Welcome to book club! Jill is hard at work on a school assignment this week, so I’m filling in as hostess.

If we were all gathered in my living room–which I would love, by the way–I would start our gathering by reading this quote from the chapter:

“Let the people in your stories struggle desperately, choose valiantly, act believably, and chart their course to an ending that is both inevitable and unexpected, and you’ll craft a story worth reading.”

This is a great summation of good story telling. It’s easy to read and agree with, but hard to actually do!

I loved the content of the chapter, but the subtitle–Eight Secrets To Discarding Your Outline to Write Better Stories–had me feeling a bit defensive for those in our midst who outline.

It’s been my experience that writers who identify as “an outliner” would tell you that they always veer from their original outline when writing. I’ve yet to meet the writer who won’t change the story’s direction during the writing process if they come up with something they like better. I’m sure they exist, I just haven’t crossed paths with any.

Also, I imagine many outliners apply some or all of the principles detailed in this chapter when they’re making their outline. I don’t see this as an either/or situation.

But let’s move beyond the subtitle. Here were two things that really jumped out at me in chapter seven:

Narrative Forces

There’s some discussion in this chapter of “narrative forces” which will be built on in future chapters. He uses the metaphor of your story being clay and the following forces pushing on the story to shape it into something good:

Believability: Characters behave in believable ways.

Causality: Your story has a natural cause and effect rhythm.

Inevitability and surprise: Scenes make sense like, “Of course this is what happens next!” Yet they also have an element of, “Didn’t see that one coming!”

Escalation: Tension increases as the story progresses.

Scenes and setbacks: Often we think of this as obstacles in a scene. If there’s nothing getting in your character’s way in a scene, you’re not building a story.

Continuity: The tone of the story matches all the way through.

Genre conventions: You satisfy expectations that come with genres. (e.g. epic fantasy is long, romance novels end with a happily ever after)

When these narrative forces aren’t being wielded properly, it diminishes the reader experience. If the first half of your book is really funny, but the last half isn’t, that’s a problem with continuity. If your story doesn’t progress logically, readers will sense the causality is off, even if they don’t express it like that.

Keeping Context As You Write:

There were lots of things I liked in the chapter, but one other part I’ll mention is Mr. James’s process of writing from the context of what he’s written before.

Unless I’ve set the story aside for a really long time, I don’t read as much as he does on a regular basis. He says he prints out the last 50 -100 pages and reads them before he starts writing. I’m sure there’s value in that, but I don’t have an abundance of writing time, so I usually just back up to what I wrote the day before or to the start of the scene and read from there.

Mr. James says, “As details emerge and the story grows, I’ll frequently go back to refine the scenes that lead up to the one I’m working on.”

Some find it easier to do this in edits, but this is a great thought to keep in mind whether you revise while you’re drafting or afterward: Those stories you love because the author foreshadows everything just perfectly? THEY DID THAT AFTER THEY FIGURED OUT WHAT NEEDED FORESHADOWING.

They either did that work in edits or using the continual revision process Mr. James talked about. Authors go back in and add those clues, and then they smooth out the scene so that you can’t even tell those clues weren’t there to begin with.

For those who read the chapter, what stuck out to you?

When you sit down to write, what’s your routine? Do you read through a certain amount before beginning? Do you dive right in?