Hey, How'd That Happen?: Mapping Out Your Setting

At the end of January I received the edit notes for my midgrade novel, CHAINED, so I've been working on those a lot lately, after giving them a couple weeks to sit on my desk so we could get used to one another. One thing the editor asked me to do was make a rough map of the setting. She's having trouble picturing where things are in the story, so that's something I need to make more clear as I revise.

Most of the story takes place on the old circus grounds where the main character, Hastin, works as an elephant keeper. I used the Draw program in OpenOffice to make a diagram of the property and came up with this:

I sent the diagram to the editor, but I've also kept a hard copy next to me while I revise, and it's really helped me firm up the setting. Whatever a character is doing, I check to make sure his actions make sense. Would he really be able to see what he's describing, or would the trees be in the way? Is he close enough to overhear that conversation he's eavesdropping on? What's a water bucket doing by the arena?

Just last night I was working on a scene where Hastin is bathing the elephant, Nandita, in the spring and decides to escape with her. The two of them take off and run away to the forest where Nandita used to live, and from there Hastin plans to return home. Then I looked at the diagram and said, "Hey, you two-- how did you get past the fence?"

Headdesk.

If Hastin were escaping on his own, I'm sure he could climb the fence, but with an elephant? Ummm, now what? Let's see:

• People can do amazing things when they're really, really motivated. Powered by an adrenaline rush and desperation, Hastin carries the elephant over the fence. (What? It's not like she's full grown.)
• You know, I've always wanted to write fantasy. Hello, magical fence that disappears for a chapter!
• That fence is pretty old. How convenient it's rotted away over there by the spring.
• Balloons. Lots and lots of helium balloons.

But after sleeping on it, I decided a fence that size would need a few gates, and I hadn't put any in the diagram. People are coming and going throughout the day, and I don't think they're all climbing over the fence. And they had to get the elephant in somehow, didn't they? They brought her in a big truck and drove right up to the arena. But if the gates are too accessible, it would be easy for Hastin and Nandita to escape any time, and the story would be over. 

So, now we have one wide gate--one of those big metal ones you might see on a farm, held closed with a chain and padlock. In a couple other places are gates for people to walk on and off the circus grounds. 

There. Now we don't have an entire cast of characters trapped forever behind a fence. For the scene I was working on, Nandita is a young elephant and can pass through one of those smaller gates (barely), but when she's older that won't be possible.

This isn't the only scene that changed--I've tweaked so many scenes as a result of having a map of the setting on the writing desk. It made everything so much clearer; if you're holding your setting only in your head, it's too easy to change it as you go along. You can have buildings that change locations from chapter to chapter, trees show up out of nowhere, fences that disappear and reappear. 

I'd have saved myself a lot of revision time (and head smacks) if I'd had the setting map from the beginning. It still would have changed along the way, but I would have changed it on the paper diagram too, so I could keep things consistent in the story. 

So if you haven't made a setting map for your story, try drawing one out and see if that helps you as your write your draft or revise.

Or a lot of you may have done this already--have you drawn out maps of your settings, and has it helped your writing? Have you used it to work out a problem that came up? Or do you cheat and just add balloons?

Revising With Chocolate And Pirates

I'm sure everyone's been to those workshops or conferences that are just okay--the speakers are good, and you pick up one or two things you might use in your writing. Or a few days later you tell someone it was a good workshop, but you can't think of anything specific you learned. 


Nothing like what we went to last weekend.


Three of us Cakers--Christina, Laura and &--attended Darcy Pattison's amazing Novel Revision Retreat, hosted by the Brazos Valley SCBWI. 


Luckily, even a couple of rotting tires couldn't get in my way. Before leaving town I stopped for an oil change. "Change" may not be the right word, really. The way my jalopy leaks oil, it's more accurate to say "oil replacement." But I digress. The mechanic told me not to go anywhere without getting two dry-rotted tires replaced. I wondered if it would help to rub the tires with a really good moisturizer, perhaps a hydrating mask, but mechanics look at you funny if you suggest things like that. Seems what I was driving around on were about as sturdy as papier-mâché, so a detour to Discount Tire was next.


Finally, I was on my way for real. I got to the workshop only about 15 minutes late, and there was chocolate on the table! In bowls that kept getting refilled all weekend!


I'd used Darcy's book Novel Metamorphosis: Uncommon Ways to Revise while revising CHAINED, and it helped so much (like with adding those pesky feelings I've mentioned), but it was even better seeing the activities and discussing in our small groups how we could use what we'd learned to revise our own novels.


For several of the activities, we used our "shrunken manuscripts" (the full novel printed single-spaced in an 8 point font). You can read more about the shrunken manuscript here, and it's a great way to visualize the big-picture stuff in your novel. Here's an example:

So that's my whole novel on my living room floor. At the workshop I placed a blue "X" over the chapters I thought were the strongest. They're pretty well spread out throughout the beginning, middle, and end of the story, so that's good. If you do this for your own novel, see if there are huge gaps between chapters you marked. If the strong chapters are all at the beginning and at the end, the middle of the novel may not be interesting enough to keep a reader going till the end. If your first chapter isn't one you marked as strong, see if there's a better place to start telling the story.


In this next activity, we used different colors of highlighters to mark the sensory details in one scene. 

The scene is from chapter 3 of my YA novel REASONS FOR LEAVING. The main character, Minna, is lying in bed after being fired from yet another job. Here's an excerpt from that scene before the revision:


Our bulldog Marge walks in and climbs onto my bed. Well, not so much climbs, I guess. It's more like, she puts her front paws on the bed and waits for me to help her up. She always knows when I'm having a bad day. She licks my face once before lying down next to me. 


After highlighting the sensory details there (not too many, other than what she sees and the dog licking her face), I set the page aside and rewrote the scene, keeping in mind that it would be stronger with more sensory details. Here's the "after" excerpt:


Our bulldog Marge saunters in and climbs onto the bed. Well, not so much climbs. It's more like, she puts her paws on the edge of the bed and waits for me to hoist her up. She's panting from the effort, even though I'm the one doing the heavy lifting. Her breath smells bacony--like real bacon, not like those treats that look just like bacon (but trust me, taste nothing like bacon). 
"Margie, have you been getting into the trash?" She's probably been chewing on paper towels I threw away after making BLTs last night.
She licks my face once and flops down next to me. She always seems to know when I'm having a bad day.


I'm sure I'll end up tweaking that more as I revise, but just that couple minutes of scribbling results in a scene that works harder to bring the reader into the story with more sensory detail.


Later in the story, Marge throws a wrench into Minna's plans when she again gets into the trash and then the laundry, so the scene now does something Darcy mentioned she learned from Linda Sue Park: every chapter should have something that looks forward and something that looks back. When Marge does this again later, the reader will already know that this is a habit of hers.


Saturday night after taking waaaaay too long at dinner (What? The restaurant had a dessert called "ooey gooey chocolate cake"), we returned to the hotel meeting room to watch Pirates of the Caribbean. Can you believe I'd never seen it before? But even those who had seen it were able to watch it in a whole new way, because throughout the movie Darcy pointed out things we'd learned from our revision activities. 


Objects weren't placed in a scene for no reason. That bed warmer? Nice weapon for whacking a bad guy in the face. We saw examples of mirror characters, like the two incompetent English soldiers and their pirate counterparts; repetition, like everyone swooning whenever Johnny Depp appeared Jack always grabbing for his personal effects, and Elizabeth singing the pirate song--once as a young girl at the beginning of the movie, and years later on the beach with Jack; and reversals of dialogue: a couple times throughout the movie, someone calls Jack "The worst pirate I've ever seen." At the end, an officer says, "That's got to be the best pirate I've ever seen."


These are all things we don't usually notice when watching a movie, but they add to the character development and the storyline, so novel writers can learn a lot from the big screen. I'm sure I'll spot those literary devices in movies from now on. But I won't mention them out loud while in a movie theater, unless I want people beating me up with popcorn buckets.


So, if you ever get a chance to go to one of Darcy's workshops, go! 


But you might need to give me a ride.

Aaaaaaannnnnd SOLD!

So if you've been reading our posts, you know by the teasers that the group has been waiting to announce some good news.

For a little over a week I've been bursting with happy news and wasn't sure how much longer I could hold it all in. We even had cupcakes at our WWFC meeting on Tuesday, to celebrate my good news, Chris' birthday, and perhaps some other good news by a Writer To Be Named Later. Still couldn't squee to the world, though, until the deal was official. I was getting worried that I'd find myself unable to take it anymore while in some random place like the grocery store and run up and down the aisles screaming, "Guess what?! Guess what?!" Or that I'd break out in a happy dance with a cubicle chair at work. So thankfully the official announcement is out! Here it is, from today's Publishers Marketplace:

"Lynne Kelly's debut CHAINED, about a boy who works as an elephant keeper in northern India to fulfill a family debt, to Margaret Ferguson at Margaret Ferguson Books, at auction, by Joanna Stampfel-Volpe at Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation."

I actually didn't know the news was public until I was checking Twitter while getting my hair done and saw that a couple of people had congratulated me on the book deal. So it was in the hair salon that I finally said publicly, "Hey, guess what?" I managed to stay in my chair, though.

For those who don't know Margaret Ferguson, she's an editor at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, and she'll be releasing books under her own imprint there starting next year. And from what I've heard, completely awesome. The release date for Chained should be sometime in the Spring of 2012.

It's been a fun and exciting time, but now that I'm able to share the news with everyone, it's just now starting to feel real. Yay!