Writing Tip: To Plot Or Not To Plot?

August 8, 2024 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 4 Comments

Plot means the story line. When people talk about plotting, they mostly mean how to set up the situation, where to put the turning points, and what the characters will be doing in the end. What happens.

Some fiction writers write organically, not knowing where the story they are writing is going. These writers say it would be boring to know what’s going to happen next and they lose their enthusiasm to tell the story because they know the outcome already. They prefer throwing themselves over the edge and into the void. This method can be very anxiety-producing. It means you need a lot of faith in your process.

Other writers plan the story before they begin. In detective fiction the story definitely needs to be worked out beforehand so information can be drip-fed to the reader.

In the past, when creating my short stories, I have worked organically and not known where my stories were headed as I wrote them. The shorter the piece of fiction, the less need for plot. You can write an interesting story in which not very much happens. A woman fights with her neighbour, a man quits his job, or an unhappy family goes out for a pizza. Simple structures work better than something too complicated when the story is short.

Now that I’m working on a new novel, I feel the need to plot.

“A plot can, like a journey, begin with a single step. A woman making up her mind to recover her father’s oil paintings may be enough to start. The journey begins there, as it did for Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment when he decided to commit his crime,” Jerome Stern Making Shapely Fiction

The plot grows and develops out of what helps and what hinders the characters’ progress toward their goals.

The Writers’ Workshop http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/plot2.html ask:

But how do you know if your draft plot has the right amount of weight to carry an entire novel?
What kind of structures work?
Is there a quick way to design your own plot template?
And how do you handle a book with multiple points of view?

“A good plot has a clear motivation. It has a clear structure. It has an outcome. It has subplots. A good plot looks something like the plot structure template below,” The Writers’ Workshop.

Motivation	Lizzie Bennett wants to marry for love
Plot structure	She meets Darcy & Wickham. She dislikes Darcy, and starts to fall for Wickham. Wickham turns out to be a bad guy; Darcy turns out to be a good guy. She now loves Darcy.
Outcome	She marries Darcy
Subplot 1	Jane Bennett (Lizzie’s nice sister) loves Bingley. Bingley vanishes. He reappears. They get hitched.
Subplot 2	Lydia Bennett (Lizzie’s idiot sister) elopes with Wickham. She’s recovered.
Subplot 3	An idiot, Mr Collins, proposes marriage to Lizzie. She says no. Her friend, Charlotte, says yes.

Of course, there are a lot of things that the above plot template doesn’t tell you. It doesn’t say where the novel is set, it doesn’t tell you anything about plot mechanics – it doesn’t say why Lizzie dislikes Mr Darcy, or how Lydia is recovered from her elopement. It doesn’t have anything to say about character.

The Writers’ Workshop strongly advises us to build a template much like the one above before starting to write. “If you’ve already started your MS then, for heaven’s sake, get to that template right away.”

So I’ve decided to put myself out of my misery and create a Plot Template for my new novel. I already had my characters in place and knew what each character wanted. But now I’m forced into planning an ending, which isn’t a bad thing. Some writers don’t find the real beginning to their stories until they’ve written the endings.

So that’s all we need: a beginning, a middle and an end. Aristotle defined it like this: a beginning is what requires nothing to precede it, an end is what requires nothing to follow it, and a middle needs something both before and after it.

Easy peasy. Not.

What about you? Do you plot or write organically? I’d love to hear what works for you and what sends you straight to the Writers Block Corner.

My Poem, “When Will It End?”

July 31, 2024 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 6 Comments

I hope you like it.

When Will It End?

The woman is weeping for her husband,

his ashes lined up with the unclaimed

urns at the crematorium.

How could this happen again?

The man is weeping for his dead wife

& unborn child stretchered out from

the bombed maternity hospital.

The woman says, “We had to flee. His ashes

were left behind.”

What use is a city of rubble?

The brother is weeping beside his mother at the grave

of his twin. The brothers had strapped on fatigues,

taken up weapons, knowing they may die—sons,

brothers, husbands & fathers.

Each day the mind grapples: no power,

no water, starvation,

but Ukrainians, bigger than their fears,

face the Goliath. Church bells ring

calling the world to stand beside them.

Look at this man in body armour on the news

saying farewell to his wife and child.

Last week a teacher of children, today a soldier,

when will he see his school again?

I Am Not the Stories I Tell

July 26, 2024 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 7 Comments

Sometimes when people read my stories they assume those stories are me. They are not me, even if I write in the first person. They were my thoughts and feelings at the time I wrote them. But every minute we are all changing. There is a great freedom in this. At any time we can let go of our old selves and start again. This is the writing process. Instead of blocking us, it gives us permission to move on. Just like in a progressive ballroom dance: you give your undivided attention to your partner—keep eye contact for the time you are dancing together—but then you move on to the next person in the circle.

The ability to express yourself on the page—to write how you feel about an old lover, a favourite pair of dance shoes, or the memory of a dance on a chilly winter’s night in the Southern Highlands—that moment you can support how you feel inside with what you say on the page. You experience a great freedom because you are not suppressing those feelings. You have accepted them, aligned yourself with them.

I have a poem titled ‘This is what it feels like’—it’s a short poem. I always think of it with gratitude because I was able to write in a powerful way how it was to be desperate and frightened. The act of self expression made me feel less of a victim. But when people read it they often say nothing. I remind myself, I am not the poem, I am not the stories I write. People react from where they are in their own lives. That’s the way things are. The strength is in the act of writing, of putting pen to paper. Write your stories and poems, show them to the world, then move on. The stories are not you. They are moments in time that pass through you.

My Poem, ‘Transience’

July 16, 2024 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 14 Comments

Have a read of my poem, ‘Transience’ first published in Quadrant Magazine. ‘Transience’ is one of the poems in my second collection titled ‘Flat White, One Sugar‘ (Ginninderra Press).

I hope you enjoy it.

Transience:

A luminous, tangerine, and blazing expanse

burst out to the left of the blue

from the harbour to the city as the western light

lowered itself behind concrete high-rises.

We watched from the hill,

took a seat on the park bench,

the lawn with its after-the-rain moistness

too wet to lie back on.

We knew we had to seize

this fleeting moment.

We were spectators of that sensational

display, after enduring the restrictions

that made us change and mutate,

shape-shifting during the months,

then the years, of the pandemic,

wearing us down, teaching us

adapt, adapt, adapt,

change, change, change.

Today we search for the brilliance

unfolding in the sky.

Writing Tip: The Feedback Sandwich

July 8, 2024 ~ Libby Sommer ~ Leave a comment

In the Saturday-afternoon feedback group recently, we talked about the ‘off with his head’ or ‘out-it-goes’ part of writing. We acknowledged that as a group we’d always been very supportive and encouraging of each others work. That was because we were all in it together. Our critiquing was not telling lies; it was from a place of open hearted acceptance. Everything you put on the page is acceptable.

Sometimes someone says, ‘I want a rigorous no-holds-barred assessment of my work.’ But what do you say to them when the writing is dull and boring? Don’t give up your day job? It doesn’t sit comfortably with most of us to be directly critical of someone’s writing. It’s like telling someone how ugly their baby is. All of us find it hard to separate our writing from ourselves, and are prone to take criticism personally.

The feedback sandwich is a widely known technique for giving constructive feedback, by ‘sandwiching’ the criticism between two pieces of praise or compliments.

hamburger with cheese and two beef patties

Yesterday, as we passed around copies of our work (just a page or two) we started to address what William Faulkner famously said:

‘In writing, you must kill all your darlings.’

First of all, we looked for the juice in each piece. Where did the writing come alive? ‘Get rid of the rest,’ we said. ‘Off with his head—out it goes.’ It’s very difficult to be this honest, and not everyone wants to hear it. ‘I simply want gentle support and a few corrections,’ some of us might say.

Be willing to have the courage to look at your work with truthfulness. It’s good to know where your writing has energy and vitality, rather than to spend a lot of time trying to make something come to life that is dead on the page. Keep writing. Something new will come up. You don’t want to put your readers to sleep by writing a lot of boring stuff.

Are you in a critique group to give you feedback on your writing? Do you find it useful?

My Poem, ‘Breaking Out’

July 4, 2024 ~ Libby Sommer ~ Leave a comment

Have a read of my poem ‘Breaking Out’, first published in the Canberra Times Panorama Arts Section. ‘Breaking Out’ is one of the poems in my recently released second collection titled ‘Flat White, One Sugar‘ (Ginninderra Press).

I hope you enjoy it.

Breaking Out

See that white terrace house?

You could live in the attic there.

Yes, I like an eyrie, looking

out on the world. I wanted to be locked

in a tower, a princess in a fairy tale,

when I was a child.

I’m still the girl dreaming of breaking out.

Maybe she’s learnt to abseil now.

Some terraces have small colourful gardens

at the front. I prefer fragrant cut flowers

in a vase. I belong to

that discreet sect of law-breakers

who snip buds over a fence. A close escape

gives me an adrenaline kick.

Writing Tip: Exercise the Writing Muscle

June 23, 2024 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 10 Comments

Writing as a daily practice is a way to exercise the writing muscle. Like working out at the gym, the more you do it, the more results you get. Some days you just don’t feel like working out and you find a million reasons not to go to the gym or out for a jog, a walk, a swim, a bike ride, but you go anyway. You exercise whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around till you feel the urge to work out and have an overwhelming desire to go to the gym. It will never happen, especially if you haven’t been into health and fitness for a long time and you are pretty out of shape. But if you force yourself to exercise regularly, you’re telling your subconscious you are serious about this and it eventually releases its grip on your resistance. You just get on and do it. And in the middle of the work out, you’re actually enjoying it. You’ve felt the endorphines kick in. When you get to the end of the jog, the walk, the bike ride, the swim, the gym workout or the Pilates, Yoga or Zumba class, you don’t want it to end and you’re looking forward to the next time.

That’s how it is with writing too. Once you’ve got the flow happening, you wonder why it took you so long to turn up on the page. Bum on chair is what I say to my writing students. Through daily practice your writing does improve.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s book on discovering and recovering your creative self, she refers to daily writing practice as the morning pages. She recommends writing three pages of longhand, strictly stream-of-consciousness—moving the hand across the page and writing whatever comes to mind every day.

Author of Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg refers to writing practice as timed exercise. She says you might time yourself for ten minutes, twenty minutes, or longer. It’s up to you, but the aim is to capture first thoughts. “First thoughts have tremendous energy. It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.”

Her rules for writing practice are:

1. Keep your hand moving.
2. Don’t cross out.
3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation , grammar.
4. Lose control.
5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
6. Go for the jugular.

In Creative Journal Writing, author Stephanie Dowrick refers to the same process as free writing; writing without judging, comparing and censoring. “Continuing to write when you don’t know what’s coming next and especially when you feel your own resistances gathering in a mob to mock you.”

Daily writing practice has been described as clearing the driveway of snow before reaching the front door. In other words, it’s what we do as a warm up before the real writing takes place. And it’s a way to loosen up and discover our own unique writing ‘voice’. That’s what publishers are looking for when they read through the slush pile. The storyteller’s voice. The authentic writing voice of the author is what engages the reader.

Are you in the discipline of writing every day?

My Poem, ‘What Happened to the Sun’

June 17, 2024 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 6 Comments

Have a read of my poem ‘What Happened to the Sun‘ first published in Quadrant Magazine. ‘What Happened to the Sun‘ is one of the poems in my debut poetry collection ‘The Cellist, a Bellydancer & Other Distractions‘ (Ginninderra Press).

I hope you enjoy it.

What Happened to the Sun:

We took that hot ball of glowing gases

at the heart of our solar system for granted,

so much intense energy and heat

bearing down on green city spaces

when she went out to walk the dog,

winter warmth brightening her face. Sometimes

under a large red gum she stopped

to watch a mother and son

play cricket or an elderly tennis player

limp towards the courts, ‘No running

today, eh?’ calls out his opponent. ‘I’ll keep

the ball on your forehand.’

Difficult to stay upbeat sometimes

when you see so much change. You

wish for things to be how they were before,

nourished by moon on water,

first stars, mountains, ocean,

a dog pulling on a lead under a bright sky,

beneath a cache of clouds,

wanting the time before,

before polar bears were in danger,

when, ignorantly, you basted your skin

in coconut oil on the hot sand,

before we were all bound by rules,

distanced in unusual ways

burning in the sun side by side

on a crowded beach.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels.com

Writing Tip: Autobiography & Fiction

June 11, 2024 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

When people ask me where I get my ideas from, I tell them I use the world around me. Life is so abundant, if you can write down the actual details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else. Even if you relocate the French doors, fast-spinning overhead fan, small red Dell laptop, and low black kneeling chair from your office that you work in in Sydney into an Artist’s Atelier in the south of France at another time, the story will have truth and groundedness.

In Hermione Hoby’s interview with Elizabeth Strout in the Guardian newspaper, the Pulitzer prize winner said her stories have always begun with a person, and her eyes and ears are forever open to these small but striking human moments, squirreling them away for future use. “Character, I’m just interested in character,” she said.

“You know, there’s always autobiography in all fiction,” Strout said, referring to her novel, My Name is Lucy Barton. “There are pieces of me in every single character, whether it’s a man or a woman, because that’s my starting point, I’m the only person I know.” She went on to explain: “You can’t write fiction and be careful. You just can’t. I’ve seen it with my students over the years, and I think actually the biggest challenge a writer has is to not be careful. So many times students would say, ‘Well, I can’t write that, my boyfriend would break up with me.’ And I’d think, you have to do something that’s going to say something, and if you’re careful it’s just not going to work.”

At the launch of my debut novel My Year With Sammy, the MC Susanne Gervay OAM said: “Libby’s level of detail creates poignant insights into character and relationships. If people know Libby they may find themselves subtly entwined in one of her stories.”

On Goodreads’ website they locate The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath under “Autobiographical Fiction” and describe the book as Plath’s shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity: “Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.”

My advice to you, dear Reader, is to be awake to the details around you, but don’t be self-conscious. “So here it is. I’m at a Valentine’s Day party. It’s 33 degrees outside. The hostess is sweltering over a hot oven in the kitchen. She is serving up cheese and spinach triangles as aperitifs.” Relax, enjoy the party, be present with your eyes and ears open. You will naturally take it all in, and later, sitting at your desk, you will be able to remember just how it was to be eating outside in the heat under a canvas umbrella, attempting to make conversation with the people on either side of you, and thinking how you can best make an early exit.

In the interview with Elizabeth Strout in the Guardian, Strout said: “I don’t want to write melodrama; I’m not interested in good and bad, I’m interested in all those little ripples that we all live with. And I think that if one gets a truthful emotion down, or a truthful something down, it is timeless.”

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

My Poem, ‘Words’

June 3, 2024 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

Have a read of my poem ‘Words’ first published in Quadrant Magazine. ‘Words’ is part of my second poetry collection ‘Flat White, One Sugar’ (Ginninderra Press) published earlier this year.

I hope you enjoy it.

Words:

Belly expansions and contractions,

turning our attention to sensations,

we remember the three things you said:

breathe light, breathe slow, breathe deep.

We take control. Above us

the air conditioner hums.

At your own pace,

no need to rush.

Next door a conference

of 43 dentists learn