I thought that was it, but then I forgot there was an Old Nemesis, and he was going to have a major impact and character arc, so . . .

Yeah, nine plots and subplots. Then I listed all the scenes and numbered them and made a chart with the plots and subplots across the top and the scene sequence names along the side and filled in the first act for everybody, and then I thought about killing myself, but I kept working anyway, and as mind-numbing at all of that was, it showed me how all the plots formed the first act, which meant if I kept going it would show me the second, third, and fourth acts, and I looked at all the relationships and suddenly I had people talking in my head again. Juice, thanks to Craft.

So that's why it's been so long since there's been an Argh post. When I got to the point where I couldn't stand working any more, I made cookies or pincushions which are Re-Fab posts. All I could have done on Argh was weep helplessly, so that wasn't good. But I've stopped sniveling now, and tomorrow I'll take apart Act Two and Three and if I'm on a roll, Four, and then I'll print it all out and tape it up and stand back from it and see if I can see the shape of it.

But the POINT of this post is, you need both juice and craft. Thank you.