Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Braiding Storylines

I don't know if you can discover braiding storylines without writing something long, like a novel or a novella, and then rewriting.  I had no idea about how exciting this method could be until I began to rewrite my novel, The Bad Project.  I had a straight-through story, involving what happened to two women during their first semester in college, more or less chronologically.  The strands I braided into it came from the question, "What else did they do?  Just go to class?"  Of course not.  The roommates began to meet with a writing outreach group for high school girls, and that helped Marianne call her resistance to Chinese culture into question.  Marianne took on a co-editorship for the college literary magazine with a gay black man, helping her to mine the prejudices of Mandy, the student representative on the panel judging Crystal's application for the Forscher premed scholarship for "students of good character." Also, Marianne had to put her writing out there to be judged by older students, some of whom were none too gentle with her.  These strands of extra-curricular activities seemed to be side issues, but when I began adding them, they made strong connections and big contributions to the main themes of the book.  Crystal sang in the Gospel Choir, and her concert broke open some of her inhibitions about relationships with men and also allowed Marianne to relax from excessive studying.  So, the fact of writing a longer story gave me the room and the freedom to develop some related activities for the two women, thinking they might prove to be distractions, only to find that they often led me right to the heart of the story.  That is why I thought of it as braiding; in braiding you take an outward path, but then it curves back to the center and connects.  I found this process highly enjoyable and surprising, and when I reread the novel now, I cannot imagine the story without these braided elements.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, that sounds like fun. I have probably done something low key like this in longer stories, but I have not written a novel so I didn't have the full experience. Did someone teach you this in UCLA or SDSU classes? Or did you figure it out on your own? I like the concept a lot, and will keep it in mind for my future novel! Suzette M.

Anonymous said...

Well, I just write non-fiction most of the time. The closest I've come to this is to try to work in a surprise in my few short stories, something that comes from left field. But of course, you have to braid in the left field or there is no conviction to it. It can't appear out of no where exactly. Coral Eng

Lorelei said...

Hi Suzette,
My novel reader at the end of my UCLA certificate encouraged me to add the extracurricular elements (to expand them a lot ) but it working with that suggestions, I discovered the braiding aspect of it for myself.
cheers,
Laura

Lorelei said...

Hi Coral,
I know, magazines and newspapers! But I do remember some of your stories, and you're right, you wove in the background so that the surprise could spring out of it and shock me at the end. But it was there in plain sight all the time. I am always amazed how you do that, even though I know now to look for that in your stories!
cheers,
Laura

Anonymous said...

I love Stephen King's book but I can't recall what he thought about rewriting except that you should look for themes. I kind of hate that. If there is a theme, I think it should be organic, emerge from what your characters do and say, not be imposed in any preachy kind of way. But King's novels don't do that so I'm puzzled.

Anonymous said...

I just hate rewriting altogether. Why can't it appear in perfect form to begin with? I don't mind editing out the adverbs and stuff like that, but reconstructing, adding plot lines and symbolism and who knows what, I don't like that.