I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.
Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn't build a house without a plan. If I wrote without a plot, it would just be a pile of bricks. Characters are your servants. They must serve your plot.
You need to know the characters as living, breathing people before you start the plot; otherwise, you'll feel panic, anarchy and chaos.
You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.
I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.
If you're going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you'll never make a map of it afterwards.
Don't set pen to paper until you know your main characters inside out. Create files detailing their appearances, likes, dislikes, and personal background. You may not use all the information, but it is a crucial step in planning your story.
I have things planned for every character like what they're doing down the road and coming to different realizations but I don't have how they overlap.
In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.
I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.
My books are written with a strong chronological spine.
I work very hard on finding good characters who can explain things to me, and I use them to help tell the story. I organize my pieces not just around people but around animals and plants, energy flows, the path that carbon takes through the food system.
I always work from an outline, so I know all the of the broad events and some of the finer details before I begin writing the book.
It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.
Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
The biggest challenge is not the storytelling, it's to track every character's arc through the entire movie.
I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.
It's a little like packing for a trip. First you lay out everything that might possibly be useful, with no thought about the size of your suitcase. Then, look at your suitcase. In the case of narrative, there's a certain obligation to keep the pace up and have each section or subsection be doing something.
I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.
I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. I'm constantly revising this as I go along. It gives me the freedom to intricately plot my story, knowing it will at least hold up on a timeline.
I make notebooks for characters, and it kind of becomes a bible.
Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.
With each book, in each place, I have to keep an ongoing map as I write because otherwise I don't know where I am.
I'm not a big fan of introducing a bunch of new mysteries into a story without really knowing where they're going because you just end up struggling at the end to make sense of them and make it all seem like you planned it all along.
