Index cards and bulletin boards. That’s it. I considered several technological options to support plot development, but decided against them. The bulletin boards are leaning against the furniture near the music stand, because my writing space has five doorways, two windows, a fireplace, and no walls. Which brings to mind this limerick by Gelett Burgess (who famously declared that he had never seen a purple cow):
I wish that my Room had a floor;
I don’t so much care for a Door,
But this walking around
Without touching the ground
Is getting to be quite a bore!
So I’m sitting in my armchair for several hours a day, staring into space and occasionally writing a sentence like “Hjalpa takes a trip to the healing box.” It’s better to do this on index cards rather than using a word processor: a couple of sentences fills the available space, giving me the heady illusion of Making Great Strides. On the large index cards, I’ve written the traditional components of a plot:inciting action, turning point, rising action, midpoint, another turning point, preclimax, climax, denoument. I don’t know what these are either—I googled them—but they’re giving me a preliminary structure so I won’t panic.
I wasn’t planning to write the book I’m writing. I have a half-completed manuscript titled The Cunningmen that’s been on the back burner for a decade, and I do want to finish it. But I had gotten stuck in the story middle—a commonplace occurrence that my wife recognizes as a syndrome—and I had lost all momentum during the years I didn’t work on it, I knew it would be a slog to get that project reenergized and then to figure out how to rescue a crappy plot that goes like this: Run away from the bad guys. Run away some more. Keep running.
Well, no wonder I didn’t want to write that book. I don’t want to read it, either.
Meanwhile, nine months of retirement having generated the conditions for creativity, the hazy bits and pieces of ideas that had been floating around in the ill-defined space of my brain suddenly coalesced into a novel. I’ll attempt to describe the contributory bits and pieces, if only so you’ll appreciate how confusing novel-writing can be.
- Paint-by-numbers
- Feeling buried in clutter
- Watercolor painting
- Climate change
- Apocolyptic fantasy (I thought I’d made this up, but it turns out to be an actual fantasy subgenre)
- That chronic piercing pain in my right foot
- A novel I read recently that had a fabulous premise. (I know you’ll ask—it was Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers.)
- The shrinking of my universe because of the covid epidemic, and its failure to re-expand
- That crazy feeling I got in February that I would KILL to go ANYWHERE outside my four walls
- Decades of doing everything, trying everything, working my ass off from early morning to late night, yet changing nothing
- Unresolved rage and bitterness at cynical people who use their power to manipulate other people into self-destruction with massive collateral damage.
Given that I had seriously considered giving up writing entirely, and that I haven’t started a new project in many years, to suddenly find myself preoccupied with world-building and character-development is a marvel, a gift, and a joy.
The Mysteries
I know I’m working on a new novel when, like the Angel of Anunciation, the main character, the starting point, and the ending point abruptly become known to me. Only after the story arrives can I can guess where it came from, as with the list above. I assume that a very busy but secretive portion of my brain is collecting, transforming, and gluing random bits together, a process I’m mostly unaware of until it catalyzes and barges into my conscious awareness, and I think, Whoah! Where did that come from?
So now my job is to provide the raw materials, including time, space, solitude, and lack of distractions, take pen and paper in hand, and behave like I have something to write. That the annunciation experience hasn’t occurred in many years is due to catastrophes that took my time and space away and did not give them back again. Yet the underlying machinery has survived, and I’ve actually written the first and last chapters, between which the story will stretch like a clothesline.
Why did I write them? Because they were distracting me.
To avoid getting bogged down in the middle, I’m doing the grim labor of making a plot plan. And, because my characters always seem to do an awful lot of traveling (which might be lazy plotting) in this project I’ve made it nearly impossible for them to go anywhere at all, rather like I was in February. Welcome to my dystopia!
-Laurie
Laurie J. Marks 
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