Eliminating Unnecessary Plot Complications

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Penguin has asked me to write a fourth Memphis Barbeque book. It was great to hear that I’d have a reason to spend more time with the characters in that series.

I also had an idea for something I wanted to do with the plot—I wanted to feature the huge Memphis in May festival that’s such a big event there every year.

My protagonist and sleuth for the series is Lulu Taylor, who owns a barbeque restaurant. I decided to make Lulu a judge for the event. There are many different foods to judge at the festival—everything from slaw to sauce to the barbeque itself.

I got deeper into the research on being a food judge. I realized there were different rules these judges have to follow to keep the competition fair. I saw that there was a good deal of training that went into being one. I felt, also, that this would be something I’d need to make sure I represented well in the book, since there are people in Memphis who read this series…and I wanted my information to be correct and not something that I changed for my own purposes.

I could also tell that Lulu would be kept very busy as a judge.

As I got farther into the book (this is one that I’m working on now), I realized I was making this mystery unnecessarily complex. And confusing. And, really, having Lulu be a judge was going to tie up a lot of her time and make her less available to investigate a murder.

This wasn’t a book about judging barbeque competitions. This was a mystery. And my sleuth needed to solve the mystery, not pick the top baked bean winner.

These were some of the questions I asked myself before I decided to demote Lulu from judgeship:

Does this forward the plot? Is it necessary?

Am I including research simply to show off how well I’ve researched?

Will this complication confuse readers?

Are there other, simpler ways to accomplish the same effect?

What’s the basic reason I’m including this complication in the book?

For me, I decided the whole point I’d made Lulu a judge was to put her on the scene at Memphis in May. But wouldn’t she already be there? Her best friends have a booth at the festival. It’s the biggest Memphis event of the year. And Lulu has two grandchildren begging for her to take them there.

Why wouldn't she be there? The whole complication of Lulu being a judge just wasn’t needed. It only made the plot more convoluted for readers and tougher for me to write. And required a great deal of research. Do you ever notice, like me, that you’re making things complicated for both yourself and your readers? How do you simplify unnecessarily convoluted plotlines?

Starting Over from Scratch

by Elizabeth S. Craig @elizabethscraig

I was recently working on revisions when I realized I wasn’t 100% happy with a particular scene.

I thought the beginning was ‘okay.’ But the more I looked at it, the more it really started bothering me.

I tried approaching it from a couple of different directions. I switched one scene with another as a lead-in.

Then I revised a long scene and made it much shorter.

I took out a phone conversation that I realized was unnecessary and instead started the next scene with the person doing the action they’d discussed on the phone.

Some of the sentences seemed longer than needed, so I broke them up into shorter ones, which made them read a lot smoother.

After all these changes, it was much better. But it still wasn’t the beginning I knew it could be.

I decided to pretend that I hadn’t written the beginning at all—that it didn’t exist.

I rewrote the entire first chapter, using a different approach. The nice thing about word processing is that we can easily see which one works better and cut and paste the different beginnings in.

The first beginning had a lot of set-up written in. I incorporated it with humor, but a duck is a duck. It was set-up. And set-up slows down the pace—and is boring.

With the second beginning, I ditched the set-up. Instead I included foreshadowing to let the reader know to keep an eye on a particular character.

I completely removed, in my rewrite, several passages that were unnecessary. For example: I needed to have a particular character at another character’s house. In the original beginning, I’d had a whole sequence to set that visit up. Boring.

In the second version, I just opened the scene with the visit and put in a passing reference to it in dialogue, “I’m glad you could come by, Jill, and help me out…”

Looking back at what I did, I’m thinking now that I should just immediately have done a total rewrite of the entire first chapter. Instead I spent a lot of time doing surface work on something that had a deeper problem. Yes, it did read better when I changed scenes around and toyed with my sentence structure. But, for this instance anyway, I got much better results with the radical rewrite.

Update Oct. 2011—I’m actually doing a lot of revision work right now and have again noticed that rewriting a scene can be much better, time-wise, than tinkering with a badly-written scene in twenty different ways. I also tend to get better results. It helps, I think, if I haven’t memorized the old scene…and only know the gist of it and what I’m trying to accomplish.

Have you had success with radical rewrites?

Note—this post is part of my Retro Wednesdays that I’m running to help me find extra writing time through the end of the year. This post first ran in December 2009.

Changing Our Book’s Game Plan

I’ve worked with several different editors for the series I’ve written/am writing.

Each editor has been very different. I’ve actually really appreciated the differences because I’m getting a different perspective each time I go through an edit.

My editor for the new series has kept me on my toes. I’m not good on the phone (actually, I hate phones), so I usually try not to talk on one. I’m also someone who makes books up as I go along…I don’t outline.

This editor likes to talk on the phone and review outlines. :)

The process has probably been good for me. Although it’s been challenging.

Our last conversation, though, showed my discomfort with both phones and outlines, all at once. My editor said, “Yes, the story you’re planning sounds really good. But I was wondering if you could change the killer?”

Now, if I’d been emailing, I would have written something really polished back. I’d have said I was delighted to change the killer and here were three alternates. Did she have a preference?

Since I was on the phone, though, I said, “Uhhhhh….”

It wasn’t that I was upset about making a change. Actually, I frequently change the killer while I’m writing my book…or even after I’ve written it. Easy enough, because all the suspects have motive, means, and opportunity. It doesn’t really matter to me which one does it because I’ve set up up so any of them could have murdered the victim.

But the difference was that I hadn’t written this book out yet…it was an outline. And I was on the phone. And I hadn’t thought it through.

Once I’d recovered and told her I’d be happy to make the change and would email her the possibilities, I took a look at the outline. She’d blown my mind enough that I couldn’t even remember who the other suspects were.

I found, though, that if I changed the killer, it actually was going to make the mystery a lot more interesting. As I started exploring the possibilities, more ideas came to me. Some of the ideas weren’t going to work, but others were more interesting.

It really changed the entire book, since it was an outline. If I were just doing a revision of a finished book, it wouldn’t have probably changed it that much…because I’d just have tweaked it in a few places and rewritten the last couple of chapters.

I’m still no fan of outlines (even though this particular instance worked out well), but it made me think about the other project that I’m starting right now..the one that I’m not outlining. I always have a big-picture idea of a book when I’m starting out, a general direction I’m heading in. In fact, I usually write the back cover copy for a book before I start writing the manuscript.

Maybe I could write several completely different big-picture ideas for the new book. Wildly different from each other. And see which one I like best.

Do you come up with different outcomes of a book when you’re brainstorming? Or do you latch onto the first feasible idea you have (which is, ordinarily, what I do…although I frequently revise it later)?

Doing Revisions and Working on a New WIP

I'll admit that I took a couple of months off this past summer. Our house was on the market (unsuccessfully, I might add! Obviously, the housing market is less than ideal right now). I had strangers tromping through at (literally) a moment's notice. Lots of, "Okay! Let's throw those Barbies in the toy chest and go to the park!!" at the drop of a hat. Add in the vacations and family visits and it really wasn't a conducive time to do a lot of writing.

But I discovered something. If you don't write nearly every day, writing doesn't come as easily to you when you come back to it. It's sort of like an underused muscle.

Now I'm in the middle of doing revisions for the book coming out next year (for a new publisher) and working on the new book in the series. I'm starting to get my groove back, but it took a couple of weeks of pure work. Even if I felt like my writing wasn't up to par, my ideas were out on paper and I knew I could go back later and edit them into something much better.

Now some writers might find reading industry blogs a real distraction. I'll admit that it's tempting to surf the net instead of slugging out your daily pages. But if you subscribe to the blogs' feeds, you can just read them when they're updated. And so many of them have great information. There are lots of great websites for writers. Here is a cool site that I've enjoyed lately: http://queryshark.blogspot.com/ ---You'll feel good about the query letters you've sent in! I like to edit these queries as I read them, which probably places me in the "disturbed" category.

An interesting idea that might appeal to many writers: organizing your writing with a wiki. This might sound a little scary, but you can make wikis that aren't shared out--that are private to your computer. Here's a blog article on creating a writing wiki: http://writerunboxed.com/2008/08/28/organize-your-novel-with-a-wiki/ If you've used a wiki for writing or if you give it a try, let me know how it goes! There are definitely parts to this that sound interesting to me if I find time to set it up.