first, a note about current events: i don’t like living in a country where the government has declared war on the people. if you disagree, there is an unsubscribe button in the footer of this email. if you have a fucking soul, there are some ideas for helping minnesota right here, and if you read this before the end of the month and have money to donate, you can enter the romance for minnesota drawing.

i also want to recommend the author naomi kritzer for a few reasons. she is a twin cities resident who is already deeply involved in community there, including writing a voting guide for every election. if you are local, you should know who she is! here is her post of ways to get involved right now. and no matter where you are, please read her incredible story the year without sunshine, which perfectly shows why and how mutual aid and community will save us all. it’s also just one of my favorite stories ever.

i’m having a real rough time lately, personal stuff on top of ~the world~, and all i can really do is write. so i want to pass along some stuff i’ve learned recently. i have no idea if any of it has helped, but it feels good! and sometimes that’s the only indication we get if our writing practice is working until, like, months or even years later.

someone in a writing discord asked for recommendations about story structure for outlining, and someone else recommended how to write your novel from the middle, which they described as putting a tentpole moment in the middle of the book and building around it.

my brain immediately began working, little synapses firing as it built that structure into one of my as-yet unwritten book ideas. brb i gotta reinvent the wheel! i sat down with a notepad and wrote out an outline with the beginning, middle, and climax at the top and the rise and fall around the middle just below/between them.

like this:

at the bottom, i’ve added what alexandra vasti calls the story engine and my agent kate mckean calls the ticking clock; this is the thing that keeps the reader engaged to the end (probably) of the book, the big overarching problem that needs to be solved.

(i’ve been taking a romance writing course from vasti, who i think is a genius, and i am learning so much. my intention was to use what i learn here to fix the mmmbook, but i am also applying it to the new idea. i won’t be sharing much from the course, but it’s been so helpful for me and i highly recommend taking any opportunity you get to learn from her.)

after i did this, i wrote a list of plot points/character beats/what-have-you under each, and i suddenly had a workable, functioning outline that was a gazillion times better than anything i’d managed so far in planning this book.

what. sorcery. is this.

(please note what i have not said that i did, which is read the book. i did not read the book. i did not even peek at the book. i worked off the title of the book. is this advisable? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but is it what i did? sure is.)

this plot structure will (probably) not work for every book, because no one plot structure works for every book (unless i’ve just discovered the one that does), and also because the author writes thrillers (some things simply do not translate between genres). but it worked very very nicely for this romance novel i plotted out. maybe it will work for your book! i’ll show you what i did.

buuuuut i don’t want to show you my actual notes, so here is the most obvious go-to example of a book that is not actually a romance novel but frequently plays one on tv:

i was a little cheeky in my descriptions of the climb and descent in particular, but those are basically everything else that happens so you can see how i would be writing for hours if i was thorough.

does a book—does this book, meaning mine—need a tentpole middle? probably not, but oh boy am i excited about trying it. i have fleshed out the outline into a chapter-by-chapter synopsis, which i am letting sit while i edit mmmbook.

one of the things that this tentpole structure (combined with my efforts to add the elusive ~tension~) helped me to do in my outline is to just let my plot be bananapants. i put in a heist! in a contemporary friends-to-lovers romance! no regrets! and i’ve already decided i need to combine the first two chapters so things get moving faster, so i guess letting it sit is also a good idea.

i am not normally a person who plots out a book at this level of detail to the beats and shape of things, but maybe that is to my detriment (i say, rewriting a perfectly good book with no story engine practically from scratch). or maybe it’s working now because every book is different! regardless, in the last few months my confidence in my own abilities has absolutely tanked, so doing things differently is helping me try to get it back.

xxoo,
annika

(some housekeeping: i turned on paid subscriptions in a moment of panic about veterinary bills, but i don’t plan on putting any emails behind a paywall, and i will probably never mention this again.)