Five Ways to Treat Meandering Storylines

 I bet it never happens to you!

     You start off with an outline, or even just a clear idea of where you story is going and how it's going to get there. Then many scenes, chapters and words later you look at what you have produced, and see the storyline is all over the place with no direction home.

     It can be a long and winding road to put it all in order. Even to figure out what you have to work with.

     I have about 46,000 words of Return of the Summer Fish. Twenty-three scenes ranging from 750 to 2,000 words. Six of which I consider 'orphan scenes'. Some of which were written in the past few months. Most of which were written as much as 12 years go. The plot points seemed important at the time. Some I now doubt their value, and others I think are worth keeping, but where to put them?

     I have five options for dealing with this 'dog's dinner' of a novel.

One
Write up a simple 'This Happened, Then This, Then This...' chronology on a spreadsheet or piece of paper, moving the scenes around without digging too deep into them, until the whole starts to make sense of the various parts.

Two
Take each scene individually and identify the Scene Goal, Story Goal and Character Goal.

     By identifying those three elements I can often discover which scenes are repetitious, which redundant, and which works where in the overall story.

    This is what I use on what I call 'Orphan' scenes - those that came to me spontaneously with no idea of why and how they fit in the overall story, but were just begging to be written for one reason or another.

Three

Use the Reverse Outline I developed a number of years ago. 

    This is a more complex system than Two above, as I work with more elements in the story, analyzing in each scene or chapter the main Action, Backstory, Character development,  Dialogue / Theme / Ending.

      What I like about this process, time consuming as it is, is that it makes me read each scene closely several times. I can use a revised chart for each draft of the novel each time using different elements as required and I can study the story's development both chronology (vertically) or by elements (horizontally).

Reverse Outline chart.

Contact me if you'd like a copy of this Word file - which you can adapt as you will - 

and the accompanying notes on how to use it.

Four

I could share the entire novel once it's in presentable form with a beta reader or two, or with my writing group. 

     That will most likely work best if I ask the beta readers for specific input of select craft elements. And if we can come up with a timeline that works for both of us. 

    And if my writers' group meets often enough to cover the whole book in a reasonable time. Which can be difficult if a group meets only once a month and reads one chapter at a time = potentially 2-1/2 years!

Five

I can hire a professional development editor or 'book coach' to give the book a once over. Jane Friedman has an invaluable article on her website about how to do just that.

Which am I doing now? Actually, writing this blog post instead of taking on what I think at the moment might be the most useful process. The Reverse Outline.

So I will get to it right now. Honest.

What about you? Would one of these work for you? Or do you use a different approach? Do share in the comments.

As an aside - just a few days later...

I just unearthed an old article by Donald M. Murray that I filed and never read.

'Making Meaning Clear: The Logic of Revision'. He has a list of revision questions that I am about to read closely.

You can find the article here: https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/jbw/v3n3/murray.pdf