How to take a good idea and turn it into a story
The title could also be: how to take a story and turn it into a novel. Because the two aren’t necessarily the same. The events of a story could be perceived differently by different people, but the art of a storyteller or writer is to present those events in a way that a reader or a listener can understand.
When I finished setting down the first version of the story of The Green Woman, I carried straight on into the sequel, picking up the lives of the characters I thought I knew as intimately as members of my own family five years on. Little did I know at the time, The Green Woman was a bordel, as we say over here, an absolute mess. The next series was well on the way to becoming a monumental bordel before I decided to slow down and take a good look at the whole story.
By that time a publisher had already given me a very thorough critique of The Green Woman, pointing out its strengths, but also the chaotic way I had chosen to drive the story. It took a couple of years to sort out the mess of The Green Woman, double the word count and break it into three separate parts.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to tackle the sequel. The problems were essentially the same. A story that rattles along at a terrific pace, lots of action, lots of characters. But as in most action-packed adventures, the story breaks into different threads, following different characters. The trick is to keep those threads separate and coherent. Mine had got hopelessly entangled.
A good storyteller will keep a dozen balls in the air without the listener constantly asking: Hold on a minute! What happened to X? or, I thought we were in Y, or even, Who the hell is Z? A bad storyteller will get listeners completely mixed up by going backwards and forwards in the narrative as they remember bits they’ve left out, bringing in new characters out of nowhere, and leaving others in the lurch. It’s the same in writing. Too much backstory kills narrative, but too little leads to utter confusion. I think that recognising the pitfalls is being well on the way to remedying them.
Geographical separation of the different main characters should start red lights flashing. Not because you shouldn’t do it—in an adventure you don’t want all your mcs walking hand in hand everywhere—but because you have to be absolutely certain that your reader knows where everybody is.
The more important characters you introduce, the more careful you have to be about headhopping. A roomful of mcs all shouting at once is impossible to control if you are hopping into one head after the other. I had thought this type of situation would have to be written out of the story, but in fact it is quite possible to organise as long as you pick one character and stay firmly in his or her head throughout. Alternatively you can write the entire scene in omniscient third person and keep it clear, no soul-searching psychoanalysis.
Once I had located a suitable break in the story, which happened to be slap bang in the middle, I had 42k words of muddle. Next step was to sort the story into separate chapters for separate themes, locations and characters, but following the same chronology so everybody moves forward at the same time. Scenes had to be added to show what all the characters were doing at a given moment in the action. The alternative is to resort to the often artificial-sounding device of having the characters giving recaps. Last, but almost hardest was to give a rounded ending to what is essentially the first third of a story.
Last night I got to the end of part one. I now have 61k words of a story that starts at A and ends up at Z, with all the letters in between strung out in a logical order. There is still a lot of work to do smoothing off the rough edges and clumsy transitions. But the essential is there. Angel Haven is on the road.
