The Myth of Plot: A Heresy

Copyright © 1993 by C. J. Cherryh
(posted here by permission of the author, June 2000)
Published in the program book of Arisia '95 where C. J. Cherryh was the Guest of Honor

Somewhere in time, approximately 1952, a fifth grade class learned the formulae of literature and book reports. A novel, they were told has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A novel has a protagonist and, probably, an antagonist. A novel has a theme, such as Truth vs. Justice or Friendship over Duty, meaning a moral question, or a proposition testing social or personal values. And a novel has a plot, that is, the train of events through which the protagonist encounters opposition and reaches the climax of the book, at which point all plot threads should be resolved and the protagonist, through change or sacrifice should pass the trial or overcome the problem.

As a member of that class, aged 10, already writing closet novels of respectable novel length, I learned to dread book reports. I couldn't understand stories in those terms because the plot-and-character method of looking at a book makes no inherent sense from a writer's viewpoint. It may work as a device for a non-writer to remember events in the book, but as a yardstick of quality or a means of creating quality, that system of analysis is worthless. Moreover, that system, the adult writer maintains, has blinded readers and misdirected neophyte writers beyond number.

So let me dismiss the entire concept of plot as significant to literature. Let me dismiss, with it, the linear analysis of character development. Both depend on a linear perception of time, events succeeding one another like beads on a string. But our real perceptions don't proceed like that. The very process of reasoning thought requires constant cross-referencing of past event versus current event versus expectations ranked as likely or unlikely which means that living people don't live or act or form their strategies in a linear system. Likewise, lifelike characters, particularly as we visit them suddenly at the start of a novel, are active in all these dimensions at once, constantly widening their own perceptions of the past as well as of the future. Story events, as I see them, work much more like a fist full of pebbles chucked at a pond. At one toss, one essential Event concentric rings of action spread out from each impact, cross each other, rebound off the shore, unsettling the entire mirror of What Is. Oh yes, dear reader, there are beads-on-a-string stories, one event sliding into another, click, click, click, without objection or complication and there are readers who prefer a flow-through kind of read, never touching what characters think or feel, preferring not to be touched, themselves, on any meaningful level. Certain linear stories succeed by pushing popular buttons, sometimes with touching well-written scenes but if the characters are only popular buttons and cardboard, the bubble can burst when the first perceptive reviewer asks a fatal . . . Why?

A character-driven story on the other hand, deals with perceptions as powerful as events, perceptions which may be vastly different from viewpoint to viewpoint, perceptions which may be founded on unique experiences, or wisdom (or lack of it) in considering consequences. Characters, like real people, differ in their tendencies, their past, their capacities to comprehend. All such attributes affect their response to events. So these Events (don't call them plot!) filtered through a half-dozen perceptions, are constantly touching the past, the present and the future of the story. Each character is constantly changing plans or failing to change plans in response to his own internal perception of reality. The universe is continually expanding in all directions including the past.

Equally important, the universe of the reader may be expanding at the same rate or at a faster rate than that of the protagonist particularly as there may exist more than one viewpoint to which the reader has access. Out of this circumstance, the writer can draw pathos, disgust, sympathy for a bizarre action, admiration for heroic decisions. A good deal of the so-called action of a story may actually take place statically in the reader's widening awareness of things the personae of the book are not aware of, about each other or about the past.

So constructing such a situation and making it play correctly to the readership is a difficult writerly trick of time and person and an arrangement that is far from linear. The past may expand within a book as a character's memory is jogged to recall or associate past events, or as things come out that no one had said before in front of a person with a critical piece of knowledge.

And do characters inevitably change? Inevitably is a formulaic word and only one of a set of human reactions to a situation: that the protagonist "must" change is a limitation, a formula as trite as that of any potboiler. For the reader to change is one additional possibility; for the reader finally to understand that the protagonist must not change is another solution; a change in the reader's mind; for the reader to realize the connections between or within characters which have always been available but which become attainable by the character's understanding is yet a third solution. So, no, change is not inevitable, or at least, not the sole answer.

Everything above this point performs what some call "character development", but that term likewise misleads "Character development" also involves the reader in a reception of information, current, past, conjectural, and interpretive. The often misunderstood advice to writers, "Show, don't tell!" merely means that if the writer wants the reader to believe a character is wise, the reader has to experience the internal "of course" of realizing a good solution; or, a more intricate trick, hear about that wisdom from the mouth of another character, while knowing a past which casts extreme doubt on that wisdom. That particular trick can jolt the reader into re-evaluating various characters, and re-evaluating the entire network of relationships and perceptions the reader has gained.

So when a hopeful neophyte writer constructs a list of events and expects the characters to walk through them without protest, change, or exception, this more than shorts the possibilities, this tramples the possibilities.

If, in the above example, a major character's wisdom is established as debatable, then all things related to it become debatable. The more items that hang uncertain in a book, the more the reader has to maintain unresolved in his opinions; the more unanswered questions the reader has, the more the reader becomes aware of the energy potential, the ironies, the expectations of the network of various characters with their peculiar demands and needs. This energy potential we call "suspense," which is a good word in Latin, where it means something like "hanging unresolved." This potential, the lines of tension, need, and expectation among the characters, is the mainspring of the book, wound tight, then set free by a triggering event. It then expands at a rate (pacing) as rapid as the writer can manage without leaving out essential bits of information.

So the reader himself figures in the art of storytelling because he brings a participance to the performance as well his own experience, his own expertise, his biases, his blind spots, and his skill at reading between the lines. The writer who wants sympathy for a character who acts in a way foreign to most of his audience must provide information to move the reader to an understanding foreign to him. So the writers of science fiction, fantasy, history, and works otherwise set in places and times foreign to the modern reader, have a further, difficult task making real an entire foreign environment and culture. In science fiction, we call it "world-building," and it is one of the most challenging requirements of any fiction: the ability, without massive blocks of exposition, to cross time and space and to evoke images in a reader who has never met the like of what is about to unfold. One might quantify this as what is commonly called "sense of wonder." By this process a writer can gradually explain a science the reader has never met or an ancient society the reader has never seen, and, to the measure of the writer's skill will do so through action and dialogue, with an absolute minimum of paragraphs of pure exposition.

This deft insertion of background is an aspect of story-telling practiced from the date of ancient epics, since certainly the average Middle Easterner never saw the Scorpion Guards at the gates of creation, nor had the Greeks seen the isle of the Cyclops. Evocation of the unseen and unexperienced is a necessary attribute of epic; fantasy, science fiction, foreign intrigue, and historical novels; and while it is one of the hardest of all story-telling techniques to acquire, it is, in methodology, closely related to the skills that create the network of characters and tensions I've described already. Exposition is the least effective method of evoking a world again, "show, don't tell." The best writers avoid expository lumps in their writing. They prefer to do their world-building on the fly, in motion as delicately and unobtrusively as possible, slipping geography and foreign names and customs smoothly into scenes that make them easy to remember, explaining entire new technologies and belief systems by entering the mind of a character and living so naturally in his flesh and bone that the reader must understand this strange new world, and experience it as the character does.

Again, it's the gradually widening circle of perception, not historical this time, but informational. Starting with small and familiar, dialogue and small bits of description advance a carefully widening circle of reader awareness of the rules of this strange world, in which every detail has significance, right down to what is not said, like Conan Doyle's oft-cited "dog in the nighttime."

In this light, I maintain that one of the most unrecognized skills, in modern literature is the deftness with which the genre writer assists the reader to remember the outré and unfamiliar, by such techniques as the timely delivering of clues, through evocative imagery, periodic reemphasis, and finally, provision of internal logic and rationality of an alien environment. The better the writer is, the less you see the process. The deeper the writer is, the more that writer can draw unspoken parallels and challenge the reader's own prejudices and perceptual limitations. Good world-building can apply in a novel about Wall Street, enabling the reader to understand an abstract danger to the protagonist, or in a historical, enabling the reader to understand why the hero has made a decision the reader wouldn't personally have made, in his own century and his own country, or, again in science fiction, enabling the reader to understand why a particular parting gesture on one alien's part devastates another. Such unexpected understandings satisfy the reader in a strange and private way, letting the reader know he understands, confirming expectations, making him feel that he is getting the point . . . and making him feel, too, that he's in the hands of a good storyteller.

There's so much more to the art than a "system," and no one method of looking at a story works for every writer: that's the other lesson from that fifth grade class. But this is my answer, this is the way I proceed and this, whether as reader or writer, is the experience I look for in a story. These are deep concepts, and writers walk about them like blind men around the elephant, each one describing what his senses detect. The consensus I've found among the writers I enjoy: 1) a string of events doth not a story make, 2) you're never satisfied with your story until your characters rise up and refuse to do what you expected and 3) you're always discovering things about them and their world that you didn't know when you began.

How do I create characters within this difficult-to-describe process? Personally, I borrow, I borrow bits and pieces of personality and attitudes, and then do everything I can to make trouble: I change gender, goals, anything that might offer me a pat answer about the character's performance under stress. Believing Burn's poem about seeing ourselves as others see us, and having heard that there's "so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us . . ." I decided it was as unlikely that one's hero should never have bad thoughts as that one's villain never had good ones. Characters are, once you start looking into them, rarely the same thing two days running even if they repeat their basic repertoire frequently. No single part of anyone is capable of being let loose on the streets without being quite monofocussed and obsessed and otherwise very crazy. Heroes and villains can get into this condition, but only in extremity, and not for long, and only after things have happened to cause it a primary fault of many unsold adventure novels, as far as I'm concerned: insufficient set-up, insufficient winding of the mainspring, insufficient checks and balances within the character.

So the people I write about are composed of bits and pieces of people I have met or perceived I have met and pieces occasionally of my personality, or traits opposite to my personality, all patched together in deliberate contradiction of rationality or economy of purpose. Real people are composite creatures, who keep a good many of their aspects locked in their mental basements where even they don't dare look at them. With very many of those basement rooms, they don't even maintain phone connections, although I suspect in some very confused basements, certain of the Aspects must be communicating with each other through the walls. Certainly in real people or in fictional characters, what exists in these mental basements is a primary motivator of actions. Stress opens up those basement doors. Stress reveals the contradictions between the Appearance the character presents the world and the Consciousness, the Aspect he thinks he presents to the world, two images, rarely congruent and constantly changing, as the character invites aspects up from the sub-basement and sends others back again at need, always deluding himself that no one else notices.

But, warning flag here, that's not the whole picture of character creation, and it won't work if you don't do the next thing the absolutely most interesting thing to construct: the set of patches that holds all these Aspects together. That is, the psychological compacts between certain of the Aspects that enable the Appearance and the Consciousness to co-exist and function, sometimes even with self-denied knowledge of each other. Aspects constantly combine and recombine, even in mid-scene: the "patches" are the enablement that permits irreconcilable Aspects of the same character to cooperate or at least to avoid seeing each other. Creating a reader's awareness of these internal compromises and how they function is as delicate a piece of "world-building" as any alien planet. It shows (not tells!) the unique internal accommodations of the character's belief system to his life experience.

So part of the circularly expanding structure of the novel is not necessarily the protagonist changing, but the reader meeting various of the protagonist's Aspects and understanding enough of those critical psychological "patches" that make him a whole, so that now the reader can understand how he works. The specific triggering action that calls up those Aspects, the action, if you please, is of minor import. What Aspect was called up and why and how it reacted to the event is the more important thing. That's why exterior events aren't the story. The response the events trigger inside the character and between the characters. That's the event the character is experiencing.

And if your character won't behave (or) won't do what you need him to do? Create a character to provoke another Aspect of his character, or, instead of rewriting your novel from the beginning, create a circumstance so potent it opens two basement doors at once and lets two already-established and hitherto unassociated Aspects of the character's personality run face-on into each other. The character creates a new psychological "patch" to make those Aspects work together, right before the reader's eyes, so the character does change, and the story now evolves elements even the writer didn't foresee.

In the first few scenes of a story the writer sets forth at least the outward Appearance of the characters, while keeping in mind certain things the characters may have yet to discover about themselves. Then the evocation and integration of the various Aspects of the characters via the "events" of the story bring the protagonist to a point of crisis in which something simply must move. For whatever reason, the spring that has been wound tighter and tighter throughout the story and held by various restraints is not stable under this final stress. By now, the reader should know the characters well enough to observe the fragmentation and reintegration of connections and relationships as the spring begins to move.

So in the endless question about which comes first, the characters or the story, perhaps one can understand that both elements are inextricably connected to their development. Writers who say characters "talk" to you or "refuse" to do as hypothesized in the original outline are discovering new areas of the basement they didn't know existed. The outline of events suddenly changes under their hands . . . and magic happens. If a writer can be surprised by a sudden manifestation or combination of traits in his central character, he can equally well be astonished by the solution to the crisis ("event") that this character in this mood with this situation may think of, and change the whole intended outcome of the story.

It's in that hope that I begin a story. I want to be surprised.

Applying C. J. Cherryh's Heresy of Plot
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
12/31/94 11:01 AM

Dear Writers,

Enclosed with this you'll find a copy of a brilliant essay by C. J. Cherryh titled The Myth of Plot: A Heresy.

(July 2000 NOTE; discussion and commentary on C. J. Cherryh's article and my discussion of it below can be posted to writers-l, and/or to the Bulletin Boards.  It is likewise material that can be worked into a writing project for Editing Circle. JL)

By the way, I was born in 1942. In 1952, I would have been ten years old, too. It was somewhere around in there that I learned the word "protagonist" - but the examples in the stories we were given to read never seemed to exemplify the definition. But then, I'm a Spock fan, not a Kirk fan. I never did think Kirk was the star of Star Trek: TOS.

Starting with C. J. Cherryh's first paragraph, I must say I have never seen a more succinct or apt set of definitions of the operant components of "story."

And yes, Carolyn is very correct that reversing the process of "analysis" into that of "synthesis" isn't so easy or straight forward as one might think. You must keep in mind here that she taught High School Latin for many years, whereas my initial training is in chemistry - laboratory research - mostly physical chemistry, not organic. Background of this kind does color how one goes about problem-solving in later life. I view the construct which is the skeleton of a novel as a physicist views a particle soup that might one day form a star. To a non-physicist it has no structure. To me, it does.

I agree completely that a writer wading into the project of telling a story will drown quickly if he/she attempts to regard the process as linear.

However, I am firmly wedded to the concept of nailing down an outline before beginning to write. I freely confess that my most recent novel (Boxmaster's Home -- as yet unpublished, 2000 JL) was written without having written down an outline before hand. But that doesn't mean I didn't have one in my well trained subconscious mind.

I knew the theme was HOME, and that every event and color, symbol, character trait, decision, issue, background detail, biographical sketch, geographical movement, plot development, conflict line, etc etc in the book had to be derived from that theme. I also knew the book would be large enough to explicate that entire bundle of inter-related themes (I see the thematic structure of HOME as a coaxial cable composed of smaller themes which form the threads of the cable and some of those smaller threads are themselves coaxial cables. Every microscopic issue which composes the definition of HOME is treated in this novel.)

("home" was the theme of Gordon R. Dickson's first published short story, Lulungomeena)

I knew the opening scene of Boxmaster's Home had to focus on the same aspect of thematic substance as the ending scene, but on a higher ring of a spiral of learning. I knew that the core essence of "HOME" to me is CHILDREN, and the essence of story is conflict. Therefore the book starts with a threat to a child which would destroy a home. One thing leads to another and new ways of countering that kind of threat are learned by the protagonists. In the end, the protagonists teach the antagonists a thing or two about countering threats to children and homes.

In the beginning image, we have a person looking at the outside of a house. The book ends with a person looking at the outside of a house. I knew that was what I had to have happen, but it's a long, complex book and my conscious mind couldn't encompass it all before I'd written it. Subconscious knew, though.

I knew before I started writing that I was going to start small, with the problems of one family trying to crystalize itself, defining "home" in terms of one small living group, and end with the application of that same definition of "home" to the entire galaxy with all its varied species. The task of my heros is to make the whole galaxy a home. (Well, so they are Heros after all.)

I also knew before I started writing that the novel was structured in parts. The opening is inside a home. The next part is an adventure outside the home. I knew before I started that the protagonists would not make it back home, that the adventure would lead them inexorably away from home. I knew they'd get trapped on the mountain by the weather, and I knew that a large number of natives would collect in that house to hunker down for the winter. I knew that the pressure would mount and lessons would be learned in that house. I knew they'd get down off the mountain as Mystic Storm a singing troupe, and tour, spreading dissension with their songs. I've known Yran's (lead protag) background as a child singing star since the beginning of the first novel, Boxmaster, but there is no hint of it overtly planted earlier than the middle of Home. In retrospect, anyone should be able to see the clues.

I did not know, before I started the book, that by the time our heros got to where they could get off Kethsem (home-planet), I'd have used up more than my allotted space and have to reconstruct the ending of the book. I had originally planned to end this book with the establishment of an orphanage founded on and about Lii's home. The last third of the book was supposed to be about the struggle to found that orphanage. It wouldn't fit, and it would have skewed the entire novel out of shape because it would have required a change of antagonist. Once the antagonist is roundly trounced and taught a lesson, the book is over.

So when I got to Chapter 17, I reconstructed my concept of where this book had to end. That was when I realized we couldn't go back to Simmerflux - former home planet. I had held that option open all the way until I drafted Chapter 17. At that point, I worked out the scenario I finally wrote - that Simmerflux was taken and Lii and family ended up on Hytril to meet Yran. At that point, I also invented their new home planet, Shire, realizing just how miserable Arvin would have been on Simmerflux.

(I am hoping to bring you BOXMASTER'S HOME in electronic editions sometime soon, whereupon the above will make much better sense as a writing lesson)

As reconstructed, the plot resolves one scene prior to the beginning of the founding of the orphanage when during that omitted sex scene after the end of the book, Lii (sated at last) turns over and comments to Yran, "Do you think it would be possible - I mean I'd really like to adopt some of those orphans they're bringing off of Simmerflux." Yran thereupon sees his whole life flash before his eyes. But of course, he can deny Lii nothing. Besides, Arvin thinks it's a good idea.

So you see, although I moaned and groaned my way through writing this novel because I didn't have an outline, and I didn't exactly know where it was going or how long each part would be, and I was groping my way through a fog most of the time - anyhow I had more of a solid, LINEAR, because-sequence (i.e. plot) than most of you have before you start a shorter novelette. I knew what I was doing because I had a THEME and a very good understanding of what elements composed that theme. I had already written two long novels about these characters, (Boxmaster and Boxmaster's Disgrace -- sold but never published, and now -- July 2000 --  available likewise for electronic editions) all the while inventing their backgrounds (mostly not mentioned in those books) designed to explicate the theme of HOME.

I looked up the dates, and it turns out I spent four years working that book out in my head before I decided to write it. All that while, I had this deep inner conviction the thing had no commercial value whatever, and so when I finally did write it, I'd have to leave out all this material and make up something completely different. (as of July 2000, it has been resoundingly rejected by the sf-formula bound publishing industry because it breaks the formula in Chapter 4.)

And Carolyn is right, not a single bit of the stuff I worked out in my head (and finally did use in the finished version of the novel) was ever worked out in a linear fashion. I would get a dream image one morning, a flash of a conception off an old movie on AMC, a bit of inspiration from a song or poem, a sequence from another novel, a philosophical insight from a friend's woes, and a long conversation with one or the other of the characters while driving around town or - while I was commuting to California - on airplanes or driving cross-country. And none of it ever came in any sort of connected, sensible linear order.

But I'm used to that. It's how ideas for novels always occur to me. I have an image that I use to explain this. I say that when you get that flash of inspiration that says, "Oh! I've got an idea for a story!" at that moment the entire composition is complete and properly arranged in your subconscious. The problems occur when you reach down into the subconscious after the root of that flash of inspiration. You grab hold of the idea and start pulling.

I visualize a story as a beaded necklace - a pearl necklace - coiled up in the muck at the bottom of the sludge collected at the bottom of your subconscious. When you start yanking on the string an old string that's been rotting in the muck for years the string breaks. But you've got one gorgeous pearl left in your hands, and you're motivated to roll up your sleeves and stick your hand down into the muck to find the rest of the pearls you just barely glimpsed. And one by one, you fetch them up. But without their string (the plot; the because-sequence is the string) they come up in random order. In fact, some of the pearls may not even belong to this necklace.

Eventually, when you've got them all, you can sit down and make the "outline" of the novel/story. You look at the pearls and your sense of ART tells you which ones go with which - by color and shape and texture and size - and you arrange a set of pearls so the big one is in the middle and the small ones on the end (or however your Art says to do it). At that point, you know which pearls don't belong on this necklace and set them aside. (after all, that's what fanzines are for - out-takes).

So C. J. Cherryh is correct, the writing process is not linear, and the entire concept of linearity is nonsense to the creative writer in the midst of creating. But I maintain that because the end-user, the fiction consumer, is looking to decode the story with a linear tool (i.e. to read the words in the order they are printed), the end product you produce has to have a certain linearity.

Carolyn (C. in CJ is for Carolyn) says that a story unfolds along various time-axes in a non-linear form as character driven stories deal with perceptions as powerful as events. And she's absolutely correct.

When I do an "outline" I don't always or even usually include all the background details. I don't include the characterization I don't write "character sketches" the way it says to in many books on writing. I don't make up the whole lives of my characters. I rarely make up the background - HOME was an exception of the first order! I love to write because I love to "discover" the story as I go along. I love to be surprised. HOME surprised me in the smooth, deep richness of the detail that came to hand the very moment I reached out for it. Subconscious knew a lot more than it had told me.

Even so, I suffered the lack of my usual degree of detailed outline, but not in the usual way. Ordinarily, when working without a written outline, I find that I fall off the conflict line - that the characters wake up and refuse to go where the story theme or concept requires. Carolyn - and many writers consider this "good" - I consider it a disaster presaging a waste of time invested in the project.

To avoid that waste, I consult my characters and have them write the bloody outline! 'Cause I don't want no arguments later. We have to agree on what they are going to do before we start. The only thing that can change what they do is if I change what happens to them. If I understand the shape of the karmic lesson they're living through before I start writing, I generally get the conflict/theme integration right before I start.

To write efficiently, you must have something to say, and set out to say that one thing clearly. You have to be burning up with a need to say that thing and that thing you want to say is the THEME of your piece. That theme is the reason you want to write the story. And as you cast the first line of the story to embody the first conflict of the conflicting elements that will cast the plot into the air, you are stating the theme of the piece in clear SHOW DON'T TELL. The theme is the reason why you want to write the piece, and it therefore becomes the opening line, and conveys to the reader why they should want to read it.

In a large, complex novel like HOME you have sprawling, complex themes. The thematic structure of a book that size can be like the coaxial cable I mentioned above, or it can be a spider web, or it can be a cocoon that will surround the reader, or a weaving that creates a tunnel for the reader to race down, or a dozen other images. The limits are set by your imagination.

To learn to create those organized objects from multitudes of small thoughts I call threads, is very much like learning to weave. Maybe you can weave without a loom, but I can't. I need the structure of an outline - but it doesn't have to be linear.

So my outlines include the operant parts of story that I've had to learn how to do consciously, deliberately, and with malice aforethought. The rest, the part that comes naturally to me, I rely wholly on my subconscious to provide, to keep me surprised and thus interested enough to finish the piece.

The scribbled mess I use as an outline while I'm writing would not be dignified by that name by any teacher anywhere. The "outline" tool available in most high-end word processors is utterly useless because it doesn't "outline". It's linear and unusable for fiction outlining.

A fiction outline is more like the paint-by-the-numbers image you can buy in a box with a set of paints. Writing the novel is like coloring and connecting - no two people do it the same way.

Every type of novel has a certain, set, structure that professional editors favor. C. J. Cherryh has probably not been plagued with the problem of editors with limited ideas of how a thing should be written to be "marketed as sf/f" - because she won a very prestigious award with her very first novel, and since then has gone on to collect some fantastic trophies. She can get away with things unchallenged that no one else can. That's good - because it opens the way for others to follow. She is creating some of those "set structures" editors will later look for in the works of new authors.

So if every novel starts with a pre-formulated template (like a paint-by-numbers drawing with only the dots in place), my "outline" consists only of a little sidebar where I've substituted my color scheme and brush sizes for the one recommended by the manufacturer. I only put in my outline the things that particularize the universal template I'm working with. That's why they are scribbled messes unusable and unintelligible to anyone else. To decode it, you've got to know the template by heart as well as the particular universe I'm working in.

The universal templates I work with are wholly internalized by my subconscious - I learned them by training my subconscious with the tried and true method of REWRITING ENDLESSLY. It's like learning to spell a word by writing it a hundred times correctly on the blackboard in front of everyone who is laughing at you because you can't do it right. It's a crude method, but it works.

I've learned a lot of these universal templates over the years. What happened during the writing of BOXMASTER, BOXMASTER'S DISGRACE, and BOXMASTER'S HOME, was very simple. My subconscious got sick and tired of working with the same old templates all the time, and just went off the deep end and invented a brand new template.  (since it's not recognizable, no editor will even read nevermind buy these MS's.  I expect they'll sell to e-publishers.)  Boxmaster and Boxmaster's Disgrace are standard action novels, very much as Robert A. Heinlein used to write.  Only in Boxmaster's Home do you discover that they aren't really standard action novels. 

That is why I keep saying the big, big problem with Boxmaster's Home is that it has no commercial value. So far a number of my test-readers readers have enjoyed reading it. That's reassuring. They were able to decode the template and follow the story and conflict I had laid down.

But the professionals who know how to assess the sales potential of a novel on the basis of how well a particular template has been selling recently all find this book unreadable. They can't FIND the template because they are looking for template "numbers" under the paint - and those numbers aren't where they are supposed to be. In fact, they aren't there at all. This book is erected on different numbers put in different places.

I think the reason I couldn't "outline" HOME before and during the writing is that subconscious was inventing the template as it went along. Or had invented it and was painting the lines in for the very first time to find out what the picture is. There was confusion about what elements were part of the universal template and what elements were unique to this novel.

The result of that confusion is that the coaxial cable forming the core of this novel has frayed and broken strands stick out at odd angles here and there. I tried to file them off smooth on rewrite, but my test readers who are sliding down this cable with their bare hands tell me they get pricked by stray strands.  (Home is such a long novel that it would take me 8 weeks staying completely offline and doing nothing for the school or Sime~Gen Inc. or my family to do the rewrite to smoothe those strands.)

In summary, then, when a writer sets out to write a story, there is that point where the bright flash of IDEA illuminates the imagination. At that point, the writer goes nonlinear and fishes the bits and pieces of the IDEA out of subconscious sludge. Washed and cleaned (made universal), the bits and pieces are then arranged artistically. The next step is to look through the inventory of universal templates to find one that sort of fits the Idea. Then the artistic arrangement of bits and pieces is modified to fit the universal template chosen. (In the analogy above - that's putting the big pearl in the middle of the necklace and the small ones on the ends - such a necklace is a universal template; you can make it from clay beads, shells, pearls or anything). Then and only then comes the outline - the nailing down of the particular elements that distinguish this story from the template and yet connect it to the template.

Only that last step is linear in nature, and must be because readers read books in a linear way.

The actual writing, which (ideally) comes after the outlining, is usually not quite so specifically linear (until the writer gets to the point where templates are wholly internalized in subconscious, writing rarely happens straight-through like reading.)

A writer moves back and forth through a manuscript adding, touching up, expanding, planting foreshadowing, illuminating descriptions, tying together, trimming verbiage. No two writers do this the same way on the same schedule - and I've found that the method I use to do this depends on the template I'm working with. Some I can write straight through just like you read it, touch up and spell check and send off to the publisher. Others I go back and forth and in and out in a tangled mess, but somehow get where I'm going anyway. That only happens when I know my templates.

Carolyn Cherryh is a magnificently talented writer and her original training is in a type of thinking alien to my core being. So she probably wouldn't recognize my concept of universal templates.

Many people think of them as "formulas" and I've called them "genre markers" on occasion. But now that I've read C. J. Cherryh's essay, I think the paint-by-numbers template concept works better. It would be closer to what she's talking about if you think of the "template" as a hologram in three dimensions that also moves through time, changing with time. That would allow for "flashbacks" which are more "technique" than genre formula. But actually, where and how to use a flashback is part of the template, though it is almost never a part of the formula for a genre.

Live Long and Prosper,

Jacqueline Lichtenberg