storytelling

Somebody mentioned, in a comment I can't find right now, the Snowflake Process for writing a novel. So I went to look, and found it quite easily. The Snowflake is the invention of Randall Ingermanson, who is a physicist and a novelist. Most of his fiction, as far as I could see, has both a strong science theme, and is decidedly Christian in approach. You may remember that I'm not Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Buddhist, or anything at all; so I'm not interested in the guy's novels, but he's got some interesting ideas about writing, and he's also very funny.

His primary statement about the process of writing:

The Importance of Design: Good fiction doesn't just happen, it is designed. You can do the design work before or after you write your novel. I've done it both ways and I strongly believe that doing it first is quicker and leads to a better result.

And when Randy says design, he means design. Have a look at the Snowflake Process and you'll see that he advocates a lot of prep work, such as character sketches. He then proceeds to make lists of scenes and chapters, which are expanded, bit by bit, until there's a whole novel. The tools he uses for this are suited to the nature of the task. For example, by step nine of the process:

Make a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your four-page plot outline. Make just one line for each scene. In one column, list the POV character. In another (wide) column, tell what happens. If you want to get fancy, add more columns that tell you how many pages you expect to write for the scene. A spreadsheet is ideal, because you can see the whole storyline at a glance, and it's easy to move scenes around to reorder things.

My spreadsheets usually wind up being over 100 lines long, one line for each scene. As I develop the story, I make new versions of my story spreadsheet. This is incredibly valuable for analyzing a story. It can take a week to make a good spreadsheet. When you are done, you can add a new column for chapter numbers and assign a chapter to each scene.

So Randy's approach is very, very structured, and most important: it works for him. It may work for other people, too. The thing about writing fiction is that there are are no universals. What is magic for one writer may paralyze the next one. I've heard many stories over the years of odd things various writers do; some of my own process is idiosyncratic.

My first reaction to the Snowflake is that it's way too structured for me personally, but on the other hand, I like structure and so I'm intrigued. I just can't really imagine getting one of the Wilderness books to fit into a spreadsheet, scene by scene (we're talking, what, maybe 500 scenes in a 300,000 word novel). But who knows? At some point in the future it may be exactly the thing I need to get a novel off the ground.

Why every one as they like; as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.

--Jonathan Swift

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I just realized I never formally reviewed this novel, and so for the record: A Thread of Grace may well be the best novel I read in a long time. I did talk a little about it in an earlier post, here.

The story is set in northern Italy in WWII. It has to do, overall, with the fate of Italian Jews and the non-Jewish Italians who came to their aid, but really it's about a handful of individuals. Characters you come to understand and truly, deeply, like, in spite of their flaws or sometimes, because of them. This is a beautifully written, skillfully told story, and I could hardly recommend it more highly but I can say this: I have already bought copies for a few friends, and I went out and found a signed first edition, which is the biggest compliment I ever pay a novel.

A Thread of Grace is what good historical fiction can be.

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The Sparrow is Mary Doria Russell's first novel, a story that almost defies categorization. It is, of course, science fiction, because it deals with space travel and first contact with sentient beings on another planet. It's also anthropology, because it approaches that topic -- first contact -- with deep understanding of the complexities in such situations. But mostly this is the story of a man's life, and it's compelling and satisfying on that basis alone. The rest of it is all frosting on a very good, very rich cake.

The main character here is Emilio Sandoz, a native of Puerto Rico, and a Jesuit priest. So here I have to tip my hat to Russell. She pulled off something I thought impossible in my case, because a childhood of Catholic education vaccinated me against this particular illness: she made me fall in love with a priest. This is such an interesting, complex character, and you go through so much with him -- that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

There are a half dozen other characters I also fell in love with. The kind of characters you want to be real so you could live across the street from them and go over to borrow sugar and shoot the breeze. This group of characters heads off on a mission organized, secretly, by the Jesuits. It's the year 2019 and they are going to the planet that will eventually be known as Rakhat.

You may remember that in various places I've discussed the difference between story and plot. Story is what happened in chronological order; plot is the artful rearrangement of that order to create suspense and interest. Russell chose to start telling this story at the end: in the year 2059, when Emilio returns from Rakhat. Because of the nature of space travel and time and relativity and all those things I don't pretend to understand, he is only a few years older but everyone else is significantly aged. More important: Emilio is the sole survivor, barely clinging to his sanity and his life, and reluctant to tell the story to his superiors in the Society of Jesus. The novel moves back and forth in time, between the near-broken and maimed Emilio, the years before the mission, and the four years of the mission on Rakhat.

If there is any problem with The Sparrow at all, it's a mechanical one: Russell pulls off the high wire act of moving back and forth in time while juggling several dozen characters, and she does so gracefully. And still there are a very few points where she wobbles, ever so slightly. Some of the four years on Rakhat feel a little rushed. We've come a long way with the characters and I was disappointed to have some storylines resolved out of scene. Some -- but not all of that -- is addressed in the sequel, Children of God.

This is not an easy novel. It's demanding in a variety of ways. It will make you laugh out loud and it will break your heart, and most of all, it will make you think.

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