Can You Diagram Your Way to Writing Success?

May 11, 2009 Posted by: Kelly | Filed under: Exercises, Writing

Last week, I started reading the cobbled-together monster that is my NaNoWriMo 2008 novel. Let me just say this: WOW. It reminds me of what my dog might create if I gave her some blank paper and her own excrement to spread around. Anne Lamott was not wrong, no sirree:

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts…I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Still, it’s hard not to be completely demoralized by the stark contrast between my novel and the fabulous creation I’m currently reading, Broken Soup.

But the awesomeness that is Jenny Valentine gave me an idea. You know how in middle school, to learn proper grammar your English teacher made you diagram sentences until your eyes crossed? It sucked, and I am totally not condoning such heartless torture of defenseless kids. But I have to admit—and please don’t tell any teachers this—that it kind of, sort of, maybe helped me learn grammar.

Could I “diagram” a great novel to learn how to de-suckify my own novel? Kind of like taking apart a car engine to learn how it all works together?

Leave a comment to chime in with your thoughts on whether this is viable:

Have any of you aspiring writers tried to diagram a novel before? And if so, how did it go?
Or: If you haven’t ever tried such a thing, do you think it would be useful to your writing? How would you tackle it?

Photo by miconian.

7 Writing Rules Gleaned from a Year of Voracious Reading

Christina

I think I'm disappointed with my diagram because it doesn't do anything an outline can't do. I like the idea of marking it with the act structure. I wonder if then each act can be broken down into sequences, where the sequences are marked up for required elements like "inciting incident," and then each paragraph broken down in stimulus/response pairs.

Kelly

Christina, I like that idea. Kind of like how you showed action/reaction pairs in your diagram?

Christina

I wish I could write a program to do it! Imagine the $$$! :-)

I took a stab at a plot diagram. It sucks. Did I mention I'm an illiterate slob? Anyway, feel free to take a look and give me suggestions for take 2: http://www.riverfiction.com/forum_stuff/Oobleck...

Kelly

Christina, do I get a cut of the millions for requesting it from you in a blog comment? ;-)

I think your plot diagram is great! It doesn't suck. :-) In fact, it looks like your plot points map very well to the "four acts" according to Diana Peterfreund (thanks for those links, Alexa!):
Act One: Ordinary world and inciting incident
Act Two: Complications leading to a crisis.
Act Three: Consequences of that crisis leading to a climax.
Act Four: Climax and resolution.
I think I'm going to take each one of my chapters and try to slot them into an "act" and see if one act is bloated (which I think might be one issue given the NaNoWriMo origins of this thing).

Jessica

I've done it a few different ways. Sometimes, I just look at plot from a character perspective, and as I read, write down how the character changes from the beginning of a chapter to the end. Or I decide whether the plot is turning for the better or for the worse at the end of each chapter, and make a little line graph for the whole book. Lately, my tactic is just to read and write down anything remarkable that I find in terms of writing or plot or whatever.

Sorry for the barely decipherable response! That is something worth a blog post, I'd say. I'll add it to my Blog To Do List and send you a link when I do!

<abbr>Jessica’s last blog post..in my mailbox today</abbr>

Kelly

Jessica, thanks for sharing what you've done. I'm looking forward to your blog post on this topic!

Christina

The story I mentioned is a Dr. Seuss. (My son's bedtime story last night). I suggested it because it has a ridiculously simple plot: the king decides he wants something new to come down from the sky, his magicians make oobleck (a green, sticky substance), and Bartholemew goes through a series of objectives, each met with failure, until the resolution at the end.

I probably don't belong in this thread since I'm basically an illiterate slob, but as an engineer who's worked on a visual programming language for 12 years, I have a strong interest in information visualization. I've even tried to read "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward R. Tufte (but I found it too ponderous to get through entirely).

Several years ago, I borrowed a book from a friend called "Elements of Writing Fiction - Scene & Structure" by Jack Bickham. I seem to recall that it broke structure down in a way that we might be able to use for diagramming. I liked a lot that I learned from the book, but didn't agree with everything in it. However, it did feel very... not fun... to analyze structure in such excruciating detail. Then again, maybe it's like diagramming sentences for structure, eh? :-)

Kelly

Um, yeah, DUH on me with the Seuss title. Oops.

So I'm curious if you would feel the same way about this diagramming stuff if instead you wrote a program to analyze the structure of a piece of text (yeah, okay that might be too much) or to display a visual representation of a text that you mark up in the program. ;-)

I've heard of the Elements of Writing Fiction series, but I haven't read any of them. So I just put that one on hold at the library. I'm also waiting for this title to come in: Write Great Fiction: Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell.

Lorin

When I think of a diagram, I think of something quite different from diagramming a sentence, actually. As an architect, I learned how to diagram what needs to go into a building and how those bits need to relate to each other. The classic architect's diagram is the bubble diagram. Here's a good example from a landscape architect:
http://www.marksusser.com/images/concept/bubble... and here's one for a house: http://www.homedesigndatabase.com/Images/home-p...

I can picture how I could use this to diagram my writing (especially characters and relationships) though I haven't actually done it yet!

<abbr>Lorin’s last blog post..Review: Zoë's Tale</abbr>

Kelly

Lorin, thank you for sharing those bubble diagram pictures. I can see how that would help with relationships especially. If you make one for your work, please share it! I’m really interested to hear how it works out.

Amanda

What a fabulous idea! Though I've never tried to diagram a novel, I often diagram sentences late at night for fun. I'm intrigued. Linguistics experts are sometimes asked to analyze sentences by diagramming them in matters of legality. Surely, diagramming a novel could turn up all sorts of useful information. But, how do you do it? Do you use different parameters than subject|predicate|modifiers?

Kelly

Amanda, I was totally thinking of you in the back of my mind when typing up this post. I swear that image of TIMED sentence diagramming rounds will never leave my memory, even when Alzheimer's has its way with me.

But yes, HOW? Hopefully the other commenters who have done this can give us some tips here! I'm also waiting on a ton of writing books to come in on hold at the library, and I plan to scour them for this topic specifically and do a follow-up post. Maybe we'll find some tips that way too.

Lorin

Oh, yeah. Reading my NaNo draft was like watching a car wreck - hard to look away, shock that it was there at all.

Many people (who are clearly more organized than me) write outlines before tacking a novel - it makes sense to be able to do it the other way around and an outline is like a slightly fleshed out diagram (at least the way I do them).

<abbr>Lorin’s last blog post..Review: Zoë's Tale</abbr>

Kelly

Lorin, you hit the nail on the car wreck I'd say. It's cool to hold the 155 pages in my hand, but oh goodness. It makes me tired just thinking about the amount of work I have ahead of me to whip this puppy into shape. Do you usually outline similar to what Heather describes as what she does? Or do you have a different approach for it?

Alexa

I've done it myself for my own book but not on someone else's. I do think it would be helpful though to see how how a great book is structured.

These posts really helped. One was Diana Peterfreund on 4 Act structure and plot boards http://www.dianapeterfreund.com/blog/ it's down the side under popular posts.

The other was Justine Larbalestier. She did a whole series of really great writing posts. http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2008/01/02/...

<abbr>Alexa’s last blog post..Review - Suite Scarlett</abbr>

Kelly

Alexa, you ROCK for sharing those links! I am off to check them out in more detail now, but it looks like EXACTLY what I wanted to find on this topic. Thank you!

Heather

I don't know that it's necessarily "diagramming" the book, but before I put one word of the prose on the page, I force myself to write a simple word document that is simply titled, "Plot Structure." This is a numbered list that contains the essential element of each chapter, which forces me into some kind of a timeline and direction.

That way if I say, "I want Character J to die in the climax," I have to have sufficiently built up why we care that J died in the rising action. So, I have to throw pieces of J into the chapters before the climax.

If I say, "I want Character M to have some gigantic secret that gets revealed, thus forcing the climax," then I have to have hinted at the secret (to give the reader a fair shake in reading), so I don't drop a plot A-bomb on them and let them enjoy the reading.

Granted, I give myself full license to stray from the plot structure as I'm writing, but it gets me headed in the right direction and I never have "writer's block."

<abbr>Heather’s last blog post..I'm Famous!</abbr>

Kelly

Heather, what a great idea to provide focus as you're writing. And good call on letting yourself keep it open so you don't feel tied to it. I had vague plans to make an outline before starting NaNoWriMo last year, but then it was suddenly Nov. 1 and I had no outline. Oops.

Jessica

I HAVE done such a thing! However, I have never been convinced that I am doing it effectively and it requires A LOT of focus/patience. I find it works best when you focus on one aspect of the book - characterization, plot, pacing, et cetera - because if you try to do it all, you get REALLY bogged down.

I haven't found a way to DIRECTLY translate this activity to my writing yet, but it definitely helps focus the mind and I've picked up a lot of small tips and ideas.

I'd look forward to reading more about this, so I'll definitely check back to see if anyone else is a Book Studier :-)

<abbr>Jessica’s last blog post..get out of the kitchen</abbr>

Kelly

Jessica, that's SO COOL that you've already diagrammed books! Thanks for the tip on taking one thing at a time. How do you go about doing it, like for plot as an example?

Christina

I have been pondering how to make a visual representation of a story's structure for some time, but I haven't come up with a way to do it yet. I bought StoryMill to try to re-work my 2007 NaNoWriMo because it has a visual timeline. But what I'd really like to see is the setup, complication and resolution for each plot and subplot. And each character development arc, although I'm not sure what the key points along those would be.

Maybe we should pick a short, popular story like "Bartholomew and the Oobleck" and take stabs at diagramming it? I'm game if you're interested. :-)

Kelly

Christina, I agree on something to visualize each plot and subplot. That would be perfect.

I haven't heard of that story (I am pretty much short story illiterate) but I'm game! Maybe we can get some of the other folks who chimed in to join us? :-)

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