Re-examining What You Have in Order to Find the Pattern

While writing The Ever Afters, only Lena’s subplot kept me up at night.

I sometimes lost sleep over meeting deadlines. Rarely did I worry about plot points. Lena’s story was exception.

I mean, a little girl...loses her hands? How could I inflict such pain on her??

But here’s the truth: I don’t feel like I did. While revising the second book, Of Witches and Wind, I was also structuring the rest of the series, sifting through what the story needed and filling in the gaps. Finalizing Lena’s subplot was one of those gaps. During the day, I could easily resist the terrible realization that I knew exactly what would round out Lena’s Character arc. I just wanted to protect her from it.  

But storytelling likes to creep in between my waking time and dreaming. So, Lena’s story would come back to me at night, in the dark quiet, and remind me again: Lena needs to lose her hands. And as much as I resisted it, as much as I looked around for more kid-friendly options, I knew, deep down, that this was where Lena’s story was headed.  

To explain how I reached this decision, we’ll need to dive into the next set of tools.

• Target: walking towards your intentions for the creation you’re making.

• Touchstone: exploring what already exists in order to find what is ready to grow.

• Finding the Next Right Step: using the touchstones and targets like puzzle pieces to build a path between them.

Then we’ll circle back to Lena’s story to see how I used these tools to complete Lena’s subplot.

Targets and Touchstones

Inevitably, when you’re a writer, you’re asked a question, one closely related to structuring a novel or series: Are a plotter or a pantster?

In case you’re new to this question, here are some quick definitions:

• Plotter - someone who plots out their stories before they write them

• Pantster - someone who writes by the seat of their pants, i.e. making it all up as they go along.

This question has always fascinated me, because it's based on a false binary. I've never met a writer who is absolutely one or the other. We all have to be a little bit of both:

Even if we are totally flying by the seat of our pants in the first draft, we have to draw from the parts of the story already written. You can make it all up in the first chapter, the first page, the first paragraph, but after the first sentence, you need to tie the current scene-in-progress to what came before. Otherwise, the story won't make sense.

And even if we plot out everything we can think of, we'll come across something in the writing process that requires us to improvise in the moment.  

So, instead of identifying as either a plotter or a panstser, I re-examine at what I know about a story, whether it’s one I’m living or one I’m writing, and I identity the targets and the touchstones within that story.

Target

Given the name, it’s easy to guess what a target is. It’s the direction you have chosen to take. Targets are as varied as your creations are and your intentions for them are. They could be:

• A draft of a scene you’ve already imagined

• A depth of a well-nuanced character you’re writing into being

• An aspect of yourself you’ve chosen to cultivate

• A goal you’ve committed to achieving,

• And many other things.

 Most of us begin with talking about targets, and naming our desire to reach our target is very helpful in reaching them. You wouldn’t make a change unless you knew you wanted to see that change first. You wouldn’t finish a novel unless you desired to write “The End” on the final page.

But within our creative process and/or our lives, we rarely begin with targets. We simply remember our targets while we’re in the midst of our murky middles. After all, you can’t help where you are in this present moment. Similarly, you can’t choose the current state of the story you’re writing.

You also can’t help where you have been or what you have done in the past. The events you’re already can’t be changed—you can only change how you understand them.

But you can always choose the target you are aiming at, by refocusing on the intentions and goals that carry you towards your future.

You may read this section and feel some wistfulness. Maybe you even remember all the targets you aimed at and missed.

I completely understand. When I attended summer camp as a kid, I loved the archery practice. A target was set up, pretty far away, and I borrowed a camp bow and shot arrows at it, imagining myself Maid Marian alongside Robin Hood and his Merry Men as well as all sorts of other adventures that eventually influenced my fantasy novels.

Despite these daydreams, I was never actually good at archery. Sometimes, my arrows would hit the very edge of the target. Sometimes, they would bounce off the target’s surface. More often, my arrows missed the target completely.

But inevitably, the round would end, and the proctor would call a halt. Everyone would walk out to the targets to retrieve their arrows, regardless of whether or not those arrows were anywhere near the bull’s eye.

Yes, if you were just lobbing things at a target, using tools you don’t have much skill using quite yet, you may miss the target.

But if you walk towards a target with your whole being, you’ll reach that target sooner or later. If you’re walking towards a target, it’s not about skill. It’s not even about the tools you use.

To walk towards a target, it’s about taking one step after another until the rest of you reaches the spot that your gaze had been focused on all along. Even if you get momentarily distracted, you can always refocus and take another step.

But to keep your gaze on the target, you first need to know what your target is. A murky middle, whether it’s in life or in storytelling, isn’t as clear cut as an archery field. The targets aren’t set up for you. Instead, you have to identify them yourself. 

We’ll go into how to do this in more detail in the next sections, when I deconstruct the targets and touchstones in Lena’s character arc, but you’ve already seen how knowing your target can make all the difference in taking action in the midst of a murky middle.

Think of the story about my classmate who'd lost his mom. Before he walked in, I was mainly focused on trying to wake up and get through class so that I could get home and finish my homework.  

When he arrived, life threw me a situation well outside my plans. It wasn’t anything he did. It was an internal experience his presence inspired: memories rose up, emotions swamped me, my mind delivered excuses. In those circumstances, I had to respond in a way that was available to me, even with everything murking up my murky middle.

In the midst of all that, I did have bone-deep clarity: I knew what type of person I wanted to be.

I wanted to be the type of person who moved towards the pain I saw in other people, not the kind of person who just ran away.

That clarity was my target, and if I wanted to reach that target in that situation, the only choice was to approach Mark and acknowledge the death of his mother.

Like in archery practice, tools and skill didn’t factor into reaching my target that day. I was already a fairly skilled writer, but my words to him were very simple. I could have written much better dialogue in my fiction, but that day, my sincerity mattered more than my words. And because of my mother’s stories, I knew it. So, I just brought my whole being to that target, and I reached it just the same.

This wasn’t the last time I had to aim my whole self at that same target, but as I mentioned, it got easier, knowing that I’d already done it once.

The act of creating a life and the act of creating a story aren't all that different.

As I described in the last section, I untangle all the pieces through journaling or free writes, but on the page or in the situation, I often already know what I need to do. If it’s uncomfortable, I just need to gather my courage to take action. Courage, in my definition, is finding a reason to do something that has more to do with love than with fear.

Usually, the process comes down to this: I look past my discomfort for my target, which usually is related to what I already care about. Then I choose the action that brings me closer to that target. It is usually still hard, but it’s the kind of hard I can live with.

I used the exact same process to structure Lena's story.

We’ll get to that soon, but first, we need to look at our next tool: the touchstone.

Touchstone:

 I can tell you when and where touchstones arrived in my life.

In between freshman and sophomore years of high school, I attended a Young Writer's Workshop at Simon's Rock College of Bard. One of the assignments was to reread a piece we’d already written and to find something juicy and interesting within it—something weighty but undeveloped. Then we use that as a jumping off point and write something new, a second piece that might be even better than the original.

The instructor was a wiry, gray-haired man who looked a bit like Gandalf. I don’t remember his name, but I remember the name of the juicy, undeveloped tidbit in a piece already written: he called it a touchstone.

As far as the actual assignment went, I didn’t really like the new piece I wrote, but I loved the word. As someone already steeped in fantasy writing, I imagined a touchstone as a wide slab which opened at your touch to reveal a path, one you’d never seen before but you knew you were meant to follow. Forever afterwards, whenever I would search my past and/or previously written stories for what had charge, like a door waiting to be opened, a path waiting to be followed, I would call it a touchstone.

This included stories about my own life. Even in the middle of an experience, I search for that charge. For example, in that Sunday School class, as all my mom’s stories about her own senior year, I picked out the ones that had charge—her experiences with her classmates after her dad’s death. I knew that I was in the same position as her classmates had been, and that clarity was like a door I could walk through. It reminded me to act in a way that I would have wished more people had acted towards my mother. In that way, it had an essential similarity to my target, which was to grow into the kind of person I wanted to be.

During the revision and/or next-book-planning process, I also search for underdeveloped but charged tidbits through behind-the-scenes writing. When I find a touchstone in what is already on the page, I develop it a little more in freewrites, so that the actual drafting is easier.

This is especially helpful in fantasy writing, where you are building a world for your characters to inhabit. I do create the world as I go, but I can't do it all in a scene. Instead, I build the set elsewhere so that I know what I need to bring on stage when the story calls for it.

You’ll find an example of worldbuilding touchstones in my own old Ever Afters workpapers below, created while drafting Of Witches and Wind (warning: there are spoilers through the fourth book, and it’s also a little gross in certain details in the sorcerer section).

However, we’ll also cover many of the relevant details later when we review the puzzle pieces that helped me complete Lena’s subplot.

Next, we’ll discuss identifying targets and touchstones and then creating a path between them to fill out a story arc.