(apologies to Italo Calvino)
Act 1
Scene 1 - “If in a normal life a wanderer”
As a child, you explore dreams. You become an adult and make practical plans. You launch a career with a corporation because you are good with numbers or people. Your life unfolds 9-5, but sometimes while drifting off in the subway on the way home stories break into your thoughts. You hear fragments of dialog and jot them in a small notebook you keep in your pocket.
Successful, you tackle a better position. You wonder if you are happy. You tell yourself that work is work, this is success, what happiness feels like. You make money and have lifestyle choices, find a partner, pursue hobbies, travel, nice things at home. When people are difficult, you make notes so you can use them in stories, or just for revenge.
On weekends, you draft stories and submit them to contests, like NYC Midnight or Write Practice. Feedback from online communities like Critters makes your work stronger. You check out a Beta reader group at goodreads and think, someday soon. You share a tiny scrap of work with close contacts. They say it's interesting. You don't believe them at first.
Relatives and friends take you aside and whisper you are wasting your life working for someone else. You wouldn’t dream of sacrificing your family’s wonderful life, the prestige of your job. Your folder of ideas and research pages grows fatter for someday.
Scene 2 - “regarding a rocky trail with an urge for thrill or danger”
Bad news - you lose your position when your company reduces its workforce, there is a rift in your family, or an unexpected health issue. You are forced to find a new way to earn a living. The economy changes. You try and try, but are unable to find a corporate job. Every day, you send out resumes. In between applications, you find solace in your story folder.
And good news - your spouse gets a raise, your employer goes public and you receive a pile of cash, an unexpected inheritance arrives. You make a change, enter a new world. You sweep off the dining table and commit to writing. You formulate a big project - short story, novella, maybe even a novel. Your work may never be publishable. You rationalize that it reduces stress during a difficult career transition.
Act 2
Scene 3 - “vanishes into unexplored territory”
You acknowledge the enormity of your assignment and struggle to find a way. You apply corporate techniques - goal-setting, project management, task breakdown. You create a work plan and cobble online systems together, like the Boho Berry bullet journal. You execute and track tactics. You consider “metrics”, but struggle to know which things should count.
You are the protagonist of your own transformation story. You read blogs like “Fiction University” to learn about the notion of “Act Two” and perceive every setback as a valuable challenge that will help you to change. You look forward to the way situations will look different to you after the midpoint. You hope that moment will come soon.
You push yourself. You write more words every day, use websites with targets - 250, then 750, then more. You experiment with software - Word, Pages, Scrivener, and Ulysses. You pack a platform full of prose, links and notes. Every morning you rise with new ideas, re-read yesterday's words and slash them without mercy, hunting passive tense and adverbs and cliches like a whirling dervish. You wrestle with Scenes and Sequels, with Goal, Conflict, Disaster / Reaction, Dilemma, and Decision. You fixate on Punchline, utter a one-liner and slam the door on the way out.
You interview your protagonist, “What is the lie you tell yourself?”, “What is your ghost?” You are a detective with a magnifying glass tracing footprints of your own character arc. You tell yourself that writing is not a viable career, but is it a lie? You aren’t good enough to be published, but is it a lie? You slash the velvet curtain to reveal the ghost behind the lies, and hear a booming voice that says to stop wasting time with infinite meta loops and get back to writing your story.
You interview your antagonist and discover an intriguing villain. In the back of your mind, you glimpse the antagonist of your own story and realize you are looking into a mirror.
Scene 4 - “falls into a network of trenches that transform”
The date is October 20th and National Novel Writing Month is eleven days away. So many years you averted your gaze from Nanowrimo because of job, kids, spouse, house, schedule, dog. But this time you register for Nanowrimo. Writing 50,000 words by the end of the month to “win” seems unimaginable. You conjure a jar with 50,000 grains of rice or pennies. It gets larger and larger until it fills the room. Stop wasting time and get back to writing, seriously now, because Nanowrimo starts in just five days.
You throw open that worn story folder. Start on the premise, the character, the objective, the challenge. Spend more and more time absorbing knowledge. You haunt the library and bookstore basements for bargain books about the craft of writing. Study Truby, McKee, Gerke, Bell and others. Transcribe tips, snap mobile phone photos of the diagrams and hope that having these in your reference file will work magic on your manuscript.
The people surrounding you become supporting characters in a novel. You identify a sidekick, healer, wise one, love interest (maybe more than one). You take a class on “Constructing the Scene” at the Grub Street in Boston and explode scenes from “Great Gatsby” and “Inglourious Basterds”. You tap references like K M Weiland’s “Structuring Your Novel” and “Outlining Your Novel”. You wonder about genres.
By Halloween, you have just the barest boney skeleton of an idea. With watering, it grows into a trilogy with all three of your favorite story ideas. You review the work of your favorite authors and recent publications in your genre, tapping goodreads for ideas.
Listen attentively to outlining video courses on sale by Smarter Artist. Andrew Butcher, and Mike Dickson. You map your story to archetypes chapter by chapter, and watch as the characters push back, break out of their molds, shift pieces. You outline half of the scenes. The sand dribbles down in the hourglass.
Morning dawns on November first and you write like a fiend. You forbid yourself to care if what you write is terrible. You trick your inner critic into coming out for a drink and lock her in a closet. You create and plug plot holes, seek and answer questions, find new ones and go back to the beginning, over and over again. Every day you plant your butt in the chair and write 1750 words. At lunch, you sit in a different room to listen to podcasts like “HelpingWritersBecomeAuthors” and “TheEveryDayNovelist”, and writing-inspired vlogs like Jenna Moreci’s. These posts inspire you. Without slowing the flow of words emanating from your fingers, you jot notes for future changes and keep writing down the road.
You gasp in shock to see 1000 words in an hour. The outline for each scene - describing Setting, Background, Character, and sequencing Setup, Conflict, Turning Point and Punchline makes it possible. Most days you hit your target and watch the bars climb on the Nano site. You take Thanksgiving off, eat a lovely meal and keep thinking about character arcs and motivations. By the end of November, a miracle occurs. You count 50,000 words. “I won” Nanowrimo, you say and it feels amazing. Then the inner critic breaks out of the closet with a sledgehammer, screaming, “Finally! Where is that damn manuscript? Let me at it!” She berates you from word one to 50,000. By the end, you lie cowering in bed as the first week of December passes in a blur.
Act 3
Scene 5 - “into slices of vision filling vacant imaginations“
Standing in front of the inner critic as she shreds your once lovely manuscript, your face darkens. Is it time to move on, to try painting or busking in Cambridge? You love your characters, especially that darling protagonist. You would die to see her succeed, to influence people. You harbor an insane belief that your novel might make a difference.
You confront your inner critic. You threaten her with starvation or violence, to cut off her wine supply. Call a truce and she joins your team. You reorganize the novel’s structure. She comes up with a better sequence for the climax and you weave the props and pieces through the plot. They are ready for their close-ups. You flesh out the characters, arm them with backstories about the lies they tell themselves, the ghosts that haunt them.
Occasionally, you venture out into real life. You add science, politics, human interest stories to swollen research files. Relevant news items on the radio jolt you with scenarios. The world is telling you it wants, needs your story.
Scene 6 - “what story might emerge?”
There are just a few scenes left to write. You absorb books, courses and podcasts on marketing, self-publishing and agents. You skim the Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market Book, accumulate a list of potential agents and publishers. You learn about query and which companies publish novels like yours, genre, voice, and theme. You keep writing. “The end” gets closer.
Your friends give feedback and pressure you. You set deadlines. You promise to finish that draft, no matter what. Even if your friends hate your work, even if you fail to find an editor, an agent or a publisher, you vow never to surrender. You keep on dreaming about the pages turning and turning in the hands of readers. Inside the dream, your inner critic hugs your inner child. They exchange knowing glances, confident that future will be here soon. They can’t wait to find out what happens at the end.