Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Developing a Story Line

When I facilitate The Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW), which is a class that is part of the New Horizon’s Academy here at WDC, I try and get students to think about a novel from three perspectives. These are the Tactical, Operational and Strategic levels of writing. Sound Military? Well it’s a view of looking at things that the Military teaches and most writers can benefit from understanding the technique.

Tactical Writing is the crafting of short pieces that follow the guidelines you learned in school. These include the introduction, body and conclusion as well as grammar, punctuation and the spelling lessons that are fundamental to the craft. These can be articles, stories or sketches that stand-alone or become the genesis of something larger and far reaching. I call them “Vignettes” in the workshop and describe them as patches on a quilt. The lessons require a student to write six vignettes of between one and three thousand words. They have common characters and story line and must include elements on the lesson checklist. They are like the prompts in a contest submission or analogous to sketches a fine arts student would do in preparation for a large mural. I consider writing a novel to be a mural and write these short sketches to get my arms around a story and the components it must contain.

Once the six vignettes are written and pasted on the storyboard it’s time to write the outlines. Writing outlines are the last two lessons in the Workshop. I consider this to be the Operational Level of writing. This is where the author begins to string the chapters of a pending novel together. Operations are regional in scope and in the military venacular is the stringing together of battles into a Campaign. Outlining the chapters is analogous in the sense that the writer now knows something about how the story will go and needs to shift gears into capturing the flow into a structure. This is a logical step because the human mind can handle a piece of writing in the vignette range but when it comes to something larger, now needs to begin taking the process in bite sized chunks. Writing the outline provides these manageable steps and arrays them in an order, letting the novelist think about creating at the next higher level.

Finally there is the Strategic level. In the Military this is putting the campaigns together into a final victory. For the writer this is making sure the chapters have all the components a good story needs. These include, a Life Changing Event, a Dramatic Premise, Themes, Foreshadowing, Repetition, Character Development, setting up the momentum of the Three Major Crisis and other components or devices used effectively by successful writers. For each chapter in the outline these get poked in to make sure they are developed appropriately when the time comes to begin working on each little part. This is what the developmental phase of writing is all about and anybody who thinks they can write a novel, simply by jotting down whatever comes to mind... is sadly out of touch with reality.