THE STORY BOARD

My current writing project began with high energy - I took voluminous notes and made character sketches, back-story for characters, and let all three of the main characters 'speak' on the page for weeks and weeks.  At one point, I had filled over 14 yellow pads with research notes and development work.

When the story itself began to form, it didn't happen in linear fashion.  This did not bother me, as I'd had that experience before writing a novel - I'd write the central scenes, the pivotal ones, and then the other scenes would come.   At some point, then, I began to need to get a view of the story over-all, to begin to see it's linear, chronological flow.  So, I did the first of what are now many story-board attempts - I spread all the different scenes, some handwritten, some typed,some done on the computer and printed, out on the floor, and began to arrange. 

This stayed this way for many days (perhaps one of the reasons writers should live alone).  In time the arrangement changed, the flow of the story, the central points of tension began to emerge.  Some scenes were eliminated, new ones written, and I began to take notes on the scenes as I arranged them.

I haven't done story-boarding for every piece I've written, though I now wish that I had.  I have always recommended it for my writing students, and when I have done it, I always come out not only with a stronger sense of the story itself, but of my purpose in writing it.  I write in a way I suppose many would call intuitive.  I don't use outlines or even think about things like story arc or plot points while I am writing.  What I always seem to start with is one central idea.  Once, it was the final scene of a novel.  Another time, it was the a transformational moment.  Most often it is, at least for me, a character and her or his situation that emerges, often in a very vivid scene context.   I go with that, and let it build.

Having taught writing for many years, I know all the arguments both for and against such a process, from those committed to a strict discipline or style, to those we might call more free-wheeling in their approach.  I've found that being tied to one approach doesn't work for me.  I have to listen to the essential nature of a story, and work on it in the way that this particular story demands.

I even change my medium - some first drafts written entirely by hand, others entirely on computer, this current one mostly on an old manual typewriter.  But listening to the form and process for an individual story doesn't mean giving up being a disciplined writer.  Far from it.  The more open I am to form and process during the initial draft, the more attentive I must be to detail and careful editing as I go through revisions.  The current manuscript is now on its ninth revision, and there may be more.

Once when Hemingway told a group of aspiring writers that he had written the last page - just the last page - of A Farewell To Arms something like 37 times, a curious youngster present asked him why.  What, he inquired of Mr. Hemingway, were you doing?  Hemingway's response?  "I was getting the words right."