more about maps
further fractals of fiction
Hello, sequelisers. Over a year ago, in a column on story structure, I wrote about David Yorke’s theory that stories are like fractals, each part being something you can zoom in on and it contains a new version of its own structure. And I often refer back to my avoiding scary owls column where I develop E.L. Doctorow’s idea of novel writing being like driving in fog (you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way), while needing at least a sketch map to help you decide between each fork in the road.
Over the last 3* weeks these two metaphors have been on my mind again. I’ve been writing chapter 10, which is at 2400 words but isn’t finished, but I’ve also been working on the roadmap for the chapters ahead. I have some time off work next month and I want to have enough plot lined up that I can motor on with the writing, without the long periods of daydreaming that I always need to make decisions on plot. And on the ground, nearly a quarter of the way through writing the novel, the roadmap I had is starting to look infeasible.
Maps are a particular interest of mine. About 15 years ago, I started up a new software company, and we made software that draws maps (and later marine charts). We also did general bespoke software development. We did agile development and I often used to have to explain to potential customers why we offered an estimate rather than a fixed quote, and I found it very useful to explain it with a map analogy. How long is the coastline of Great Britain, I would ask? If you don’t know, your first guess might go like this: it’s about 450 miles from, say, Brighton to Inverness; the south coast of England is about 200 miles long; the north coast of Scotland maybe 50 miles, so our first guess could use a trapezoid shape 450+200+450+50=1,150 miles. Would that be in the right ballpark? Well no, it’s not even the right order of magnitude: the coastline of mainland Britain is actually around 11,500 miles, ten times as much as our first estimate. The closer you zoom in, the more detail you find, rivers like the Humber where the tidal reach is 50 miles inland; and the further you zoom in, the more every river and promontory adds to the total. The only way to measure the distance accurately is to get down to ground level and survey it all. Similarly, the only accurate description of what software does, is the code itself. Anything else is just an estimate. And in a nutshell, that’s why software costs ten times as much as you think it should.
I’m finding that the same idea applies as I work on the plot of my sequel, the roadmap I’m navigating by as I write it. It needs clarity in the distance I can see by my headlights (current and next chapter), a sense of direction (current five-act story stage) and some kind of ultimate goal (to avoid the owl-infested dead end).
I set out with three possible book ideas:
a story about marginalised people and the rave culture of the early 1990s
a campus novel in the tradition of Amis, Bradbury and Lodge, set in the 1990s because that’s when I was in the university world
a dotcom story of boom and bust set in the late 1990s
At first, I didn’t have a clear idea of what any of those would look like – in other words, I didn’t have enough ideas to fill any one of them – so I thought why not combine all three? My previous novel Parallel Lines spans the whole of the 1980s and has three main acts, with two interludes between them, so I thought I knew how to do this.
As soon as I tried to sketch out an overall plot, I could see that this threefold structure wouldn’t fit in one novel. There is too much to explain, too many characters needed, to much of everything. Fine, I thought, the dotcom novel can be the third in a trilogy, and I’ll make a two-strand novel contrasting the unemployed and the academics. For the last six months I’ve been working on the basis of a sketch map that follows this idea.
However, nine or ten chapters of zooming into the detail, I can see this is too much for one novel as well. I still need too many characters and too much detail even to tell the first story. I’m already feeling nervous about how little we see of several important characters in the first 10 chapters; apart from the main characters, most of the others have only appeared a couple of times, in a handful of paragraphs each. So, now that I’ve got closer in to the detail, I can see that the marginalised-people story is worth a novel in its own right. The campus novel is now demoted, on my sketch map, to the two short interludes between the main three acts, and I’m still not sure how to skate over so much time that I can get from 1991, the start of the raves, to the Criminal Justice Act 1994. I still like the idea of the contrast between the lives of the academics and the unemployed, but if the Byker valley plot takes over 100,000 words to tell, even the interludes might have to go, to make a readable book. Time will tell.
*I missed my usual fortnightly update last week because I was on the night shift over the weekend, supporting a late-running major software project for a customer who demanded both a fixed price up front, and agile ways of working to give them time to think about what the software should do. I work for a global corporation now but the problem is forever the same.
By next time, I should have finished redrawing my plot sketchmap and be well along with chapter 11. See you then, if you subscribe!